Fells Acres Sexual Abuse Trials:
1986-87

Defendants: Gerald Amirault, Violet Amirault, Cheryl Amirault LeFave
Crimes Charged: Sexual abuse (including rape and indecent assault)
Chief Defense Lawyers: First Trial: Juliane Balliro, Frank Mondano; Second Trial: Joseph Balliro, Juliane Balliro
Chief Prosecutors: Both Trials: Patricia Bernstein, Laurence Hardoon
Judges: First Trial: Elizabeth Dolan; Second Trial: John Paul Sullivan
Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dates of Trials: First Trial: April 15-July 19, 1986; Second Trial: May 28-June 13, 1987
Verdicts: Gerald Amirault: guilty of eight counts of rape and seven indecent assaults; Violet Amirault: guilty two counts of rape and three counts of indecent assault; Cheryl Amirault LeFave: guilty of three counts of rape and four indecent assaults.
Sentences: Gerald: 30-40 years in prison; Violet and Cheryl: 8-20 years in prison

SIGNIFICANCE: One of a number of similar cases alleging patterns of sexual abuse of very young children in institutional settings, the Fells Acres Day School case was perhaps not the most extreme, but it raised the issues common to so many of these cases: Why did they suddenly emerge on the American scene only at this time? How much of the children's testimony may have been "planted" by the adult questioners? What were average people to make of the contradictory claims of the experts?

In the 1980s, Americans suddenly found themselves reading of charge after charge that individuals attached to various institutions had sexually abused children in both persistent and provocative ways. In particular there were cases involving day-care centers in Miami, Florida; the Bronx, New York; and Manhattan Beach, California: some involved "recovered memory," some involved "satanic rituals," but all shared the charge that adults attached to day-care centers had subjected the children to horrific varieties of sexual abuse. One of these day-care center cases was the Fells Acres Case.

What Went on at Day Care?

The Fells Acres Day School was located in Malden, Massachusetts, a city just north of Boston. Violet Amirault had founded the day-care school in 1966; by 1984, her daughter Cheryl Amirault LeFave was teaching one class, while her son Gerald dd everything from maintenance repairs to cooking. When things were busy, he would also pitch in and help the staff with the children.

It was just such an occasion in April 1984, when a four-year-old, new to the school, wet himself during a nap. At a teacher's request, Gerald changed M.C. (as he would be known in the trial) into some dry clothes and put the wet things in a plastic bag that the child took home. As it happened, the boy's parents were in the midst of breaking up and he was exhibiting several behavioral problems at home. At this time, too, M.C.'s mother told him of the alleged sexual abuse of her brother when he was a child; and during that summer, the boy was discovered in sex play with a cousin. This prompted the mother to ask her now-adult brother to question the boy, who, told his uncle that Gerald had taken his pants down. Upon further questioning, his mother would later claim, the boy proceeded to describe how every day at Fells Acres Gerald had led him blindfolded into a "secret room" and there performed sex acts.

At that point, in September 1984, the mother called a hotline and accused Gerald of sexual abuse. The local police were informed and they arrested Gerald and closed the school. Soon numerous Fells Acres children were being interrogated by not only their parents but also by the police, social workers, therapists, and prosecutors. Child after child began to tell stories of fantastic goings on, not only involving sexual acts performed by or in the presence of all three members of the Amirault family, but also incidents involving robots, murdered and buried animals, drinking of their own urine, eating a frog. By 1985, the district attorney indicted the three Amiraults and charged them with sexual abuse of a total of 21 children. Gerald's offenses were regarded as especially horrific and so he was brought to trial first.

Gerald's Trial

The trial was held at the Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Because of the pretrial publicity, the jury was actually drawn from people in the Springfield area, 100 miles west of Boston. The trial proper began on April 29, by which time Amirault was charged with 10 counts of rape and 12 counts of indecent assault on a total of 13 children. Prosecutors said that six other children originally part of the case against Amirault had been withdrawn because they could not stand the prospect of testifying against him. Those who did come to the courtroom were protected by their parents from seeing him, and one child was allowed to testify via a videotape. When the children did testify, the courtroom was usually cleared of the public and the press.

The testimony that was then offered by the prosecution was indeed horrific. Several children—now some two years older than when the alleged events occurred—took the stand to recount stories of how "Tooky," as Gerald was known by the children, had taken them to a "secret room" or "magic room." There—usually made-up and costumed as a clown—he did everything from simply touching their genitalia to actually placing his penis in their genitalia, anus, or mouth. One child testified that Gerald and a never-identified "Mr. Gatt" had each inserted a butcher knife in her rectum on separate occasions.

In addition to the children who took the stand, several parents testified about their own conversations in which their children told them of these events. The prosecution also called several specialists on child psychology, pediatric medicine, and sexual abuse. Much of the prosecution's case, however, rested on the intensive interrogations of the children by Susan Kelley, the Fells Acres Day School's own pediatric nurse. In these interviews, she employed a controversial technique: using anatomically correct dolls, she persisted in trying to get the children either to point to parts of the doll or to actually demonstrate with the doll where the alleged sexual acts had occurred. But the potential fallacy of this technique was demonstrated by the prosecutor who used just such a doll to question a child on the witness stand:

Q. I'm going to take the dress off this doll and show it to you … [Prosecutor has the child name the body parts.] If I show you this doll, can you tell us or show us on the doll whether or not Tooky did anything to you?

A. [No response]

Q. Can you show us on the doll, yes or no?

A. I don't know.

Q. Was there any time that anyone in the magic room touched you? Yes or no?

A. Yes.

Q. Who touched you?

A. Tooky.

Q. And can you tell us where he touched you?

A. [No response.]

Q. And did he touch you here on the vagina?

A. Yes.

Q. And did he touch you on the legs?

A. Yes.

Q. And did he touch you on the bum?

A. Yes.

In such questioning lay what the defense would attack as the fundamental fallacy of the whole case against Gerald Amirault. From the very first time M.C. and all the subsequent children had been questioned, Amirault's lawyers contended, adults had put ideas and words in their mouths and then coaxed and pressured them until they got the answers they were seeking. It was also pointed out that experiments had shown that young children often claimed to have been touched in their private parts during doctor's visits when videos showed nothing of the sort.

The cumulative detail and consistency of the children's accounts, however, proved to be more than Amirault and his lawyers could overcome, and after 64 and one-half hours of deliberation, the jury returned with its verdict: they found Gerald Amirault guilty on 15 counts of rape and aggravated assault. On August 21, he was sentenced to 30 to 40 years in prison.

Mother and Daughter on Trial

After Gerald's conviction, there was some doubt as to whether the state would move ahead with the charges against Violet and her daughter, Cheryl, but on May 28, 1987, jury selection began for this new trial. The charges against them were of the same nature as those against Gerald: by the time they went to the jury, Violet was charged with two rapes and three indecent assaults and Cheryl with three rapes and four indecent assaults. In the end only four children testified against them but, as with Gerald, they recounted shocking tales: how they had been fondled by the women, had objects inserted in them, had been made to fondle the women, and, in the case of the boy, had oral sex performed on him. Much was made in this trial, too, of the claims that while these acts were being performed in the "magic room" or elsewhere, they were being photographed by Gerald Amirault. The state then charged that the Amiraults did this to sell the photographs to dealers or fanciers of child pornography, although no such photograph of the Fells Acres children was ever produced.

One issue hanging over both trials was how such things could have been going on over a period of time yet none of the children spoke up until well after the initial claims of M.C. The prosecution got several children to testify that it was because the Amiraults constantly threatened that they would kill them and their parents. The little boy in this trial, for instance, said that Cheryl had "hurt" a bird and a squirrel in front of him and then said that "this is going to happen to your parents" if he ever spoke of what was going on.

When it came time for the defense, they introduced 23 former teachers or teachers' aides at the school and five parents who testified they had never seen any indications of any of the activities described by the children. All testified, in fact, that the children seemed eager to be at the school and that they interacted easily with the Amiraults The most they conceded to the prosecution's crossexamination was that there were times when the defendants were alone at the school with some children.

But once again, a jury chose to believe the stories of the children and returned on June 13 with a verdict that found Violet and Cheryl guilty of all charges. On July 15, the two women were sentenced to 8-20 years in prison.

Aftermath

Not unexpectedly, the Fells Acres case produced a lengthy and complicated series of legal actions. Gerald appealed his case on numerous grounds and in several courts but was never able to gain a new trial, let alone his freedom, and short of a commutation, it appears he will be in prison until at least 2015. Violet and Cheryl, however, were released on an appeal in 1995, and in May 1997, their convictions were overturned on the grounds that the children, while testifying, had not been required to face them. The state appealed this, but that September Violet died. Then in June 1998 Judge Isaac Borenstein ruled in favor of Cheryl's motion for a new trial on the grounds that there was new evidence that testimony of very young children can be drastically distorted by suggestive interviewing techniques of the kind applied in the Fells Acres case. After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned Judge Borenstein's ruling in August 1999, the state negotiated an agreement with Cheryl: in return for ceasing all attempts to clear her name via both the legal system and the media, Cheryl's sentence was reduced to time already served plus 10 years of supervised probation.

But the issues raised by this and similar cases of child abuse still trouble many people—numerous articles, books, television programs, and movies have been based on these day-care cases alone. One such issue was that the parents and others who interrogated these children appeared to have set out with an agenda to prove they had been abused. Another issue was how it was possible for Violet Amirault to have had some 3,000 children pass through her school during 18 years before any such charges surfaced. Equally troubling to logic was another question: how is it that, after the wave of institutional child abuse charges swept across the country in the 1980s, the phenomenon seems to have vanished from the American scene?

—John S. Bowman

Suggestions for Further Reading

Boston Globe. April 16, 19, 24, 30, 1986; May 8, 14, 29, 1986, July 21, 1986; August 22, 1986; May 29, 1987; June 2, 4, 6, 9, 14, 1987; July 16, 1987.

http://www.tiac.net/users/hcunn/witch/fells

http://www.ultranet.com/-kyp/amirault

Nathan, Debbie, and Michael Snendeker. Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. New York: Basic Books: 1995.