Smear Campaign?

"They're worthless as far as the court thing," Stevens says. "But I'll tell you what's going on, is they're being used behind her back against Mrs. King. While they weren't admissible in court, they apparently were admissible in the minds of the people at the state."

Estella Olguin, public information officer for the Child Care Licensing division of the state's protective and regulatory services in Houston, admits that yes, transcripts of the tapes were a factor in the state's decision to revoke King's license, as were on-site compliance investigations, and interviews with children and parents and Delcambre and at least one other King employee. Olguin can't say how many parents were interviewed, or how many children, but she does say that "we found enough noncompliances, even without the abuse," to close down King. On December 22 Child Care Licensing sent King a letter outlining a small laundry list of noncompliances, from the sensational feces-smearing charge to the tepid "you acknowledged that you have 'tapped' children on their hands as punishment." On February 28 CCL informed King that her license was being permanently revoked.

"When the state started talking about this case and brought it to court," Stevens says, "they were talking about rubbing feces and battering children and everything else. By the time they argued the case, and by the time they put their representative witnesses on to tell the state's position, they seem to have abandoned that position, the physical battery, the feces smearing and everything else. They were relying on emotional abuse."

If there is any medical evidence that any child suffered abuse at the hands of King, it has not been presented.

King has filed an appeal, which will be heard by the State Office of Administrative Hearing probably no sooner than three months from now.

The state has no continuing investigation into the charges. Galveston police dropped the case after the grand jury no-bill.

Not satisfied with the best efforts of herself and of Stevens, Rhoades has retained trial consultant and author Dean Tong, of Florida, whose Web site (www.abuse-excuse.com) and forthcoming book (Elusive Innocence: Survival Guide for the Falsely Accused) deal with a narrow specialty in false allegation cases, especially as they relate to accusees mired in the bureaucracies of child protection service agencies.

Tong believes that "What usually happens happened in this case. And that's that the government went with their initial suspect and they ran with it. They just don't conduct a complete objective and independent, impartial investigation. They don't have the resources, they don't have the time, they don't have the personnel, and there's always that hidden agenda that exists: They want to get their victory."

Tong, Stevens and Rhoades all agree that if the state had indeed done a thorough investigation, it would have found what both Judge Carmona and a grand jury had found earlier: a lack of evidence of wrongdoing on King's part.

The tapes are, at the very least, deeply suspect. And the toddlers who told their mothers they'd had feces rubbed on their faces?

"I don't think we can start giving credibility," Tong says, "certainly not reliability, to what comes out of the mouths of babes at age two and a half…It's absolutely normal for two-and-a-half-year-olds to be smearing feces, albeit on themselves, on a wall, whatever…so that doesn't tell me anything."

But according to Tong, establishing one's innocence in false accusation cases is only half of an uphill battle. One must also impeach the credibility of the accuser.

That would be Bobbie Delcambre, who had worked for King less than a year. And it turns out, according to King, that she and Delcambre had had a fight several weeks before the allegations arose. King had been letting Delcambre borrow her Lincoln Town Car to run errands, but once she started getting calls from the close-knit community about Delcambre driving around town and showing off "her new car" to friends, King rescinded those privileges.

Rhoades says Delcambre started circulating poison phone calls to parents several days before coming forth with the tapes, even as she was filling out daily sheets for the children containing no hint of trouble. Why, King wants to know, did Delcambre leave her own grandson in King's care the day before she went public, to "protect" the children, with a supposed three weeks' worth of incriminating recordings? Rhoades has also filed a police report on King's behalf alleging that Delcambre forged King's signature on checks and stole paperwork from her office.

According to Department of Public Safety records, Bobbie Delcambre has a history of using alias names, including Bobbie Phillips and Bobbie Cooper. She also has two arrest records in the 1980s, accompanied by guilty or no contest pleas, for DWI and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

"Ms. Delcambre used to be in the day-care business until she surrendered her license two years ago," says Stevens. "There were some sanitation complaints and she just said to hell with it and gave her license back…Her daughter is still in the business, and her daughter runs a facility that is open and in good standing today…Our information -- and there are denials of this kicking around, this is disputed -- is that when Mrs. Mudge had her little press party…apparently somebody got up and made the suggestion about other places they could send these children, so there was a little bit of a commercial angle in this too. Mrs. King had a nice book of business. And I think it would help certain people to knock her out of business."