Smear Campaign?

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."

"I guess my point," Tong says, "is there's a lot of information there about Ms. Delcambre that I don't believe has been uncovered. And I find this in a lot of my cases, oftentimes the finger's pointed at the wrong person, and in fact the finger should be pointed at the actual complainant or accuser."

The Houston Press was unable to locate a current phone number or address for Delcambre.

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Laura Rhoades is not a lawyer and she is not a detective, and there is in fact squabbling among the team she has amassed. Rhoades hired Tong with money she raised partly from private contributions on King's behalf, many of them from local day cares, but lawyer Stevens has decided to make do without Tong's services.

"He didn't agree with my plan," says Tong, who maintains low hopes that King will win her appeal with Stevens at the wheel. "I'm not going to state for the record that Mark Stevens is incompetent," Tong says, "but I will tell you that [lawyers] don't know what they don't know, and they've got huge egos. And I'm sorry, but there's no course in any law school in Texas or the other 49 states that shows a lawyer how to litigate or try false allegation cases."

What it takes, Tong says, is money. Money, mostly, for expert witnesses.

Rhoades is doing her part, throwing a community fund-raiser last Saturday, and continuing to amass testimonials from other day-care parents who are eager to confirm, for the record, their absolute certainty of King's innocence.

Leanne Mudge and other parents remain unconvinced.

Rhoades keeps searching for the evidence, stringing discrepancies and suspicions and a trail of paper together into a plausible theory as to how a small-time con artist might have tried to take advantage of a sweet old lady and ruined her name and her business in the process, and how a state agency -- in a rush to shut down talk about a woman, licensed and decorated by that same agency, smearing shit on the cheeks of children -- might not be inclined to bend over backward in considering her innocence.

And while Laura Rhoades collects all that, searching for a smoking gun to prove it and for someone in authority who cares, her most compelling pieces of evidence are out in the backyard, playing, illegally, with Delores King.