For seven months Margaret Kelly Michaels, a 22-year-old teacher's aide at Wee Care, had been sexually abusing the girl and her classmates. The youngsters later told investigators that Miss. E leven years ago, on a bitter January night, dozens of young men, dressed in a uniform of black berets, white T-shirts, and black pants, gathered on a hill overlooking the Nigerian city of Jos, shouting, dancing, and shooting guns into the black sky. A drummer pounded a rhythmic beat. Amid the roiling crowd, five men crawled toward a candlelit dais, where a white-robed priest stood.
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August 18, 1991,Section NJ, Page12Buy Reprints
August 18, 1991,Section NJ, Page12Buy Reprints
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IN the fall of 1984, before anyone knew the terrible things that were happening to her, the 4-year-old girl changed from an insouciant, vibrant child into a moody and sullen one. She cried often and fought bitterly with her siblings; once she knocked her sister unconscious in a battle over a toy.
The 4-year-old began suggesting that the family move from their South Orange neighborhood. And she kept asking when she would no longer have to take naps at the Wee Care Day Nursery, the preschool she attended in Maplewood.
It was the following June that her mother discovered why. For seven months Margaret Kelly Michaels, a 22-year-old teacher's aide at Wee Care, had been sexually abusing the girl and her classmates. The child's mercurial behavior suddenly made sense.
The girl's harrowing experience and those of other children at the nursery are recounted in a book by the girl's mother, 'Not My Child,' recently released in paperback (Avon, $4.95).
In 1988, Miss Michaels was convicted of molesting 20 children. The jury returned guilty verdicts on 115 counts, including 34 counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault. In all, 31 children had charged 235 separate offenses, although dozens of the charges were dismissed either for insufficient evidence or because the children were unable or too fearful to testify. A 10-Month Trial
The trial lasted 10 months; 19 children, including the 4-year-old girl, testified. Miss Michaels denied all the charges.
Now serving a 47-year prison term, she is eligible for parole in the year 2002. The case was appealed on the grounds that testimony used to convict her was inadmissible. She was recently denied bail while the case is pending appeal.
In the book about what happened at Wee Care, the author, a journalist, uses pseudonyms, Patricia Crowley for herself and Hannah for her daughter, to protect her child's privacy.
Mrs. Crowley writes that the children were sexually assaulted with knives and forks and forced to engage in sexually oriented games and explicit sex acts. She says that many of the children saw Miss Michaels, whom they called Kelly, taste urine and feces. And there was the 'stackup game,' in which the children were told to lie nude on top of their teacher, making a stack.
In 'Not My Child,' Mrs. Crowley dovetails the children's puzzling behavior at home with the situation they faced at Wee Care. She writes that many of the Wee Care children, her daughter included, abruptly refused to eat peanut butter shortly after Miss Michaels's arrival at Wee Care; the youngsters later told investigators that Miss Michaels frequently spread peanut butter on her genitals and demanded that they eat it.
In the months after the abuse, many of the children began exhibiting sophisticated sexual behavior, the book says. It quotes one mother of a 5-year-old girl as saying, 'It was almost as though I had to throw her into a cold shower to calm her down.'
And sending their children to preschool in the mornings became a daily battle for many of the parents. Entreaties by the children to stay home were upsetting and confusing. Yet not one child said what was wrong.
One mother in 'Not My Child' described the morning she dropped her 5-year-old son off early, when Miss Michaels was the only teacher on duty: 'Billy would take one look at her and start to scream and yell. I figured we had to peel him off every day for those weeks. I would leave and my guts would be in knots. But he wouldn't tell me what was wrong.'
The investigation of Miss Michaels began in April 1985, when a mother took her 4-year-old son to a doctor to have a rash examined. As a nurse inserted a rectal thermometer, the boy said: 'That's what my teacher does to me at school every day. Her takes my temperature.' When asked who that teacher was, he said, 'Kelly.' Marriages Affected
So devastating were the effects of the abuse on the families, Mrs. Crowley writes, that one marriage broke up and many others soured, her own included. For Mrs. Crowley, the only antidote for the pain was to talk endlessly about Wee Care, to question what she and her husband had done wrong, how they had failed to protect Hannah.
Her husband reacted differently. 'His feeling was, 'Let's sweep it under the rug,' ' Mrs. Crowley said in a recent interview. 'It took me a long time to realize how much he was hurting too. Right from the start, we fought, whether it was about Hannah testifying to the grand jury, therapy, writing the book, anything.'
Indeed, her decision to write 'Not My Child' rocked the couple's already fragile relationship, Mrs. Crowley said. Three years had passed since they discovered what had happened to their daughter. The trial was over, and the family was finally putting the horror of the experience to rest. 'Hard on All of Us'
'My husband was upset; he felt I was biting off more than I could chew,' Mrs. Crowley said. 'And he knew he'd be watching the kids while I was writing. It was hard on all of us.'
But the couple managed. On weekends and at night Mrs. Crowley interviewed dozens of parents and the Essex County prosecutors. Her husband prepared meals and shuffled the couple's children to piano and ballet lessons.
Memories resurfaced in the months she worked on the book, but for Mrs. Crowley, writing 'Not My Child' was an opportunity to exorcise some ghosts of her own. In it she reveals that she and her sisters were molested by an uncle when they were young.
At that time, she did not tell her parents. And even though she now tries to understand why her daughter and the other Wee Care children remained silent about the abuse, it still hurts, she said.
No doubt fear played a part. The book says one girl told her mother that Miss Michaels threatened to turn her into a monster if she told anyone about the 'games' they played; a boy said he was afraid his teacher would 'throw him down the stairs.'
Since 'Not My Child' was published, Mrs. Crowley has received dozens of letters and phone calls from parents whose children, although not attending Wee Care, were also abused. To all parents she offers advice: watch for changes; ask your children; believe them if they say someone is hurting them. A Move to New York
The Crowleys recently left South Orange and moved to New York, where Hannah is doing much better. She is settling into her new school, where she is on the track and swim teams, and will attend sixth grade in the fall. These days, Hannah says she would like to be an artist, a nurse or a veterinarian when she grows up.
On weekends, her parents occasionally drive her back to South Orange to visit friends, some of whom also attended Wee Care. But Wee Care and Miss Michaels do not often come up in the couple's conversation. New friends do not know what happened to Hannah six years ago, but if she wants to tell them, her parents say that's up to her.
'If it's on her mind and she feels she wants to talk about it, that's fine,' Mrs. Crowley said. 'I don't want her to get the message you shouldn't share your feelings. I'm not going to make that decision for her.'
The Crowleys' other children, three girls, ages 13, 8 and 2, and a 6-year-old boy, do not understand what all the fuss was back then. 'The kids will say, 'When Hannah went to school where there was the bad teacher,' but that's about it,' Mrs. Crowley said. 'They were just too young.'
To keep communication open, Mrs. Crowley every Wednesday evening takes each of her three oldest daughters out for pizza or ice cream, rotating weekly. They chat about school, friends, anything the girls like. On some occasions, if Hannah has seemed troubled, Mrs. Crowley may broach the subject of Miss Michaels, but Hannah seldom wants to talk about the past. 'I Felt So Bad' for
Yet there are times when the past comes rushing back to Mrs. Crowley herself. When a jury acquitted Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son, Raymond Buckey, of 52 charges of sexual assault in a Manhattan Beach, Calif., preschool case last year, Mrs. Crowley said she felt the blow. 'I felt so bad for those parents,' she said. 'Whether or not it happened, those parents believe it did.'
Hannah and the other Wee Care children will be in their early 20's when Miss Michaels is eligible for parole. Mrs. Crowley said there was no doubt what she and other parents would do then.
'We'll go to the parole board so we'll keep her behind bars forever,' she said. 'Maybe if she had said, 'I'm sorry for the way I screwed up your kids,' maybe I could have found it in my heart to feel some compassion. But she didn't, and I have no sympathy for her. My daughter will remember the abuse for the rest of her life.'