LORAIN, Ohio -- The allegations started 17 years ago with a green leaf, tucked under the shirt of a Lorain preschooler.

The leaf, and the story a little girl told her mother about how it got stuck to her 4-year-old body, ignited one of most sensational sexual molestation cases in Northeast Ohio. It also one of the most debated.

In all, 14 pre-school children and their parents accused a bus driver for the Lorain County Head Start program of delivering her tender charges to a convicted sex offender to play nasty games and endure sadistic sexual acts. Allegations of five of them went to court.

But today, even as the children involved are now college-aged, the case is filled with legal twists that may be far from over. And as questions linger over among other things, the reliability of the children's statements, not everyone is convinced justice has been done.

A local judge freed the bus driver, Nancy Smith, and Joseph Allen, an unemployed sanitation worker in 2009 after they had served just more than a decade of their lengthy sentences. He believes they are innocent and should have never been charged.

The two were released on a technicality, and the judge has not re-sentenced them, even after the Ohio Supreme Court said they should return to prison. The judge has asked the justices to reconsider. Prosecutors think he overstepped his bounds and trampled on the decision of the jury.

Meanwhile, the Ohio Innocence Project, which has taken up Smith's case says they have new information that will call into question the entire investigation and exonerate the mother of four, who served more than 14 years in prison for a crime she swore she never committed -- with a man she insisted she never met.

"To do justice you have to look at everything," said Jack Bradley, who represented Smith at her trial. "Not through the glasses of 1993 but through the glasses of 2011."

The case

In May of 1993, the night the 4-year-old's mother found the leaf, she took her daughter to a local emergency room. She was so shaken, she took pills to calm her nerves.

Her daughter, she said, had told her that her bus driver told her school was closed one day and took her to a man's house for a party. There, they put tape over her mouth and put a stick inside of her.

Soon police became involved. But when the girl's mother wasn't satisfied with the pace of their investigation she went to other parents -- and a Cleveland television station.

Anxious parents started showing up in the lobby of the police station and telling detectives stories of their kids simulating sex with stuffed animals, wetting their beds and putting tape over the mouths of their dolls.

The vivid accounts of preschoolers being raped, tied up, poked with needles and urinated on, inflamed the community.

Conflicting descriptions of a molester began emerge. A man who was black. Or white. Or painted black with white spots. Sometimes he had blue eyes, sometimes not.

Parents did their own investigating, looking for the house, for the man, for justice.

Police, under pressure to make arrests, interviewed some of the 4-and 5-year-olds again and again.

In hours of taped interviews, the kids were grilled about who touched them, and where. Sometimes their parents answered questions for them.

Other times, police suggested to the children who the possible abusers might be. Was it Nancy? Was it Joseph?

Some kids said yes. Others denied being hurt at all.

Smith, when contacted by police, offered to take a polygraph and passed. Police already had their eye on Allen, a convicted child abuser, for another sex crime and decided he was the man the kids spoke about.

But in the swirl of questions and suggestions, some wonder whether the chance to discover what really happened to the children -- if anything -- may have been lost forever.

More than a year after the first report of abuse, several children -- often in whispers -- told their stories from the witness stand in Lorain County Common Pleas Judge Lynn McGough's courtroom.

One wiped her eyes with tissues and asked for her mom. Most testified in shakes and nods of their heads or barely decipherable "uh-hums" and "uhn-uhns."

They often seemed confused, eager to agree with whoever was asking the questions.

But what they did say, especially when responding to questions by assistant county prosecutor Jonathan Rosenbaum seemed indisputable -- that someone had hurt them.

Some talked about a man who had spots on his skin. Allen, the man at the defense table in front of them, had a skin pigmentation condition.

Others testified that the man who had hurt them had a scary Halloween mask. A similar mask found in his home was held up for jurors.

The same went for a pink dress and some Batman bed sheets and some toy cars.

And from the witness stand, each kid pointed out their former bus driver, Nancy, though not all of them said she took them to Joseph's house.

Bradley, Smith's attorney, tried to quiz the children on the details, on how their stories had changed. But what Bradley could not do was play for the jury the hours of taped interviews, that, in some cases, contained drastically different versions of the stories they told the jurors.

Transcripts of those tapes showed that some of the kids only mentioned Nancy or Joseph when prompted. That some also said another bus driver and Nancy's children were also with them. That sometimes they drove in a car or walked to Joseph's house.

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Timeline of case details

McGough would not let the jurors listen to those tapes or watch the videos of the police lineups, where the majority of the kids failed to pick out Allen.

Absent from the prosecution's case were reports from doctors and child abuse experts who examined some of the kids.

Detectives testified they were never able to pinpoint the house where the abuse happened. Many of the kids described a junky basement and an upstairs bedroom. But Allen lived in one-story cottage on a concrete slab right across the street from the hometown newspaper.

It was also left largely unexplored how Smith and Allen coordinated the rendezvous -- getting the children and all the toys, the Halloween mask, scary magazines and ropes and belts to tie them up -- to the unknown location with time to molest the kids and get them back home before someone noticed they were missing.

Even the leaf, the piece of evidence that sparked the whole investigation, never appeared.

Instead, prosecutors relied on the kids, their parents and several people who said they saw Allen around the church where the kids attended school and around Smith.

Head Start employees also testified that Smith would not have time between her various bus routes to have committed the crimes. But mileage sheets for the bus and attendance sheets for the children were not given to jurors to examine.

Bradley said the defense was hindered because the prosecution didn't turn over some of their evidence until after the trial started.

It took a jury less than a day to convict the pair. Jurors said it was the children's testimony that swayed them.

Perhaps they agreed with Rosenbaum, who later said that weirdness of the allegations convinced him that the children were telling the truth. That the children, though their stories may not have been identical, talked about adult sexual behavior, things they could not make up.

After the verdict was read Smith sobbed into her hands.

"I don't even know this man," she cried. "I'm a mother. I just want my children. ... I never touched these children, never. I never hurt them in any way."

McGough sentenced Smith to 30 to 90 years in prison for rape, attempted rape and two counts each of gross sexual imposition and two counts of complicity to rape.

Allen got five consecutive life sentences for four counts of rape, three counts of felonious sexual penetration and one count of gross sexual imposition.

Bradley has likened the case and the outcome, which mirrored at least a half-dozen other daycare-related molestation cases in the 1980 and 1990s, to the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, in which the stories of children led to the hanging of dozens of people.

"I've seen miscarriages of justice in the 33 years I've been practicing," he said. "But this is by far the most egregious."

He points to similar cases decided during an era he said was tinged by hysteria that have since been overturned.

Though not as understood at the time, central to many of the highly publicized cases was whether the children's stories were influenced or contaminated by suggestive interviewing techniques.

Dr. Kathleen Quinn, who headed the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation who interviewed many of the children as part of a civil lawsuit against the Head Start agency, concluded that the coercive, leading and intense formal and informal questioning of the preschoolers was flawed and that the adults failed of maintain openness when listening to the kids.

She said investigators also failed to take into account major inconsistencies between what the kids said in interview and what they kids said to their parents.

In the decade following the conviction the debate over whether justice prevailed or failed in the so-called "Lorain Head Start case" played out mostly in sporadic flurries of court filings.

The majority of filings have sought freedom for Smith. Smith's attorneys have argued among other things that:

* The children's statements were contaminated by police and parents.

* A judge should have allowed jurors to review the taped statements and videos of police lineups.

* A prosecutors failed to disclose a main witnesses' drug conviction that would have questioned her credibility.

* Smith should have been tried separately from Allen, who had previously admitted to sexually abusing a young neighbor.

Each time, prosecutors responded -- and courts agreed -- that the jury knew there were missteps in the investigation, and had still decided to convict based on the testimony of the children.

In addition to that, other lawyers fought to compensate some of the young molestation victims and their parents by suing the Head Start program for their suffering. More than a decade after the original accusations, they were awarded millions of dollars.

In 2008, the case landed in front of Lorain County Judge James Burge who had been elected to replace McGough.

A former defense attorney and staple in the county's courthouse chewing on his trademark stogies, Burge had been asked by Smith's attorney to reconsider her case and noted that the judgment entry that sent her to prison almost 14 years earlier had failed to mention that a jury had decided her fate.

He released Smith and Allen on bonds and voided their sentences because of the technical error.

Burge then spent months reviewing the case's evidence, trial transcripts, the lineup videos and interview tapes the jury never heard, and a 16-page memo prepared by the Ohio Innocence Project in 2007 for one of Smith's parole board hearings.

It also included affidavits from several witnesses who said they were never contacted to testify. And from a woman, who said assistant prosecutor Rosenbaum, had pressured her when she expressed concern about her ability to identify Allen. She said she was told, "Goddammit, you will answer the way I want you to. . .Is that understood?"

In June of 2009, Burge made it official. He said there was never enough evidence to convict the pair. He acquitted them, almost 15 years after they had originally been convicted.

Prosecutor Dennis Will, who inherited the case, had to be pulled off a golf course that day. He was stunned. Smith, who said she had cried herself to sleep every night in prison, wept joyfully.

"I'm in another world right now," she said. "I never have to go back to that prison again."

But prosecutors quickly appealed Burge's decision.

Though Will agreed the Ohio Supreme Court had created some confusion with its ruling on sentencing entries, Burge had had no standing to acquit the pair, he said.

Bradley, of course, sees it differently.

"Judge Burge is the first person, the first person with the guts to say the truth," Bradley said. "He doesn't care about being re-elected. He cares about doing the right thing. He's a brave guy. He's the poster boy for what judges are supposed to be like."

The state's high court agreed with Will, and in January admonished Burge and ordered him to correct the clerical error and send the pair back to prison.

Burge has asked them to reconsider their decision.

Meanwhile, Smith waits to see whether she will be returned to the place she calls "hell."

Allen has been mostly silent. His attorney K. Ronald Bailey has been less vocal about his case outside a courtroom. He did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Will, a former police detective-turned-lawyer, says the recycled arguments are still not enough to reopen the case a jury decided. He agrees that there may have been flaws in the investigation but that the jury knew about them.

In the past few years he said he has asked Lorain detectives to run down numerous leads that Smith's family has provided but none of them have turned up new evidence.

But his ears, he said, ears are open.

"If there is any new evidence, anything new we will take that one step at a time," he promised.