Comes again

Who am I.

By that time, Eddie had told his fourth-grade girlfriend that he lied about Stoll. On a camping trip a few years later, he told his uncle too. "He wasn't very helpful," Sampley says. "He just said, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?"'

Eddie was the only accuser left in the Center Street neighborhood. When he rode his bike by, he could still see Stoll's living room where he had watched "fright night" videos. There were other reminders too -- like the school field trips to the courthouse. "It was like going to a doctor's office," he remembers. "I had that creepy feeling. I didn't want to be there."

Eddie didn't need external reminders to torment him. He thought about Stoll all the time. By high school, he couldn't remember what Stoll looked like, but he often imagined what his life must be like in prison. He thought about writing him a letter. "But then I'd think about it for a while, the idea would pass and I'd do nothing," he says. Still, he kept confessing; he told every girlfriend he ever had and he told his closest friends. In part, he was revealing a painful lie. But he was also trying, in some way, to get help. "People would say we should do something about it," he says, "but no one really knew how to help me."

The authority figures with the power to help all seemed suspect to him. He could have gone to the district attorney's office, but "they were the ones who did this to me," he says. He could have called Child Protective Services. But that was where Velda Murillo worked. He couldn't go to the sheriff's office. Conny Ericsson worked there. What about Stoll's defense attorney? "He lost the case," Sampley said. "How could he lose that case?"

Bakersfield isn't a town that welcomes challenges to law enforcement. Though it's just two hours north of Los Angeles, the city feels more like Texas than California, surrounded by miles of oil and agriculture fields. Many residents are proud of the small-town conservative flavor. On its Web site, the Kern County D.A. office highlights having "the highest per-capita prison-commitment rate of any major California county," and the longtime district attorney, Ed Jagels, a subject of the book "Mean Justice," by Edward Humes, is considered one of the toughest prosecutors in the state. (Jagels declined comment for this article.) "You have to understand the power of Ed Jagels," says Michael Snedeker, an attorney who helped overturn 18 convictions of Bakersfield defendants in sex-ring cases and co-author of "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt" with the journalist Debbie Nathan. "He is more important than the mayor in that city. He's more feared than J. Edgar Hoover on his best day."

In three years during the 1980's, Jagels and his predecessor prosecuted eight sex rings involving 46 defendants. Consider the example of Scott Kniffen, who agreed to be a character witness for his friends Alvin and Deborah McCuan, accused of molesting their own children. Within weeks, Kniffen and his wife, Brenda, were under arrest for supposed involvement in the same sex ring. They were subsequently convicted. (Their convictions were reversed 12 years later). Or consider Jeffrey Modahl. He was a single dad of two daughters who suspected two relatives had molested his girls. After Modahl asked Velda Murillo for help, Murillo's suspicions turned to him. He was sentenced to 48 years in prison for running a family sex ring that included tying his preadolescent daughters to hooks in a bedroom. (No evidence of hooks was ever found.) "Velda said, 'Tell us what happened and you'll go home,"' remembers Carla Jo Modahl, who was 9 when she testified against her father and subsequently tried to commit suicide several times after his conviction. "I didn't understand what would happen. I didn't realize it until everyone was in prison." Carla was scared that if she recanted her testimony, she, too, would be imprisoned. Still, when she was 12, she told a judge she'd lied on the witness stand. The judge didn't believe her, and her father remained in prison for a dozen more years -- until his conviction was finally reversed.

One night in 1999, Ed Sampley walked into a Mexican restaurant and saw his childhood friend Victor Monge at the bar. They had lost touch after the trial, and now, 15 years later, they were both in their early 20's. Monge had a job selling phones; Sampley had completed a two-year degree in computer technology and was installing Internet wiring in schools. As they headed outside to catch up and smoke cigarettes, Sampley brought up the D.A.'s office. He always blamed them for what happened to Stoll. That trial was messed up, Sampley said, wasn't it? And then Sampley told Monge than Stoll had never molested him. Monge said the same thing.