There are several ways to view the small white house
on Center Street in Bakersfield, Calif. From one
perspective it's just another low-slung home in a
working-class neighborhood, with a front yard, brown
carpeting, a TV in the living room. Now consider it
from the standpoint of the Kern County district
attorney's office: 20 years ago, this was a crime
scene of depraved proportions. According to
investigators, in the living room with brown carpeting
and a TV, boys between the ages of 6 and 8 were made
to pose for pornographic photos. On a water bed in the
back bedroom, the boys were sodomized by three men,
while a mother had sex with her own son.

But look at the house once again -- this time, through
Ed Sampley's eyes. Twenty years ago he was one of the
boys molested in the house where sex abuse was part of
the weekend fabric. That's what he told Kern County
investigators. That's what he told a judge, a jury and
a courtroom of lawyers. The testimony of Sampley and
five other boys was the prosecution's key evidence in
a trial in which four defendants were convicted, with
John Stoll, a 41-year-old carpenter, receiving the
longest sentence of the group: 40 years for 17 counts
of lewd and lascivious conduct.


Now for the first time in 20 years, Sampley is back in
the driveway of that small white house. ''It never
happened,'' he tells me. He lied about Stoll, an
easygoing divorced father who always insisted the
neighborhood kids call him John rather than Mr. Stoll
and let them run in and out of his house in their
bathing suits, eat popcorn on the living-room floor
and watch ''fright night'' videos.

Last January, Sampley and three other former accusers
returned to the courthouse where they had testified
against Stoll. This time they came to say Stoll never
molested them. They are in their late 20's now. They
have jobs in construction, car repair, sales. A couple
of them have children about the same age as they were
when they testified. Although most of the boys drifted
apart after the trial, their life stories echo with
similarities. Each of them said he always knew the
truth -- that Stoll had never touched them. Each said
that he felt pressured by the investigators to
describe sex acts. A fifth accuser isn't sure what
happened all those years ago but has no memory of
being molested. During the court hearing to release
Stoll, only his son Jed remained adamant that his
father had molested him, though he couldn't remember
details of the abuse: ''I've been through many years
of therapy to try to get over that,'' he told the
court.


Maggie Bruck, co-author of ''Jeopardy in the
Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children's
Testimony'' and a professor of psychiatry at Johns
Hopkins University, says no long-term psychological
studies exist that track groups of children involved
in alleged sex-abuse rings, in part because of
confidentiality issues. But Bruck has studied
follow-up interviews of children involved in cases
similar to the notorious McMartin preschool trial.
Some kids continue to believe they were abused. Bruck
suspects it's because their families or therapists
have reinforced the stories of abuse. ''The children
say they don't remember the salient, allegedly
terrifying details,'' she told me. ''But they are sure
it happened.''


Then there are other kids -- kids like Sampley who
have always known nothing happened and have spent
years tormented by it. Linda Starr, the legal director
of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa
Clara University School of Law, which represented
Stoll in his hearing this year, is a former sex-crimes
prosecutor and was surprised to see how much the
events of 20 years ago had affected the children.
''Before I met them, I didn't appreciate that these
kids, who had not been sexually abused, would have
experienced trauma comparable to kids who had been,''
Starr says.

In part, Sampley, now 28 and a worker for a
commercial-sign maker, is haunted by his own role.
''Why couldn't I withstand the pressure?'' he says.
''I didn't smoke when I was pressured by my friends.
But when I was pressured by the investigators, I broke
down. I still search for that moment I gave in.'' He
is also haunted by how the investigation distorted his
trust. Several years ago, he realized that each time
his stepdaughter, then 6, invited friends to the
house, he shut himself in his bedroom; he didn't want
to play with strangers' kids or even be around them.
For a year, he also wouldn't give his own daughter,
now 3, a bath. ''I'm afraid of somebody saying
something that isn't true.'' A child or an angry
ex-girlfriend might twist the truth into a lie. A
tickle becomes molestation; a hug is lechery. He knows
firsthand that children do lie.


In September 1983, when John Stoll rented the white
three-bedroom house in an east Bakersfield
neighborhood, Eddie Sampley was a sweet, polite second
grader with sun-blond hair and plenty of freckles. His
mother kept a close eye on her only child; Eddie
wasn't allowed to bike more than three houses away
without permission and had to check in every 30
minutes when he was out in the neighborhood. Among his
friends, Eddie was the kid with the cool,
chrome-colored bike who won cycling races and
maneuvered the concrete embankments of the nearby
reservoir on his skateboard.

That winter, Eddie met a new kid in the neighborhood
named Jed Stoll. His parents were divorced, and Jed
spent every other weekend at his father's house, six
doors from Eddie's. Jed had a collection of Matchbox
cars, cap guns and a dad who didn't have too many
rules.

The house was busy on the weekends Jed visited. Stoll
often picked up Jed's friends, Donnie, 6, and Allen,
8, whose mother, Margie Grafton, was a friend of
Stoll's, and he drove the pack of boys to the beach in
his black Toyota truck with a camper shell. Or he
would bring them back to the house where they and
other neighborhood kids caught frogs, dug in the
irrigation ditches out back or swam in the pool.

One June afternoon, a sheriff's deputy named Conny
Ericsson, along with Velda Murillo, a social worker
with the county's Child Protective Services, came to
Eddie's house to talk to him about a possible
neighborhood sex ring. Ericsson was a recent transfer
to the sex-crimes unit and had no training in
sex-abuse investigations. Murillo was the more
experienced one, and several kids say she led many of
the interviews. She was small, with long dark hair and
bangs, and might have been mistaken for a
schoolteacher. By many accounts, she was intense about
her work.

That day, Ericsson and Murillo told Mr. and Mrs.
Sampley that they needed to speak to their son alone.
As Karen Sampley tried to listen through a heating
vent in the kitchen, the investigators asked Eddie
about John Stoll. They told him that other boys said
Mr. Stoll did something sexual to Eddie and that Eddie
had seen Mr. Stoll do bad things to other kids, too.
''I kept telling them no, that nothing happened,''
Sampley remembers. ''I didn't understand what they
were talking about.'' Murillo and Ericsson described
sex acts that embarrassed the 8-year-old boy, and he
started crying. ''I kept telling them, 'No, no,' but
it wasn't working,'' he now says. After what ''seemed
like forever,'' Ericsson and Murillo told him they'd
be back to talk to him again. At the Sampleys' front
door, they told Karen that her son denied being
molested, but that they suspected otherwise. ''I asked
what information they could give me,'' Karen says.
''They told me that it might be a child-porn ring that
was linked to the East Coast, or a satanic cult or a
molestation ring. They weren't sure yet.''


A few weeks later, Karen took her son downtown for
another interview. This one was in the sheriff's
office, and Eddie remembers sitting on a metal chair,
at a table too high to rest his elbows. According to
the police report, Ericsson asked Eddie ''what he
calls his penis.'' (''I chose 'hot dog,''' he says,
''because it was the least embarrassing.'') The deputy
also asked about the first time he saw ''adults
playing sex games with the kids.''


''They told me that John Stoll was a bad man and I
needed to help put him in prison so he wouldn't hurt
any more children,'' Sampley says. ''They said
everything would be O.K. if I just told them something
had happened.'' And at some point -- Sampley doesn't
remember when or exactly why -- he changed his story.
He told them yes, Stoll had done something very bad to
him. And Stoll had done worse things to other boys.

By then, the investigators were convinced they were on
the trail of another sex ring. Kern County prosecuted
the first major child-sex ring in the United States in
1982, and within two years the investigations of Stoll
and the McMartin teachers in Manhattan Beach, Calif.,
were under way. The hysteria began creeping across the
country, to Maplewood, N.J. (Wee Care Day Nursery), to
Malden, Mass. (Fells Acres), and to Great Neck, Long
Island, where the documentary ''Capturing the
Friedmans'' takes place.

Sometimes an investigation began with a legitimate
complaint of the abuse of one child, which then
transmogrified into a sex ring. In the Stoll case, the
only defendant with a previous conviction of
molestation was Grant Self, who rented Stoll's pool
house briefly. Jed's mother, Ann Karlen, had, in fact,
told the sheriff's department that Self had
inappropriately touched Jed. (Self denies ever
molesting any of the kids.) But Stoll didn't know
about Karlen's charge or Grant Self's criminal record,
Stoll says.


Neither a child nor Karlen had lodged any abuse
allegations against Stoll. In fact, a social worker
was the first person to name him as a suspect. In June
1984, two Child Protective Service workers went to
talk to Karlen after Stoll complained about her
child-rearing. Karlen had her own grievances: Stoll's
parenting practices were too lax, and he often had
numerous children at the house where Jed had also told
his mother that he was involved in sex play with
another kid. According to county records, one of the
social workers asked Karlen if Stoll might be a child
molester. Karlen said she had never considered it, but
''he's so weird, maybe.'' After talking to Karlen, the
social worker noted, ''I told her he sounded like he
possibly could be molesting children, including Jed.''


When Murillo and another social worker asked Jed about
being abused, he ''had some difficulty talking about
his father,'' according to Murillo's report. But as
she continued the interview, encouraging Jed to talk
about his father by using a puppet, Jed did accuse his
dad. Within a few days, the Sheriff's Department
suspected that Grant Self, Stoll, Stoll's friend
Margie Grafton and her boyfriend, Tim Palomo, were all
part of a sex ring.


Murillo and Ericsson removed Donnie and Allen from
their home and placed them in a juvenile center where
Murillo repeatedly questioned them about their mother
and the other adults. A few days later, the
investigators interviewed 8-year-old Victor Monge, one
of Eddie's best friends. Though Victor didn't know
what happened to the Grafton boys, he also feared
losing his mother. Mrs. Monge was an illegal immigrant
from Mexico, and Victor thought his mother would be
deported if he didn't tell Murillo what he thought she
wanted to hear. So, Victor told her that Stoll
molested him.

It was a school day when Eddie went to court to
testify against Stoll in November 1984. It had been
five months since the investigation began, and Eddie
was now a third grader. He remembers the big court
seal over the judge's head and being very embarrassed.
But he can't recall any of his testimony. ''You don't
remember the lies,'' he says. ''You remember the
truth.''

On the witness stand, Eddie said that Stoll had told
him to ''get on the water bed.'' He told him to take
his clothes off. Stoll touched his ''hot dog.'' He
told him to turn over. Eddie didn't want to, so he
left the room. He testified that on another day, he
walked by Jed's bedroom and the door was slightly
open. He saw Stoll trying to put his penis in Allen.
Another time, the door was ajar again and he saw Stoll
trying to put his penis in Donnie.


The other boys offered more extravagant stories. Allen
testified that the children had to stand in a line to
have sex with Stoll on his water bed and that another
time, Margie Grafton took pictures of the adults and
kids naked, ''doing sex things.'' And Donnie detailed
being sodomized by Stoll and having oral sex with
Grant Self.


Prosecutions of child sex-rings later led to dozens of
studies about interviewing techniques, many of which
suggested that with a little coaxing, children tell
adults what they think the grown-ups want to hear --
especially if it means they will go home sooner or be
rewarded for providing information. Several years ago
two Chicago boys, 7 and 8, were accused (and later
exonerated) of killing 11-year-old Ryan Harris. In
part, the boys were enticed by a McDonald's Happy Meal
to confess.

James Wood, a psychologist at the University of Texas
at El Paso who studies interview techniques used with
children, says investigators should use nonsuggestive
prompts to help kids to narrate their own stories.
''They shouldn't tell children they have information
from other witnesses,'' he says. Or praise them when
they provide information. Or express disapproval when
they don't. Murillo, who retired from the D.A.'s
office a couple of years ago, won't talk about her
investigations in detail, but she did say: ''We never
pressured the children. Those boys were telling the
truth when they first testified.''

Yet even if you believe that someone did molest one or
more of the boys, much of the kids' testimony pushed
the bounds of plausibility -- and of anatomy. Chris
Diuri, four feet tall, testified that he had to
sodomize men two feet taller than him. Asked how he
did it, he said: ''I stand on my toes.'' Jed, who was
6 years old and so small he had to kneel on the chair
to reach the microphone at the witness stand, could
not remember how many months are in a year or the
names of all the months. But he was positive that his
father molested him exactly 19 times. One occasion was
a Saturday morning while his friends Donnie, Allen,
Victor and Eddie were in the next room watching TV.
Jed testified that he missed 10 cartoons.

When the trial ended in the winter of 1985 and all
four defendants -- Stoll, Self, Grafton and her
boyfriend -- were convicted, a quiet descended on many
of the boys' families. ''I don't remember ever
allowing a child to spend the night after that,''
Karen Sampley says. ''You felt like you couldn't even
speak to a child on the street. We were scared we
might be next.'' Eddie told his parents that Stoll had
never hurt him, but investigators told her that her
son was too embarrassed to tell her the truth. ''I
didn't know what to believe,'' she says.


By the end of the trial, the Grafton boys went to live
with their father outside Bakersfield. Jed moved with
his mother to Pennsylvania. Within a few years,
Victor's family moved to another Bakersfield
neighborhood. The case began receding into history.


But in small ways, some of the boys tried to keep the
story alive -- and to change it. In the year following
the trial, Donnie Grafton told a therapist that he had
lied in court. After the session, the counselor
reported to Donnie's father that his son was ''in
denial.'' Donnie and his brother didn't talk about
what had happened during the investigation. Neither
did Donnie and his dad. But as a frustrated and angry
12-year-old, one afternoon Donnie shut his bedroom
door and wrote:

Who is the one I see in the mirror every morning?
I get good grades
But still others get the parades
Never me!
But still it comes up, Who am I?
As I cry!
My mother imprisoned innocently for 7 years
Here come the tears.
As [I] cried & lied & put her there
She didn't do it.
I was forced to lie.
Here I go to cry, cry, cry.
But I lie to myself as the question
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.


Until then Sampley's main obsession about the trial
was his own guilt. But now he and Monge were comparing
notes. ''Things started to make sense,'' Sampley says.
They told each other that they had denied any abuse in
the beginning. But investigators kept pushing and
pushing, and they finally said yes. They talked about
how it made their families insular and more
protective. For the same reason that Karen Sampley
didn't want children in her house anymore, Victor's
mom didn't either. ''We never hugged or showed
affection after that,'' Victor says.


That night might have been a turning point, a moment
when two young men head to a payphone, put a quarter
in the slot and dial -- who exactly? They weren't
sure. ''We talked about it,'' Sampley says. ''But we
didn't really come up with anything.''


Meanwhile, Stoll had spent 15 years in prison. He was
56 years old. His son Jed was about 20 by now and had
stopped writing to his father eight years earlier.
Stoll's mother, who always believed in her son's
innocence, died while he was in prison. From time to
time, Stoll thought about Eddie and the rest of the
kids. ''I was never angry at them,'' he says. ''I was
just disappointed that they'd testified.''

The convictions of most other defendants in Kern
County molestation rings were overturned -- including
Margie Grafton's and Tim Palomo's -- as appellate
judges issued often harsh rebukes of the county's
overzealous prosecutions. (After completing his
sentence, Grant Self was moved to a state mental
hospital, where he remains because the court deemed
him a ''sexually violent predator.'') Stoll's case
lacked easy grounds for appeal and required a
significant pro bono investment from a law firm.
Finally, in 2002, Michael Snedeker got the Northern
California Innocence Project interested in the case,
and two N.C.I.P. attorneys, Jill Kent and Linda Starr,
sent a private investigator to Salmon, Idaho, to track
down Donald Grafton. ''You're either going to love
that I'm here or you're going to hate it,'' Sheila
Klopper, the investigator, told Grafton when he
answered the door. Over seven hours the next day,
Grafton told Klopper his story, and showed her the
poem he had written at age 12.

A second private investigator had already found Chris
Diuri, Victor Monge and Ed Sampley. When the
investigator showed up at the home of Sampley's
parents, Ed was standing in the front yard, six doors
away from Stoll's house. It was as if he'd been
waiting all those years.

When Sampley walked into the courtroom on the first
day of Stoll's hearing last January, he says he
wouldn't have recognized Stoll if he wasn't wearing a
brown jailhouse jumpsuit. He expected Stoll to be
bigger and tougher than the man who had lost most of
his teeth after years of prison dental care and who at
age 60 was balding and wore glasses. Sampley took
vacation time from his job to attend as many days of
the hearing as possible. Each time he arrived in the
courtroom, he tried to catch Stoll's eye. ''I wanted
him to know I was there.''


With some exceptions, much of the original cast from
two decades ago appeared during the 12-day hearing.
Conny Ericsson, now a narcotics detective in Redding,
Calif., denied tape-recording any of the children,
which contradicted the hearing testimony of Diuri,
Monge and Sampley. Donald Grafton drove 17 hours from
Idaho to recant his testimony. His brother, Allen,
arrived in court the next day. Articulate and
introspective, Allen may have had the most vexing
experience of the six kids. For most of his life, he
has assumed he was molested by his mother, Stoll and
the other adults. And he has spent years in therapy,
including a 10-week Adults Molested as Children
program. But when he learned that his brother and
others were recanting their testimony, he tried to
dredge up specific memories of abuse -- and realized
that he didn't have any. When a prosecutor, Lisa
Green, suggested he might have repressed the memories,
Grafton wasn't convinced. ''I remember getting hit
with a board across the back,'' he told Green. ''I
remember being kicked out of the house for days. I
have reasonable memories about certain tragic events
in my life.''


Later, Grafton tells me: ''I've been lied to one way
or another. But I know I have to let go of victim
feelings regardless of what happened. There's
something that's missing in my memory. Or maybe not,
and that's the big joke. Maybe I keep looking for
something that's not there.''

On April 30, Judge John Kelly overturned Stoll's
conviction. He said the children had been improperly
interviewed, making their testimony unreliable. In the
days before Stoll's release, Sampley went to visit him
in prison. ''Eddie started to apologize,'' Stoll says.
'I said: 'No. Stop right there. You have nothing to be
sorry about. Don't be sorry; be angry at the people
who did this to you.'''

Stoll, who now lives in the San Jose guesthouse of two
of his lawyers while he figures out how to spend the
rest of his life, telephones Sampley and some of the
other kids every once in a while. There is something
fatherly in his voice when Stoll talks about the boys
-- as if they were as much victims as he was. ''I
worry about them,'' he says. ''It seems to me they're
all struggling in one way or another.''

Though Sampley clearly helped win Stoll's release by
recanting his testimony, it hasn't purged the past. It
hasn't erased his feelings of guilt for telling
investigators what he thought they wanted to hear. It
hasn't quieted his questions about why he did it. And
it doesn't end his unease around strangers' children.
''I'll never coach Little League,'' he says. Recently,
he was at a playground with his daughter when a kid in
the next swing asked Sampley to give him a push. ''I
said no. It just made me uncomfortable.''

Certainly prosecutors aren't chasing phantom sex rings
as they once did, and investigators are more educated
about proper interview techniques, but some of the
investigative tactics and the mind-set from that era
still linger. In England and Israel, sex-abuse
investigators routinely videotape their interviews. In
the United States, only a minority of prosecutors and
investigators are required to do so, and the American
Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, an
organization of child-protection workers, has never
officially supported recording interviews. Some
members have claimed it confuses juries.

''It's shameful -- they should have taken a stance on
it a long time ago,'' says Wood, the University of
Texas psychologist and an Apsac member. ''If you want
to know what really happened, without an audiotape of
the interview it's like trying to diagnose lung cancer
without an X-ray.'' If Murillo and Ericsson had
recorded the interviews, life might have turned out
differently for Stoll and his co-defendants, as well
as for his accusers. The McMartin trial ended without
convictions after the jury saw videotapes of
therapists' suggestive questioning of kids.


Still, discredited child-sex rings like McMartin
actually may not be a bogeyman of the past. Some
parents, therapists and child-protection professionals
continue to believe ritual sex abuse took place at
McMartin preschool. ''In 10 to 15 years, there will be
an attempt to rehabilitate the ritual abuse scare,''
Wood says. ''You can bet on it.''


On an August night three months after Stoll's release
from prison, Sampley and I stand outside Stoll's
former house. ''I think this is where the pool was,''
he says, pointing to the end of the driveway now
covered with asphalt. As Sampley talks, the owner of
the house walks up and introduces himself. He's a
Mexican immigrant who moved in in the early 90's. He
has never heard of John Stoll or the trial, but he
invites us inside for a tour. We walk through the
living room where, according to the D.A.'s version of
events, children were lined up and photographed naked.
We go to the back of the house -- once a den of sex
abuse, prosecutors say -- now a studio apartment that
was Stoll's bedroom with custom-built shelves for
Jed's collection of Matchbox cars and where Stoll's
water bed was decorated with the Pac-Man pillowcases
and sheets that Jed loved.


''I don't know,'' Sampley says. ''None of it really
looks familiar.'' He says he thinks he remembers where
the TV was, where he watched a ''fright night'' video
about man-eating cockroaches. But Stoll later tells me
it was on a different wall. Sampley remembers some kid
showed him a Playboy magazine in one of the bedrooms.
But he isn't sure which kid or which room. These are
just the vague memories of typical childhood days at a
neighborhood house.


From Sampley's perspective, the inside of the Center
Street house is, in fact, just an ordinary home with
brown carpeting and a TV in the living room. As we
leave that evening, Sampley says that it's the outside
of the house that gnaws at him. That's what still
triggers his feelings of disillusionment and of
self-recrimination. ''I don't think it will ever
completely go away,'' he says. ''Even now, when I see
the house, it's like a statue.'' It's a monument to
deception.