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Since December 1999, when The Guide first ran an account of Bernard Baran's plight, additional details have bolstered the case for his innocence and illustrated the extent to which the execution of justice in Berkshire County is skewed by ineptitude and corruption.

When Bernard Baran, a 16-year-old high school dropout, sought employment through a federal job placement program, he stated a preference for working with the elderly. But since his work history included little beyond babysitting, he was sent to the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC), a mixed-income preschool not far from his home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His first day on the job was January 7, 1983.

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The initial complaint against Baran came 21 months later from Julie and David Heath. The couple was well known to Pittsfield police, who used them as drug informants, and to hospital personnel at Berkshire Medical Center, where Julie stole syringes from her children's pediatrician, and David underwent emergency open-heart surgery necessitated by a supposedly self-inflicted stab wound. The pair used a pharmacopoeia of recreational drugs including Nembutal, Percodan, Dilaudid, cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth. Despite his history of armed robbery, David managed to hold a maintenance job in nearby Lenox. Julie seldom worked. During 1982, she was in and out of detox, drug rehab, and, when she overdosed, the hospital emergency room.

Because of the Heaths' turbulent home life, a social worker placed Julie's son James at ECDC. James, whom everyone called "Paul," was the result of Julie's brief marriage to David Heath's cousin. The placement took persuasion, since the boy fell short of the facility's minimum age. Once admitted, two-year-old Paul was hyperactively hostile toward children and staff, pushing, hitting, biting, throwing tantrums, breaking toys. At home, Julie and David's volatile relationship poisoned the air. Both Paul and his younger half-brother were in foster care by the time of Baran's trial.

A month after Paul began attending ECDC, Baran joined the preschool's staff. The new teacher's aide was candidly gay at a time when Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign was still a recent memory, and AIDS was widely considered a sinister gay curse. In '80s Pittsfield, most gay men were closeted. They furtively visited cruising spots, or drove across the New York line to the bars of Albany where, by May of '84, at least one establishment had started serving drinks in disposable plastic glasses to avoid the imagined danger of AIDS contamination.

Julie and David Heath made no effort to hide their contempt for gay men. In a deposition Julie provided in 1988 while pursuing a largely unsuccessful civil suit against ECDC, she recalled being repelled by Baran's dress and manner. "I had the feeling that if they're gay, they shouldn't be with children," she said. "They shouldn't get married. They shouldn't have kids. They shouldn't be allowed out in public."

In September 1984, David Heath called the preschool and complained about the administration's willingness to hire a homosexual. The "Bernie question" was discussed at a board meeting. On September 13, ECDC's new executive director, Jane Trumpy, confronted Baran about his sexuality; Baran replied that his personal life in no way hindered his ability to do his job.

On October 1, Julie removed Paul from the school. On October 5, David telephoned police and said that on the previous day, the boy had come home with blood on his penis from an injury inflicted by a gay ECDC employee, Bernie Baran. (Later, Julie admitted there had been no blood, and David expressed doubts about Baran's guilt.)

Within hours, police detectives appeared at ECDC and examined Paul Heath's file. One ECDC administrator quickly called a friend on the preschool's board of directors and told her that Bernard Baran was being investigated for child molestation. The board member, a ceramics teacher at Miss Hall's, a respected Pittsfield private school, began asking her daughter, a three-year old enrolled at ECDC, pointed questions about being touched by Baran. Eventually, after the girl said Baran had touched her "privies," the mother contacted police.

Grilled about Baran by investigators, the girl launched into a narrative about a lost or dead baby bird, and gave a garbled account of something called the "Bird's Nest Game." Investigators eager to validate their vision of Baran attached sexual implications to the story, which they failed to recognize as the plot of P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother?, a children's book the teacher's aide had read aloud to toddlers at ECDC.

Once a middle-class family was affected, the case snowballed. On October 6, when Baran was arrested, he denied all charges, waived his rights, and responded to questions without hesitation. He had no police record. Freed on bail, he was seized again three days later when Paul Heath's gonorrhea test came back positive, even though the other children-- and Baran himself-- showed negative test results.

Scores of ECDC children were treated to "good touch/bad touch" puppet shows by a therapist from the Rape Crisis Center. Children were coaxed, badgered, and bribed by police and therapists until some "disclosed" abuse. By the time Baran went to trial, he was alleged to have sexually assaulted six toddlers.

He was accused of raping boys in a low, locked shed to which he had no access, in nonexistent woods, and on a fantasized field trip. He was said to have ravished a girl in an open bathroom a few feet away from a classroom filled with teachers and children, "scooped" blood out of her vagina with scissors, then stabbed her foot in an effort to hide the source of blood that no one ever saw. He was accused of assaulting a girl who never entered the classroom where he worked.

There was no real evidence, physical or circumstantial, that Baran had committed any crime. "ECDC was an open, busy place," says Pittsfield resident Dorothy Stowe, who once worked at the preschool. "I remember the layout well. What they said he did there was impossible."