Investigation detailed alleged abuse at MO Christian school, so why was nothing done?
A Missouri Highway Patrol sergeant spent months investigating abuse allegations against the owners of Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch in 2018 before presenting his case to federal prosecutors.
But according to the sergeant’s 44-page report, obtained by The Star, his investigation didn’t go any further than the U.S. Attorney’s office in Springfield. A federal prosecutor there declined to file charges against Boyd and Stephanie Householder, who have operated the Christian boarding school near Humansville, Missouri, since 2006.
“This investigation is close(d) due to lack of prosecution,” the report concluded.
Sgt. Travis Hitchcock opened his investigation on May 30, 2018. His report is filled with allegations of physical abuse, sexual misconduct and possible human trafficking. Several former students and two former staff members told the sergeant that girls ages 17 and 18 weren’t allowed to leave the ranch.
Two years later, Cedar County authorities are investigating following similar allegations of excessive punishment, physical abuse and sexual misconduct and executed a search warrant at the reform school a month ago. Circle of Hope is now closed after authorities removed all the girls in mid-August.
Two former residents filed civil lawsuits last week against Circle of Hope and the Householders.
Both lawsuits cite numerous examples of alleged extreme punishment, many of which were detailed in the 2018 Highway Patrol investigation.
Some parents and students, after hearing about the patrol’s report and lack of subsequent charges, want to know why authorities didn’t step in and rescue the girls two years ago.
“Our daughter was in a prison and people knew about it,” said Michelle Stoddard. Her daughter Emily went to the school after a counselor recommended it in December 2017 and stayed there more than two years. “And we had no way to know. There were people who had authority to do something about it. We were never notified about anything.
“Girls are being harmed and they’re saying, ‘Oh we don’t care.’”
Brian Stoddard said any knowledge of allegations being investigated would have prompted him and his wife to ask more questions. As it was, the couple — after reading negative comments on social media from a couple of former students — searched online regularly for any information and questioned the Householders. The owners would explain away any concerns, the couple said.
“There was always something in the back of our heads, and we’d look and there was nothing there,” Brian Stoddard said. “If there was an actual investigation going on, we would have definitely paid attention.”
Don Ledford, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the western district of Missouri, declined to comment.
“As a matter of Dept. of Justice policy, we don’t comment upon investigations, or even confirm or deny the existence of investigations, unless or until charges are filed,” he said in an email. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment upon allegations in a matter that has not been charged by our office.”
The southwest Missouri boarding school had largely escaped attention until the current investigation became public. Boyd Householder, 71, and his wife, Stephanie, 55, told The Star in a recent interview that the allegations are all lies conjured up by former students who are angry at them and just want to shut down Circle of Hope because their lives didn’t turn out the way they expected. They did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The Star found that in recent years the state has substantiated four reports of abuse and neglect involving Circle of Hope, according to the Missouri Department of Social Services. One was for neglect, one for physical abuse and neglect and two for sexual abuse allegations.
But because the faith-based facility is exempt from state licensure, the state does not have authority over Circle of Hope’s operations.
The Star first reported on the growing allegations on Sept. 6. Former residents described punishments that included withholding food and water and being forced to stand against a wall for hours for even minor infractions. They also explained how they were restrained — a procedure in which they said that after shoving a girl to the floor, Boyd Householder would kneel and press his knee on the back of her neck while four other girls or staff members were required to push as hard as they could on pressure points on her arms and legs.
According to the patrol report, Hitchcock interviewed 10 alleged victims, the sister of one alleged victim, two former employees, a former co-worker of Boyd Householder, and Stephanie Householder’s mother, among others. The interviews took place from June 26 to Sept. 7 of 2018.
Hitchcock said in the document that he also received a 223-page incident report from the Missouri State Technical Assistance Team, part of DSS, that detailed an investigation of the Householders that began in December 2017. The investigation was of an allegation that Boyd Householder was having a sexual relationship with a student. Hitchcock said the State Technical Assistance Team issued a probable cause statement to Cedar County authorities but that they decided not to prosecute.
Aside from that sexual assault investigation, Hitchcock wrote in his report that “all of the physical and sexual assault allegations are outside of the state statute of limitations.”
After learning about allegations against Circle of Hope, state Rep. Keri Ingle, a Lee’s Summit Democrat, called for a legislative hearing and more oversight of exempt residential treatment centers for children. She’s also been contacted by many former residents of Circle of Hope and other schools who refer to themselves as survivors of the “troubled teen industry.”
“I have a lot of respect for the caliber of investigations they (the Highway Patrol) do,” said Ingle, a former social worker for Missouri’s Children’s Division. “I would be really curious as to why charges weren’t filed.”
Former residents’ allegations
The former students told Hitchcock about physical abuse that included restraining girls while they lay in horse and chicken manure and even their own urine, forcing girls to stand against a wall for hours on end, and refusing to provide proper medical care. They also detailed sexual misconduct, including one student’s account that Boyd Householder tried to kiss her on multiple occasions and touched her inappropriately.
A former co-worker said Boyd Householder made crude and inappropriate comments about teenage girls’ anatomy and wanted to withhold food from children as a form of punishment. And a former Circle of Hope employee said the Householders lied about how often the girls attended school at the ranch. The employee said they were lucky if they got to attend two days a week. Much of the time, the employee said, they had to work on the ranch or were sometimes hired out to work at other locations.
One former student said if the Householders thought a girl was too heavy, they would cut her meal portions in half. If they thought a girl was underweight, they would double and sometimes triple her portions. Some girls would vomit because they couldn’t handle all the food, the resident said, and on several occasions were forced to eat the vomit.
Another resident told Hitchcock that she recalled an older classmate wanting to leave and Boyd Householder bringing all the girls together to ridicule that student. Householder said “she was going to hell for wanting to leave.”
Two former employees said girls older than 17 were not allowed to leave the ranch. One said she only worked there a month and didn’t feel free to leave so she ended up running away. Another former employee said she was told to physically restrain girls over 17 and not allow them to leave. And five of the alleged victims said they were not allowed to leave when they were over 18.
One girl said she ate a cookie when she was a “black shirt,” the lowest ranking at the facility. Because “black shirts” weren’t allowed to have sweets, she said, the Householders forced her to eat a bag of chocolate candy then drink a pitcher of water. She was made to repeat the process until she threw up, she said, then Boyd Householder made her eat her own vomit.
Another girl told Hitchcock that when a case of head lice went through the facility, the Householders smeared mayonnaise on all their heads and covered their heads with plastic sacks, then sent them outside to work in the heat. Some of the girls were so hungry, Hitchcock was told, that they ate the mayonnaise out of their hair. That same girl said that a resident suffering from bulimia was told “that her meal would be her vomit until she stopped the behavior.”
Former students also said they were denied medical care. One girl said she was accidentally shot with a BB gun and the pellet lodged in her ankle. Boyd Householder refused to take her to a doctor, she said, and tried to dig it out with a pocket knife. It was only when the wound became infected that a staff member was allowed to take her for medical treatment, she said.
A woman said that during a visit to see her daughter in 2014, she and her husband sat with the teen in a room steps away from Boyd Householder’s office. A group of girls was called to the office, she said, because one of the girls was in trouble.
The girl could be heard crying, saying she was sorry and asking them to stop hurting her, the woman said. She then heard what sounded like the girl being struck and screaming as the other girls called her “stupid” and told her to stop crying. The woman said the incident went on for about two hours and that her daughter “began humming to drown out the noises.”
Amanda Householder, the Householders’ estranged daughter and one of those interviewed in the investigation, told The Star that Hitchcock “listened to story after story after story.”
When charges weren’t filed, Householder said, “we kind of got discouraged.”
“A lot of girls backed away,” she said. “They stopped talking about it, which is totally understandable.”
Then in March, a friend of Boyd and Stephanie Householder contacted Amanda. He’d just gone to see the Householders, he told her, and was so upset at the way Boyd Householder had treated the girls that he secretly took video on his cellphone in which Householder could be heard telling some of the girls to assault another girl.
Amanda Householder said she showed some of the former residents the video and they decided to go public about their experiences.
“To us, we all knew what we went through was real. We lived it,” she said. “But having that video, we were like, ‘We can’t allow that to continue to happen.’”
The Stoddards only learned about the patrol investigation after they picked up their daughter in late July. After leaving the reform school, the family drove straight to the Cedar County Sheriff’s Office.
Emily told a deputy what went on at Circle of Hope.
“He said the state patrol had been working on it without success for years,” Brian Stoddard said. The deputy told the Stoddards that having Emily explain what she saw and experienced was crucial for the current investigation.
“Everything he was told was old data,” Brian Stoddard said. “To have something new was huge for him.”
Two lawsuits
The plaintiffs in the lawsuits filed last week in Cedar County District Court request jury trials and seek an unspecified amount of damages.
The first lawsuit, filed under the name Jane Doe I, says the teen arrived at Circle of Hope in December 2014 when she was 16. While there, the suit alleges, she was physically abused by Boyd Householder and “sexually abused, assaulted, molested, and raped by” a Householder relative who was a teenager at the time.
The lawsuit also alleges that Boyd Householder attacked the teen, threw her into a wall and onto the ground and that she was restrained for more than an hour while staff pushed on her pressure points.
The girl lost 40 pounds in the two months she was at Circle of Hope, the lawsuit alleges, “due to Defendant’s policy of starving residents that they felt were overweight.”
The second lawsuit, filed under the pseudonym Jane Doe II, says the girl arrived at Circle of Hope in 2015 at age 15. Eighteen months later, the lawsuit alleges, Boyd Householder appointed her as his secretary. Over a six-month period, it says, he isolated her from others on the premises, forced her to perform sexual acts and repeatedly raped her.
Boyd Householder’s actions, the lawsuit says, were “part of a long-standing pattern of sexual abuse occurring at Circle of Hope that was known to the Defendants and staff members of Circle of Hope.”
Both lawsuits also allege that around 2009, a male employee was arrested for sexually abusing minor residents of Circle of Hope.
“Despite their knowledge of prior sexual abuse, Defendants took no corrective action to ensure such activity would not continue and failed to change its policies or implement reasonable safeguards to protect residents of Circle of Hope,” the lawsuits say.
The Householders assured parents that their daughters would be provided counseling and treatment for the issues that prompted them to send their girls to Circle of Hope, the lawsuits say.
However, the lawsuits allege, “no employees of Circle of Hope, including Defendants Boyd and Stephanie Householder, had qualifications to provide counseling or treatment and the program was in fact designed through systematic abuse to emotionally and physically break the residents rather than provide effective evidence based treatments.”
Circle of Hope’s “treatment” program, the lawsuits say, “consisted of an abusive and strictly regimented bootcamp environment where every detail of the residents’ lives were monitored, manipulated, and controlled. An effect of Circle of Hope’s program was to enforce the residents’ compliance with all demands of the Defendant Boyd Householder, including sexual demands, by causing residents to be fearful of punishment in the manner set forth below if they failed to comply.”
Circle of Hope was not accountable to any state agency, the lawsuits allege.
“As a so-called religious based organization,” they say, “Circle of Hope was permitted to forgo State licensure and was at all times completely unregulated by Federal, State, or local agencies and such lack of regulation permitted the Defendants to implement their abusive program without oversight.”
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Investigation detailed alleged abuse at MO Christian school, so why was nothing done? ."
