Ex-Alabama cop on a crusade to end reform school abuse has Missouri in his sights
Capt. Charles Kennedy knew it was bound to happen.
Just months after Gary Wiggins vanished from Alabama in early 2017 — his Christian boarding school near the Gulf Coast shuttered amid allegations of abuse — the owner resurfaced and was back in business 700 miles away.
This time, Wiggins turned to a state where years before he had worked at a similar reform school. A state where he knew he wouldn’t face government scrutiny and could run his new school, known in Alabama as Blessed Hope Boys Academy, the way he wanted.
“I ran him out of Alabama and he came back to Missouri,” said Kennedy, a now-retired police captain from Prichard, a suburb of Mobile. “It’s like whack-a-mole. They’ll pack up and run before anybody can do anything, because they know they can’t withstand an investigation.”
Wiggins’ actions intensified Kennedy’s crusade to put these schools out of business and their owners in prison. Not just in his home state of Alabama, but wherever a lack of government oversight opens the door for reform school staff to easily harm children.
And there’s no example more glaring than Missouri, where for nearly four decades legislators have refused to tighten a law that gives free reign to any school that claims a religious exemption.
A Star investigation found that boarding schools continue to exploit the 1982 Missouri law that allows them to operate without a license or any accountability.
In 2018, Kennedy’s mission pointed him to the Show-Me State.
He learned Wiggins was in Pineville, a tiny McDonald County town of 800 near the Arkansas and Oklahoma borders, where the former Alabama man opened The Joshua Home. Wiggins described the school on his website as a “safe haven” for young men struggling with drugs, alcohol, school or “a rebellious spirit.” Wiggins brought seven boys from Blessed Hope near Robertsdale, Alabama, with him.
Once Kennedy confirmed the school’s new location, the indomitable cop and Army veteran put in a call to McDonald County authorities. They needed to know, he thought, about the man who had just opened a Christian boarding school in their neck of the woods.
Wiggins has described himself on The Joshua Home website as a born-again Christian and recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Escambia County, Florida, court records list more than a dozen charges against him prior to 2009, including possession of cocaine and intent to sell cocaine, driving with open containers, writing worthless checks and driving under the influence.
The Star’s investigation found that Wiggins worked at another Christian boarding school in Missouri prior to going to Alabama. According to a bankruptcy document filed by Wiggins and his wife in 2012, Wiggins was superintendent at New Beginnings boarding school in La Russell, Missouri — about 60 miles from where he would later open The Joshua Home — and had been in that position for two years.
The document indicated that he and his wife owed their creditors more than $77,000.
Roads lead to Missouri
The meandering trail that eventually led Kennedy to Pineville originated with a phone call years earlier from a worried mother in California.
A new boarding school called Restoration Youth Academy had opened in Prichard, Alabama, in 2011 in a former juvenile detention center. The woman called police and talked to Kennedy, saying she was concerned about her son, who was a student at the unlicensed school. She asked Kennedy to check on him.
He went to the school the next day, and the youth director, William Knott, gave him a tour. Something seemed off, Kennedy said: the boys were too quiet and showed no emotion. Even at lunch, the dining area was eerily silent.
Kennedy sat down to talk one-on-one with the 15-year-old whose mother had contacted him. The boy told Kennedy that when he first arrived at the school, he was forced to strip and do exercises while naked.
“He said when he couldn’t do all the pushups, Knott grabbed him by the neck and pounded him on the floor,” Kennedy said. “Then he stuck him in this isolation booth. And that was his hello. His first day.”
Kennedy stopped by again two days later. As he waited in the office for Knott, Kennedy glanced up at a security monitor.
“And here’s a boy on the floor of one of these rooms, buck naked, curled up in a fetal position.”
Knott told Kennedy the boy was in the 6-by-8-foot room because he had a “poor attitude” and had threatened to commit suicide. Knott said the boy’s mother had just died and he was upset because his dad, who was divorced from his mom, wouldn’t let him attend her funeral.
When Kennedy returned to the school in another two days, he said, the boy was still in the isolation room, now wearing boxers.
Kennedy demanded to talk to the boy, who denied that he’d threatened to kill himself and said he’d told Knott in anger that he’d rather be dead than be at the school. After making that comment, the boy said, Knott and two others took him into Knott’s bedroom, where Knott pulled out a pistol, handed it to him and told him if he wanted to kill himself so badly, he should pull the trigger. The boy did, and it clicked. The chamber was empty.
Stunned at the story, Kennedy confronted Knott about the incident and Knott said he was simply trying to teach the boy a lesson.
“That was insane,” Kennedy said. “I thought, ‘This place isn’t for real.’”
As Kennedy dug deeper into Knott’s past, he discovered that Knott had been a drill instructor at another boarding school, Bethel Boys Academy in Lucedale, Mississippi. That school closed in 2007 following a series of investigations and lawsuits, including one filed by parents of boys — called cadets — who alleged horrific incidents of abuse that included beatings, locking them nearly naked in isolation rooms, depriving them of food, sleep, water and bathroom privileges, and training dogs to bite them in the crotch. According to the lawsuit, Knott was one of the chief abusers.
“When I read that lawsuit, I got physically ill,” Kennedy said. “Because at that point, I knew what William Knott was doing to these children here.
“It was like finding out Dr. Mengele is running a children’s hospital.”
For the next four years, Kennedy said, he tried to get Restoration Youth Academy shut down but because Alabama didn’t have any licensure or regulation requirements, that wasn’t easy. He knew it would take time.
When he’d stop by Knott’s school, boys would sneak notes to him, begging him to get them out.
“I had nightmares after witnessing this stuff,” he said. “And I couldn’t get anybody to do a damned thing about it.”
Local and state authorities didn’t care, Kennedy said, “because most of the boys weren’t from Alabama.”
One prosecutor, he said, told him, “Well, these children are from out of state and their parents should be more careful about where they send their child.”
Kennedy forged ahead with his investigation. During one visit when he asked to interview some students, he said, Knott had him meet with them in the shower area. Kennedy said he was shocked when every boy entered the area naked on the way to the shower. He said he later learned that Knott had ordered the boys to do so in an attempt to make Kennedy look like a pedophile and afterward made them write reports saying Kennedy had wanted to see them naked. Anything to discredit the cop.
Yet Kennedy refused to be intimidated, keeping the pressure on.
“And all of a sudden, (the school) just disappeared,” he said. “It took me a few months to finally find them.”
The school had reopened in Mobile under the name Saving Youth Foundation. In 2015, after a mother picked up her child there and reported the appalling conditions to police, the state Department of Human Resources raided the school and removed 36 students.
Kennedy, eager at the opportunity to expose Knott, shared all his documentation with the Mobile police. Their investigation led to charges of aggravated child abuse against Knott, the school owner and another employee. The three were convicted and sentenced to 20 years. Knott remains in prison.
When the school closed, Kennedy said, one boy was returned to juvenile detention in Florida while a hearing was held to determine which of his divorced parents would get custody. Kennedy said after the judge granted the mother custody of her son, she drove him directly to another reform school.
Blessed Hope Boys Academy, run by Wiggins.
‘The Lord was on our side’
Kennedy quickly found out from the boy’s sister where he’d been taken and went to Blessed Hope to check on him.
“He started telling me what was going on, in front of Gary (Wiggins), about the same kind of abuse,” he said. “And he beat the crap out of him after I left.”
The boy ran away that night and made it to a sheriff’s department across the state line in Florida. The deputies allowed him to call Kennedy.
“He had welts and bruises and everything else all over him,” Kennedy said.
The boy, who was gay, said that Wiggins told him he was “going to get the demon out of you and make you straight.”
Soon after that, some more students ran away and reported that the staff had punished them with forced exercise, solitary confinement and withholding of food. In December 2016, authorities raided Wiggins’ school and removed 22 boys ages 8 to 17.
Alabama lawmakers were already talking about how to strengthen the law in regard to boarding schools. The state at the time was one of a few in the country with no regulations for these faith-based facilities.
Kennedy formed a partnership with Rep. Steve McMillan, a Republican. Both agreed that Alabama needed to take a stand.
“We got together with the legitimate religious groups and they saw that this could be something that could really backfire on them if they were opposed to it and then had a bad incident,” said McMillan, the chief sponsor of the legislation. “I’m friends with two or three of the religious groups’ lobbyists. I went to them and said, ‘Look, this is a problem we’ve got. We’re going to confront it, and I’d like your input and I’d like you to support it. And they did.
“The Lord was on our side.”
Yet they knew they couldn’t make religion the focal point of the bill. The key issue for them was that the schools were unregulated and unchecked.
“We said, ‘We’re not interested in your religion,’” Kennedy said. “’We don’t care about that. All we’re saying is if you keep a child in your care and custody more than 48 hours, you must register that child with the local authorities and the state of Alabama and your place must be open for inspection and employees must undergo background checks. And when a child leaves, you must notify authorities again.’”
As lawmakers considered the bill in April 2017, Wiggins filed paperwork with the state of Missouri creating The Joshua Home as a nonprofit corporation whose purpose was “to bring young men to Christ.”
Kennedy continued to track Wiggins. When he discovered Wiggins was running The Joshua Home in Missouri., Kennedy called McDonald County authorities to let them know about Wiggins’ past.
Meanwhile, a woman in Georgia contacted Kennedy seeking help to get her great-nephew out of Wiggins’ care. She went to court, and a judge ordered Wiggins to turn the boy over to her.
But Wiggins disappeared again. In mid-2018, he turned up in Bertram, Texas, where he opened another Joshua Home on property his wife had inherited from her father.
Kennedy wasn’t letting up. He called the sheriff’s office in Burnet County. It wasn’t long before reports of abuse, labor violations, fraud and human trafficking started coming in. And in July 2018, soon after the school opened in the Lone Star State, authorities — including the Texas Rangers — executed a search warrant on the property and removed eight boys ages 10 to 17.
Wiggins, 50, and his wife, Meghann, 35, were charged in 2019 with human trafficking. Court documents say the couple forced four underage boys to work for their lawn care business. The case is ongoing, and the two remain out of jail on bond.
Attempts to reach Wiggins and his wife for this article through phone calls and emails were unsuccessful. In the past, he has denied ever assaulting anyone in his care and said he received written permission from parents to swat their children.
Mission still not accomplished
Kennedy and McMillan’s work in Alabama paid off.
On May 17, 2017, the Legislature passed the Alabama Youth Residential Facility Abuse Prevention Act. There was little opposition; even the Alabama Christian Coalition eventually backed it.
The law requires all facilities housing children for more than 24 hours — including those that are religious-based — to register with the state. To be registered, those facilities must pass health and safety inspections and provide students with three nutritious meals a day.
All employees must undergo annual criminal background checks, and staff are prohibited from using physical or mechanical restraints or isolation rooms as forms of punishment. Those providing mental health or behavioral-based services to students must be licensed or certified, and the facilities must notify the state within 48 hours of the arrival of any child.
The hope is that other states that exempt faith-based boarding schools will follow Alabama’s lead. They have to if children are going to be protected, Kennedy said.
“Before the Alabama law passed, they could sit right here and thumb their noses,” he said. “They could beat a child right there in front of me and the only thing I could do is watch. But that’s come to a halt now. And I aim to keep it that way.”
While working on the Alabama legislation, lawmakers discussed Missouri and how it was one of the remaining holdouts.
Now, Kennedy is setting his sights on the Show-Me State, where legislators this month prefiled legislation that would for the first time give the state some oversight of unlicensed schools. And he’s committed to do whatever he can to keep boarding schools here from abusing children.
“Missouri has been a burr in my saddle for a long time,” Kennedy said. He plans to keep fighting until other states do at least what Alabama did.
What motivates the grandfather of four are those desperate notes from the boys years ago at the Prichard school, some scribbled on tiny pieces of scrap paper. One said, staff “treat us like dogg’s plz make this stop before it’s to LATE!!”
“I’ve still got every one of them,” Kennedy said, pausing to keep his composure. “I didn’t throw anything away. They can really get to you.”
