Missouri reform school never had to answer to authorities — until it moved to new state
David Bosley was livid. He had just learned that authorities were removing students from his Master’s Ranch West boarding school in Prescott, Washington, only months after it had opened.
He headed there from southern Missouri, live-streaming messages on Facebook along the way.
“I’ve never had anything like this happen in the history of our ranch,” Bosley fumed at the time.
For months, The Star has been investigating Missouri’s faith-based reform schools, where former students and parents say abuse has been allowed to continue for decades because of a law that lets them operate with no state oversight.
And Bosley, a church pastor and former corrections officer, is one of the biggest players. The 58-year-old operates three Master’s Ranch sites in Oregon County in far southern Missouri. All are unlicensed.
But in May, it was the new Prescott school that was demanding his attention. Washington, like most states, keeps closer tabs on the schools than Missouri does.
Deputies had been called to the site seven times over a 13-day period that month, according to the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office. One incident involved five boys who ran away from the ranch and were later located in a stolen vehicle.
The sheriff’s office said it also received multiple child welfare referrals during that time as students and former staff members were making allegations of abuse and neglect. The last visit deputies made to the ranch was in response to reports of 30 angry students armed with shovels and brooms “building toward a riot.”
For years, Bosley’s reform schools in rural Missouri have operated with scant public attention because of the state’s lax laws. In Washington, it was a different story.
In an emailed response to questions from The Star, Bosley adamantly denied that students have been abused at his facilities.
In his Facebook video, he blamed child welfare officials in Washington for upsetting his students. He said authorities executed an “unplanned and poorly thought out intervention,” referring to it as a “Lord of the Flies chaos and a dangerous situation.”
“Now you got boys that are literally going to hurt each other and hurt staff,” he said. “Now it’s getting out of hand to where it’s not even controllable.
“Who are you going to blame then?”
But investigative reports obtained by The Star detail multiple offenses the facility was accused of in the short time it was open.
One 15-year-old boy, according to the reports, told sheriff’s deputies he had been restrained 16 times in the six months he’d been at Master’s Ranch West. Another boy gave them a list of everything that he said happened to him at the school, including getting “choked out,” “table slammed” and being slapped in the face with a Bible.
The facility, which hadn’t been licensed, closed in May after authorities interviewed 45 to 50 boys and removed eight as part of their investigation. In December, the state obtained an injunction to keep it closed unless it gets licensed by the state.
But even as the Washington investigation was underway, Bosley opened another Master’s Ranch back in Missouri.
Legislation introduced after The Star began its investigation would require background checks of employees, health and safety inspections and notification that the schools are operating in the state. For now, however, no state regulations exist.
Bosley’s new school, Master’s Ranch at Belle Vie in Thayer, for girls ages 9 to 17, took in its first student in September and now has about a dozen in the program.
It was the opening of that location that prompted three sisters to file suit in Washington last month. The women claim that two churches where Bosley had been the pastor in the 1990s knew that he was grooming and then sexually abusing them for several years but did nothing to stop it or protect future victims. Bosley denied the allegations.
The week after authorities removed students from Master’s Ranch West, Bosley defended himself in another livestream on Facebook.
“I don’t believe in child abuse at all,” he said. “There’s a lot of child abuse in a lot of homes in a lot of places... I hate it. I despise it.”
Substantiated reports in Missouri
Bosley’s Missouri schools are located in a remote area near the Mark Twain National Forest and the Arkansas border. He has run a Master’s Ranch location in southern Missouri since 2007.
Although the state doesn’t track faith-based boarding schools, The Star found in its investigation that at least 13 had been operating in southern Missouri alone. According to the Missouri Department of Social Services, five of those, including a Master’s Ranch location, have had substantiated reports of abuse or neglect.
Two reports of neglect were substantiated since 2010 at Master’s Ranch for older boys in Couch, Missouri, DSS said. The school’s location for younger boys in Myrtle and the one for girls in Thayer did not have any substantiated reports of abuse or neglect.
One former student at the Couch location, whose mother reported the Oregon County school to DSS in 2011, said his few months at the school were an “unnecessary, painful experience.”
“I don’t think that any good came out of it,” Ryan Gardner told The Star. “I probably came out more bitter and with more anger. It wasn’t really nurturing. … It was kind of just more of like punishment.”
Bosley, in his emailed response to The Star, said other schools have mistreated youth in their care, and he’s even taken in some of them.
If Missouri lawmakers require schools like his to register with the state, he said he would “welcome” that.
“It would sure help reign in a lot of other programs,” Bosley said in the email. “Behind the scenes, I’m the one that takes in kids from these other programs. I’m the one who is a mandatory reporter that hears their horrific stories, and I’m the one that helps them blow the whistle on these other programs. Our operations would not be affected in any way.”
He said he’s the one who made the two reports to the state that were substantiated.
“The first involved a staff member that neglected his duties during nightwatch,” Bosley said. “He was on his phone while one boy assaulted another boy. I immediately contacted CPS and dismissed the employee.”
The second report, he said, involved a staff member who had the boys play an unsafe game that could have led to an injury or a fight. Bosley said the employee was reprimanded and later dismissed — and that he ended up filing a restraining order against the man.
“We have nothing to hide,” Bosley said, “and if there is a problem, I am the first one to reach out for the sake of transparency.”
His assertion that he was the one who made the complaints could not be confirmed. One parent told The Star that she had called the hotline in 2011 and was told that her complaint was substantiated.
Despite concerns from parents and former students, Master’s Ranch is praised by some in the community. Former Oregon County prosecuting attorney Fred O’Neill, who now represents the school in legal matters, applauds its mission in a testimonial on the Master’s Ranch website:
“The Bosleys and staff are doing something very right,” O’Neill wrote. “At a time when it seems many of today’s youth are unwilling to work it’s a delight to know that David Bosley teaches young individuals about the importance of hard work, honesty, and, foremost, the love of God.”
And the schools’ websites and social media pages are sprinkled with support and praise from parents who say Master’s Ranch came through for them.
“Our son is now more motivated and respectful than I have ever seen him in his life,” wrote one mom.
On his Facebook video last year, Bosley said the problems at his Washington school stemmed from “a couple of disgruntled employees” who “stirred up a mess.”
“We didn’t hurt a kid,” he said. “Never would, never did.”
He said he grew up in a broken home with half-a-dozen different dads who showed up at various times in his life: “So I have a heart for kids. Always have.”
Others see Bosley differently.
Former staff member speaks out
Shelva Thomas-Jackson was on the staff at Master’s Ranch in Missouri for just one week in 2019.
“In seven days, I’d seen enough,” she told The Star.
Students physically restrained other students with no adult present, she said, a boy’s arm was dislocated by a bully, many were covered in bed bug bites and one defecated on a barn floor because boys weren’t allowed to go inside to use the restroom during the day.
The Houston mom was the only parent to testify last month at a hearing on the proposed Missouri legislation. She drove overnight to Jefferson City to tell lawmakers about her experience with Master’s Ranch and Bosley.
Thomas-Jackson’s saga began when her 15-year-old son started acting out after his grandfather died. In January 2017, the single mom enrolled him at Master’s Ranch, using her son’s trust fund to pay the $42,000 annual tuition.
He spent a year at the boarding school and went back to Texas that December. But the teen never wanted to talk about his experience in Missouri.
Thomas-Jackson said they returned to Master’s Ranch for a visit in March 2019. And to her surprise, Bosley offered her a job at the location for junior high boys.
“He said they’d never had a single mother be a house mom before,” she said, “and because of my background he wanted me to come and help do some fundraising and work with some students there.”
Thomas-Jackson, who had worked for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as a licensed chemical dependency counselor, accepted the challenge. But two days before they were to leave for Missouri, her son, then 17, told her he wasn’t going.
“He said, ‘You need to go through what I did. You need to go so you can see for yourself.’”
He remained in Texas with friends, and she headed to the Show-Me State.
“I called him the second or third day I was there,” Thomas-Jackson said. “I said, ‘Did they do this and that when you were there?’ He said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ He says, ‘I tried.’ But they were always listening to his phone calls.”
They also screen the boys’ letters, she said.
“They read them, and if they don’t say what they need to say, they don’t send them,” she said. “They make the boys rewrite them.”
The boy whose arm was dislocated, Thomas-Jackson said, was in excruciating pain.
“One of the older kids bullied him and he hit him so hard it was bent in two places,” she said. “They took him by ambulance then had to (air lift) him to a bigger city.”
She said she reported her concerns about the ranch to DSS on her drive back to Texas.
“It took about 30 days for them to send me a letter, and they said there were no substantiated findings of my allegations,” she said.
Bosley disputed Thomas-Jackson’s allegations. The boy who was injured dislocated his elbow playing football, he said. No negligence was involved.
“I paid for her to move here from Houston, gave her a job and a place to live,” he said. “She was here only 9 days before I realized what a horrible mistake I had made. She threw violent fits, threw chairs, and ironically, was the one on duty when the injuries you speak of took place. … We had no choice but to part ways with her. She is very unstable and I’m not sure why she continues to attack me.”
Thomas-Jackson called Bosley’s response “hogwash.”
“That man,” she said, “is a compulsive liar. … He needs to be stopped.”
Shocking discovery in Washington
A woman whose son was among the boys taken into protective custody during the investigation at Master’s Ranch West in Washington last May said she and her husband were shocked to learn about the disciplinary tactics the 16-year-old endured.
She had started keeping a detailed journal of the things her son told her and later gave it to the social services worker investigating the case. The physical abuse and neglect report was eventually determined to be “founded,” she said.
According to her notes from an April 18 phone call, a staff member put her son in a choke hold during a restraint the week before. She said her son was able to tell her about it because the staff member monitoring his phone call had stepped away for a few minutes.
“He said he has marks on his neck and shoulders, and it was so forceful that his shirt was ripped,” the journal entry said. “He said that he almost blacked out, vision went blurry and then couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, and was really scared. He was afraid that he was going to die.”
She also wrote in her journal that Bosley and another staff leader “would take a paintball gun and shoot paintballs at kids who aren’t running fast enough or doing push ups sufficiently, leaving big welts.”
Bosley denied that allegation.
“We have paintball wars regularly,” he told The Star. “But paintballs have never been, nor will they ever be, a form of punishment.”
The paintballs also came up during the police investigation of the facility last May.
Among other allegations at that time: Making students “Army crawl” on thorny hills, forcing them to do push ups until they vomited and restraining them on the ground while applying painful pressure to various parts of their bodies.
Bosley denied that students were forced to crawl on thorn-laden ground.
“There was an incident where a staff member had them rolling down a hill and there happened to be thorny bushes on the hill,” he said. “He was reprimanded and later dismissed over similar disregard for student safety and failure to comply with ranch expectations.”
He said students “have never been forced to do extreme workouts until they vomited.”
And as for restraining them, Bosley said, “Students who are deemed to be a danger to others, staff, or themselves are asked to get into self-restraint,” a tactic that requires them to lie face-down with their hands clasped behind their backs and legs crossed at the ankles.
“If they escalate, we assist them in the restraint,” he said. “Pressure is never applied unless the student is fighting back and it is necessary to protect all those involved.“
The woman whose son was at Master’s Ranch West said he was hungry most of the time he was at the school. Portions were small, she wrote in the journal, and meals were by rank, “so those of lower rank ate last and often there wasn’t much food left.”
She said her son and others would often sneak into the kitchen in search of apples, bananas or chips. Sometimes, they’d give the food to boys of lower ranks, she said.
“Often they would try to stuff food in their pockets, like a roll,” she wrote, “so that they would have something to eat at night because they were so hungry.”
Mother removes her son from school
Ryan Gardner’s mom, Joanne Parillo, found Master’s Ranch online when she was looking for a boarding school to help her 15-year-old son in 2011. Three years earlier, she said, his father had died and “he went off the deep end” and needed some help.
She liked that Master’s Ranch in Couch, Missouri, was a Christian program and that its website described outdoor activities for the boys. But she said she soon saw “red flags,” like the staff not showing her around the facility or letting her see where her son would sleep.
There was a period of several weeks where she was unable to talk to him. When she finally did, she felt something was wrong.
What she wouldn’t know until she saw her son in person was that he was struggling at the Oregon County ranch. A big reason why, he said, was a joke he told regarding the martial arts they were taught at the boarding school.
Ryan told The Star that he mentioned back then that he was going to learn to be the best fighter and “kick the guy’s ass that ran the camp, Master’s Ranch.”
“Obviously, I was joking,” Ryan said recently. “He (Bosley) completely blew it out of proportion. They isolated me from every other kid there. Made me do push ups until my muscles would fail.”
He said he was put on a “bread and water diet” and forced to write out entire passages of the Bible “until my hands would cramp.”
When he next talked to his mom on the phone, she said she sensed her son had been punished after an earlier call and she wanted to make sure he was OK. Knowing that the staff listened to the boys’ phone conversations, Parillo said she told Ryan to just answer yes or no to her questions.
“Are you in trouble?”
“Yes,” he answered.
She asked if someone had hit him. He answered yes.
Is that why he couldn’t call? Again, her son said yes.
“Are you in danger?”
“Yes.”
She booked a flight from North Carolina that night and went and got him.
While she was at Master’s Ranch to pick Ryan up, a boy with two black eyes — which she said she later learned were from martial arts sparring that the boys were forced to do — came up to her. He got close, slipping a piece of paper into her hand.
“Please call my mom,” the note read, with a number next to that.
As soon as she got home, Parillo said she called the number on the paper. But the boy’s mom told her she wasn’t going to get her son. He would stay at Master’s Ranch, something that has troubled Parillo in the years since.
She also called the Missouri Department of Social Services.
“I told them everything that was going on,” she said. “I told them about the boy’s black eyes. And they went out and saw the boy’s black eyes.”
She later said she got a letter saying her report had been substantiated.
“I am going to speak out. That’s what a true Christian would do,” she said. “I’m going to advocate for those who can’t advocate for themselves.”
Allison Stormo of the Tri-City Herald in Washington contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 7, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
