Circle of Hope students happy with charges, but still want to know: What took so long?
Nearly three years ago, Maggie Drew sat across from two Missouri Highway Patrol troopers and told her story.
When she was at Circle of Hope Girls Ranch from October 2007 to January 2013, she told them, food was often withheld as punishment. Girls would be restrained on the ground, she said, and she and other girls sometimes would be ordered to help hold them down. She said she witnessed sexual abuse and the coverup that followed.
“They listened,” Drew said of the troopers, “which was something I wasn’t used to. Not somebody telling me, ‘Oh I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.’ They were just like, ‘I’m so sorry.’”
For the first time, Drew said she believed that authorities were serious and that they’d rescue the girls at the Christian reform school in southwest Missouri. But that hope soon was crushed when she learned that federal prosecutors declined to file charges, despite the findings of a 44-page report from Sgt. Travis Hitchcock of the Highway Patrol.
“That felt like a slap in the face, it really did,” said Drew, who is now 28 and lives in Oklahoma. “I sat there for hours and poured out everything, thinking that it was going to count. That it was going to help. That people were going to take it seriously. … It was a huge setback.”
It would be almost three more years before she and the other young women who spoke out in the summer of 2018 would see Circle of Hope owners Boyd and Stephanie Householder arrested and charged.
Since Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced on Wednesday 102 criminal charges against the Householders, many former students and staff wonder why the journey toward justice had to take so long. They say fewer girls would have been hurt if authorities had done something years ago.
Twenty-two of the 80 counts against Boyd Householder involve acts he allegedly committed against one former student, many classified as statutory rape or sodomy. Those allegations were included in the Highway Patrol’s 2018 report that was presented to federal prosecutors.
They also were the subject of an investigation by the state the year before that generated a 223-page report.
“The case was investigated by the Missouri State Technical Assistance Team (in 2017) and a probable cause statement was presented to the Cedar County Prosecuting Attorney,” Hitchcock’s report said. “No charges were filed on the case.”
In an interview shown online last year, the former student, now 21, described the alleged abuse by Householder. She said it began with inappropriate hugging, then advanced to kissing and later, sexual intercourse.
“He would push me up against the wall and be like, ‘You’re mine. You understand me?’” she said.
Maci Smith, who was sent to Circle of Hope in May 2018 at age 16, said students made allegations for years but they were never taken seriously.
“And that put our lives at risk, because they wouldn’t listen and talk to the girls,” she told The Star. “If they had, things would have been different. How many girls are now just completely destroyed and their lives ruined because of people not doing their jobs?”
Schmitt briefly discussed previous complaints in his news conference Wednesday but focused on what he and his staff are doing now.
“While rumors and reports of the abuse had been circulating or had been coming to light for years,” Schmitt said, “our office became involved in the case in mid-November of 2020 when we were asked by the Cedar County prosecutor’s office to assist in the case and by Gov. Mike Parson, who subsequently appointed our office as special prosecutor.”
Stephanie Householder, 55, was charged with 22 felonies, including 12 counts of abuse or neglect of a child and 10 counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
Boyd Householder, 71, was charged with 79 felonies, including six counts of second-degree statutory rape; nine counts of second-degree statutory sodomy; six counts of sexual contact with a student; 56 counts of abuse or neglect of a child; and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. One count of second-degree child molestation is a misdemeanor.
The Householders were arraigned Wednesday afternoon. Both pleaded not guilty.
When the patrol’s 2018 report went to the U.S. attorney’s office, it also detailed allegations of physical abuse 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. Allegations of human trafficking were not part of the charges announced last week.
Don Ledford, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City, said policy prohibits commenting or providing information on investigations that don’t result in charges.
Drew said she thinks about the years lost and those who remained at the school since 2018.
“I wish those girls wouldn’t have had to suffer,” she said. “I feel super bad for the girls who had to deal with it. … I think it could have all been handled earlier but I’m glad it’s finally being handled now.”
Video led to action
The first abuse allegations about Circle of Hope started about a year after it opened in 2006 and continued over the years. Parents, former students and staff have reported abuse and other concerns to numerous agencies, including the Cedar County Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Social Services, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Attorney General, the Missouri Highway Patrol and the FBI.
One parent told The Star that after she pulled her daughter out of the school in late 2007, she reported her concerns to county, state and federal agencies.
“But basically, it was brushed off,” Donna Maddox said. “Lots of people said, ‘Oh, that’s out of our jurisdiction.’ Someone could have done something, but nobody wanted to mess with it.”
Amanda Householder, Boyd and Stephanie’s estranged daughter, said her therapist called to report the concerns about Circle of Hope to the state in 2015 but never heard back. She called the child abuse and neglect hotline herself in 2016, she said, but didn’t get a return call.
Then new potential evidence surfaced last year.
When Amanda Householder opened the video last March, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
There was her mom sitting on a couch, her father’s voice bellowing in the background.
“Knock her out!” Boyd Householder said, ordering the girls to assault one of their fellow students if they felt threatened. “I mean it. Knock her out!”
“Yes, sir,” one of the girls replied.
“And that goes for any of the rest of you,” Boyd Householder said. “If she clenches her fist like she’s gonna hit you, that’s a threat. Knock her OUT!”
The 21-second video was taken by a friend of Boyd and Stephanie Householder who was visiting from Pennsylvania. He told The Star he was so upset at the way Boyd Householder treated the girls that he secretly took the video on his cellphone.
“It shook me up so much,” Amanda Householder told The Star last fall. She showed it to some former Circle of Hope students she’d been communicating with.
“I told them, ‘I can’t be silent about this. If you guys want to join me, you can join me.’ So the majority of them joined. And we have been going public since.”
Amanda posted the video on Facebook, and it got about 3,000 views. Then in May, she put it on TikTok. It went viral — her site, #exposecoh, now has 34.4 million views — and a Cedar County Sheriff’s deputy soon contacted her. Over the next several months, more and more former students came forward to tell their stories of alleged abuse.
In August, authorities removed two dozen girls from Circle of Hope and within weeks announced a criminal investigation into allegations of abuse. In mid-November, Gov. Mike Parson directed the attorney general’s office to assist with the case.
Ty Gaither, Cedar County prosecutor, said after he reviewed the sheriff department’s case, he knew he needed help. And he disagrees with anyone who says his county hasn’t done enough.
“Before the AG ever got involved in this, my sheriff was conducting an extensive investigation, reviewing all the cases from the last four or five years, and we were reviewing that,” Gaither said. “When they brought that to me, that’s when I said this needs to be brought to someone who has the resources to handle this matter. That was not our office.”
Gaither often juggles multiple murder cases as well as high-profile crimes at one time. He said he knew that more resources would be needed to handle a complicated case like Circle of Hope.
Regarding his decision not to file charges on the sexual assault allegation from late 2017, he said he’s “not going to go into the facts and circumstances of an ongoing case.”
But Gaither did say that information on that case was included in the information passed to Schmitt’s office last year.
“The AG has a lot more resources available to them than an individual prosecutor in a small rural county does in terms of flying in witnesses and victims and all these other things,” Gaither said. “There are various facts and circumstances in this case that I’m sure will come out as the case is tried which may have affected my decision on that.”
The charges brought last week by the Attorney General detail former students’ allegations of physical abuse by the Householders. The incidents included being restrained by Boyd Householder, who would push his knee into the backs of several girls and apply pressure to certain areas of their bodies, handcuff or restrain their hands and feet, and force them to remain in the “push-up position” for long periods.
The charges also allege that Boyd Householder slammed girls’ heads or bodies against walls, slapped or struck them with his hands, a belt or other objects, shoved one girl’s face into horse manure and poured hot sauce down a girl’s throat. Other charges accuse him of stuffing dirty socks in a girl’s mouth, binding a girl’s ankles with zip-ties, and handcuffing one girl then pushing her down the stairs.
Stephanie Householder faces numerous charges that involve restraining students and is also charged with allowing her husband to have continued contact with several girls after he physically assaulted them. Also among the allegations is that she used duct tape to bind the wrists of a student.
Gaither said he is still involved in the case against the Householders and is proud of the investigation that happened in his county.
“I’m glad the attorney general is able to proceed with these cases and seek justice,” Gaither said. “I think our decisions were proper. … We were on top of it, we were concerned about it and we said, ‘Look,this is bigger than we can handle.’
“We sent it over to the AG. I do not think we dropped the ball. I think we did what was necessary.”
For Amanda Householder, ‘mixed emotions’
Amanda Householder was 15 when her parents opened Circle of Hope. Before that, the family lived in nearby Stockton, where her father worked at Agape Boarding School, a Christian home for troubled boys that is under investigation by the Highway Patrol.
She said she worked at Circle of Hope, cooking meals, helping with school and at times being forced to assist in restraining students. A victim of abuse herself as a child, she said, she counted the days until she turned 18 and could leave on her own. But her parents kicked her out when she was 17, and she eventually moved to California.
She said she started hearing from former Circle of Hope students in 2010, when they told her their stories of physical and emotional abuse. At first, she said, she wasn’t supportive. But after having children of her own, she said, “a lot of stuff just started coming back and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this was really wrong.’” In 2015, she said, she reached out to a lot of them and they started working together.
In 2018, she said, a woman whose sister had been sent to Circle of Hope contacted a Missouri Highway Patrol officer, helping spark that agency’s extensive investigation.
But when the case was closed and no charges were filed, Amanda said, they got discouraged and many stopped talking about it.
Then came the video last March, which led to the new investigation.
When she learned Tuesday night about the criminal charges against her parents, Amanda said, “I had mixed emotions.”
“My oldest son was like, ‘Yay,’ but my youngest son goes, ‘But that’s my grandparents.’”
She knows she faces an emotional roller coaster in the months ahead, but is convinced she’s doing the right thing. At a rally held in Stockton in November to bring awareness to abuse at Missouri reform schools, Amanda, now 30, broke down as she sent a message to her parents.
“I’m not sorry, but I wish you guys would see what you’re doing is wrong, and that I don’t hate you…,” she said. “I can only imagine that this doesn’t feel like love. But I love you, and what I’m doing is out of love.”
Drew was at that rally. She said then that she hoped law enforcement and the state would do something, not just about Circle of Hope but other Christian boarding schools in Missouri facing abuse allegations.
For her, the years at the Cedar County school caused pain she still endures. She said she broke bones as a teenager that were never treated properly and she now has degenerative disc disease. She struggles with trust issues and has had night terrors.
“They never took care of me the way they were supposed to,” Drew said. “But they also used me and left me broken.”
Amanda Householder called Tuesday night to tell her the couple had been arrested. At first, Drew said she was in shock. Then the feeling of relief washed over her as she heard from many former students.
“They finally are in bars for once for something they did,” Drew said. “I never thought that day would come, to be very honest.
“They used to preach and preach and preach at us about ‘What’s done in the dark will come to the light.’ And trying to use the Bible to scare us into submission. If I could say anything to them it would be that everything they’re doing in the dark is finally coming to light. And I wish I could see their faces.”
