Court records: Missouri boarding school student locked in room, held against her will
The owners of a southeast Missouri boarding school locked a former student in a room on her 18th birthday and kept her from going home for months, court records allege.
A court affidavit released Monday describes the kidnapping charges against Carmen and Larry Musgrave. It details what one student said she experienced more than 15 years ago at ABM Ministries, a Christian boarding school near Piedmont, about 330 miles southeast of Kansas City.
“Carmen told (the student) that she needed to understand that nobody cared that it was her 18th birthday, and she wasn’t special, and she wasn’t leaving,” the affidavit said. “(She) stayed in the room and was not free to leave the building. All doors were locked and only a staff member had the key.”
The Musgraves own ABM Ministries — also known as Lighthouse Christian Academy. They were taken into custody this past weekend on first-degree kidnapping charges.
Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch served the arrest warrants Friday night at the ABM campus. He took several deputies with him, as well as two troopers with the Missouri Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control.
Those authorities spoke to all 19 students at the boarding school, Finch said Saturday.
In interviews with The Star, nearly a dozen former students have described how they said they were treated at the school over the past nearly 20 years. That included physical abuse and restraints, not being allowed to make eye contact with fellow students, standing for hours at a time staring at a wall when they were in trouble and being forced to do manual labor to benefit the school.
They also detailed how food was used as a punishment, saying that if they were in trouble they were given little to eat, such as a tortilla smeared with peanut butter for breakfast or plain white rice for dinner. And, they said, they had to watch as other students ate large portions of prepared meals.
Finch told The Star that this first wave of charges was just the beginning of his extensive investigation.
‘Every aspect of (their) lives were controlled’
The arrests and charges came more than a week after The Star detailed how several boys had run away from ABM Ministries since Jan. 13.
Two of those boys were helped by a local resident who took them home after they flagged her down and asked her to call 911. That resident, and another neighbor, told The Star that the boys were “terrified” and said the 12- and 14-year-old reported that they were hit for no reason or because they didn’t finish chores fast enough.
They also said they were berated by school staff, especially the Musgraves. Deputies picked up the boys and initially returned them to the school.
All five boys who ran away since mid-January have been sent back home, the sheriff said.
The student who said she was locked in a room on her 18th birthday in 2007 also described to authorities how she said she and the other students were treated at the school, which at the time also admitted girls.
“The students were told when and how to do everything, to the point of who to look at, when to go to the bathroom, how long you could use the restroom and the amount of toilet paper you could use,” the records said. “Every aspect of (their) lives were controlled.”
The former student described mental and physical abuse, including “really, really hard exercises” that would last for hours. That included running, planks “and things that people see in boot camps,” court records said, adding, “This would occur with no food or water.”
She recalled one time when the students would “run, run, run, run, run” and then Carmen Musgrave would “have like 5-gallon buckets of ice water and there was like a 50 gallon drum filled with ice water.”
“She would make us line up and we would have to dunk our heads all the way under the water and ice,” the student said.
On one occasion, a student was accused of drinking the water. The former student said Carmen held the girl’s head underwater by “holding the back of her neck and pushing her head into the bucket of ice water.”
She said the girl was “freaking out.”
Thinking she could never leave
The Star spoke to the former student last month, and she shared the same experiences she did with Finch when he traveled to Alabama to interview her.
At 17, Julianna Davis said she had already graduated from ABM — which meant she finished the required school work — and figured once she hit 18, she could go home.
“So I woke up on my 18th birthday and Miss Carmen locked me in a room,“ Davis, 34, told The Star. “And she gave everybody else the day off school and let everybody else go play outside and she locked me in a room where I couldn’t leave physically.
“And she told me, ‘You got too excited about your birthday. You need to understand that you’re not special, and nobody gives a crap.’”
The Musgraves’ sentiment, Davis said, was that they didn’t care how old she was: “You’re not leaving here.”
And Davis said she’s not the only one who heard that.
“’Larry Musgrave would tell the students, ‘You are mine until you are 21,’” Davis said. “He would throw in there, ‘Your parents gave you up. You’re ours until you’re 21.’”
Davis said he would tell her she would never go back home. And those words became like a “mental restraint” on her.
“I was literally like, ‘I’m never going to get out of this place.’”
Four months after her 18th birthday, she went home for a visit and then to college. And she never went back to the Show-Me State.
“I’ve always said that I would never step foot back in Missouri unless it was for a rescue mission or something,” Davis said. “And I always said that jokingly, but in the bottom of my heart, I really meant that.
“The only thing I ever wanted is for them to stop doing it. Shut the school down, let the little kids go home and I hope the people there now, the people there in the past, can get appropriate help.”
Last year, Davis graduated with her doctorate of education in trauma counseling. One motivating factor for going into that line of work, she said, was her experiences at ABM.
For more than a decade, she and other former students have said they tried to share their experiences at the southeast Missouri boarding school online and on social media. But they said no one listened.
After they heard several current students had run away, they started speaking out again. Davis said she called the Missouri Highway Patrol and told her story to a trooper.
“He took me seriously and put me in contact with the sheriff,” Davis told The Star. “From the night I first talked to the sheriff on the phone, I knew that he believed me.”
Having charges filed against the Musgraves, she said, “just feels very validating.”
“I mean, we can’t change what happened to us,” Davis said, “but I do think we can stop it from happening to more people and that almost makes it worth it.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2024 at 4:00 PM.
