Women describe abuse, 'stolen babies' at youth Christian group homes. Now, they push for change.
Editor's note: This is the first in an occasional series of stories examining the breadth and depth of abuse alleged by women who were sent to Christian homes for troubled teens across the country. Many of the homes were in the South, but the girls were sent to them from just about every state.
HATTIESBURG, Miss. — When Emily Adams was a teenager, she was whisked away from her home and placed in a school for wayward girls in an isolated location outside Petal, Mississippi.
Adams stayed at Bethesda Home for Girls for about two years in the mid-1980s — two years of torment and torture, she says.
Now in her 50s, Adams said she is working to change the narrative on what happened in those years and connect with her "sisters" who lived through the same nightmares.
"The main focus is to give my sisters healing," she said.
Adams is not alone. There were dozens of similar homes across the country where parents were convinced that their children would receive a good Christian education in a loving environment.
The homes' directors said they would work with the teens' issues — drinking, drugs, smoking, disobedience, sex — and "cure" them of their vices through the word of the Lord.
Instead, the girls were beaten daily, deprived of food, locked in their dormitories and forced to endure a variety of humiliations, Adams said.
In addition to the physical and emotional abuse, Adams and other former residents allege some of the girls were raped by the men who worked at the homes or came from the associated churches.
The girls sometimes came to the home already pregnant or became pregnant while at the home. Their babies were taken from them after birth, they said, and the babies were allegedly sold to other families.
Decades later, many of these women are speaking out about the horrors they say they faced at the hands of the homes' administrators. They are trying to find babies that are now adults and reunite them with the birth mothers they say never were given the choice to keep them.
They also are sharing their stories with state lawmakers in hopes of getting legislation passed that would offer more protections for other youth in residential care. Some homes are still operated by the same people who have been accused of abusing children in the past.
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Group homes started in the late 1960s, quickly spreading across the South
Thousands of teen and preteen girls were sent to Bethesda and similar homes, primarily in the South, but the children — there were separate homes for boys — came from just about every state in the country.
The homes were built and operated through a formula developed by the Rev. Lester Roloff, a fundamentalist independent Baptist minister who had previously worked with drug addicts and the homeless.
His staff followed a strict set of rules, which included monitoring and censoring all communication between the girls and their family and friends; feeding them a minimal diet with little protein in between periods of fasting; and beating them with wooden boards when they did not follow house rules, some of which is documented in lawsuits and news reports that continued to surface years after the homes were closed.
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The former residents and some of their parents allege in several lawsuits filed in the 1970s, '80s and '90s that they were forced to memorize Bible verses and were punished if they failed to recite them properly.
They were allowed to read only the Bible, the women said, and were given very little in the way of a formal education.
The women said they had to give up the possessions they brought with them and had to spend hours doing manual labor like scrubbing floors and carpets.
The girls sent to these homes typically were considered troublemakers — smokers, drinkers, drug users, runaways, disobedient to their parents — but sometimes they came from broken homes or were in foster care and placed by their respective states.
Barbara Foreman — who lived at the Rebekah Home for Girls, a similar home near Corpus Christi, Texas — said she was a ward of the state before she was sent to the girls' home.
She too suffered from abuse, she said, which still has an impact on her life today.
"You're sitting here telling all those stories and nobody believes you," Foreman said. "I ended up in a mental hospital on Thorazine."
Teen girls say they were beaten, raped, tortured
The homes were supposed to be places where girls like Adams and Foreman could get an education and learn discipline in a religious setting.
Instead, the women said they were beaten, raped and tortured by a staff that professed to be called by God to nurture them.
Adams said in addition to being a victim of torture, she witnessed many instances of abuse — all in the name of God.
Dorothy "Dot" and Bert Barnwell were directors of the girls' home before it was taken over by Bob and Betty Wills.
"I want to expose Bert and Dot for what they were," Adams said. "I want to expose Bob and Betty for what they were."
Bert Barnwell died in 1997. His wife died Oct. 10. The Willses are "living very well in Alabama," Adams said.
Attempts to locate the Willses for comment were unsuccessful.
Adams and Foreman said no one believed them when they tried to tell what horrors they said they endured.
At least that is what some former residents of the girls homes claim. And after hearing their stories, one Hattiesburg judge believed them.
Retired judge comes to rescue of 127 girls at Bethesda Home
Adams and 126 other residents who were at Bethesda Home in the 1980s were rescued after retired judge Dan Wise stepped in and shut the home down.
"They had dark rooms in there with blacked-out window light and rooms with full light 24/7," Wise said. "We're talking about classic CIA torture treatment. I'm talking about some really bad stuff going on."
Most of the girls were able to go home with their parents, Wise said. He then had to determine how the other girls got there and where to place them.
One place the girls wouldn't be going, Wise said, was back to Bethesda.
Wise said the girls were scared and traumatized when he arrived at the home with a deputy from the Forrest County Sheriff's Office.
While the girls in the school may have been relieved they were removed from the home, many in Hattiesburg didn't agree with Wise's ruling, believing the directors were doing the Lord's work, Wise said.
"This thing polarized our town," he said.
Babies were taken from teens, allegedly sold to Christian families
Some of the girls came to Bethesda Home already pregnant. Others became pregnant at the home, Foreman and Adams said. The only men who came to the home were the directors and the ministers from the churches the girls say they were forced to attend.
The women believe some babies were sold and then adopted by families with connections to the churches. Some babies are believed dead and may be buried on the homes' properties, Adams and Foreman said.
The girls — now middle-aged women — may never know what happened to the children they gave birth to. But Adams and Foreman and others like them are hoping to find these children and reunite them with their birth mothers.
"We want these babies to know their mothers wanted them," Adams said.
Adams, Foreman and other volunteers have helped find two of those babies and were able to introduce them to their birth mothers.
It's not an easy task, Adams said. Birth records are difficult to obtain and there are very few clues as to where the babies were taken.
Group homes still active, some unregulated; court cases show no recourse for victims
Although many of the homes have been closed over the years, some have reopened under different names or their directors opened new homes in different states.
In a previous story by Hattiesburg American, part of the Paste BN Network, a youth court judge explained that the girls technically were not kidnapped and were placed there with the authorization of their parents and remained in the homes despite allegations of abuse.
The girls in the homes said they were forced to appear happy and content if the homes were ever inspected, diminishing the credibility of the runaways.
Instead, the girls were charged as delinquents and could have been sent to juvenile detention centers if they were caught running away again, the Hattiesburg American reported.
"No one has ever been held accountable," Foreman said.
Adams and Foreman are traveling the country, pleading with lawmakers to pass new laws on schools like the Bethesda Home in hopes of stopping the abuse they say has been rampant for so many years.
One of the first states to support their mission is Missouri, which in June passed two bills authored by state Reps. Rudy Veit and Keri Ingle that will offer some protections for children in unregulated residential care facilities.
Running away cost one teen her life
One night in August 1980, 10 girls fled the Bethesda Home in hopes of getting away from "the strict rules" of the home and get back to their families.
The girls ranged in age from 12 to 17, according to a report in the Hattiesburg American.
Six of the girls were found by Forrest County deputies after someone reported they had been given a ride by a stranger. Five of them were returned to the home. The parents of the sixth came to Hattiesburg and took the 17-year-old home to Missouri.
Although the girls claimed they were abused at the home, a Forrest County Youth Court judge returned the girls to the home at their parents' request.
One of the runaways, 14-year-old Connie Munson, found herself at the home of Pam Pellegrini, who was also 14 at the time. Pam was walking with Munson to a grocery store so she could use a payphone.
Both girls were struck by a passing truck. Connie was pronounced dead at the scene. Pam sustained head injuries and was listed in critical condition, the newspaper reported.
Connie's mother came from Lakewood, Colorado, to take her daughter's body home.
Reports at the time did not disclose whether the other three girls were ever found.
Pregnant girls faced torment, loss of babies
One of Adams' "sisters" at Bethesda Home was pregnant, she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"She was made to drink a glass of Epsom salts and then she was made to get down and scrub the carpet," Adams said. "And then she miscarried."
Adams said the teen wrapped the miscarried fetus — a girl — in newspapers and "they just threw her in the trash."
"We believe there might be other babies' bodies buried behind the barn," Adams said.
Numerous children allegedly were taken from their mothers, either to be adopted or left to die, Adams and Foreman said.
"They were selling babies," Foreman said. "If they come out brown-skinned or not to their expectations, they'd get thrown in the burn barrel."
There are many accusations like those made by Adams and Foreman purporting abuse in many forms.
Some of the cases are documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in 1982 filed a lawsuit on behalf of Candy H., a Bethesda survivor, and other teen girls who found themselves trapped in the home.
According to the class-action lawsuit, Candy H. was 19 and pregnant with nowhere to go. She had heard about Bethesda Home and agreed to go there. She didn't know she had to commit to staying at least one year and would spend three months without contact from her family and friends.
Once the three months were over, her communications were monitored and censored, but she was finally able to send a coded message to her mother, who begged authorities to rescue her daughter, the lawsuit says.
Candy H. arrived at Bethesda Home through a minister in Alabama that she was introduced to by her twin sister Cindy. She agreed to go to the home because she was led to believe it would provide a "relaxed atmosphere" where she could have her baby, which would be adopted by "good, Christian parents," the lawsuit says.
According to the SPLC, "the lawsuit was settled in 1987 after the Willses agreed to stop paddling pregnant girls, give no more than eight 'licks' to others in a five-day period and modify some of their rigid rules."
In another case, SPLC said a girl named Trisha and another teen at Bethesda Home were told to go on what she believed was a trip to the grocery store with the wife of the home’s director.
The other girl, who was pregnant, went into labor and gave birth in the grocery store parking lot.
Trisha said a man approached the vehicle and handed $250 to the director's wife, who in turn gave him the baby.
“Before the afterbirth was delivered, I had been given a stack of cash,” Trisha said in an SPLC interview. “I was told to count the money to make sure there was $250 there. I had to count the money three times, because I was so nervous and scared of getting it wrong. The next day, this girl was removed from the home and I never saw her again.”
Girls homes may have closed, but scars remain
Bethesda Home eventually was taken over by Hattiesburg's Central Baptist Church, which later shut it down.
"I have some very hard feelings towards them because they were associated with the church," Adams said.
"At the same time, in everybody's defense, we all got up there and smiled and sang," Foreman said. "Because we knew if we didn't ….
"People don't realize as a child, you get up every day and want to know, 'Is this the day I'm going to die?' Because we got that. So we did get up there and we smiled and we sang and Jesus changed our lives."
In 2010, a three-story dormitory at the Bethesda Home was burned in a suspected arson.
Adams said the fire was devastating to her and the other Bethesda survivors, no matter how painful, since the dormitory was no longer there to offer the survivors a sense of closure.
"That's our pain. That's our agony," Adams said. "We needed to go through there and try to cleanse ourselves from what they did to us. We need to walk through there."
Foreman, who was a resident at Rebekah Home from 1976-79, said she has never been able to get past the abuse she endured.
"You still have the hurt, the trauma you felt as a child," she said, "just in a different form." she said.
Contact reporter Lici Beveridge at lbeveridge@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @licibev or Facebook at facebook.com/licibeveridge.
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