The Knife: Off Record – 110

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Speaker 1 This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to The Knife Off Record. I'm Paisha Eaton.
I'm Hannah Smith. Today we have two follow-ups on last week's episode about Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about the murder that took place there in 1996, as well as the troubled teen program that the Wills ran prior to Mountain Park, Bethesda Home for Girls.

Speaker 1 And as always, we will have recommendations. Let's get into it.

Speaker 1 So, you know, we had talked briefly in the episode about Bethesda Home for Girls, but you did a little more research about what exactly that was.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I did a little more research and I'll tell you about that. And I also spoke with someone who was sent there as a child.
Wow.

Speaker 1 So Bethesda Home for Girls was just outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, very small town, obviously, as you can imagine, a pretty conservative area.

Speaker 1 It was also founded, of course, by Lester Roloff, as we know, who went on to start Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy after Bethesda.

Speaker 1 So Bethesda Home for Girls operated in the 1970s and in the 1980s. And I spoke with a woman named Lisa Dean, who gave me permission to tell her story on the show.

Speaker 1 Bethesda Home for Girls, if you Google it, was sort of advertised as a safe haven for young pregnant girls to give birth.

Speaker 1 And then their babies were adopted out by, I mean, I'm putting this in air quotes because that's how it was advertised. Good Christian families.

Speaker 1 And are these like unmarried

Speaker 1 teenage girls whose families maybe felt like it would bring them shame to the family, to their daughter, to be seen pregnant? Yeah. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, in pregnancy, if you've never done it before, it can be pretty intense physically and emotionally.

Speaker 1 So immediately upon learning about this place and others like it, it's like, wow, to be going through that at a a young age, you're not in a stable relationship with your partner, I would assume, and then you're taken from your family, who is hopefully a support system to you, and surrounded by strangers.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's pretty traumatic all around. Lisa, who I spoke with, actually found Lisa on YouTube.

Speaker 1 There was a YouTube video interviewing someone else who had been at Bethesda Home for Girls, and Lisa had commented, like, I'm so sorry, you went through that. I know what you went through.

Speaker 1 I went went there too. And so Lisa actually was not sent there because of pregnancy.
Her story is different. She

Speaker 1 girls were also sent to Bethesda for behavioral issues. And this idea was that Bethesda would be both a place for pregnant teen girls to have their babies free of shame with support.

Speaker 1 And it would also be a place to send girls who needed help with behavior and maybe getting their lives back on track, so to speak.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's interesting that those two things would be combined into one place. And it kind of shows like the attitude toward, you know, teen pregnancy.

Speaker 1 Teen pregnancy has always been stigmatized, right? And it's not an ideal situation.

Speaker 1 But the fact that, you know, these teen girls are sort of lumped in with like kids who are having behavioral issues, it just really, I don't know, shines a light on the attitude toward all of that.

Speaker 1 Totally. And I mean, you can imagine the probably lack of sex education at that time.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And certainly young boys weren't sent away like you have gotten someone pregnant and then, you know, you need to take responsibility. That wasn't happening.

Speaker 1 That doesn't happen, does it? It doesn't happen. Yeah.
And Lisa grew up in a single parent household with her mother and they were incredibly close.

Speaker 1 Lisa, when I spoke with her last week, she's 60 years old now. And as she told me her story, it was hard for her to get through.
She was choking up a lot. It was really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, just the pain of what she went through was still that present for her all these years later. And so.
How old was she when she was at Bethesda?

Speaker 1 So I guess to start, it all happened because Lisa was estranged from her father. He was not in the picture.
And her mother. died by suicide when Lisa was, she remembers it as 11 or 12.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And she said her mom was like the most incredible, loving mother. She has so many memories in the kitchen, cooking beside her.
You know, this was her entire world and support system.

Speaker 1 And it was a happy home that they lived in. And to lose her mother that way, of course, was just so traumatic.
And she was sent to live with her aunt, her mother's sister.

Speaker 1 Lisa's aunt also was a very, she said, loving caretaker. She had only good intentions, but, you know, this was the 1970s and Lisa was entering her teenage years.

Speaker 1 And now she was in a new home, reeling from the loss of her mother. And she started running away and maybe breaking the house rules.
It wasn't one thing that was like, okay, now you have to leave.

Speaker 1 It was just this sort of like her

Speaker 1 behavior was becoming too much for her aunt. And her aunt, who attended a local Baptist church where they were living, she had heard of Bethesda Home for Girls.
Got it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so Lisa remembers it as her aunt put her on a plane, did not get on the plane with her.

Speaker 1 And when she got to her destination, she was picked up by strangers, taken to a location, and then told where she was and why.

Speaker 1 And it was presented to her as a place where she could really find herself again and recenter. But of course, that's not what it was.
No, of course not. Yeah.
That's so scary too.

Speaker 1 You just like are sent off all the trauma she's already been through and now she has no idea like what she's getting into, you know? Yeah, I mean, it was at a time when she really needed counseling.

Speaker 1 She needed therapy and she didn't get those things. She was shipped off to what we now know was a place with a lot of abuse.

Speaker 1 So when Lisa got to Bethesda, the first thing similar to Meg's experience at Mountain Park, you're made aware of the rules and there are a lot of rules.

Speaker 1 You're up around 5 a.m., teeth brushed, face washed, and then you're supposed to be dressed and sitting in the hallway reading your Bible by like 6 a.m.

Speaker 1 or something crazy like that for teenagers, you know, who are growing. And you're listening to Lester roll off preaching on recordings.
You're reading your Bible. You're doing devotions.

Speaker 1 And then it's, you know, a very meager breakfast. And then you're doing chores.

Speaker 1 Similar to Mountain Park, you have like a buddy system where someone who has been there longer is watching over you, making sure that you're following the rules.

Speaker 1 And if you're not, they're, you know, incentivized to report that. And then there is physical abuse.
So they're sleep deprived. Even things like dreaming were not allowed.

Speaker 1 That's dreaming when you're asleep. It was like said that it was un-Christian.
Wow. I mean, psychotic.
Yeah. And that piece I actually found online.

Speaker 1 Lisa didn't mention that to me, but it was just like, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 So no wonder this is how you're justifying this sleep deprivation is like well if you sleep you might dream and we're gonna say that that's unchristian it's interesting to hear you say all of this because it's so similar to mountain park we can see the similarities we can see that their sort of system for operating these troubled teen programs was already like in place in the 70s and 80s also can we just like acknowledge that like

Speaker 1 you want these teens to read the Bible. Like this is not the way that you do it.
No, this is not the way that you do it.

Speaker 1 It's like like you are sleep deprived, you're hungry, and you're an adolescent person with all of these hormonal changes. It's like you're set up to fail.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And just like at Mountain Park, these people are, they're financially incentivized. So Lisa wasn't there because of a pregnancy, but she was aware that that was something that happened there.

Speaker 1 But one thing I found really interesting, and although not surprising after having heard Meg's story, is that they didn't speak to each other really about anything personal.

Speaker 1 There was no information sharing between the students there. She said, if someone was pregnant, I didn't know it.
Oh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 She said that she knew that was going on, but it wasn't like, you know, how are you feeling? There was none of that. But one thing Lisa really did remember is the fasting.

Speaker 1 And, you know, being told to fast for so-called religious purposes, but, you know, you're young, you're growing and you're made to do physical physical labor and chores all day. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's just excruciating. And so that's horrible.
That's really horrible. It's horrible.
All of her communication, just like at Mountain Park was monitored. You know, at this time, it was all letters.

Speaker 1 They weren't doing any phone calls. And so Lisa knew that if her aunt knew what was actually going on at Bethesda, she wouldn't want her there.

Speaker 1 But all of her letters going to her aunt were read and all of her aunt's letters going to her were read by monitors.

Speaker 1 And so, there was no communication that she could have done to save herself from that situation. She was totally captive there.
It is like prison. It's prison, yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's not regulated at this time.

Speaker 1 There's no like enforcement officer coming in and making sure that these kids are getting the education they need to be getting, that they're getting the food that they need to be getting.

Speaker 1 That just wasn't happening. There was no oversight.
And so, Lisa was there for three years. She thinks it was about from age 13 to around age 16.
Wow, those are pivotal years. Pivotal years.

Speaker 1 And I think it just speaks to what she went through. You know, she said, I really don't remember a lot of that time because my brain has just blocked it out.
It was just so bad.

Speaker 1 And not to mention, you don't get over the loss of a parent. No.
So that's all very present. So Lisa's aunt just came to get her about three years later.

Speaker 1 She just sort of decided it had been enough time. And even then, Lisa didn't tell tell her aunt right away what had happened.

Speaker 1 She was sort of this mixture of like processing it and scared to tell her and also knew that her aunt would be really sad that that happened because that was not what she thought it was.

Speaker 1 And so there were so many mixed feelings around it. And she did eventually tell her and she was really upset.
It made their relationship difficult for a time.

Speaker 1 The living situation, these girls were packed into bunk rooms. Lester Roloff was there when Lisa was there, but when Bob and Betty came into the picture, they were referred to as mama and papa.

Speaker 1 That is so creepy. So creepy, so gross.
Also, like if your mom has died, to be forced to call someone else mama is like really sadistic. Oh my God.
Yeah. It's like terrible.

Speaker 1 They were beat with paddles. It was just abhorrent.
And so I tried to also find out a little bit more about the teen pregnancy and how that operated at Bethesda outside of my conversation with Lisa.

Speaker 1 And from what I gather from researching it online, there was an estimated, you know, 100 plus adoptions that took place from teen pregnancies that were happening at Bethesda Home for Girls.

Speaker 1 And, you know, those young women, those girls, they did not consent to the adoption in a meaningful way.

Speaker 1 So interestingly, in Mississippi at the time, at age 16, you have the right to say, no, I want to keep my child. And so you would have to sign the consent to adopt your child to another family.

Speaker 1 And there are a lot of allegations, just like in Meg's story, of girls who suspect they were drugged during their delivery and during the time that they signed that paperwork. Okay.

Speaker 1 So, like, talk me through that because I mean, I assume that when you're giving birth, you are given drugs. Yeah.
I mean, I was so like, my epidural worked so perfectly.

Speaker 1 I had a really lucky birth experience with like pain management, but I was

Speaker 1 very present the entire time. I was totally conscious of my surroundings and what was going on.

Speaker 1 So these girls don't know what they were drugged with, but it certainly wasn't just, no one thinks it was just a standard painkiller that got the best of them. Because they don't remember.

Speaker 1 They don't remember.

Speaker 1 There was an account online by a woman who said that she did not ever even see her child or have any memory of that. She didn't know if she had a boy or a girl.

Speaker 1 And a nurse accidentally slipped the gender to her and was punished for it. So these things were highly secretive.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how consent could exist where you don't even know the gender of your child.

Speaker 1 Are they saying that when they were in this drug state that they were giving consent to adopt out their child? Yes. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And, you know, who, who's to say?

Speaker 1 Were they actually even physically signing a document if they can't even remember doing it so where does that leave these women now because this happened you know in the 70s and 80s they were teenagers have any of them you know reconnected with their biological children since then yeah you know thanks to the accessibility of genetic testing and websites like 23andme or what have you, genetic testing websites, people have connected with their children after many years.

Speaker 1 And there's so many mixed feelings around a reunion like that.

Speaker 1 You're happy to be connected, but you've missed out on so much.

Speaker 1 And for the adopted child, that was their own trauma of questioning where they came from and if they were wanted and why their adoption took place.

Speaker 1 And then for the adopted parents who were sold this bill of goods of like, you're doing a great thing and this mother wants you to have her child to learn that the mother was actually 16 years old, has no memory of consenting to the adoption and actually actually really wanted to keep her child.

Speaker 1 That is their trauma. And so it's so layered.
And it was all for profit. I don't know exactly what money they made.
Of course, we're not going to find that out.

Speaker 1 It was in the 70s and 80s, not regulated. I mean, even now there's a conversation around that, but they were incentivized to be doing this.
And so Bethesda is eventually shut down.

Speaker 1 And how that happened is a young woman who is identified in court documents by the the name of Candy, last name initial H, was on a monitored call with a family member and the staff member who was monitoring her call.

Speaker 1 So this is in the 1980s, left the room. And yeah, Candy seized the moment to communicate to the family member, like, come get me.
It's not what you take. Ah, good job, Candy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And she was actually 19 when she entered Bethesda, which I just find so surprising because that's a legal adult and you're still being, you're there against your will. Forcefully.
Forcefully there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It sounds like from what I gather with Candy's story, she initially wanted to go there.

Speaker 1 But once she got there and realized, you know, she was going to be suffering a lot of verbal and physical abuse here, wanted to leave.

Speaker 1 And then you can't because you've signed your rights away, essentially. So once Candy's family knew what was happening, they alerted an attorney who worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Speaker 1 And they filed a lawsuit against Bethesda. As soon as that suit was filed, over 70 girls leave the home.
And from there, there was a lawsuit. And the repercussions are just

Speaker 1 mind-blowing to read because it's like the result of the suit was that, okay, Bethesda, home for girls, you're no longer allowed to paddle pregnant girls and you're now limited to no more than, quote, eight licks.

Speaker 1 to others within a five-day period. It's just like, how this possible? But of course, then they had more eyes on them.
And so then the state's paying more attention.

Speaker 1 So Bethesda Home for Girls was moved to Missouri, reopened under a new name, and eventually closed in 2004.

Speaker 1 And we now know from our conversation with Meg that Missouri was home to Mountain Park Boarding Academy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they just moved states. They just moved states.

Speaker 1 Because Mississippi, you know, I think I remember, didn't they deem it as an unlawful detention facility or they were holding people against their will which is unlawful people who have not committed a crime yeah it was all around bad press like what are you doing to these young women and now we are going to pay attention and i think because of the way that they were operating they knew the end was coming so then they just moved to missouri they just moved to missouri started back up again yeah wow

Speaker 1 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time.

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Speaker 1 So, before we get into, you know, the murder that happened in 1993 in Mountain Park, I wanted to talk about the mindset so many people had leading up to the 90s.

Speaker 1 So like everything that you're talking about, the 70s and 80s, just like makes so much sense in this context.

Speaker 1 The fact that the end of this lawsuit is like they limit them to how many SWATs that they can administer to students per day really like shows you the mindset people had toward teens and children and how you were supposed to, you know, get them to be in line.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that I was reading about was just how

Speaker 1 troubled teens really became a huge topic in the U.S. in the 1990s.
And this guy named John Diulio, he is a political scientist and a criminologist. And he had written a lot about crime.

Speaker 1 He had visited prisons. He had visited juvenile facilities.
And he is actually the person that coined the term super predator in 1995. I wonder if he knew the staying power that would have.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I was kind of like talking about this to Ben, my boyfriend Ben yesterday.
And I just said, like, do you know the term super predator? And he's like, yeah, yeah, I've heard it.

Speaker 1 I asked him, like, what do you think that is describing?

Speaker 1 And he was like, I don't know, someone who's like really violent and has committed a lot of crimes and has like a huge criminal record and is incredibly dangerous. Like, you would think that.

Speaker 1 Or like a grizzly bear? Or a grizzly bear. Yeah.
And it's actually was coined to describe teenagers, juveniles.

Speaker 1 Which is so outlandish because in every single situation we've come across where we've been researching these troubled teen so-called schools, it's like the child in question, the teenager in question, has experienced a traumatic event and they're reeling from that traumatic event and then their behavior changes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. We know a lot about brain development at this point.
They don't have the life experience or whatever you want to call it to kind of look in the mirror and say, okay, why am I behaving this way?

Speaker 1 And how can I help myself? They need that guidance. Yeah.
Yeah. They're just like reacting to the situation around them.
But, you know, that wasn't obviously how a lot of people saw it in the 90s.

Speaker 1 And so Super Predator was coined in 1995. John Diulio.
He had this theory.

Speaker 1 He supposedly, he looked at this data on crime and he, you know, analyzed the data and he predicted that there was going to be what he called a wave of teenage crime.

Speaker 1 He said America was sitting on top of a crime bomb. He talked about like these homicidal teens roaming around in wolf packs that were going to like just start wreaking havoc on America.

Speaker 1 I mean, he, he predicted this would happen in the thousands, the tens of thousands. He was like, in a few years, we're going to see just like the streets overrun by these homicidal teenagers.

Speaker 1 And, you know, a lot of stuff has been written about this now. A lot of his language was very racist.

Speaker 1 You know, he talked about this starting in inner cities and even wrote about like black teenagers specifically.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was just so racist and said that like all of this crime would overtake the suburbs.

Speaker 1 There was just so much fear mongering about like quote unquote bad kids and kids that cannot be rehabilitated.

Speaker 1 And he actually, he went to the White House to consult with Bill Clinton and he warned him about this coming crime wave. And he said apparently that rehabilitation does not work.

Speaker 1 And he advocated for locking bad teens up and separating them from society. And then in 1996, the Violent Youth Predator Act passed.
This is a federal act.

Speaker 1 It offered $1.5 billion in grant money to any state that toughened up their juvenile offender laws. And 45 states acted quickly on this, making their laws so much stricter against juveniles.

Speaker 1 And I think it's important to note that that's 1996, which is the same year of the murder that we're about to talk about. Right.

Speaker 1 So suddenly across 45 states in the U.S., it becomes very easy to try a minor as an adult for violent crimes.

Speaker 1 And you know, like one thing to note about Dulio before we move on from this is that he was wrong. Like he was very wrong.

Speaker 1 He later came out and said that like, you know, he like misinterpreted the data or he kind of blamed the data, but it's pretty clear that he interpreted studies incorrectly and then went on to become hugely influential in how people view teenagers who are acting out or even teenagers who are committing crimes and has had like a pretty negative effect.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the damage was done at that point. Yeah.
So the campaign for fair sentencings of youth, their website, I just wanted to note note a stat from their website.

Speaker 1 So from 1985 to 1994, the number of minors tried as adults nationally increased by 71%.

Speaker 1 And black children make up almost half that number. So it had like devastating effects on so many people's lives.
And as we talk about the ripple effect on families and, you know, communities.

Speaker 1 Diulio did in 2012 sign Friend of the Court document. There was a Supreme Court case that would ban mandatory life sentences for juveniles convicted of murder, but that's in 2012.

Speaker 1 This law passed in 1996. So from 1996 to 2012, you know, there's not a whole lot there that's being passed that's preventing minors from being tried as adults.

Speaker 1 So that sort of sets the background to what we're going to talk about with this case today.

Speaker 1 Some of the information we got was from this trial transcript that I was able to find for Joseph Burris's trial, as well as some other articles that we found online.

Speaker 1 And I reached out to the surviving members of Joseph's family, which is his mother and his two brothers. And I did not hear back from anyone, so I just wanted to mention that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So Joseph Stanley Burris, he was born in 1980. He grew up in Granada Hills, California in a Baptist family.
He's the son of Patrice and Keith Burris. And he has two brothers, Nathan and Kyle.

Speaker 1 Patrice, his mother, she was a witness at the trial. And I thought it was interesting.
She described her family that she grew up in.

Speaker 1 Her dad was a Baptist minister and her family was incredibly religious. You know, she was raised in an environment where mental health wasn't really a thing that was talked about or acknowledged.

Speaker 1 Everything was spiritual. So every problem was addressed through prayer and through going to church.
And this was kind of the same environment that she raised her children with.

Speaker 1 I think that's important to note because that really comes into play with everything we're talking about, with troubled teens needing help. So it's Patrice and Keith, and they have these three boys.

Speaker 1 Keith was an engineer and everyone says they were a very tight-knit family. They went to church together regularly.
Patrice homeschooled her sons, Keith and Joe, were very, very close.

Speaker 1 Joe's father, Keith, he was a runner. He was an athlete.
He loved to swim and he started doing those activities with his sons.

Speaker 1 I think his two oldest sons, Joe and his older brother, got involved with swimming. And Joe, by all accounts, was really good at it.

Speaker 1 He was participating in swim meets and his dad would always go to his swim meets and like tape record and cheer him on. Patrice said that Joe would follow his dad around, help him with the yard work.

Speaker 1 Like he really looked up to him and Keith was a really good dad. Joe is described by his family and community as like a good kid.
He got, you know, fine grades. He was social.
He was well liked.

Speaker 1 He didn't get in trouble. You know, he seemed like very well adjusted.
But then when he was 12 and a half in 1993, they came home from a swim meet one day and his father, Keith, had a heart attack.

Speaker 1 It's probably just so unexpected. He'd been living this ultra healthy, active lifestyle.
Not that you would ever expect it, but,

Speaker 1 you know, young. He was young.
Yeah, young and healthy. And Joe was there to witness it.
His mom called 911. You know, he was rushed to the hospital, but he did die that evening.

Speaker 1 And this was an unexpected tragedy for the whole family. Patrice talked about just absolutely falling apart, you know, not being able to get out of bed, just being so ridden with grief.

Speaker 1 And she did say that she really kind of didn't have a lot of energy to help her sons at that point in time. She enrolled them back in school because she just like could not homeschool them anymore.

Speaker 1 And she just tried to get by.

Speaker 1 And it seems like the other two sons, I'm sure it was not easy for them at all, any of them, but kind of, you know, were able to kind of continue on and cope with it in some way.

Speaker 1 Whereas it became pretty clear that Joe was really affected by this.

Speaker 1 And if I'm remembering correctly, Patrice also noted that Keith and Joe, their relationship was like, not that he wasn't close to his other sons, but they had a very, very special connection.

Speaker 1 And so everyone responds to tragedy a little bit differently. And Joe was just, he did not respond to it by sort of of putting his head down and focusing on schoolwork.
Yeah. He was devastated.

Speaker 1 And he started to internalize his feelings and kind of withdraw. Patrice said that she knew he was bothered, but he wouldn't talk to her about it.
But life keeps moving forward.

Speaker 1 And they continue to go to these swim meets, which are like two hours away from where they live.

Speaker 1 And they start to carpool with another family in the area who they're friends with who also goes to these swim meets. This woman named Louise is another mom.

Speaker 1 Her son goes to these swim meets and they start to carpool with her. So tragically, like a few months after this happens where Joe's dad Keith dies, Louise gets cancer and can no longer drive them.

Speaker 1 So her husband, Ken, there's a lot of K's here, Ken starts to drive them. In September of 1993, Louise passes away from cancer.
This is about seven months after Keith died.

Speaker 1 So now both Patrice and Ken have lost their spouses and are single parents. And it sounds like they just really bonded over that and they start dating and get engaged.

Speaker 1 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time.

Speaker 8 Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, Omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

Speaker 9 Zolair 150 milligrams is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods.

Speaker 9 While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair.

Speaker 9 Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis.

Speaker 9 Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions including anaphylaxis.

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Speaker 1 Before they get married, Joe approached approached his mother and asked her not to marry Ken. I don't think it was because he didn't like him.
I think it was just like so much.

Speaker 1 Like his dad had passed away, you know, a little more than a year before that, which is really not a long time. And Joe was still really struggling with that.

Speaker 1 You're also then completely blending families. Yeah.
Yeah, that's so much change in one year for a kid his age. Yeah.
So at this point, he would have been like 13.

Speaker 1 But they did get married. They got married in June of 1994.
And then Patrice and her three sons moved out of their home and in with Keith. And I think this was also really hard for Joe.

Speaker 1 You know, then he's moving away from his home where he was with his dad. Joe is just, by all accounts, not doing well.
He stops sleeping through the night.

Speaker 1 He stops eating and people notice he's losing a lot of weight. He is more and more withdrawn and distant.

Speaker 1 Patrice said like he would just be in his room and then he would come out for family dinners, but not really eat, not really talk, and then go back. So it's clear that something is really going on.

Speaker 1 He's really struggling. You know, he doesn't really get along with his stepdad at first, but they do start to get along.
They're just different people.

Speaker 1 And obviously no one can replace his dad, but they start to like get along. And I mean, it's just kind of unbelievable.
Tragedy strikes again.

Speaker 1 Nine months after they're married, Ken is diagnosed with colon cancer. Is that the same kind of cancer Louise had? Do we know? I don't know.
I wasn't able to find that. Wow.

Speaker 1 That's just like, yeah, so difficult to imagine. I mean, especially like they had a son, Chris, who was 16 at the time.
I just can't even imagine.

Speaker 1 Like your mom dies and then your dad gets cancer, you know, a couple years later. It's devastating.
And you're living with a new family trying to find your place there.

Speaker 1 It's just your whole world turns upside down. Yeah.
Patrice says that Joe said to him at that time, I can't lose another father because the cancer is really serious.

Speaker 1 At this point in time, Joe starts like acting out. He drops out of swimming.
He gets kicked out of school because he has weed in his backpack.

Speaker 1 You know, his mom says he was experimenting with alcohol and drugs and having sex. She tried to talk to him, but she described what she said to him in the trial.
And it really just

Speaker 1 sounds like, you know, she was kind of like, actions have consequences and you shouldn't do this. This is not Christian.
Like, why are you behaving this way?

Speaker 1 Clearly, she just had no idea what to say to him or how to deal with this. And her husband now has terminal cancer.
He needed professional help. Yeah.
So Joe's stepdad has a surgery.

Speaker 1 Everyone's hopeful about it. It doesn't end up going well.
And it becomes clear that this is going to be terminal.

Speaker 1 So at that point, Patrice and Ken do contact a social worker to have all of their kids speak to because they know that Ken is going to die. And so they want their children to speak with someone.

Speaker 1 So Joe did speak with a social worker says two to three times. It seems like he didn't really open up to her at one point.

Speaker 1 Patrice also contracted a nutritionist for Ken, but also had the nutritionists provide some herbs and vitamins for Joe. She was hoping that that might help him.
It's so sad, right?

Speaker 1 Because you're like, okay, here is this mom who is noticing that her son needs help. She's also now probably still grieving the loss of her first husband, Keith.

Speaker 1 Now, the fact that Ken, her second husband, is terminally ill, you know, you're trying to stay above water. You're trying to get your kid help, but you don't know what to do.

Speaker 1 You've never, there's no playbook for this. Yeah, exactly.
I think that's a great point. It's really important to remember because like, it's so easy in these scenarios to blame the parents.

Speaker 1 And it's clear that like she didn't make all the right decisions, but also like, yes, she had a lot going on. And I think it's important to take the context of like the culture she was raised in.

Speaker 1 She was raised in an environment where like men are the head of the household. They're the ones that handle everything.
They make the decisions. They're in charge.

Speaker 1 And then she lost her husband and suddenly she didn't really know how to lead or be in charge or help her kids. So then she, you know, got married to another man.

Speaker 1 And I think that was comforting to her. She talked about how that was really her focus at the time was to try to like work on this marriage.

Speaker 1 And I think that she believed that would help her sons in some way, right? Right. Like here's this new father figure for you and more stability than we would have had otherwise.

Speaker 1 And then you lose it all a second time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the herbs and vitamins don't help Joe. He's 15 at this point.
He starts to run away. At one point, he goes through his mom's purse, takes some money.

Speaker 1 He gets on a bus to Los Angeles toward the airport. He has some kind of loose plan to get on a plane and leave, but he doesn't know where he would go.

Speaker 1 So he calls his mom and is like, you know, come pick me up. When I hear this story, it's just so sad to me because it's like, he's not trying to do anything violent.

Speaker 1 He's just like in desperate need of help.

Speaker 1 And he's like, then calls his mom to be like, come get me. You know, I ran away.
It's like waving this flag, like, I need help from you. I need help.

Speaker 1 He runs away a few weeks later, but he ends up just being at like his pastor's house, who also has a son his age.

Speaker 1 And he's sort of just there for a few days and while he is you know run away his mom knew where he was she talked to him on the phone and then his stepdad passed away so two days after his stepdad passed away patrice along with some friends of the family go and pick up joe where he was staying in her words they basically kidnap him and they get on a plane to st louis missouri and then get in a car and drive to mountain park baptist boarding academy to drop him off she had heard about this through some friends at church.

Speaker 1 And I think that she just didn't know what else to do. And so she thought that this is a place that would help him.

Speaker 1 Later on, after everything happened, there was a psychiatrist who evaluated Joe and basically said that he believed he had major depression that had started when his dad died and was just getting worse and worse.

Speaker 1 And said that once he got to Mountain Park, you know, Joe was just surviving at that point. You know, we've heard from Meg Richter in last episode about what all was going on at Mountain Park.

Speaker 1 It was clearly not a place where there was a lot of care given to struggling teens. It was a lot of structure and discipline and abuse.
At a time when he really needed stability and compassion. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And someone to just allow him to grieve and help him through that process. But instead, it was just more pain.
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, he did fine there.
Like he, he seemed to be adjusting.

Speaker 1 He was kind of going through the motions.

Speaker 1 And after being there for a while, he got promoted to Orientation Guide, which is the program where students are in charge of other students that Meg talked about.

Speaker 1 He was assigned a student to be underneath him that he was supposed to be guiding, Will Foutrell. He also met this student named Anthony Rutherford.
Anthony was three years older than Joe. Joe was 15.

Speaker 1 Anthony was 18, so a legal adult, but still at Mountain Park.

Speaker 1 So this leads us us to March 25th, 1996. The day started out pretty normally.
They woke up, they went to school, and then they broke for lunch.

Speaker 1 It's around lunchtime that Joe said that Anthony approached him and told him that he had a plan to take over the school later that day. When you hear about the plan, it's disturbing.

Speaker 1 The plan was to somehow take over the school. to locate firearms.
I don't know if they knew that there were firearms somewhere or just assumed. That's unclear.

Speaker 1 And then they were going to break into the girls' side of Mountain Park, which was locked from the outside, like fenced in. It's interesting that like the girls were fenced in.
Like literal prison.

Speaker 1 And the guys were not. They could kind of room around outside.
So they were going to break into the girls' side and like have sex with them is what they said. Which like also it is.

Speaker 1 It's a disturbing plan that's really hard to trap your mind around, but you have to remember, we have to remember like they are in a psychological war zone. Like they are being sleep deprived.

Speaker 1 They're not being fed adequately. They're being verbally abused.
They're being physically abused. They're being manipulated to abuse one another.
Yes.

Speaker 1 There becomes this like, after speaking with Meg and learning about others' experiences there, it's like you lose sight of reality when you are in that situation because your new reality is just Mountain Park and what goes on there.

Speaker 1 And you're not thinking about the real world outside and the real consequences. You're thinking about the consequences at Mountain Park where it's, in a way, lawlessness.

Speaker 1 You're being beat at a place that is supposed to help you.

Speaker 1 There is no real rhyme or reason. A hundred percent.
And you're being forced to physically abuse other students.

Speaker 1 And when you're an orientation guide, you're abusing the student who you're supposed to be guiding, as Meg talked about.

Speaker 1 And I think like one of the things that goes to show just what you're saying, this mindset of really hopelessness is that part of the plan was that if there was like some sort of police standoff, they are envisioning all of this, that they would die by suicide.

Speaker 1 This is their plan. This is like their dream and goal.
Like it's so dark and hopeless, really. And it's sort of unclear if Joe even believes that this will happen or is even that excited about it.

Speaker 1 But he's so hopeless at this point that he is like, okay, let's do it. Let's do it.
Let's take over the school.

Speaker 1 Originally, it seems like Will Foutrell, the student who Joe is in charge of, has agreed to go along with this. But at some point, he changes his mind.
He's like, no, this isn't a good idea.

Speaker 1 I don't want to participate in this.

Speaker 1 So that afternoon around 3.30 p.m., Will, Joe, and Anthony all go out to the woods by Mountain Park to collect firewood, which is one of their jobs they'd been assigned.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Joe said that they walked down this trail and essentially Joe and Anthony attacked Will at that time and killed him using a brick and then a knife.

Speaker 1 And yeah, brutally murdered him and left his body in a ditch. And like, if you are Will's parents, this is a place you sent your child to be safe, to be protected.
I know.

Speaker 1 And Will had only been there three months. It's amazing how quickly this all transpires.
It's like that morning, Anthony reveals his plan to Joe.

Speaker 1 Joe, Anthony's three years older than him. That's a huge gap at that age.
Maybe you don't want to cross someone who's about to take over a school or attempt to with firearms.

Speaker 1 And then you do this inexcusable crime and you murder someone simply for not wanting to go along with your terrible plan and it impacts the rest of your life. Yeah, it's definitely inexcusable.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's horrible, but I do think that it's important to look at the environment of Mountain Park that we've talked about. And that was not looked at in the trial at all.
It was not mentioned.

Speaker 1 It was not talked about. Nothing.
So, you know, what happens after they murder Will? They

Speaker 1 look around for some guns. Look, they try to break into a staff member's house.
There's no guns in there. They think that there might be keys in car ignitions, but they look and there's no keys.

Speaker 1 It's like, this has clearly not been very well planned at all.

Speaker 1 And then they're just kind of standing around and a staff member sees them and sees that they look really disturbed, goes up and talks to them and asks them, like, what's going on? Are you okay?

Speaker 1 And they essentially admit to him exactly what they've done. He contacts Sam Gerhardt and together they all go and walk down the trail and they show them Will's body and confess to the crime.

Speaker 1 And so the staff members immediately call law enforcement.

Speaker 1 The Wayne County Sheriff's Department was called and the Missouri State Highway Patrol and both boys are taken into custody and questioned separately. And they both confess.

Speaker 1 The crime happened about 3.30 in the afternoon. Joseph was taken into custody.
That early next morning around 12.30 or 1 a.m. at police headquarters in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

Speaker 1 The officers videotape his confession. He's signed a confession.
He's also signed a document that says that he's aware of his rights and that he doesn't want an attorney.

Speaker 1 This is later brought up in an appeals because he's 15 at the time. He was able to call his mom and his mom told him to just do whatever Sam Gerhardt tells him to do.

Speaker 1 At this point, also his mom has signed over power of attorney to Mountain Park. Right.

Speaker 1 So Mountain Park is really in charge of him legally, but they're not standing in as his adult friend, which is like the legal term.

Speaker 1 If a minor is in trouble and gets involved with the criminal justice system, they're allowed to have an adult person there with them, explaining things to them, kind of being on on their side.

Speaker 1 And he has no one to do that for him. So he signs a confession.
He signs a document that says, I understand I'll be tried as an adult. He didn't understand that.
Anthony Rutherford took a plea deal.

Speaker 1 So Anthony Rutherford was 18 years old at the time.

Speaker 1 A legal adult. Yes, a legal adult, which meant if he was convicted, he could be given the death penalty.
Right.

Speaker 1 So he signed a plea deal basically saying that he could avoid the death penalty, but he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 1 Joseph Burris took his case to trial, and he was also convicted and sentenced to life without parole plus 50 years. And he was not eligible for the death penalty since he was only 15 at the time.

Speaker 1 What they did to Will committing a murder, obviously there's no excuse, but it is shocking that the environment they were in at Mountain Park didn't play a role in the trial because how could it not?

Speaker 1 You know, you have these boys who were deemed by their families as really in need of a lot of help, help, having behavioral challenges.

Speaker 1 And then also just looking at the way Mountain Park was operating, you put these young men, boys with behavioral problems together and say, Now you manage each other and go off in the woods and get firewood.

Speaker 1 Like such a lack of supervision, a lack of training. Like in what world did any of them have the ability to supervise another person?

Speaker 1 It was just a recipe for disaster. And most of all, the school did not protect Will.
No, they did not at all.

Speaker 1 Meg told me, and she got this information from Joseph Burris because she visited him in prison a few years back.

Speaker 1 I actually wasn't able to verify this, but according to Meg, who said that Joseph Burris told her that his attorney at the time was recommended by Sam Gerhardt and that he had been an attorney for Mountain Park previously.

Speaker 1 So I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not, but nothing was brought up in the trial.

Speaker 1 The fact that Mountain Park was promoting corporal punishment, the fact that Joe had been forced to already physically abuse Will, that he was told to do this by adults regularly or he would be abused himself

Speaker 1 feels really important to what happened here. You're normalizing abuse.
You're normalizing violence. Yeah.
And none of that was brought up. You know, none of it was talked about.

Speaker 1 In fact, it seems like the angle was to blame Joseph's mother more so than anything. Joseph's attorney appealed the conviction in the year 2000.
That was denied.

Speaker 1 After this 2012 Supreme Court decision, Miller v. Alabama established that mandatory life in prison without parole sentences for minors is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.

Speaker 1 Burris' attorney then filed a petition claiming that his sentencing violated that Miller decision, but that was also denied.

Speaker 1 But then in 2021, just a few years ago, he had the opportunity to go before the parole board. And Meg Richter actually was in contact with him at that time.
And she attended his parole hearing.

Speaker 1 She brought a written statement. She talked about the conditions at Mountain Park.
I spoke with her on the phone recently about this. And she said that she felt a little bit conflicted.

Speaker 1 Will's sister was there. She didn't end up meeting her.
She was in a separate room. And Meg was really clear that like, she didn't want to condone what happened to Will.
It's a tragedy.

Speaker 1 It's absolutely horrible. But she did feel that it was the right thing for her to do to go there and just describe the environment of abuse that was happening at Mountain Park.

Speaker 1 And she said the parole board was really interested to hear that because they said that that was important context that they had never heard before.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Joseph Burris is currently 45 years old. He's been in prison for 30 years.
And he actually will be released next year at some point.

Speaker 1 They don't have an exact release date yet, but the parole board did make that decision. So he will be out of prison next year.

Speaker 1 30 years is a long time, but I can imagine for Will's family who, you know, he will be gone more than 30 years. He will be gone for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 1 And that is just like, how terrible to send your child somewhere to help them. And then they don't come home.
It's terrible on all accounts.

Speaker 1 And we also now know that Anthony Rutherford died in prison in July of 2015. It just said Valplay was not suspected in his death.
And so so much loss in one story.

Speaker 1 And, you know, also the Branch Davidians and that saga that plays out when the ATF goes in, that happened in 1993. Wow.

Speaker 1 And that was so, as we know, highly televised. Yeah.
And so hearing about Anthony Rutherford.

Speaker 1 coming up with this plan to be this like Branch Davidian like leader of the girls in the adjacent Mountain Park structure is like, okay, so you have this 18-year-old who's being kept in a cult-like environment, physical abuse, verbal abuse, all sort of operating as this, quote, Christian organization.

Speaker 1 It's like he was in a cult.

Speaker 1 It doesn't excuse his actions. Right.
But I'm reassured that the parole board was interested to hear that information because it does feel like important context to someone's psyche at that time.

Speaker 1 And Joe Burris, he was only 15. Yeah, so young.
So young. And context.
It's all about the context. It's so important.
It's everything. Well, thank you so much for doing a deep dive on that story.

Speaker 1 You know, when Meg brought it up in her interview, it was just like, there's no sadder outcome than that.

Speaker 1 And to understand the environment there and how it impacted every person that was at Mountain Park, I think is crucial.

Speaker 1 So, we're going to wrap this episode up with some recommendations. Patia, what do you have to recommend today? Well, you know, I always have something.

Speaker 1 I actually have another BBC podcast called Stalked. I am currently on episode eight,

Speaker 1 and it's a well-told story where actually one of the hosts is the victim of this stalker. And I'm really loving how much introspection, is that the word?

Speaker 1 I should probably Google it, that there is from this person. Her name is Hannah.
Oh, wow. I love it already.
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 1 About sort of her mindset when she began associating with the person who later became her alleged stalker.

Speaker 1 I'm really enjoying the storytelling there and how they're going about unraveling something that so much of it happens online.

Speaker 1 And when someone presents themselves to you as someone they're not, that's by design. How do you go about finding out who they really are when they've worked so hard to hide it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm just, I'm really liking it. Sounds really good.
It's called stocked. Stocked.
I will check it out. So I want to recommend a docu series.

Speaker 1 My friend was just in town and she was telling me about it. She liked it.
So I started watching it. I think it's really good.
It's called Rich and Shameless. Rich and Shameless.
Yes. HBO.

Speaker 1 Rich and Shameless. How have I not seen this? Sounds like something I would have definitely seen.
I haven't watched all the episodes yet, but I'm really into it. There's two seasons.

Speaker 1 The second season is all sports stories. And you know, I'm not that into sports, but when sports and true crime intersect, somehow I find that to be very interesting.

Speaker 1 They did an episode on Peggy, actually. Oh, wow.
Yeah. Dennis Rodman's financial manager who stole money from him.
We actually covered that story years ago on The Opportunist.

Speaker 1 So it was great to watch it. They did a really good job.

Speaker 1 Anything you didn't already know? I don't think so, but they got some good interviews. It was really well done.
And there was like some video in there that I hadn't seen. So I recommend it.

Speaker 1 And the first season is kind of a mix of a lot of different stories.

Speaker 1 Like one of the episodes I watched is the Pam and Tommy story of like how the tape was leaked, which is, you know, we all know that story, but it's so disturbing to really like think about what was really done to them.

Speaker 1 A lot of these stories are, you know, rich and shameless.

Speaker 1 They're like famous people that maybe you've seen a headline about something that happened to them but this is like a deep dive into the whole story so i find it really intriguing cool

Speaker 1 check it out and we will see you next week thanks for listening

Speaker 1 If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it. Our email is theknife at exactlyrightmedia.com, or you can follow us on Instagram at theknife podcast or Blue Sky at theKnife Podcast.

Speaker 1 This has been an exactly right production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Patia Eaton. Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samorosi.
This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Speaker 1 Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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