but have not received a response. it s been painful, she told us, this reckoning with her father and her own past. but she hopes it mattered for former students like ashley tucker. ashley kicked her drug addiction and plans to become a paramedic. she s a mother herself now and calls her daughter her angel. now you know how your mom felt about you. yeah. now i realize that she was just trying to help me. amanda does not expect to reconcile with her parents anytime soon. do you miss them at all? i miss what i wanted to have happen. like, what i i would never go back, but i think what i m trying to say is i just miss something i never had. what she has instead is a
letter is how i is how i started just thinking. amanda started thinking about all of it. how her parents had raised her. what she said she saw them do to the children at circle of hope. it wasn t until i had my own kids that i realized what was going on was happening to other people s kids. and she wanted to make things right. she and maggie decided to track down the girls of circle of hope, as many as they could, listen to their stories, ask if they were okay. it was a big thing for a lot of them to be able to honestly, in a safe space, speak their truth. but it wasn t just kids at circle of hope who had stories about her father. amanda began hearing from former students of agape, the boys religious reform school where her dad used to work.
a runaway who said she d been choked by boyd householder. and four years later, another runaway who said boyd had grabbed her by the throat. and several times, child protective services went out to visit. except i was told if i said anything negative, that my life was going to be made miserable. boyd coached the girls, said d nae, before they talked to cps investigators. and they were sure that he was listening, she said, eavesdropping from his office on the other side of the wall. i remember being asked, like, are people being starved? and i was like, no. i was literally terrified about what would happen to me, if i was going to start being the person that was starved next, because nothing ever came out of these. amanda told us her parents had another way of handling investigators, too. i was told, when cps came downstairs, to take the girls outside and basically hide the girls from cps. you hid the girls from
the authorities who would check on whether or not they were okay? yes. you know, your parents said they had an open-door policy with cps, that they could come in any old time. that s not the case? cps could come in. but like i said, i had to hide them. amanda s parents denied that, said they never hid students from cps. they said they told the girls to be honest with investigators. in any case, none of the reports ever resulted in any action. the school prospered. and parents like teresa had no way of knowing about the complaints over the years. we have no regulations on any religious facilities in the state of missouri. none? none, none. not at all. keri ingle is a missouri state representative and former social worker. do these places even have to register with the state when they open up? no. we have no ability currently to even know about their existence.
his first job at a christian reform school. the family later moved to missouri where boyd worked at agape, a boarding school for rebellious boys. and when amanda was 15, he decided to open his own school. only this one would be for girls. what was this place like, this physical house, the location? it was just a very run down, homely place. d nae hetrick was sent there in 2007, the year after the school opened. she was 14. what had you been doing? had you been committing crimes or something? had never committed a crime. my mom found out that i had become sexually active and that i had tried marijuana for the first time. maggie drew arrived a few in 2007 when she was 15. nobody was smiling. i saw the girls, and everybody was so quiet. and i was like, this is so dismal. what is this? maggie said the girls were