New Bethany Home for Girls Endured 30 Years of Controversy, Leaving Former Residents Wondering Why
By Rebecca Catalanello
But New Bethany did not stay closed. By the mid-1990s, documents show, residents at the home were once again trying to draw attention to what they described to police and politicians as abusive and inhumane conditions at the compound. These days, Scott says she doesn't want to talk about what she told the women with the tape recorder 23 years ago. She has a new name and asks that it not be used. She says she has never spoken to police. For three decades starting in the early 1970s, New Bethany took girls no one wanted. It was the outreach ministry of Mack Ford, a high school dropout who worked for a time as a tire repairman before he said he heard God's call to preach. He once told attorneys he was inspired to build New Bethany after meeting two blonde twins who had been impregnated by their father, a drunk. "We are reaching out as a mission project to the incorrigible, unwanted rejects," Ford told attorneys in a 1997 court deposition. "Destitute, lonely, prostitutes, drug addicts ... These kids haven't been loved and haven't had a chance in life." Until its final closure in 2001, hundreds of children and young women from across the state and country arrived at the high chain-link gates of the school, tucked off a rural highway in north Louisiana about 50 miles east of Shreveport. The census at the girls' home fluctuated over the years, according to news reports and legal documents. The number of girls residing there was said to be as low as a couple dozen at times and as high as 250 at others. To some who heard of its mission -- and others who encountered the school through its traveling girls' choir -- New Bethany seemed a charitable cause worthy of support and prayer. But as often as the girls charmed congregations with songs of praise and testimonies of salvation from darkness, records, interviews, news reports and other documents show they sometimes also went to extraordinary lengths to seek refuge from the darkness they say enveloped the compound. Stories of physical and mental abuse plagued New Bethany for almost as long as it was open, documents and news stories show. Girls who ran away from the school described brutal paddlings and harsh physical punishment to anyone who would hear, but the opportunity to interact with outsiders was rare. Calls home from the compound were limited to a few minutes a month and, by accounts of those who lived there, were often monitored.
Residents who wanted to get the word out say doing so first required scaling a tall chain-link fence, crawling over the inward facing barbed wire at the top, and running through dense woods to find someone -- a driver, a cop, a state trooper, a social worker -- who might believe them. One resident told investigators her head was slammed against the wall repeatedly by another girl while Ford's wife, Thelma, stood by and watched, according to court records. Another told authorities she had refused to take off her jewelry as instructed and Mack Ford slapped her repeatedly across the face until she was quiet. A girl who didn't eat her meal told an investigator she was tackled and held down while a staff member forced peas into her mouth. When the girl spit them out, they were shoved back in until she started to gag, then was paddled 15 to 20 times until she became hysterical. Ford also opened a boys' home in nearby Longstreet, La., soon after creating New Bethany. That compound was shuttered in 1981 amid charges of child abuse, and its manager, L.D. Rapier, was arrested and charged with cruelty to children. Charges against Rapier were soon dropped. A year later, Ford moved the boys' home to Walterboro, S.C. In 1984, two administrators for that school were arrested on abuse and neglect charges and the facility was closed. The men, Olin King and Robert King, pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of false imprisonment and the charges were dropped. There are no records of anyone at the girls' home ever being prosecuted on similar criminal charges. Runaway sightings were common. In 1983, Joe Storey, former Arcadia police chief from 1962 to 1980, reported that he had encountered 50 runaways during his time as chief. Current Bienville Parish Sheriff John Ballance recently recalled seeing a New Bethany runaway on the side of the road in 1975, when he was a state trooper. Her legs were bleeding with scratches and, at age 18, she begged to be freed from the home but had been denied, he said. A couple from Shreveport is still haunted by the memory of the night they picked up a runaway who rose out of a roadside ditch and begged them to take her to the sheriff. When they started to drive, they said, two cars blocked them in and men, including Ford, forced them to relinquish the girl back to the home. Ford has denied allegations of physical abuse at the home, though he has also repeatedly acknowledged using a wooden paddle to administer corporal punishment. "Let's watch our terminology," Ford told a reporter in 1988 after the state officials raided the compound and removed 28 of 52 girls from the home. "If we strike someone and you call it a beating, that's offensive. ... If we call it a spanking, that's not so offensive." Ford's resistance to outside interference became well documented. He filed federal civil rights lawsuits twice after state officials from child protective services and the state fire marshal sought to inspect the facility or question children and staff about their complaints of abuse. In 1992, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit in which Ford asked the government to keep officials from interfering in New Bethany operations. Seven years later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision determining there was no evidence that state officials were plotting to shut down New Bethany, as Ford complained. Now, more than a decade after New Bethany's board voted to close the facility for good, women are coming forward with not only tales of continued harsh physical and emotional treatment, but reports of sexual abuse. At least four women in the past year have made statements to law enforcement claiming they were sexually abused and naming Ford as chief among their abusers. All four have spoken with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Louisiana State Police and the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office confirm they are investigating the claims. The man at the center of the investigation, Mack Ford, now 82, said he doesn't want to talk about it. He has denied any kind of abuse at the home in the past.
When reporters from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune approached Ford at the New Bethany compound in December, Ford declined to talk and asked if the journalists were trying to cause trouble. "Are you going to heaven or are you going to hell?" he asked. Ford demanded the journalists leave and threatened to throw a photojournalist's camera in a creek. He then referred reporters to attorney John Hodge of Shreveport. When contacted, Hodge said he had not represented New Bethany in years and was no longer qualified to talk about it. Ford did not respond to additional attempts to reach him by phone and letter. So many questions remain about the three decades New Bethany operated under Ford's oversight. It survived years of residents' complaints, outlasted social workers' documented abuse findings and largely fended off state and local authorities' efforts to intervene. And while the home was shuttered from time to time, it always reopened. No one at the girls' home was ever prosecuted over claims of abuse. *** Tara Cummings had just turned 12 when she arrived at New Bethany in 1982 after law enforcement was notified that her adoptive father, a minister, had severely beaten her, records show.
Cummings, like many of the students from the home, said she remembers being subjected to isolating conditions, harsh paddlings and torturous physical punishment for infractions as small as asking an unwelcome question or forming friendships with other girls. "The only way you weren't in fear of some kind of negative repercussion was if you walked around and read the Bible," said Cummings, 43, of Metairie. One night, she and two other girls devised an escape plan. They went to bed with their clothes under their pajamas and, mid-morning, climbed out though a window they had secretly propped open earlier in a way that would not trip the alarm. They ran across the yard with the Ford family's German shepherds howling and trailing them and scaled the fence. An electric jolt shook Cumming's body when she touched the barbed wire. She tried again, finding a corner spot where two posts met and hoisted herself over. A law enforcement officer stopped when he saw the girls running near the edge of the woods. He put the girls in his car, drove them to the station, where he asked if he could call their parents. "Don't you want to go home?" he asked. As desperately as Cummings wanted to leave New Bethany, the prospect of returning to her adoptive parents terrified her. Social workers had concluded she had been beaten there. It was in papers and court documents. But she feared returning to New Bethany meant a similarly harsh physical punishment awaited her.
"They are going to beat the s--- out of us," Cummings remembers pleading. It was not uncommon, she said, for her to get 45 licks with a paddle in one sitting. "Enough licks," she said, "that the other person's arm would get worn out." The officer listened. He asked the girls if they needed anything before he returned them to the home. Cummings requested scissors for a haircut, which she said was forbidden at the home. The officer drove the girls back to New Bethany. When the metal gates of the New Bethany compound closed behind the cruiser, Cummings said, her dread "felt like getting sucked in by a moldy vacuum cleaner." The officer stood before the house mother and put his hand on Cummings' shoulder. "I will be back," he told the woman, Cummings remembers. "If she has a mark on her -- anything -- this whole place will be shut down." That was in 1983. *** Because Scott won't talk about the details of that taped interview in 1991, it's not clear what New Bethany leaders knew or suspected when they closed the home, albeit temporarily. But four women who have filed recent police reports saying they were sexually abused by Ford give accounts of abuse from various periods. One lived at the home from 1976 to 1977; another from 1981 to 1984; the third in 1980 and again in the early 1990s; and the fourth resided there from 1988 to 1990. Despite persistent, documented allegations of physical abuse over the years New Bethany was open, it's difficult to find any similarly documented allegations of sexual abuse. Storey, the former Arcadia police chief who went on to serve as Bienville County Sheriff, now 82, says he doesn't remember it coming up in all the conversations he or his deputies had with runaways from the home. "I had never talked to the first one who told me that they had been sexually abused," he said. "Not the first one."
Jeffrey Dion, an expert in child sexual abuse, said that's not uncommon -- and the reasons why child sex victims may take decades to go public with their stories of abuse are numerous. Dion is deputy executive director of the National Centers for Victims of Crime and a child sex abuse survivor himself. He said that often children either block out the experience or else don't realize until later that they were harmed by what happened to them. Because children who are sexually abused are at higher risk of suffering from other problems later in life -- alcohol or drug abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, sex addiction or even further involvement in abusive relationships -- they often find themselves dealing with the cycle of fallout from those issues before they make the connection between those problems and their childhood abuse. By the time adults work up the courage to report their abuse to authorities, if they ever do, they can find themselves besieged with mixed emotions including outrage, guilt, sadness, anger and vulnerability. "That's why false allegations of old abuse are really quite rare," Dion said. "Because it's not a pleasant thing to deal with. Oftentimes, survivors will do everything they can to get on with their lives and avoid making their report." *** In December, several women journeyed from different parts of the country to help support a woman as she made a statement to police describing abuses at the home, including repeated sexual abuse by Ford.
John Ballance, sheriff of Bienville Parish, listened to Jennifer Halter, 38, of Nevada, recount part of her story to his detectives. As she described years of sexual abuse starting at age 14, he stepped back in his office. Seated at a desk beneath a plaque that reads "My boss is a Jewish carpenter," he thought back to the runaway he had encountered years ago when he was a state trooper. "If that home was in operation when I was sheriff, me and the preacher would have had a problem," he said. Ballance said that back in 1975, he didn't know what he knows now about how to help runaways. So, he put the girl in his cruiser and drove her to the courthouse, where he phoned her father in the Midwest. "Daddy, I'm 18 today," she said. She handed the phone back to the trooper. "I don't want her," the man on the other end told Ballance. "Take her back." Ballance hung up and looked at the tearful girl. "As far as I'm concerned, you can walk out of here." He left her sitting in the courthouse and, he said, never saw her again. He said he wishes now he had done more. *** Shannon Scott says the other person who was in the room at the time she gave her report was Nora Carter. She's 72 now, goes by Nora Carter Shepherd, lives in Indiana and said she can't figure out why women who were residents at New Bethany can't stop dwelling on what happened to them there. "That's so long ago, a person should have been able to go on with their life," she said in a phone interview. Shepherd won't discuss Scott's memory of the tape-recorded conversation. "I did what was needed to be done. That's all I'm going to say." Several of the former residents who talked to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and others who commented online over the years say they remember Shepherd for her wide and forceful swing with a paddle. Asked about the reports of physical abuse at the home -- and the memories some of these women have of her -- Shepherd said the standards for abuse back then were not the same as today. She said adults today could get in trouble for "looking crooked" at a child. "No punishment was ever administered unless Mack Ford sent down a directive to do it," she said. "I don't know about physical abuse. I know some of the kids there had never had any correction in their lives and that's why their lives were out of control." Asked if she ever knew of sexual abuse there, Shepherd says she was unaware. Then, she qualifies it. "Not with any children," she said. She paused and then declined to go into detail. A political dust-up last spring at Louisiana College, a private Christian school in Pineville, dredged up some of these lingering questions about who knew what at New Bethany Home for Girls in late 1991 and early 1992.
Timothy Johnson, former executive vice president of Louisiana College, says he can't talk about it now on advice from attorneys. But while he was embroiled in a political battle with the college's president, an anonymous blog called Chuckles Travels claimed that Johnson, 57, Mack Ford's son-in-law, knew about a girl's complaint of sexual abuse at the home in 1991 and failed to contact authorities. The blog post said that a girl tape-recorded a sexual assault by Mack Ford, and, when Johnson became aware of it, he chose to send the girl home and shutter the compound for a time instead of reporting the matter to police. In a March 13, 2013, email to other Louisiana College leaders, Johnson acknowledged a girl complained about sexual abuse while he was involved with the school. He said he did not send one girl home, but "sent all girls home and closed the doors." "That night, after the girl's complaint, I gathered girls together and asked if there were any girls abused by Mack Ford," Johnson wrote. "If so, please speak up. NONE expressed anything and they had a great opportunity to do so without him present."
Johnson wrote in the email that he never heard a tape, but that his mother-in-law, Thelma Ford, was in possession of what he called "the supposed tape." He wrote that Mack Ford passed a lie detector test. Johnson acknowledged in his email that the school reopened some time later, but said his in-laws had little contact with him after that. He wrote that he learned in 2001 that he was still listed as a board member, and he voted to close the school. When asked recently by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune about whether he contacted police about the girl's complaint that she had been sexually abused, Johnson said he isn't allowed to discuss the matter because he could be a witness in a legal case involving his now estranged father-in-law. "Once we are confident that there will be no trials, I will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have," he wrote in an email. For her part, Nora Carter Shepherd said that she did speak up: "If there was something that was wrong, I reported it. Not to the sheriff's department, but to other board members or preachers or others," she said. She said she's still glad she worked at the home, as imperfect as it may have been. Asked if she had any regrets about her time there, she said she has one. "I regret that if these girls had these things happen to them that they didn't come down and talk to me about it." *** Part 3: An experience with a New Bethany runaway still haunts a couple 20 years later. *** Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@nola.com or 504.717.7701. Correction: An earlier version of this post gave the incorrect name of Jeffrey Dion's affiliation. He is deputy executive director of the National Centers for Victims of Crime.
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