KANSAS CITY (MO)
Kansas City Star [Kansas City MO]
June 27, 2024
By Laura Baker and Judy L. Thomas
In the hours after Boyd Householder died Tuesday, former students who attended his Circle of Hope boarding school in southwest Missouri had one lingering question.
Would a judge and jury ever hear what they say went on inside the unlicensed school he and his wife, Stephanie, operated for 14 years in rural Cedar County? The brutal restraints, excessive workouts in extreme temperatures, psychological and sexual abuse and food and water used as punishment.
His death at age 75 comes four months before the Householders were scheduled for trial on 99 felony counts of child abuse and neglect, including statutory rape, sodomy and physical abuse. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office charged the couple in March 2021 and then-AG Eric Schmitt described the abuse that students suffered as “extensive and horrific.”
The charges against Boyd Householder allege that he slammed girls’ heads or bodies against walls, slapped or struck them with his hands, a belt or other objects, shoved one girl’s face into horse manure and poured hot sauce down a girl’s throat. Former students said Stephanie allowed the abuse to happen and even participated at times.
“There needs to be an urgency with Stephanie’s case,” said Sophia Ellis, a former Circle of Hope student who attended a news conference in downtown Kansas City Wednesday. “There is no reason for it to have been pushed back so many times. Justice needs to be served to her and what she’s done.”
It was unclear Wednesday whether Stephanie Householder, 59, would still go to trial in late October. The Star sent several questions to the AG’s Office asking how Boyd Householder’s death would impact the criminal case against the couple and whether victims were contacted.
“This is an ongoing criminal matter, so I am going to decline to comment at this time,” said Madeline Sieren, spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, in an email Wednesday.
Adam Woody, the Householders’ attorney, did not answer a question about what would happen with the case against Stephanie. Boyd Householder, he said, died after going into “cardiac arrest.” “He passed away maintaining his innocence against any criminal conduct,” Woody said in a text message to The Star Tuesday night, “and is in a better place.”
‘HE DID NOT FACE JUSTICE IN OUR WORLD’
Former students said they wanted Householder, a former Marine they were made to call “Brother House,” to face a jury and be held accountable. They said they’ve now lost that chance.
“I think all I can really say is that even though he did not face justice in our world, I feel as though he will face it in the next,” said Ellis, 21, who was at Circle of Hope for 3 ½ years. “I believe in life after death, so it was definitely a mix of emotions for me, just because I spent so much time there.”
Stephanie Householder is charged with 21 felonies, including 11 counts of abuse or neglect of a child and 10 counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
Ashlyn Dixon, 18, attended the Cedar County school from 2019 to when it shut down in August 2020. And she said she believes Stephanie Householder should be held accountable for the abuse she and others said went on there.
“They were really in it together,” Dixon said.
Authorities began investigating Circle of Hope in early 2020 after a short video surfaced on social media showing Boyd Householder ordering students to go after Dixon if they thought she was threatening them. The video went viral on TikTok, getting millions of views.
The Householders’ estranged daughter, Amanda, posted the video, which was sent to her by a friend of the family who had secretly recorded it on a visit to Cedar County.
Several former students said they thought the Householders should have been kept in jail before trial and not allowed to be at home. Both were on monitoring devices for a period of time but they later asked the court to remove them.
The Householders said they’d had no violations since being released from jail on July 23, 2021, and that the GPS monitors were “not in furtherance of the safety of the community or of the alleged crime victims” and were too costly.
“They are paying nearly $700/month for the monitors, an unnecessary expense that has now exceeded its necessity,” their motions said. Boyd Householder further said that his health is “slowly failing” and he “is now on two tanks of oxygen per day.” The judge granted Boyd Householder’s request to remove the monitor, but not his wife’s.
“They were literally attacking multiple young little girls every single day, like in so many horrendous ways that you could not even imagine, and they just get their freedom,” Dixon said. “That shouldn’t be allowed.”
After the news conference, organizers planned to deliver a letter to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s Kansas City office demanding that he take a stand against abuse inside the state’s unlicensed boarding schools. They called on Bailey to ask prosecutors in counties with such boarding schools to investigate and determine if any abuse exists.
“He can and should and must take the lead on this because otherwise, there will just be this constant drip, drip, drip of allegations and reports and prosecutions and lawsuits,” said David Clohessy, former national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “And in the meantime, the attorney general is essentially sacrificing countless children to devastated lives. It’s just absolutely irresponsible and inexcusable.”
NEW AGAPE LAWSUIT FILED
Rebecca Randles, a Kansas City attorney who has filed more than 15 Circle of Hope lawsuits, was at Wednesday’s news conference, where Dixon and Ellis and others wrote names of alleged boarding school abusers on the sidewalk.
The attorney also announced a new lawsuit filed Wednesday against Agape Boarding School, another unlicensed facility in Cedar County that faces dozens of abuse lawsuits and where Boyd Householder first worked when coming to Missouri. That new suit alleges that an Arizona boy — who goes by MB2 — was abused and/or neglected by five former staff leaders at the school.
“The latest one, unfortunately, is like all of the others in the sense that this is a child who is very young still,” Randles said, “who was assaulted, thrown around, beaten, denied water, denied food, required to exercise in the heat with no water available to him, not provided food when he was hungry.”
One of the alleged victims whom Randles has represented from Circle of Hope is the Householders’ daughter, Amanda. She was instrumental in pushing for an investigation into alleged abuse at Circle of Hope and sued her parents for forced labor, beating her for their own sexual gratification and making her punish other students at the unlicensed boarding school near Humansville.
She said she had a wide range of emotions surrounding her father’s death, including frustration that the trial had been through so many delays.
“The little girl inside me hurts that I didn’t get to say goodbye to the version of my dad she longed for,” Amanda Householder told The Star on Wednesday. She was even more heartbroken, she said, “for those of us who were sexually, emotionally and physically violated by him for years and years.”
“I hope his passing brings some solace to the hundreds of vulnerable children who suffered even more pain at his hands. But I’m also angry because I feel the state of Missouri drug their feet on letting us survivors see our abuser’s face while getting held accountable.”
Now, she said, “Abuse victims are denied justice and their day in court. It’s tragic that none of us who were so severely hurt by his crimes will be able to expose the full extent of his crimes in court.”