May 29, 2025 • 51 mins
Hannah and Patia discuss the 1996 murder at Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy, where 16-year-old William Futrelle—new to the school—was killed by fellow students. They unpack the trial of Joseph Burris, who was charged with Futrelle’s murder, and examine the disturbing environment that enabled the crime. We also cover what happened with Bethesda Home for Girls, Bob and Betty Wills’ earlier “troubled teen” program in Mississippi, which was eventually shut down by the state.
LA Times - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-04-me-39141-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-05-mn-39651-story.html
Bethesda Home for Girls: https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/bethesda-home-girls-stolen-babies/
Cult Education Institute: https://www.culteducation.com/group/1059-mountain-park-baptist-church-and-boarding-academy/14571-insiders-tell-of-boarding-school-past-and-present.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised. Hello,
(00:20):
and welcome to the Knife Off Record. I'm Patia Eaton,
I'm Hannah Smith. Today we have two follow ups on
last week's episode about Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy. We're
going to talk about the murder that took place there
in nineteen ninety six, as well as the troubled teen
program that the Wills ran prior to Mountain Park Bethesda
Home for Girls, and as always we will have recommendations.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
So, you know, we talked briefly in the episode about
Bethesda Home for Girls, but you did a little more
research about what exactly that was.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
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. So but as
the home for girls was just outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
very small town obviously, as you can imagine, a pretty
conservative area. It was also founded, of course by Lester Rolloff,
as we know, who went on to start Mountain Park
(01:13):
Baptist Boarding Academy after Bethesda. So but as the home
for girls operated in the nineteen seventies, and in the
nineteen eighties, and I spoke with a woman named Lisa
Dean who gave me permission to tell her story on
the show. But as a home for girls, if you google,
it was sort of advertised as a safe haven for
young pregnant girls to give birth and then their babies
(01:38):
were adopted out by I mean, I'm putting this in
air quotes because it's how it was advertised good Christian families.
And are these like unmarried, unmarried 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, so,
(02:01):
I mean in pregnancy, if you've never done it before,
it can be pretty intense physically and emotionally. So immediately
of han learning about this place and others like it,
it's like wow, to be going through that at 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
(02:25):
by strangers. I mean, it's pretty traumatic all around. Lisa,
who I spoke with, actually found Lisa on YouTube. There
was a YouTube video interviewing someone else who had been
at bethesta home for girls, and Lisa had commented like,
I'm so sorry you went through that. I know what
you went through. I went there too. And so Lisa
actually was not sent there because of pregnancy. Her story
(02:50):
is different. 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, and it would also be a
place to send girls who needed help with behavior and
(03:10):
maybe getting their lives back on track, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
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. Teen pregnancy has always
been stigmatized, right, and it's not an ideal situation, but
the fact that you know, these teen girls are sort
(03:34):
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 totally. And I mean
you can imagine the probably lack of sex education at
that time. Yeah, and certainly young boys weren't sent away
like you have gotten someone pregnant and then you know,
(03:56):
you need to take responsibility that wasn't happening, So.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
It doesn't have does this doesn't happen? Yeah? And Lisa
grew up in a single parent household with her mother
and they were incredibly close. Lisa, when I spoke with
her last week, she's sixty 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 wow.
Really yeah, just the pain of what she went through
(04:20):
was still that present for her all these years later.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
And so how old was she when she was at Bethesda?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
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 eleven or twelve, wow, And she said
her mom was like the most incredible, loving mother. She
has so many memories in the kitchen cooking beside her.
(04:50):
You know, this was her entire world and support system,
and it was a happy home that they lived in.
And to lose her that way, of course, was just
so traumatic. And she was sent to live with her aunt,
her mother's sister. Lisa's aunt also was a very she said,
(05:12):
loving caretaker. She had only good intentions. But you know,
this was the nineteen seventies and Lisa was entering her
teenage years 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.
(05:34):
It was just this sort of like her 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. But that's the home for girls, got it. Yeah,
And so Lisa remembers it as her aunt put her
on a plane, did not get on the plane with her,
and when she got to her destination, she was picked
(05:57):
up by strangers, taken to a location and then told
where she was and why, and it was presented to
her as a place where she could really find herself
again and resent her But of course that's not what
it was.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
No, of course not. Yeah, that's so scary too. You
just like are sent off all the trauma she's already
been through and now she has no idea what she's
getting into, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, I mean it was at a time when she
really needed counseling, 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. 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. You're up around
(06:43):
five am, teethbrush, face washed, and then you're supposed to
be dressed and sitting in the hallway reading your Bible
by like six am or something crazy like that for teenagers.
You know, her growing and you're listening to Lester roll
Off preaching and recordings, You're reading your Bible, you're doing devotions.
Then it's you know, a very meager breakfast, and then
(07:05):
you're doing chores. 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,
and if you're not there, you know, incentivized to report that.
And then there is physical abuse, so they're sleep deprived.
Even things like dreaming were not allowed. That's dreaming, Yeah,
(07:28):
you're asleep. It was like said that it was un Christian. Wow,
I mean psychotic. Yeah, and that piece actually found online.
Lisa didn't mention that to me, but it was just like, oh, okay, so, no,
wonder this is how you're justifying the sleep deprivation. Is like, well,
if you sleep, you might dream, and we're going to
say that that's on Christian.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
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 team programs was already like in place in
the seventies and eighties. Also, can we just like acknowledge that,
like you want these teens to read the Bible, like,
this is not the way that you do it. No,
(08:10):
this is not the way that you do it. It's
like you are sleep derived, you're hungry, and you're an
adolescent person with all of these hormonal changes.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
It's like you're set up to fail. Yeah, 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. But
one thing I found really interesting and although not surprising,
after having heard. Meg's story is that they didn't speak
(08:42):
to each other really about anything personal. There was no
information sharing between the students there. She said, if someone
was pregnant, I didn't know it. Oh yeah, she said
that she knew that was going on, but it wasn't like,
you know, how are you feeling that? There was none
of that. But one thing Lisa really did remember is
the fasting and you know, being told to fast for
(09:06):
so called religious purposes, but you know, you're young, you're growing,
and you're made to do physical labor and chores all day. Yeah,
it's just excruciating. And wow, that's horrible. That's really horrible.
It's horrible. All of her communication, just like at Mountain Park,
was monitored, you know, this time it was all letters.
(09:27):
They weren't doing any phone calls. And so Lisa knew
that if her aunt knew what was actually going on
it Bethesda, she wouldn't want her there. 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,
and so there was no communication that she could have
done to save herself from that situation. She was totally
(09:50):
captive there. It is like prison it's prison, yeah, and
it's not regulated at this time. 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. That
just wasn't happening. There was no oversight, and so Lisa
was there for three years. She thinks it was about
(10:11):
from age thirteen to around age sixteen. Oh, those are
pivotal years. Pivotal years, 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,
and not to mention, you don't get over the loss
(10:31):
of a parent, so that's all very present. So Lisa's
aunt just came to get her about three years later.
She just sort of decided it had been enough time.
And even then, Lisa didn't tell her aunt right away
what had happened. 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
(10:53):
happened because that was not what she thought it was.
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. The living situation,
these girls were packed into bunk rooms. Leicester Rolloff was
there when Lisa was there, but when Bob and Betty
(11:13):
came into the picture, they were referred to as Mama
and Papa.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Oh my god. Yeah, it's like terrible. They were bet
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 it Bethesda. Outside of
my conversation with Lisa and from what I gather from
researching it online, there was an estimated, you know, one
(11:49):
hundred plus adoptions that took place from teen pregnancies that
were happening at But that's the home for girls, and
you know those young women, those girls, they did not
consent to the adoption in a meaningful way. So interestingly,
in Mississippi at the time, at age sixteen, you have
(12:10):
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. 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.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Okay, so like talking me through that, because I mean,
I assume that when you're giving birth you are given drugs.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, I mean, I was so like, my epideral worked
so perfectly. I had a really lucky birth experience with
like pain management. But I was very present the entire time.
I was totally conscious of my surroundings and what was
going on. So these girls don't know what they were
(12:56):
drugged with, but it certainly wasn't just No one thinks
it was just a standard pain killer that got the
best of them because they don't remember. They don't remember. Okay.
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, and a nurse accidentally
(13:16):
slipped the gender to her and was punished for it.
So these things were highly secretive, and I don't know
how consent could exist where you don't even know the
gender of your child.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Are they saying that when they were in this drug state,
that they were giving consent to adopt out their child?
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yes? Oh wow? Yeah? And you know, who's to say,
were they actually even physically signing a document if they
can't even remember doing it?
Speaker 1 (13:44):
So where does that leave these women now? Because this happened,
you know, in the seventies and eighties they were teenagers.
Have any of them, you know, reconnected with their biological
children since then?
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, you know, thanks to the excessive of genetic testing
and websites like twenty three and me or what have you,
genetic testing websites, people have connected with their children after
many years. And there's so many mixed feelings around a
reunion like that. You're you're happy to be connected, but
you've missed out on so much. And for the adopted child,
(14:21):
that was their own trauma of questioning where they came
from and if they were wanted and why their adoption
took place. 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 sixteen years old,
has no memory of consenting to the adoption and actually
(14:43):
really wanted to keep her child. 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. It was in
the seventies and eighties, not regulated. I mean even now
there's a conversation around that. But they were incentivized to
(15:03):
be doing this, and so Butthesda is eventually shut down.
And how that happened is a young woman who is
identified in court documents by the name of Candy lastem
initial h was on a monitored call with a family member,
and the staff member who was monitoring her call, so
this is in the nineteen eighties, left the room and yeah,
(15:25):
Candy sees the moment to communicate to the family member like,
come give me, it's not what you think. Yeah, good job, Candy. Yeah.
And she was actually nineteen 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.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Will, coursefully for healthy there.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, it sounds like from what I gather with Candy stories,
she initially wanted to go there, 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. 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
(16:07):
Law Center, and they filed a lawsuit against Bethesda. As
soon as that suit was filed, over seventy girls leave
the home and from there there was a lawsuit, and
the repercussions are just mind blowing to read, because it's
like the result of the suit was that, okay, Bethesda
(16:28):
Home for Girls, you're no longer allowed to paddle pregnant
girls and you're now limited to no more than quote,
eight licks to others within a five day period. It's
just like, how is this possible? But of course then
they had more eyes on them, and so then the
state's paying more attention. So Beth as a Home for
(16:51):
Girls was moved to Missouri, reopened under a new name,
and eventually closed in two thousand and four. And we
now know from our Converse station with Meg that Missouri
was home to Mountain Park Boarding Academy.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, they just moved states. They just moved states 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 yes, unlawful people who have not
committed a crime. Yeah, it was all around bad press,
like what are you doing to these young women?
Speaker 2 (17:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So then they just moved to Missouri. They just moved
to missour started back up again.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
So before we get into, you know, the murder that
happened in nineteen ninety three in Mountain Park, I wanted
to talk about the mindset so many people had leading
up to the nineties. So, like everything that you're talking
about the seventies and eighties just like makes so much
sense in this context. The fact that the end of
this lawsuit is like they limit them to how many
(18:02):
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 and One of the things
that I was reading about was just how troubled teens
really became a huge topic in the US in the
(18:24):
nineteen nineties. And this guy named John Deulio. He is
a political scientist and a criminologist, and he had written
a lot about crime. He had visited prisons, he had
visited juvenile facilities, and he is actually the person that
coined the term super predator in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
I wonder if he knew the staying power that would have.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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, hey, yeah,
I've heard it. I asked him, like, what do you
think that is describing? 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 for like
a grizzly bear or a grizzly bear. Yeah, And it's
(19:13):
actually was coined to describe teenagers juveniles.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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. Yeah,
(19:39):
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 and
how can I help myself? They need that guidance. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
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 nineties, and so super Predator
was coined in nineteen ninety five. John Deulio he had
this theory. He supposedly he looked at this data on
crime and he you know, analyzed the data and he
(20:14):
predicted that there was going to be what he called
a wave of teenage crime. 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. I mean,
(20:35):
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. And you know, a lot of stuff has
been written about this now. A lot of his language
was very racist, you know. He talked about this starting
inner cities and even wrote about like black teenagers specifically.
(21:00):
I mean, it was just so racist, and said that
like all of this crime would overtake the suburbs. There
was just so much fear mongering about like quote unquote
bad kids and kids that cannot be rehabilitated. 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, and
(21:22):
he advocated for locking bad teens up and separating them
from society. And then in nineteen ninety six, the Violent
Youth Predator Act passed. This is a federal act. It
offered one point five billion dollars in grant money to
any state that toughened up their juvenile offender laws, and
(21:43):
forty five states acted quickly on this, making their laws
so much stricter against juveniles and I think it's important
to note that that's nineteen ninety six, which is the
same year of the murder that we're about to talk about.
So suddenly, across forty five states in the US, it
becomes very easy to try a minor as an adult
(22:05):
for violent crimes. And you know, like one thing to
note about Dulia before we move on from this is
that he was wrong, Like he was very wrong. 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
(22:28):
view teenagers who are acting out or even teenagers who
are committing crimes, and has had like a pretty negative effect.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, I mean the damage was done at that point. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
So the Campaign for Fair Sentencings of Youth their website.
I just wanted to note a stat from their website.
So from nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety four, the
number of miners tried as adults nationally increased by seventy
one percent, 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 rebel effect on family
(23:00):
and you know, communities, Gulio did in twenty twelve signed
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 twenty twelve. This law passed
in nineteen ninety six, So from nineteen ninety six to
twenty twelve, you know, there's not a whole lot there
that's being passed that's preventing miners from being tried as adults.
(23:22):
So that sort of sets the background to what we're
going to talk about with this case today. 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 2 (23:40):
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 anyones. I just wanted to
mention that, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
So Joseph Stanley Burris, he was born in nineteen eighty.
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. Patrese his mother.
She was a witness at the trial, and I thought
it was interesting she described her family that she grew
(24:10):
up in. 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. 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
(24:32):
raised her children with. I think that's important to note
because that really comes into play with everything we're talking
about with troubled teens and needing help. So it's Patrice
and Keith and they have these three boys. Keith was
an engineer, and everyone says they were a very tight
knit family. They went to church together regularly. Patrese homeschooled
her son's Keith and Joe were very very close. Joe's father, Keith,
(24:58):
he was a runner, he was an athlete, he loved
to swim, and he started doing those activities with his sons.
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. 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
(25:20):
said that Joe would follow his dad around help him
with the yard work, like he really looked up to him,
and Keith was a really good dad. Joe was described
by his family and community as like a good kid.
He got you know, fine grades, He was social, he
was well liked, He didn't get in trouble, you know,
he seemed like very well adjusted. But then when he
was twelve and a half in nineteen ninety three, they
(25:42):
came home from a swim meet one day and his father, Keith,
had a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Which probably just so unexpected. He'd been living this ultra healthy, active, yeah,
lifestyle he would ever expected, but you know, young, he.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Was young and healthy, and Joe as their to witness it.
His mom called nine one one, he was rest of
the hospital, but he did die that evening, and this
was an unexpected tragedy for the whole family. Patrees talked
about just absolutely falling apart, you know, not being able
to get out of bed just being so ridden with grief.
(26:19):
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, and
she just tried to get by. 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,
(26:42):
you know, we're able to kind of continue on and
cope with it in some way, Whereas it became pretty
clear that Joe was really affected by this, And if
I'm remembering Craigtley, Patrese 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.
(27:04):
And so everyone responds to tragedy a little bit differently,
and Joe was just he did not respond to it
by sort of putting his head on and focusing on
school work. Yeah, he was devastated and he started to
internalize his feelings and kind of withdraw. Patri said that
she knew he was bothered, but he wouldn't talk to
her about it. But life keeps moving forward and they
(27:28):
continue to go to these swim meets, which are like
two hours away from where they live, 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 her son goes to
these swim meets, and they start to carpool with her.
So tragically, like a few months after this happens where
(27:51):
Joe's dad, Keith dies, Louise gets cancer and can no
longer drive them, so her husband Ken, there's a lot
of K's here, Ken starts to drive them. In September
of nineteen ninety three, Louise passes away from cancer. This
is about seven months after Keith died. So now both
Patrise and Ken have lost their spouses and our single parents.
(28:13):
And it sounds like they just really bonded over that,
and they start dating and get engaged. Before they get married,
Joe 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 like his
(28:35):
dad had passed away a little more than a year
before that, which is really not a long time, and
Joe was still really struggling with that.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
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 thirteen.
But they did get married. They got married in June
of nineteen ninety four, and then Patrise and her three
sons moved out of their home and in with Keith.
And I think this was also really hard for Joe.
(29:03):
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, he
stops eating, and people notice he's losing a lot of weight.
He is more and more withdrawn and distant. Patrice said
like he would just be in his room and then
he would come out for family dinners but not really eat,
(29:25):
not really talk, and then go back. So it's clear
that something is really going on. 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 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. Nine months after
(29:47):
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 was unable to find that. Wow,
that's just like, yeah, so difficult to imagine.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
I mean, especially like they had a son, Chris, who
was sixteen at the time. I just can't even imagine. Like,
your mom dies and then your dad gets cancer, you know,
a couple years later.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
It's devastating, and you're living with a new family, trying
to find your place there. It's just your whole world
turns upside down.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, Patria says that Joe said to him at that time,
I can't lose another father because the cancer is really serious.
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 2 (30:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
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 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?
Clearly she just had no idea what to say to
(30:57):
him or how to deal with this. And her husband
now has terminal cancer.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
He needed professional help.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, So Joe's stepdad has a surgery. Everyone's hopeful about it.
It doesn't end up going well, and it becomes clear
that this is going to be terminal. So at that point,
Patrisa 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. So Joe did speak with
(31:25):
a social worker, says two to three times. It seems
like he didn't really open up to her. At one point,
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.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
It's so sad, right, 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. Now the fact that Ken, her second husband,
is terminally you know, you're trying to stay above water,
You're trying to get your kid help, but you don't
(32:04):
know what to do. 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, 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
(32:24):
raised in. 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.
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 got married to another man,
and I think that was comforting to her. She talked
(32:46):
about how that was really her focus at the time
was to try to like work on this marriage, 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 STI then we would have
had otherwise, And then you lose it all a second time.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, So the herbs and vitamins don't help Joe. He's
fifteen at this point, he starts to run away. At
one point, he goes through his mom's purse, takes some money.
He gets on a bus to Los Angeles toward the airport.
He has some kind of loose plan to get on
the plane and leave, but he doesn't know where he
would go, so he calls his mom and is like,
(33:28):
you know, come pick me up. When I hear this
story is just so sad to me because it's like
he's not trying to do anything violent. He's just like
in desperate need of help. And he's like then calls
his mom to be like come get me.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
You know, I ran away. It's like waving this flag
like I need help from you. I need help.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
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, 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, Patrese, along
(34:12):
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 Saint 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, and I
think that she just didn't know what else to do,
(34:33):
and so she thought that this is a place that
would help him. 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, and
said that once he got to Mountain Park, you know,
Joe was just surviving at that point. You know, we've
(34:56):
heard from Meg Richt in last episode about what all
was going on at Mountain Park. 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, and someone to just allow him
(35:17):
to grieve and help him through that process. But instead
it was just more pain, yeah, exactly. But you know,
he did find there like he seemed to be adjusting.
He was kind of going through the motions. 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. He was assigned a
(35:40):
student to be underneath him that he was supposed to
be guiding Will Futrell. He also met this student named
Anthony Rutherford. Anthony was three years older than Joe. Joe
was fifteen, Anthony was eighteen, so a legal adult, but
still at Mountain Park. So this leads us to March
twenty fifth, nineteen ninety six. The day started out pretty normally.
(36:02):
They woke up, they went to school, and then they
broke for lunch. 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. The plan was
to somehow take over the school to locate firearms. I
(36:24):
don't know if they knew that there were firearms somewhere
or just assumed that's unclear. And then they were going
to break into the girl's 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,
(36:44):
and the guys were not. They could kind of room
around outside. So they were going to break into the
girl's side and like have sex with them, is what
they said.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Which like also it is. 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,
they're not being fed adequately, they're being verbally abused or
(37:12):
being physically abused, or being manipulated to abuse one another. Yes,
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,
and you're not thinking about the real world outside and
(37:36):
the real consequences. You're thinking about the consequences at Mountain Park,
where it's in a way lawlessness. You're being beat at
a place that is supposed to help you.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
There is no real rhyme or reason one hundred percent,
and you're being forced to physically abuse other students, and
when you're an orientation guide, you're abusing the student who
you're supposed to be guiding, as Meg talked about. And
I think like one of the things that goes to
show just what you're saying this mindset of really hopelessness,
(38:07):
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. 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, But he's so
(38:28):
hopeless at this point that he is like, Okay, let's
do it. Let's do it, let's take over the school.
Originally it seems like Will Futrell, 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. I don't want to participate
in this. So that afternoon, around three thirty pm, Will, Joe,
(38:50):
and Anthony all go out to the woods by Mountain
Park to collect firewood, which is one of their jobs
they'd been assigned. 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, and yeah, brutally murdered him and
(39:11):
left his body in a ditch.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
And like, if you are Will's parents, this is a
place you sent your child to be safe, to.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Be protected, I know, and Will had only been there
three months.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
It's amazing how quickly this all transpires. It's like that
morning Anthony reveals his plan to Joe. 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, and
then you do this inexcusable crime and you murder someone
(39:46):
simply for not wanting to go along with your terrible plan,
and it impacts the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, it's definitely inexcusable. 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 all. It was not mentioned,
it was not talked about nothing. So you know what
happens after they murder Will. They look around for some guns. Look,
(40:12):
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.
It's like this has clearly not been very well planned
at all. 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
(40:34):
asks them, like, what's going on? Are you okay? And
they essentially admit to him exactly what they've done. He
contacts Sam Gerhart, and together they all go and walk
down the trail and they show them Will's body and
confess to the crime. And so the staff members immediately
call law enforcement. The Wayne County Sheriff's apartment was called
(40:55):
and the Missouri State Highway Patrol and both boys are
taken into custody and questioned separately, and they both confess
the crime happened about three point thirty in the afternoon.
Joseph was taken into custody that early next morning, around
twelve thirty or one am, at police headquarters in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.
The officer's videotape his confession. He's signed a confession. He's
(41:18):
also signed a document that says that he's aware of
his rights and that he doesn't want an attorney. This
is later brought up in an appeals because he's fifteen
at the time. He was able to call his mom
and his mom told him to just do whatever sam
Gerhart tells him to do. At this point. Also, his
mom has signed overpower of attorney to Mountain Park, right,
(41:39):
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 if a miner 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 their side, And
he has no one to do that for him, so
(42:00):
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. So Anthony
Rutherford was eighteen years old at the time was a
legal adult. Yes, a legal adult, which meant if he
was convicted, he could be given the death penalty right
so he signed a plea deal basically saying that he
(42:21):
could avoid the death penalty, but he was convicted and
sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Joseph Burris took his case to trial, and he was
also convicted and sentenced to life without parole plus fifty years,
and he was not eligible for the death penalty since
he was only fifteen at the time.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
What they did to will committing a murder obviously is
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. You know, you
have these boys who were deemed by their families as
really in need of a lot of help, having behavioral challenges,
and then also just looking at the way Mountain Park
(43:01):
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 fire with 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. It was just a recipe for disaster.
(43:25):
And most of all, the school did not protect Will.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
No, they did not at all. Meg told me, and
she got this information from Joseph Burris because she visited
him in prison a few years back. 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. So I don't know
(43:51):
if that has anything to do with it or not,
but nothing was brought up in the trial. 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, feels really important to what
(44:14):
happened here.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
You're normalizing abuse, you're normalizing violence.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yeah, and none of that was brought up, you know,
none of it was talked about. 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
two thousand that was denied. After this twenty twelve Supreme
Court decision Miller versus Alabama, established that mandatory life in
(44:41):
prison without parole sentences for minors is unconstitutional under the
Eighth Amendment. Burris's attorney then filed a petition claiming that
his sentencing violated that Miller decision, but that was also denied.
But then in twenty twenty one, just a few years ago,
he had the opportunity to go before the parole b
and Meg Richter actually was in contact with him at
(45:03):
that time, and she attended his parole hearing. 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.
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
(45:26):
to Will. It's a tragedy, 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. 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. And you know, Joseph Burriss is
(45:48):
currently forty five years old. He's been in prison for
thirty years, and he actually will be released next year
at some point. 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 2 (46:01):
Thirty years is a long time, but I can imagine
for Will's family, who you know, he will be gone
more than thirty years. He will be gone for the
rest of their lives. 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 in all accounts.
And we also now know that Anthony Rutherford died in
(46:24):
prison in July twenty fifteen. It just said faul Play
was not suspected in his death. And so so much
loss in one story. And you know also the Branch
Davidians and that saga that plays out when the ATF
goes in that happened in nineteen ninety three. Wow, and
that was so as we know, highly televised. Yeah, and
(46:46):
so hearing about Anthony Rutherford 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 eighteen year old who's being kept
in a cult like environment, physical abuse, verbal abuse, all
(47:10):
sort of operating as this quote Christian organization. It's like
he wasn't a cult. 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. And Joe burrisse he was
only fifteen, Yeah, so young, so young in context.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
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. You know, when Meg brought it up in
her interview, it was just like, there's no sadder outcome
than that. And to understand the environment there and how
it impacted every person that was at Mountain Park, I
(47:54):
think is crucial. So we're going to wrap this episode
up with some recommendations. Petia, what do you have to
recommend today? Well, you know I always have something. I
actually have another BBC podcast called Stocked. I am currently
on episode eight, and it's a well told story where
(48:18):
actually one of the hosts is the victim of this stalker.
And I'm really loving how much introspection is that the
word I should probably google it that there is from
this person.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Her name is Hannah. Oh wow, I love it already,
me too about sort of her mindset when she began
associating with the person who later became her alleged stalker.
I'm really enjoying the storytelling there and how they're going
about unraveling something that so much of it happens online.
(48:55):
And when someone presents themselves to you as someone they're not,
that's by designed. How do you go about finding out
who they really are when they worked so hard to
hide it? M yeah, I'm just I'm really liking it.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Sounds really good. It's called Stocked, Stocked. I will check
it out. So I want to recommend a docu series.
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, 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
(49:29):
I'm really into it. There's two seasons. 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. They did an
episode on Peggy Actually, oh wow, Yeah, Dennis Rodman's financial
manager who stole money from him. We actually covered that
(49:49):
story years ago on The Opportunist, so it was great
to watch it.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
They did a really good.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
Job and 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. And the first season
is kind of a mix of a lot of different stories.
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
(50:17):
it's so disturbing to really like think about what was
really done to them. A lot of these stories are
you know, rich and shameless. 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.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Cool. We'll check it out and we will see you
next week. Thanks for listening. If you have a story
for us, we would love to hear it. Our email
is The Knife at exactly rightmedia dot com, or you
can follow us on Instagram at the Knife Podcast or
a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Pasha Eating.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Our producers are Tom Briefogel and Alexis Samarosi.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer
is Christina Chamberlain.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport, artwork
by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised. Hello,
(00:20):
and welcome to the Knife Off Record. I'm Patia Eaton,
I'm Hannah Smith. Today we have two follow ups on
last week's episode about Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy. We're
going to talk about the murder that took place there
in nineteen ninety six, as well as the troubled teen
program that the Wills ran prior to Mountain Park Bethesda
Home for Girls, and as always we will have recommendations.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
So, you know, we talked briefly in the episode about
Bethesda Home for Girls, but you did a little more
research about what exactly that was.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
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. So but as
the home for girls was just outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
very small town obviously, as you can imagine, a pretty
conservative area. It was also founded, of course by Lester Rolloff,
as we know, who went on to start Mountain Park
(01:13):
Baptist Boarding Academy after Bethesda. So but as the home
for girls operated in the nineteen seventies, and in the
nineteen eighties, and I spoke with a woman named Lisa
Dean who gave me permission to tell her story on
the show. But as a home for girls, if you google,
it was sort of advertised as a safe haven for
young pregnant girls to give birth and then their babies
(01:38):
were adopted out by I mean, I'm putting this in
air quotes because it's how it was advertised good Christian families.
And are these like unmarried, unmarried 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, so,
(02:01):
I mean in pregnancy, if you've never done it before,
it can be pretty intense physically and emotionally. So immediately
of han learning about this place and others like it,
it's like wow, to be going through that at 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
(02:25):
by strangers. I mean, it's pretty traumatic all around. Lisa,
who I spoke with, actually found Lisa on YouTube. There
was a YouTube video interviewing someone else who had been
at bethesta home for girls, and Lisa had commented like,
I'm so sorry you went through that. I know what
you went through. I went there too. And so Lisa
actually was not sent there because of pregnancy. Her story
(02:50):
is different. 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, and it would also be a
place to send girls who needed help with behavior and
(03:10):
maybe getting their lives back on track, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
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. Teen pregnancy has always
been stigmatized, right, and it's not an ideal situation, but
the fact that you know, these teen girls are sort
(03:34):
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 totally. And I mean
you can imagine the probably lack of sex education at
that time. Yeah, and certainly young boys weren't sent away
like you have gotten someone pregnant and then you know,
(03:56):
you need to take responsibility that wasn't happening, So.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
It doesn't have does this doesn't happen? Yeah? And Lisa
grew up in a single parent household with her mother
and they were incredibly close. Lisa, when I spoke with
her last week, she's sixty 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 wow.
Really yeah, just the pain of what she went through
(04:20):
was still that present for her all these years later.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
And so how old was she when she was at Bethesda?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
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 eleven or twelve, wow, And she said
her mom was like the most incredible, loving mother. She
has so many memories in the kitchen cooking beside her.
(04:50):
You know, this was her entire world and support system,
and it was a happy home that they lived in.
And to lose her that way, of course, was just
so traumatic. And she was sent to live with her aunt,
her mother's sister. Lisa's aunt also was a very she said,
(05:12):
loving caretaker. She had only good intentions. But you know,
this was the nineteen seventies and Lisa was entering her
teenage years 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.
(05:34):
It was just this sort of like her 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. But that's the home for girls, got it. Yeah,
And so Lisa remembers it as her aunt put her
on a plane, did not get on the plane with her,
and when she got to her destination, she was picked
(05:57):
up by strangers, taken to a location and then told
where she was and why, and it was presented to
her as a place where she could really find herself
again and resent her But of course that's not what
it was.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
No, of course not. Yeah, that's so scary too. You
just like are sent off all the trauma she's already
been through and now she has no idea what she's
getting into, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, I mean it was at a time when she
really needed counseling, 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. 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. You're up around
(06:43):
five am, teethbrush, face washed, and then you're supposed to
be dressed and sitting in the hallway reading your Bible
by like six am or something crazy like that for teenagers.
You know, her growing and you're listening to Lester roll
Off preaching and recordings, You're reading your Bible, you're doing devotions.
Then it's you know, a very meager breakfast, and then
(07:05):
you're doing chores. 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,
and if you're not there, you know, incentivized to report that.
And then there is physical abuse, so they're sleep deprived.
Even things like dreaming were not allowed. That's dreaming, Yeah,
(07:28):
you're asleep. It was like said that it was un Christian. Wow,
I mean psychotic. Yeah, and that piece actually found online.
Lisa didn't mention that to me, but it was just like, oh, okay, so, no,
wonder this is how you're justifying the sleep deprivation. Is like, well,
if you sleep, you might dream, and we're going to
say that that's on Christian.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
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 team programs was already like in place in
the seventies and eighties. Also, can we just like acknowledge that,
like you want these teens to read the Bible, like,
this is not the way that you do it. No,
(08:10):
this is not the way that you do it. It's
like you are sleep derived, you're hungry, and you're an
adolescent person with all of these hormonal changes.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
It's like you're set up to fail. Yeah, 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. But
one thing I found really interesting and although not surprising,
after having heard. Meg's story is that they didn't speak
(08:42):
to each other really about anything personal. There was no
information sharing between the students there. She said, if someone
was pregnant, I didn't know it. Oh yeah, she said
that she knew that was going on, but it wasn't like,
you know, how are you feeling that? There was none
of that. But one thing Lisa really did remember is
the fasting and you know, being told to fast for
(09:06):
so called religious purposes, but you know, you're young, you're growing,
and you're made to do physical labor and chores all day. Yeah,
it's just excruciating. And wow, that's horrible. That's really horrible.
It's horrible. All of her communication, just like at Mountain Park,
was monitored, you know, this time it was all letters.
(09:27):
They weren't doing any phone calls. And so Lisa knew
that if her aunt knew what was actually going on
it Bethesda, she wouldn't want her there. 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,
and so there was no communication that she could have
done to save herself from that situation. She was totally
(09:50):
captive there. It is like prison it's prison, yeah, and
it's not regulated at this time. 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. That
just wasn't happening. There was no oversight, and so Lisa
was there for three years. She thinks it was about
(10:11):
from age thirteen to around age sixteen. Oh, those are
pivotal years. Pivotal years, 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,
and not to mention, you don't get over the loss
(10:31):
of a parent, so that's all very present. So Lisa's
aunt just came to get her about three years later.
She just sort of decided it had been enough time.
And even then, Lisa didn't tell her aunt right away
what had happened. 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
(10:53):
happened because that was not what she thought it was.
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. The living situation,
these girls were packed into bunk rooms. Leicester Rolloff was
there when Lisa was there, but when Bob and Betty
(11:13):
came into the picture, they were referred to as Mama
and Papa.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Oh my god. Yeah, it's like terrible. They were bet
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 it Bethesda. Outside of
my conversation with Lisa and from what I gather from
researching it online, there was an estimated, you know, one
(11:49):
hundred plus adoptions that took place from teen pregnancies that
were happening at But that's the home for girls, and
you know those young women, those girls, they did not
consent to the adoption in a meaningful way. So interestingly,
in Mississippi at the time, at age sixteen, you have
(12:10):
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. 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.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Okay, so like talking me through that, because I mean,
I assume that when you're giving birth you are given drugs.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, I mean, I was so like, my epideral worked
so perfectly. I had a really lucky birth experience with
like pain management. But I was very present the entire time.
I was totally conscious of my surroundings and what was
going on. So these girls don't know what they were
(12:56):
drugged with, but it certainly wasn't just No one thinks
it was just a standard pain killer that got the
best of them because they don't remember. They don't remember. Okay.
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, and a nurse accidentally
(13:16):
slipped the gender to her and was punished for it.
So these things were highly secretive, and I don't know
how consent could exist where you don't even know the
gender of your child.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Are they saying that when they were in this drug state,
that they were giving consent to adopt out their child?
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yes? Oh wow? Yeah? And you know, who's to say,
were they actually even physically signing a document if they
can't even remember doing it?
Speaker 1 (13:44):
So where does that leave these women now? Because this happened,
you know, in the seventies and eighties they were teenagers.
Have any of them, you know, reconnected with their biological
children since then?
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, you know, thanks to the excessive of genetic testing
and websites like twenty three and me or what have you,
genetic testing websites, people have connected with their children after
many years. And there's so many mixed feelings around a
reunion like that. You're you're happy to be connected, but
you've missed out on so much. And for the adopted child,
(14:21):
that was their own trauma of questioning where they came
from and if they were wanted and why their adoption
took place. 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 sixteen years old,
has no memory of consenting to the adoption and actually
(14:43):
really wanted to keep her child. 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. It was in
the seventies and eighties, not regulated. I mean even now
there's a conversation around that. But they were incentivized to
(15:03):
be doing this, and so Butthesda is eventually shut down.
And how that happened is a young woman who is
identified in court documents by the name of Candy lastem
initial h was on a monitored call with a family member,
and the staff member who was monitoring her call, so
this is in the nineteen eighties, left the room and yeah,
(15:25):
Candy sees the moment to communicate to the family member like,
come give me, it's not what you think. Yeah, good job, Candy. Yeah.
And she was actually nineteen 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.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Will, coursefully for healthy there.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, it sounds like from what I gather with Candy stories,
she initially wanted to go there, 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. 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
(16:07):
Law Center, and they filed a lawsuit against Bethesda. As
soon as that suit was filed, over seventy girls leave
the home and from there there was a lawsuit, and
the repercussions are just mind blowing to read, because it's
like the result of the suit was that, okay, Bethesda
(16:28):
Home for Girls, you're no longer allowed to paddle pregnant
girls and you're now limited to no more than quote,
eight licks to others within a five day period. It's
just like, how is this possible? But of course then
they had more eyes on them, and so then the
state's paying more attention. So Beth as a Home for
(16:51):
Girls was moved to Missouri, reopened under a new name,
and eventually closed in two thousand and four. And we
now know from our Converse station with Meg that Missouri
was home to Mountain Park Boarding Academy.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, they just moved states. They just moved states 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 yes, unlawful people who have not
committed a crime. Yeah, it was all around bad press,
like what are you doing to these young women?
Speaker 2 (17:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So then they just moved to Missouri. They just moved
to missour started back up again.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
So before we get into, you know, the murder that
happened in nineteen ninety three in Mountain Park, I wanted
to talk about the mindset so many people had leading
up to the nineties. So, like everything that you're talking
about the seventies and eighties just like makes so much
sense in this context. The fact that the end of
this lawsuit is like they limit them to how many
(18:02):
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 and One of the things
that I was reading about was just how troubled teens
really became a huge topic in the US in the
(18:24):
nineteen nineties. And this guy named John Deulio. He is
a political scientist and a criminologist, and he had written
a lot about crime. He had visited prisons, he had
visited juvenile facilities, and he is actually the person that
coined the term super predator in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
I wonder if he knew the staying power that would have.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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, hey, yeah,
I've heard it. I asked him, like, what do you
think that is describing? 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 for like
a grizzly bear or a grizzly bear. Yeah, And it's
(19:13):
actually was coined to describe teenagers juveniles.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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. Yeah,
(19:39):
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 and
how can I help myself? They need that guidance. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
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 nineties, and so super Predator
was coined in nineteen ninety five. John Deulio he had
this theory. He supposedly he looked at this data on
crime and he you know, analyzed the data and he
(20:14):
predicted that there was going to be what he called
a wave of teenage crime. 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. I mean,
(20:35):
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. And you know, a lot of stuff has
been written about this now. A lot of his language
was very racist, you know. He talked about this starting
inner cities and even wrote about like black teenagers specifically.
(21:00):
I mean, it was just so racist, and said that
like all of this crime would overtake the suburbs. There
was just so much fear mongering about like quote unquote
bad kids and kids that cannot be rehabilitated. 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, and
(21:22):
he advocated for locking bad teens up and separating them
from society. And then in nineteen ninety six, the Violent
Youth Predator Act passed. This is a federal act. It
offered one point five billion dollars in grant money to
any state that toughened up their juvenile offender laws, and
(21:43):
forty five states acted quickly on this, making their laws
so much stricter against juveniles and I think it's important
to note that that's nineteen ninety six, which is the
same year of the murder that we're about to talk about.
So suddenly, across forty five states in the US, it
becomes very easy to try a minor as an adult
(22:05):
for violent crimes. And you know, like one thing to
note about Dulia before we move on from this is
that he was wrong, Like he was very wrong. 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
(22:28):
view teenagers who are acting out or even teenagers who
are committing crimes, and has had like a pretty negative effect.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, I mean the damage was done at that point. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
So the Campaign for Fair Sentencings of Youth their website.
I just wanted to note a stat from their website.
So from nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety four, the
number of miners tried as adults nationally increased by seventy
one percent, 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 rebel effect on family
(23:00):
and you know, communities, Gulio did in twenty twelve signed
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 twenty twelve. This law passed
in nineteen ninety six, So from nineteen ninety six to
twenty twelve, you know, there's not a whole lot there
that's being passed that's preventing miners from being tried as adults.
(23:22):
So that sort of sets the background to what we're
going to talk about with this case today. 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 2 (23:40):
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 anyones. I just wanted to
mention that, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
So Joseph Stanley Burris, he was born in nineteen eighty.
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. Patrese his mother.
She was a witness at the trial, and I thought
it was interesting she described her family that she grew
(24:10):
up in. 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. 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
(24:32):
raised her children with. I think that's important to note
because that really comes into play with everything we're talking
about with troubled teens and needing help. So it's Patrice
and Keith and they have these three boys. Keith was
an engineer, and everyone says they were a very tight
knit family. They went to church together regularly. Patrese homeschooled
her son's Keith and Joe were very very close. Joe's father, Keith,
(24:58):
he was a runner, he was an athlete, he loved
to swim, and he started doing those activities with his sons.
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. 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
(25:20):
said that Joe would follow his dad around help him
with the yard work, like he really looked up to him,
and Keith was a really good dad. Joe was described
by his family and community as like a good kid.
He got you know, fine grades, He was social, he
was well liked, He didn't get in trouble, you know,
he seemed like very well adjusted. But then when he
was twelve and a half in nineteen ninety three, they
(25:42):
came home from a swim meet one day and his father, Keith,
had a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Which probably just so unexpected. He'd been living this ultra healthy, active, yeah,
lifestyle he would ever expected, but you know, young, he.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Was young and healthy, and Joe as their to witness it.
His mom called nine one one, he was rest of
the hospital, but he did die that evening, and this
was an unexpected tragedy for the whole family. Patrees talked
about just absolutely falling apart, you know, not being able
to get out of bed just being so ridden with grief.
(26:19):
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, and
she just tried to get by. 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,
(26:42):
you know, we're able to kind of continue on and
cope with it in some way, Whereas it became pretty
clear that Joe was really affected by this, And if
I'm remembering Craigtley, Patrese 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.
(27:04):
And so everyone responds to tragedy a little bit differently,
and Joe was just he did not respond to it
by sort of putting his head on and focusing on
school work. Yeah, he was devastated and he started to
internalize his feelings and kind of withdraw. Patri said that
she knew he was bothered, but he wouldn't talk to
her about it. But life keeps moving forward and they
(27:28):
continue to go to these swim meets, which are like
two hours away from where they live, 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 her son goes to
these swim meets, and they start to carpool with her.
So tragically, like a few months after this happens where
(27:51):
Joe's dad, Keith dies, Louise gets cancer and can no
longer drive them, so her husband Ken, there's a lot
of K's here, Ken starts to drive them. In September
of nineteen ninety three, Louise passes away from cancer. This
is about seven months after Keith died. So now both
Patrise and Ken have lost their spouses and our single parents.
(28:13):
And it sounds like they just really bonded over that,
and they start dating and get engaged. Before they get married,
Joe 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 like his
(28:35):
dad had passed away a little more than a year
before that, which is really not a long time, and
Joe was still really struggling with that.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
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 thirteen.
But they did get married. They got married in June
of nineteen ninety four, and then Patrise and her three
sons moved out of their home and in with Keith.
And I think this was also really hard for Joe.
(29:03):
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, he
stops eating, and people notice he's losing a lot of weight.
He is more and more withdrawn and distant. Patrice said
like he would just be in his room and then
he would come out for family dinners but not really eat,
(29:25):
not really talk, and then go back. So it's clear
that something is really going on. 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 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. Nine months after
(29:47):
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 was unable to find that. Wow,
that's just like, yeah, so difficult to imagine.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
I mean, especially like they had a son, Chris, who
was sixteen at the time. I just can't even imagine. Like,
your mom dies and then your dad gets cancer, you know,
a couple years later.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
It's devastating, and you're living with a new family, trying
to find your place there. It's just your whole world
turns upside down.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, Patria says that Joe said to him at that time,
I can't lose another father because the cancer is really serious.
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 2 (30:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
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 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?
Clearly she just had no idea what to say to
(30:57):
him or how to deal with this. And her husband
now has terminal cancer.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
He needed professional help.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, So Joe's stepdad has a surgery. Everyone's hopeful about it.
It doesn't end up going well, and it becomes clear
that this is going to be terminal. So at that point,
Patrisa 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. So Joe did speak with
(31:25):
a social worker, says two to three times. It seems
like he didn't really open up to her. At one point,
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.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
It's so sad, right, 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. Now the fact that Ken, her second husband,
is terminally you know, you're trying to stay above water,
You're trying to get your kid help, but you don't
(32:04):
know what to do. 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, 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
(32:24):
raised in. 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.
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 got married to another man,
and I think that was comforting to her. She talked
(32:46):
about how that was really her focus at the time
was to try to like work on this marriage, 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 STI then we would have
had otherwise, And then you lose it all a second time.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, So the herbs and vitamins don't help Joe. He's
fifteen at this point, he starts to run away. At
one point, he goes through his mom's purse, takes some money.
He gets on a bus to Los Angeles toward the airport.
He has some kind of loose plan to get on
the plane and leave, but he doesn't know where he
would go, so he calls his mom and is like,
(33:28):
you know, come pick me up. When I hear this
story is just so sad to me because it's like
he's not trying to do anything violent. He's just like
in desperate need of help. And he's like then calls
his mom to be like come get me.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
You know, I ran away. It's like waving this flag
like I need help from you. I need help.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
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, 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, Patrese, along
(34:12):
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 Saint 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, and I
think that she just didn't know what else to do,
(34:33):
and so she thought that this is a place that
would help him. 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, and
said that once he got to Mountain Park, you know,
Joe was just surviving at that point. You know, we've
(34:56):
heard from Meg Richt in last episode about what all
was going on at Mountain Park. 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, and someone to just allow him
(35:17):
to grieve and help him through that process. But instead
it was just more pain, yeah, exactly. But you know,
he did find there like he seemed to be adjusting.
He was kind of going through the motions. 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. He was assigned a
(35:40):
student to be underneath him that he was supposed to
be guiding Will Futrell. He also met this student named
Anthony Rutherford. Anthony was three years older than Joe. Joe
was fifteen, Anthony was eighteen, so a legal adult, but
still at Mountain Park. So this leads us to March
twenty fifth, nineteen ninety six. The day started out pretty normally.
(36:02):
They woke up, they went to school, and then they
broke for lunch. 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. The plan was
to somehow take over the school to locate firearms. I
(36:24):
don't know if they knew that there were firearms somewhere
or just assumed that's unclear. And then they were going
to break into the girl's 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,
(36:44):
and the guys were not. They could kind of room
around outside. So they were going to break into the
girl's side and like have sex with them, is what
they said.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Which like also it is. 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,
they're not being fed adequately, they're being verbally abused or
(37:12):
being physically abused, or being manipulated to abuse one another. Yes,
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,
and you're not thinking about the real world outside and
(37:36):
the real consequences. You're thinking about the consequences at Mountain Park,
where it's in a way lawlessness. You're being beat at
a place that is supposed to help you.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
There is no real rhyme or reason one hundred percent,
and you're being forced to physically abuse other students, and
when you're an orientation guide, you're abusing the student who
you're supposed to be guiding, as Meg talked about. And
I think like one of the things that goes to
show just what you're saying this mindset of really hopelessness,
(38:07):
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. 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, But he's so
(38:28):
hopeless at this point that he is like, Okay, let's
do it. Let's do it, let's take over the school.
Originally it seems like Will Futrell, 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. I don't want to participate
in this. So that afternoon, around three thirty pm, Will, Joe,
(38:50):
and Anthony all go out to the woods by Mountain
Park to collect firewood, which is one of their jobs
they'd been assigned. 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, and yeah, brutally murdered him and
(39:11):
left his body in a ditch.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
And like, if you are Will's parents, this is a
place you sent your child to be safe, to.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Be protected, I know, and Will had only been there
three months.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
It's amazing how quickly this all transpires. It's like that
morning Anthony reveals his plan to Joe. 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, and
then you do this inexcusable crime and you murder someone
(39:46):
simply for not wanting to go along with your terrible plan,
and it impacts the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, it's definitely inexcusable. 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 all. It was not mentioned,
it was not talked about nothing. So you know what
happens after they murder Will. They look around for some guns. Look,
(40:12):
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.
It's like this has clearly not been very well planned
at all. 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
(40:34):
asks them, like, what's going on? Are you okay? And
they essentially admit to him exactly what they've done. He
contacts Sam Gerhart, and together they all go and walk
down the trail and they show them Will's body and
confess to the crime. And so the staff members immediately
call law enforcement. The Wayne County Sheriff's apartment was called
(40:55):
and the Missouri State Highway Patrol and both boys are
taken into custody and questioned separately, and they both confess
the crime happened about three point thirty in the afternoon.
Joseph was taken into custody that early next morning, around
twelve thirty or one am, at police headquarters in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.
The officer's videotape his confession. He's signed a confession. He's
(41:18):
also signed a document that says that he's aware of
his rights and that he doesn't want an attorney. This
is later brought up in an appeals because he's fifteen
at the time. He was able to call his mom
and his mom told him to just do whatever sam
Gerhart tells him to do. At this point. Also, his
mom has signed overpower of attorney to Mountain Park, right,
(41:39):
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 if a miner 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 their side, And
he has no one to do that for him, so
(42:00):
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. So Anthony
Rutherford was eighteen years old at the time was a
legal adult. Yes, a legal adult, which meant if he
was convicted, he could be given the death penalty right
so he signed a plea deal basically saying that he
(42:21):
could avoid the death penalty, but he was convicted and
sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Joseph Burris took his case to trial, and he was
also convicted and sentenced to life without parole plus fifty years,
and he was not eligible for the death penalty since
he was only fifteen at the time.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
What they did to will committing a murder obviously is
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. You know, you
have these boys who were deemed by their families as
really in need of a lot of help, having behavioral challenges,
and then also just looking at the way Mountain Park
(43:01):
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 fire with 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. It was just a recipe for disaster.
(43:25):
And most of all, the school did not protect Will.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
No, they did not at all. Meg told me, and
she got this information from Joseph Burris because she visited
him in prison a few years back. 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. So I don't know
(43:51):
if that has anything to do with it or not,
but nothing was brought up in the trial. 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, feels really important to what
(44:14):
happened here.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
You're normalizing abuse, you're normalizing violence.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yeah, and none of that was brought up, you know,
none of it was talked about. 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
two thousand that was denied. After this twenty twelve Supreme
Court decision Miller versus Alabama, established that mandatory life in
(44:41):
prison without parole sentences for minors is unconstitutional under the
Eighth Amendment. Burris's attorney then filed a petition claiming that
his sentencing violated that Miller decision, but that was also denied.
But then in twenty twenty one, just a few years ago,
he had the opportunity to go before the parole b
and Meg Richter actually was in contact with him at
(45:03):
that time, and she attended his parole hearing. 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.
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
(45:26):
to Will. It's a tragedy, 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. 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. And you know, Joseph Burriss is
(45:48):
currently forty five years old. He's been in prison for
thirty years, and he actually will be released next year
at some point. 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 2 (46:01):
Thirty years is a long time, but I can imagine
for Will's family, who you know, he will be gone
more than thirty years. He will be gone for the
rest of their lives. 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 in all accounts.
And we also now know that Anthony Rutherford died in
(46:24):
prison in July twenty fifteen. It just said faul Play
was not suspected in his death. And so so much
loss in one story. And you know also the Branch
Davidians and that saga that plays out when the ATF
goes in that happened in nineteen ninety three. Wow, and
that was so as we know, highly televised. Yeah, and
(46:46):
so hearing about Anthony Rutherford 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 eighteen year old who's being kept
in a cult like environment, physical abuse, verbal abuse, all
(47:10):
sort of operating as this quote Christian organization. It's like
he wasn't a cult. 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. And Joe burrisse he was
only fifteen, Yeah, so young, so young in context.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
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. You know, when Meg brought it up in
her interview, it was just like, there's no sadder outcome
than that. And to understand the environment there and how
it impacted every person that was at Mountain Park, I
(47:54):
think is crucial. So we're going to wrap this episode
up with some recommendations. Petia, what do you have to
recommend today? Well, you know I always have something. I
actually have another BBC podcast called Stocked. I am currently
on episode eight, and it's a well told story where
(48:18):
actually one of the hosts is the victim of this stalker.
And I'm really loving how much introspection is that the
word I should probably google it that there is from
this person.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Her name is Hannah. Oh wow, I love it already,
me too about sort of her mindset when she began
associating with the person who later became her alleged stalker.
I'm really enjoying the storytelling there and how they're going
about unraveling something that so much of it happens online.
(48:55):
And when someone presents themselves to you as someone they're not,
that's by designed. How do you go about finding out
who they really are when they worked so hard to
hide it? M yeah, I'm just I'm really liking it.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Sounds really good. It's called Stocked, Stocked. I will check
it out. So I want to recommend a docu series.
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, 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
(49:29):
I'm really into it. There's two seasons. 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. They did an
episode on Peggy Actually, oh wow, Yeah, Dennis Rodman's financial
manager who stole money from him. We actually covered that
(49:49):
story years ago on The Opportunist, so it was great
to watch it.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
They did a really good.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
Job and 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. And the first season
is kind of a mix of a lot of different stories.
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
(50:17):
it's so disturbing to really like think about what was
really done to them. A lot of these stories are
you know, rich and shameless. 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.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Cool. We'll check it out and we will see you
next week. Thanks for listening. If you have a story
for us, we would love to hear it. Our email
is The Knife at exactly rightmedia dot com, or you
can follow us on Instagram at the Knife Podcast or
a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Pasha Eating.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Our producers are Tom Briefogel and Alexis Samarosi.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer
is Christina Chamberlain.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport, artwork
by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.
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