His voice gets heavy and even starts to crack when he talks about the abuse claims that have engulfed an unlicensed boarding school in his southeast Missouri county.

“I didn’t know,” Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch says, referring to former students’ yearslong allegations of physical and mental abuse at the school. “I didn’t.”

When in 2014 Finch scooped up a runaway from Lighthouse Christian Academy, the skin on his feet starting to peel away from frostbite, the teen didn’t divulge any abuse. Neither did a boy who ran away from the Wayne County boarding school three years later, the sheriff said. Same thing with the boy who ran away two years ago.

“Kids didn’t say a word,” said Finch, who has been the sheriff since 2013. “I tried to get it out of them, why they were running away. But they never said anything.”

Boys would tell him, the sheriff said, that they were forced to do jumping jacks, intense exercises and stand at the wall for hours as punishment. Or they just didn’t like the school run by ABM Ministries because staff members were mean. But nothing they shared with him, he said, led him to believe a Missouri law had been broken.

Until earlier this year.

After five boys ran away from the secluded boarding school near Piedmont over a three-week period in January, one boy told him something “I could sink my teeth into,” Finch said. And once the sheriff spoke to a former student from more than 15 years ago, “all the dominos started to fall,” he said.

Since March, he’s traveled to 10 states, interviewed about 25 former students and spoken to many others on the phone. In the coming days, he plans to speak with dozens more. Now in their 20s and 30s, many of these men and women are telling the sheriff what they’ve told The Star. They said staff members put them in headlocks and at times hit them, that food and water were withheld and they were made to exercise for hours and work in extreme temperatures.

Others described what they call “emotional torture” at the school owned by Larry and Carmen Musgrave.

“I’m going to investigate this thoroughly,” Finch told The Star in a series of interviews over the past two months. “Every victim will be interviewed. Every victim will have their say, they will be able to tell their story.

“Until the end, I am here. And if there’s charges there, those charges will be filed.”

In early March, Larry and Carmen Musgrave were charged with kidnapping and another staffer faces one count of physical abuse of a student. The sheriff said he expects additional charges.

The couple pleaded not guilty and their attorney did not respond to multiple calls for comment.

Larry Musgrave denied that students were mistreated or abused at the school, Finch said.

“Whenever we interviewed him, he laughed about it,” Finch said. “And he said, ‘That is not going on. That never happened.’”

Soon after the Musgraves were arrested, Lighthouse closed. The husband and wife were released on their own recognizance and required to wear GPS monitoring devices.

“We’re very happy and proud that (the sheriff) is standing up and saying this is wrong,” said Rebecca Randles, a Kansas City attorney who has handled many boarding school abuse cases. “We’ve never had that response from any law enforcement before.”

Indeed, when it comes to boarding schools, many say Missouri hasn’t seen a sheriff like Finch. And they hope his actions will spur real, lasting change in a state that had become a haven for unlicensed boarding schools during the past few decades.

Robert Knodell, director of the Missouri Department of Social Services, said his agency embraces the partnership with Wayne County authorities.

“It’s not always been the case everywhere we’ve had these cases,” Knodell said. “Sometimes local law enforcement is cooperative, and sometimes they’re not. … The ability to address ongoing issues is much greater when there’s full cooperation across the spectrum.”

The Star began investigating Missouri’s unlicensed boarding schools and abuse allegations at Circle of Hope Girls Ranch and Agape Boarding School — located in southwest Missouri’s Cedar County and now closed — in late summer of 2020. Former students at those schools said they had told local authorities for years about the abuse, but nothing ever happened.

Those who attended Lighthouse Christian Academy, most of whom were there before Finch became sheriff, said they hoped to draw attention to the school years ago by posting testimonials on social media. They urged families online to not send their kids there, but the pleas never gained much traction.

Until Finch started investigating.

“We’ve never had anyone pull so hard for us,” said Michael McCarthy, who attended Lighthouse Christian Academy from August 2010 to August 2012. “It feels surreal because we had tried. It’s almost like why now? … It’s almost hard to believe.”

Child advocates have also been surprised by the actions in Wayne County.

“It’s a complete 180 from what we experienced when the schools in Cedar County were revealed,” said Jessica Seitz, executive director of the Missouri Network Against Child Abuse, formerly known as Missouri KidsFirst. “The response of seeking out justice and believing kids is exactly what we would hope for.

“Law enforcement is one of the parties responsible for protecting kids from abuse.”

Concerns of conflict had surrounded the investigation at Agape Boarding School in Cedar County because the son-in-law of the late founder, James Clemensen, was a deputy with the sheriff’s department. That deputy, a former Agape student, had also worked at the school for years and on multiple occasions was sent there to respond to a call, The Star found.

When asked what motivates him in Wayne County, Finch, 62, pauses and speaks slowly.

“Because they’re victims,” the sheriff says, his voice breaking before he apologizes for getting emotional. “Because they were mistreated and because it happened in my county.

“I feel like my department let these kids down, although it wasn’t me. … They deserve better than what they got in the past. They deserve to have their story heard. And it’s just like any victim — they deserve their day in court.

“These kids, dammit, they deserve justice.”

‘Liable to freeze to death’

Finch’s cellphone rang late one frigid night in early February 2014. A call had just come in from ABM Ministries, a dispatcher told him.

A teen boy at the boarding school had run away and been gone 3 ½ hours.

The grandfather of five at the time, who had been sheriff for about a year, called in deputies and alerted the fire department. Search dogs were brought in. The frigid temperatures outside filled him and others with a rising sense of urgency.

“I got a kid out here, that’s run off, out in the middle of the woods and it’s subzero weather,” Finch said of what was going through his mind that night. “He didn’t have a coat. He didn’t have anything. We got to find this boy because he’s liable to freeze to death.”

The sheriff also alerted Union Pacific Railroad, telling officials they had a missing child and “to be on the lookout.” Finch worried the boy could be on the tracks between Piedmont and Williamsville and wanted to make sure the train wasn’t “going to come flying through.”

As the railroad crew moved slowly through the the area and looked for the boy, so did Finch and all those he called to help with the search.

“I had search teams in the woods all over,” the sheriff said. “We were all over. Running the roads, running through the woods, looking in the woods.”

A couple of hours into the search, Union Pacific let the sheriff know that a crew had found the boy and was transporting him to a nearby crossing. Finch was waiting with an ambulance.

The sheriff lifted the teen, who was wearing pajamas and a fleece jacket, off the train. He didn’t have any socks on and had lost his flip flops they wore at the school. He had used his jacket to wave down the train, the sheriff said.

“His feet were, in all reality, black,” Finch said. “And the skin had peeled off of them from frostbite.”

When the sheriff first encountered the young teen, he asked why he ran away. He just shook his head, the sheriff said.

“I’m assuming he was just so cold and disoriented that he didn’t talk,” Finch said.

He would try again later at the landing zone with a helicopter waiting, and as first responders tended to the teen’s injuries.

“I was trying to get him to say, ‘Why did you run away?’” Finch said. “‘Just don’t like it. Just don’t like it.’ That’s all he would say. ‘Just don’t like it.’”

The teen was airlifted to St. Louis Children’s Hospital where he was treated for severe frostbite, and according to a news article at the time, his family was told he would face a slow recovery. That article, in the Wayne County Journal Banner on Feb. 13, 2014, quoted the mother as saying she believed her son was mistreated at the school.

“She told the newspaper that her son said the physical and mental abuse was unbearable and that he felt running away was his only alternative,” the article stated.

The teen didn’t speak to the sheriff again. But his mother told a reporter that he had given a full report to the Missouri Department of Social Services.

The sheriff’s office also reported the incident to DSS, Finch said.

In the years since, other students at ABM Ministries have run. In 2017, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department was called out again. Then again two years ago.

That’s when Finch started to look deeper and have unanswered questions.

“Something is going on here,” he said he thought about two years ago. “Something isn’t right. These kids, there is no reason for these kids to be running away. … But I had nothing to go on. I literally had nothing to go on.”

Until, he said, late January of this year.

Former students tell their stories

After Julianna Davis, of Alabama, heard about the boys who had run away from ABM Ministries earlier this year, she called the Missouri Highway Patrol.

For years, she and other former students had tried to let the public know about what they say they experienced at the school. Now, she thought, maybe someone in authority would listen.

At the southeast Missouri school, Davis said that she had been told not to trust law enforcement, that authorities wouldn’t believe her and other students because they were just troubled kids.

“We’ve tried this for 15 years plus,” she said. “I already kind of had the impression that nobody was gonna listen to us.”

But the patrol sergeant she spoke to did. And then he referred her to Finch.

Something Davis told the sheriff matched what a current student had told him. Because he doesn’t want to jeopardize the case, Finch won’t say what that is. But it did cause the dominos to fall and prompt the investigation that continues today.

“I knew that something had happened there,” he said. “I knew something illegal had happened to a child who was defenseless, who had been sent to this home for rehabilitation, so to speak, or whatever you want to call it. She was sent there by the parents to be helped.”

Davis also told Finch that Carmen Musgrave locked her in a room on her 18th birthday and she was kept at the school for months after. It was Davis’ experience that led to the kidnapping charges against the Musgraves.

“I’ve just been continuously impressed at how hard he’s trying to help,” Davis said of Finch. “But at the same time, surprised in the sense that like, we’ve tried this before, you know, and it just never got anywhere.”

After talking with Davis, the sheriff knew that more former students would reach out. He told dispatchers to expect a few. That grew to 10 or 15. Then 25 to 30.

“I got my 81st call this morning,” Finch said in early May. By the end of that month, he received another six or seven calls.

In-person interviews have lasted anywhere from minutes to hours, he said. A few of the former students attended the school in recent years, but the majority he’s talked with have been gone from ABM for 15 or so years.

“Now I know, looking back at the runaways that we had in the past, and doing this investigation, I now know why they didn’t say anything,” Finch said. “Because they were scared.

“It was instilled in them and drilled in their heads that unfortunately, I didn’t care about them, that they (boarding school leaders) have law enforcement in their back pocket. Well, that pocket has a big hole, and I slipped out of that pocket.”

The sheriff drove to Oklahoma in March to speak with Aralysa Baker, who went to ABM in 2005 when she was 13 and stayed for two years.

For seven hours, over two days, Baker told the sheriff what she was unable to tell an investigator who went to the school during her last year. Her great-grandparents had called Wayne County and asked authorities to do a welfare check. She told the officer she was OK because she feared what would happen if she said more.

Baker told Finch how her life had been impacted because of the school. The nightmares. The flashbacks. And the anxiety over food.

For all of her adult life, she’s feared that there wouldn’t be enough to eat. First, just for herself. And now that she’s a wife and mom, for her family.

While at ABM, she said the owners and staff used food as a punishment. When in trouble, she and other former students said staff would withhold food and sometimes they would go to bed hungry. Several students said they would have to sneak food or water at times.

Baker told the sheriff and The Star that she now hoards food. There are chips and cookies stashed behind her pots and pans. Stacks of canned goods, boxes of pasta, and macaroni and cheese in the garage. The trunk of an old Honda that doesn’t run is full of snacks.

“I always want something stashed away, squirreled away,” she said. “I need to be able to get to it quickly.”

Baker and Davis want people, especially lawmakers, to realize that Missouri must do more to keep abuse, both physical and mental, out of boarding schools in their state.

“I hope they take it seriously and change the laws to make it harder for people to abuse children and not have any consequences whatsoever,” Davis said. “And then, of course, I hope that there’s some sort of justice or closure for all of us. I have been hurt for so long. But I’ll be happy as long as it doesn’t happen again.”

‘They’re just being bull-headed’

Hours before Finch served the arrest warrants on the Musgraves, someone issued him a warning about the past.

Don’t forget about Heartland Christian Academy, he was told, a reference to a decades-old case that to this day haunts those who have tried to place regulations on religious-based boarding schools in Missouri.

Operated by the late millionaire Charles Sharpe, a prominent Republican who made his fortune after founding Kansas City-based Ozark National Life Insurance Co., the Christian school for troubled youth drew national attention in 2001. A call to the state hotline reported students were being forced to stand in ankle-to chest-deep cow manure as a punishment.

Several months later, after receiving two more allegations of abuse, authorities raided the northeast Missouri school and removed 115 children, prompting a series of lawsuits and challenges that took years to wind through the courts.

In the end, felony child abuse charges against five employees were either dropped or the staffers were acquitted. Sharpe and his school also were cleared of any wrongdoing and the state settled with Heartland, agreeing to pay extensive attorney fees and court costs.

Ever since, the Heartland case has cast a shadow over attempts to address concerns inside boarding schools — especially proposals that would require them to be licensed. A law passed in 1982 allows religious-based schools to claim an exemption from Missouri’s licensing requirement.

Randles, the Kansas City attorney who has represented the families of abused children, said the arguments against licensing don’t hold water.

“They’re just being bull-headed over this particular issue,” she said. “We’re not asking them to change their religious affiliation or to change the manner in which they teach their religion. As a matter of fact, I’m a graduate of Southwest Baptist University, and Southwest Baptist University is accredited, it’s licensed, it goes through all of the processes that are required.

“And it doesn’t change the way that Southwest Baptist University delivers its teaching. It’s still a faith-based Christian education university. It can be done.”

In response to abuse allegations at Cedar County schools, lawmakers passed legislation in 2021 to implement some oversight over religious boarding schools but shied away from requiring them to be licensed.

Boarding schools that are abusing children, Randles said, are not Christian institutions.

“That has nothing to do with Christianity,” she said. “And so there’s no reason that the state can’t act on these individuals who are acting well outside the law. Because they’re claiming and cloaking themselves under religious authority. There’s no religious authority that says you can beat children and make them eat their own vomit. There is nothing in the Bible that says anything of the sort.”

Carmen and Larry Musgrave moved their boarding school from the Tennessee and Kentucky area to Patterson in southeast Missouri in 2004, corporation records show. One former student said that the Musgraves loaded students into a blue 15-passenger van and drove them to the Show-Me State.

The Patterson site had previously been home to another controversial boarding school — Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy.

That school’s owners, Bob and Betty Wills, were running the Bethesda Home for Girls in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when a former student sued Bethesda in federal court in 1982. Child welfare officials conducted an investigation, and the Willses closed the school in 1987 after a judge ordered authorities to remove students.

They headed to southeast Missouri and opened Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy. The school gained notoriety in 1996 when two students murdered another student because they feared he would reveal their plot to take over the school and escape.

In 2003, the school was sued in federal court by five former students and two sets of parents. They accused school officials of abusing and falsely imprisoning students. The school closed in 2004, and the Musgraves then opened Lighthouse Christian Academy on that property. Lighthouse later moved to its current location near Piedmont, and former students say they were forced to do much of the construction work.

Ginger Koller Joyner, the Wayne County prosecutor who formerly served as the Guardian Ad Litem for the 42nd Judicial Circuit, said seeing what’s happened at Lighthouse has convinced her that a licensing law is necessary to keep children safe in these schools.

“I think both my background in the juvenile system and this experience has strengthened my opinion that there really needs to be a legislative push to regulate these types of places to ensure that there’s uniformity and consistency of care across our state,” Joyner said. “I don’t think we want this anywhere in our state.”

The key, she said, will be for legislators to get involved.

“We can have every sheriff on board, we can have every prosecutor on board, but the bottom line is until we change the legislation about how these facilities are licensed, we’re not going to see the depth of change that’s needed to protect the vulnerable people,” she said.

DSS’ Knodell said he anticipates that Missouri lawmakers will “continue to consider whether they want to go down that road and take that approach.”

“Many other states have,” he said. “I think it’s time to take a close look at it. Absolutely.”

‘Trying to get them justice’

Before the runaways and subsequent investigation, Finch said he didn’t know much about other boarding schools in Missouri. He didn’t follow what happened across the state with Circle of Hope and Agape.

In his decade as sheriff, Finch’s department has called the state’s child abuse and neglect hotline multiple times, he said. And in January, after the runaways, several residents who live near ABM also reported the school. At least two of them said they were told they didn’t provide enough information to warrant an investigation.

After The Star reported that, Knodell said in March that DSS was looking into whether hotline calls about the school were properly handled over the years.

When asked the status of that internal inquiry and what, if anything, came of it, DSS said it was ongoing.

Finch hopes to eventually go to Jefferson City and talk with legislators and share his opinion that “every one of these schools should be licensed.” But first, he said he needs to remain focused on the case in his county.

The sheriff often meets with Joyner, the county prosecutor, to make sure the two are on the same page. He keeps her updated after new interviews with former students.

Joyner praised Finch for his dedication in making sure former students have the opportunity to report what they say happened to them. And she shares that motivation.

“Our law enforcement is committed, I am committed,” said Joyner, who first filled in as the county prosecutor in 2021 and took office in early 2023. “I realized that some of these students aren’t necessarily residents of our county, but they were in our county and we’re dedicated to protecting them and trying to get them justice.”

Many of the students who have come forward alleging physical and emotional abuse attended the school years ago, and their cases may no longer be inside Missouri’s statute of limitations.

“The prosecution piece is going to be, in some cases, difficult,” Joyner said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to try, but you know, I have to abide by the ethics in terms of what I can prosecute. And if I can prosecute it, and believe that I can prove it, then I absolutely will.”

Early last month, Finch was preparing for another week of travel, driving to several states in his Ford F-150 to interview more former students of ABM.

“I’m headed for Colorado Springs, Vail, Colorado,” he told The Star. “And then I’m going to shoot up into Montana, Wyoming (and) come back across into Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and there’s one other one that I’m gonna hit.”

All while he’s in the middle of running for reelection.

On that trip early last month, Finch stopped in a Chicago suburb and interviewed Inesa Kolberg, who attended ABM from late 2005 to June 2007.

“He gave one of the best hugs,” she said. “His hug was so tight, and it was just full of compassion. I didn’t cry during the interview, but (at the end) it brought me to tears because it felt so comforting.

“He has a heart of gold. He is doing God’s work. He is a true example of what a Christian is.”

Finch said what fuels him on the long days and long weeks is knowing that for so long students at ABM were told they couldn’t trust law enforcement, that he and his department were on the school’s side.

“I’m going to tell you something — that’s not me,” the sheriff said. “I don’t give a damn who you are or what your last name is. If you break the law, you break the law and I’m going to come after you.

“Now, in the end, it’s up to the jury and the system. But I am going to do my job. And I am going to bring these people to justice for these kids.”