Unmarked Graves

Hey, do you love scary movies? Do you like scary stories? Well, we've got a really scary story for you today If you like the saw movies, but you like them because they're not real brace yourself Because this one is 100% real and true stick around for the end of the episode. We're gonna talk about it They called Disney World in Orlando, Florida the happiest place on earth, but drive just 325 miles or so north of the Magic Kingdom And you'll find yourself in a place where dreams never came true Unless those dreams were nightmares They called it a school, but the grounds were littered with unmarked graves The boys that made it out alive tell of beatings assault torture and murder and Those boys they were the lucky ones And they got a small game of life Stuff Weird stuff What was it that woke Willie Bell up that fateful night It was 330 in the morning the quietest deepest part of night in building one at the Florida Reform school for boys a sudden sharp noise the first hint of smoke We'll never know Willie Bell got out of bed alarmed enough by whatever had broken his sleep to make his way through the darkness to the hallway What he saw must have nearly stopped his heart the entire stairway was in flames Bell immediately realized the magnitude of danger and he knew something else The fire escape doors were locked from the outside Locked with heavy brass Yale padlocks He knew that and he also knew where the keys to those padlocks were Because Willie Bell wasn't an inmate. He was the assistant superintendent at the Florida Reform school for boys With the stairway ablaze Bell had no option but to climb to the top of the tower Attached to building one and then jumped to the roof below Using a fire escape Bell scrambled down the three stories to the ground then raced to re-enter the building and Retrieve the keys to unlock the fire escape doors But now the office was burning Flames licking the ceiling the freshly painted pine interior merrily sizzling and popping Impossible to enter Willie Bell took off running again joined now by one of the school's guards a mr.

Allen Somehow Bell spotted an axe and all of the chaos and with Alan climbed the fire escape to the second story landing Slamming the heavy axe Bell Succeeded in breaking the metal bars of the graded window to the screams of the boys trapped in the burning building Three frantic faces hollered at Bell from the other side of the window hurry RB Evans a carpenter employed by the school his son CM Evans a guard and an inmate boy, his name is lost the time a Spell wrestled with the metal window frame trying in vain to tug it loose Inside building one the floor suddenly collapsed Somehow by chance or by miracle CM Evans made it out of the inferno, but then he raced back into the flames in search of his father Tragically neither man survived When it was all over the weak light of a November dawn revealed the charred smoldering Hulk of building one Reporters described it looking like the ruins of a castle The Pensacola News-Journal reported the bodies of the victims of that awful Holocaust were removed from the bed of coals and ashes inside the walls of the burned building and Placed under a tree at the rear of the building that had been killed by the fire of most of the bodies Nothing remained but charred lumps of flesh and bone Representing the bodies and organs that have been roasted to an unrecognizable Blackened mass to say the press lacked sensitivity back then is clearly an understatement Nearly a hundred boys had managed to escape death by clambering through a skylight onto the building's roof Many were injured in the three-story jump to the ground below injured but alive Ten were dead the guard CM Evans his father RB Evans and eight boys all under the age of 17 a Funeral was a long time in coming for the ten who lost their lives that night November 18th 1914 by the time the funeral service took place the Florida Reform School for boys had a new name the Dozier school and the funeral was in the year 2012 Rhonda Dykes watched patiently as her great-great-grandfather Bennett Evans was lured into his grave at Boothill Cemetery on the Dozier school for boys campus Bennett was one of those who lost their lives during a fire in 1914 he had been buried for 99 years before being exhumed during an investigation in the school's burial ground in 2012 when Rhonda realized her relationship to Bennett. She wanted to see him laid to rest back at the Dozier school I found a picture of my great-grandfather who which was his his son and I zoomed in on the computer and looked him straight in the eyes and I said Are you sure this is really what you want me to be doing and a piece came over me?

Yes, this is where it needs to be. That's Rhonda Dykes interviewed by W TV. Why news in January 2019? Why the 98 year wait for this solemn ceremony? What did Dykes mean when she said? Exhumed and then reburied And who exactly was her great-great-grandfather His name was R.B. Evans the carpenter whose son was the guard who ran straight into the inferno in a doomed attempt to rescue his dad Evans along with the others killed that awful night in 1914 had been in their graves for nearly 100 years when allegations of abuse at the school led to an investigation 51 bodies buried on campus grounds were exhumed and examined and that process took more than four years Rhonda Dykes made the decision that Evans should be reburied and laid to his final rest at the Dozier school and So as she watched on that January day R.B. Evans was once again lowered into his grave this time. Hopefully for good The Florida Reform School for boys may have gotten a new name But no such simple trick exists to erase its legacy of violence cruelty torture and death boys died their terrible brutal deaths Dying in that fire was a mercy compared to what some of those children endured Their broken bodies were buried on school property and what we now know were mostly unmarked hastily dug graves The school had acknowledged only 31 deaths including those lost in the fire each commemorated with a marker in the school's Boothill Cemetery and Then excavators hired in 2019 to clear trees downed by Hurricane Michael and prep polluted ground for cleanup They found more graves and then more all unmarked for a total of 82 burials at the school But former student Terry Burns told a Florida TV news reporter that if the entire campus were to be scanned I Guarantee, they will find another 200 to 300 dead boys buried on them grounds Here's the thing about digging into the box of horrors that is the history of the Dozier school Just when you think you've made it past the worst the school serves up another steaming helping of sadism It opened its doors on January 1st 1900 and didn't close them until June 30th 2011 but you weren't expecting that 2011 when you hear a fun little bit of symmetry the number one movie in 2011 was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows You know the story of an orphan boy sent away to a mysterious school where he found himself battling the forces of darkness for his very survival That's basically the plot line for the Dozier school minus the magic wands and the butterbeer So what sort of crimes might land a boy in a reform school like Dozier?

The kinds of crimes the founders of reform schools like this one had in mind were theft and murder the school was supposed to be a place where children convicted of criminal behavior might be educated and Rehabilitated and returned to society as productive citizens It just didn't play out quite that way at the Florida reform slash Dozier school the laws were very swiftly amended to include crimes like incorrigibility and truancy one of the boys who died in the 1914 fire Waldo drew Was only eight years old the child had stolen a dozen eggs His brother Robert also an inmate was lucky to escape unharmed Another victim Joe Weatherby 14 years old had been sent to the school strictly to keep him from falling in with a bad crowd Clifford Jeffords Guilty of skipping school while never missing a day on his newspaper route He was incarcerated for skipping school and then burned alive These are the names we know these are the boys who can be identified The boys whose graves were at least marked whose deaths were acknowledged. These are the boys who could be mourned too many others simply vanished victims not only of abuse and murder by school staff But have been different record-keeping their bodies dumped in the woods and brushy areas on the school's 1,400 acre campus to this day There are still human remains found on that property that have yet to be identified At its founding the school was segregated and remained segregated until 1968 Building one housed the white boys Building two housed the black boys though. They called them colored boys and worse Back, then the school didn't bother with niceties like calling any of the boys students They were called inmates and they were treated as such The school had only been in operation for three years when the first of many shocking disciplinary measures came to light it was 1903 and Investigators found children in leg irons the report they submitted argued that this was not a school at all But a harsh prison for children. In fact, the stories coming out of the school were so hair-raising that state Investigators visited the place six different times in its first 13 years of operation Why weren't these findings enough to spark outrage and a reform of the reform school?

Well, you know what they say times were different News didn't travel as fast as it does today There wasn't social media to amplify a story to make it go viral plus people just weren't as focused on child welfare back then and There was simply more trust in authority in those days More trust in institutions if the people in charge said everything was cool, then everything was cool Except nothing was cool at the dozer school by 1920 just two decades in Multiple investigations also found evidence of boys being hired out as labor Alongside adult convicts. Are you picturing a chain gang that sort of thing?

Yep, except now Make it worse. They called it convict leasing The state would basically lease convicted criminals to private citizens to work them However, they saw fit which sounds a lot like slavery Because it was I'm gonna tell you which states made use of convict leasing after the Civil War See if you can spot a pattern Alabama Louisiana, Georgia Florida, South Carolina Tennessee Mississippi and Texas Interesting. It's almost like those states found a loophole in the 13th Amendment or something Almost like a little work around the whole abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude Because while the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery it helped those states put their inmates to work for the private sector with just six carefully chosen words Except as punishment for a crime Boom see how the law works. It just doesn't always work for you or the way you think it should work at all Anyway as it happens Florida boasted a reputation for having a more severe convict labor program as compared to other states and The Sunshine State was one of the last to outlaw the practice in 1923 of course by that point too many child inmates at the Dozier School had put in their unpaid time in the fields Factories on the railway lines and the roads and when those boys returned to campus at the end of the day spent Toiling in the Florida heat and humidity under that relentless baking Sun It wasn't to a cool shower a hearty meal a clean bed The school was only 20 years old at this point and there was already ample evidence of boys being beaten with hands Fists a thick leather strap attached to a long wooden pole But even worse was soon to come It became known as the White House built in 1929 it was a concrete block detention facility segregated of course One cell for white inmates one cell for black inmates its entire purpose was to restrain and punish violent or Incorrigible boys it was the site of the most brutal physical Punishments the place where the real beatings went down. I Could list all the things we now know happened in that building But I think maybe we should hear it from one of the boys Roger Dean Kiser the author of the White House boys an American tragedy shared his own harrowing story Kiser was sent to the school after he ran away from an orphanage in Jacksonville He said he'd been sent to the school for the crime of having no parents to care for him. I Waited for the two men who would take me to the White House I knew the routine well as I had heard about it from any other boys who were taken there Other than the time I learned that I had cancer and would die within six months I have never known more fear than when I was told I was going to be taken to this place My mind was just going crazy with fear I mean my thoughts seemed to be swimming in a circle like a cat that had been thrown into a cold river I Was so scared I could not think straight Two men picked me up and carried me into a small room which had nothing in it except a bunk bed and a pillow They put me down on the floor and ordered me to lie in the bed facing the wall Crying I pulled myself up onto the edge of the bed wiped the blood from my nose onto my shirt sleeve When I looked up at the men's faces, they were plain

Cold and hard they had no expression whatsoever. I Knew what was going to happen. I knew it was going to be very bad I've been told what to expect by some of the boys who were taken into the White House. I Never heard from some of them again. I Also heard that this giant strap was made of two pieces of leather the piece of sheet metal sewn in between the halves Again, everything was dead silent. I Remember tightening my buttocks as much as I could then I waited and waited and waited I tried to jump off the bed, but I was not backward and the leather strap hit me on the side of the face. I Jumped to the end of the bunk and began trying to climb up the cement wall, but there was nothing to climb Mr. Hatton kept beating me with a leather strap about the chest back and legs And then grabbed me pulled me down and held me to the floor I was yelling God saved me begging for someone anyone to help There was blood all over everything I was everywhere, please forgive me, please forgive me I repeated at the top of my voice, please forgive me dear God, please help me God didn't hear me that day Maybe he was smart enough not to ever enter the White House even to save a child There were no age limits for punishment at the White House Boys as young as six right up to age 18 were brutalized Any infraction at all could land you in that cement block building?

Maybe you didn't answer a staff members question quickly enough or how to look on your face that irritated a guard Maybe you were witness spitting on the ground or slouching in your seat Those were the boys who lived to tell what happened in January 2023 78 year old Jean Luker a former inmate and one of the White House boys a group of men who'd been imprisoned at the school in the 1950s and 60s told the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper that they have the names of 185 boys who entered the school and never left 185 boys who disappeared into the brick buildings at the Dozier school Then what?

No record of their release no record of their lives post-incarceration No record of their deaths. No markers showing their names in the Boothill Cemetery Are these the boys who were tossed haphazardly? into disorganized unmarked unhallowed graves scattered across the schools 1,400 acres of land When anthropologists at the University of South Florida studied the human remains found in 55 unmarked graves at the school They uncovered not just evidence of blunt force trauma, but of gunshots Not a surprise to former inmate Jerry Cooper another of the White House boys Cooper told of Psychological torment as well as physical abuse Cooper described rape older boys assaulting younger boys Staff assaulting inmates with impunity He said that boys as young as 12 would be taken from the dormitory and then never seen again Cooper's own experiences in the White House left him scarred with lifelong trauma And he was only incarcerated at the school for two years in April 2019 Cooper then 74 years old said I got the worst beating I ever got at that school Over a hundred lashes at two o'clock in the morning Searing the cloth of my nightgown and my underwear into my skin. I Was sure I wasn't going to survive There were a lot of us who didn't I told them for years. There's a lot more boys dead than the 55 They located we've always known this Of course punishment wasn't limited to the White House. Gene Luker 12 years old when he entered the Dozer school Described the casual violence that stalked the inmates days I had one instructor hit me so hard in the face with his hand pow. I never forgot that, you know Luker said that the psychological terror kept all the boys in a state of near constant fear You didn't know when they were going to come in and snatch you out of class and take you down and beat you Looker said that at the time he was at the school there were between 600 and 700 inmates Looker said you'd hear things awful things about boys being raped the suffering these children endured the anguish they endured it's just about unimaginable and Like everything else at the school. The torture was also segregated according to forensic Anthropologist, dr. Aaron Kimmerly who led the team from the University of South, Florida quote there's a Disproportionate number of kids who were sent there who were black and that number is also disproportionate in terms of those who died 75% of the boys who died were black in late summer 2013 five now elderly black survivors of the Dozer school gathered on the grounds of the now closed school John Bonner described building one the white dormitory as being roomy with Industrial and woodshops where a boy could learn a trade and earn a certificate building to the black dormitory According to Richard Huntley just 11 years old when he landed at Dozer. That was the slave side fieldwork Picking and planting for the state's profit all five men recalled the stark fear of life in the locked dormitory Where the boys were captive prey for fellow inmates and staff alike And of course all had their own dark memories of being sent to the White House Johnny Gaddy also 11 at the time of his incarceration Told of being forced to lie on a bed while beaten with a belt until his entire body was bloody from the waist down Gaddy also reported seeing a boy's severed hand in the garbage that he was made to haul off for burial Gaddy was warned to be silent about what he'd seen unless he wanted to meet the same fate himself

If you're wondering why Gaddy didn't try to flee why boys didn't run away from the school They did at least they tried Johnny Gaddy said the guards would send dogs to run those boys down and many of those failed runaways were taken for punishment never seen again an Investigation by the Department of Justice found three times as many black inmates died as white inmates and According to the Miami Herald were also three times more likely to be dumped and unmarked graves The DOJ also found that a fair number of the black boys sent to Dozer were there for non-criminal infractions stuff like skipping school or running away from home and Reflecting the racism of the segregated South black inmates were far less likely to be named in the historical record It's hard to hear that and not think of how utterly dehumanized these boys were how little their lives were valued how Disposable they had seemed and had been to the men in charge And how many of their bones have yet to be on earth?

How many will never be recovered between 1911 and 1973 it's believed that a minimum a minimum of 96 children lost their lives at the Dozer school the 1914 fire accounts for eight of those deaths Another handful of boys died from influenza poor health The others if not outright murdered died of injuries sustained as a result of brutal corporal punishment and Most of those burials weren't documented Meaning those boys died as though they had never lived It's believed that 96 is a low estimate in terms of body count because changes to privacy laws after 1960 have made the task far more difficult for researchers and Time and nature have conspired to hide evidence Plant life goes wild in the Florida climate and that overgrowth has made searching for signs of burials Ever more complicated with each passing season One question you might be asking is where were the families of those boys?

How was this allowed to happen? It's true that some of the inmates were orphans, but even they were known by someone on the outside Listen, many of the families tried for years to learn the whereabouts the fate of their sons and brothers Owen Smith was sent to Dozer in 1940 he'd run away from home then stole a car and wrecked it His sister Ovelle said that was the last the family ever saw of Owen. They wrote letters to the school They were eventually told that Owen had escaped when the boy was captured by law enforcement His father immediately went to retrieve Owen Only to be told that he'd already been sent straight back to the Dozer school Ovelle Smith Krell her married name Said the family heard from a former inmate that Owen had been taken to the White House and then carried out to the infirmary The boy's mother wrote letter after letter after letter to the school pleading for information about her son Eventually the school replied Condolences, so sorry for your loss Owen's badly decomposed body had been found underneath the house The boy died of pneumonia. The letter said he must have been trying to keep warm under that house Now the occupants of the home denied ever hearing or smelling anything But the Smith family could not prove any wrongdoing on the part of the school by 2012 Ovelle's hopes had narrowed down to a prayer that she might one day Be able to bury her brother's long dead body in the family plot with their parents Owen Smith was robbed of his humanity in life then robbed of any justice in death Just one more boy one more body moldering in the ground at the Dozer school This is the part where we talk about arrests and indictments and trials and consequences for the horrors that happened for more than 100 years on those 1,400 acres in Marianna, Florida Surely some of the perpetrators were held accountable, right?

Even if many were already dead something was done, right? This was evil on an institutional scale. You don't just get away with that, right? right Wrong none of that happened Don't you know the physical evidence of violent assault and rape has a way of rapidly degrading when a dead body is tossed into a crudely dug hole in the ground Especially when the soil in that grave tends to be acidic as it is in Marianna, Florida Body breaks down about three times more quickly in acidic versus alkaline soil Then there's the average temperature in the area 68 degrees Fahrenheit not conducive at all to preserving soft tissue Guess that's why an investigation into the claims of abuse at the Dozer school by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement 2010 found insufficient evidence to prosecute any former employee for any criminal behavior I'm not sure how the state got around the problem of so many unmarked graves of so many unaccounted for boys But they did they found a way School was shut down in 2011 a victim not of its own bloody and immoral history But budget cuts In 2021 then 75 year old Cecil Gardner sat in the rotunda of the Florida State House and sobbed Recounting the repeated whippings and rapes. He'd endured as a young inmate at the Dozer school Gardner one of the White House boys have been on the receiving end of the state legislature's 2017 formal apology for the abuses the former inmates had suffered But the survivors they want it more than words They didn't feel an apology was even close to adequate compensation for their broken bodies and broken spirits and lifelong trauma 500 survivors demanding justice and Reparations finally led to the filing of Senate bill 482 in October 2021 That bill died in February 2023 the victims of reform school abuse House bill 629 was filed in Florida and that one died too in committee Even with former inmates giving sworn testimony It just didn't matter Just like it didn't matter in 1958 when a psychologist employed by the school Testified to the freaking United States Senate Judiciary Committee To having witnessed at least one school administrator beating the boys with severe blows using a 10-inch long leather strap and That the beatings constitute a brutality his professional opinion Just like it didn't matter in 1962 when a former Dozer school employee told law enforcement that Multiple school employees had to be removed from their posts because of a pattern of sexual advances Being made toward the boys in their care Just like it didn't matter how many graves and burial shafts were found by ground penetrating radar on the campus of the shuttered reform school The truth never mattered at the Dozer school Just like human life never mattered at the Dozer school in January 2023 Six of the White House boys gathered on the grounds as officials unveiled a memorial in recognition of the horrific Physical and sexual abuse they'd been made to endure at the hands of the state nearly half a century ago The memorial features a courtyard with life-size statues of adolescent boys all standing in line Facing a blood-stained bed on the bed is a leather strap Off to the side is a big industrial fan

That's there because the building had once upon a time been a milking stall That more thought was given to the comfort of a dairy cow Then to the safety of a child sobering Leading away from the bed are three more statues two boys helping an injured third boy to walk and Next to that courtyard is a one-story concrete building painted white The sculptor is Orlando artists Frank Castelluccio He's deflected praise for the memorial even when it comes from the White House boys themselves Castelluccio said I wasn't trying to make it look pretty. I was trying to make it look realistic we're trying to tell a story here a Story no boys should have ever lived a story. None of us should be able to live with Next time on true weird stuff You have to be a special kind of something to attack another person With an axe and yet it happens all the time one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in the world Happened with the swing of an axe on the next true weird stuff This was a tough episode to do was it not really is I mean, I mean We can talk about Halloween time a year and horror, but this was true horror that happened right here in this country It's just it's beyond belief some of the things that some of the young men at this school endured You know what? I am here. Okay, so so many things. Here's the first thing. I wonder What kind of human being?

could Perpetrate these crimes on a child Like do you do you realize that absolutely no one who worked at the dozer school has ever been held accountable for any of this? It's not not sick in you and it's not like they didn't know what was going on I mean there were different points along the line like back in the 1950s There was a psychotic a psychologist or psychiatrist who came forward and said, you know There's some really bad stuff happening at this school and it was all kind of squashed down And I think the idea is just because somebody is incarcerated you can do pretty much and I get I don't know if this is The way it was then or we're better than that now If they're incarcerated you can do whatever you want to to them and because they're children. They really have no voice What well one of the interesting things that you are confronted with?

when you're talking about a story like the dozer school and these this whole reform school movement is What a recent invention childhood is the way we understand childhood, right? Because some of the kids that were sent to the dozer school in Florida and other schools like it We're just focused on this one for this episode We're you know as young as six or seven or eight years old. And so, you know, this is a reform school This is meant to transform these young hooligans into productive members of society But you had little boys little boys that were sent to the dozer school for the crime of skipping class like they were school truant and So they were incarcerated in this incredibly vile and violent punitive environment We we don't think of children that way now Although there there are plenty in this country That would like to turn that clock back and have kids working third shift at poultry processing plants and in some states That is exactly what's happening. In fact, I think it was in Wisconsin we just had a kid injured on a third shift in a factory because Kids probably shouldn't be up in the middle of the night operating machinery Factories, but the idea of childhood is super different for us than it was even a hundred 150 years ago in this country The teenager is a very modern invention, you know, it was post-world war two when the teenager the idea of a teenager was basically invented and we just didn't think of children as people in in the way that we do now and so we could send an eight-year-old off to be Beaten and sexually abused Violated and assaulted and in too many cases murdered with no accountability what and And the thing about this particular story is this isn't the olden times Like the school was built a hundred years ago But it only just closed right and it was only January of this year 2023 that the memorial to some of the boys that were brutalized At Dozier school was unveiled. So you can't tell me this is ancient history and people have changed Can you know and the idea, you know, the crimes that were committed against these children and they you know There's there's human beings who are committing these crimes and you just wonder what kind of a person is doing that, you know I mean, isn't there anybody going, you know, yeah, we need to punish, you know, they're they're incarcerated there's maybe a reason that they're incarcerated but the kind of punishment that they were doing was nothing short of torture that you would see it Prisoner of war camps, you know in wartime I mean, that's the sort of thing that was going on and it's just in reading the accounts you Some of the accounts that are in there, of course you had me voice them It's it's horrifying it's just it's horrifying to think that this actually happened in this country you think that's something that happens far away and No that happened here right here right here Roger Dean Kiser who wrote the book the White House boys in American tragedy you read from his book and He was the one who said that These two men he was he was eight years old ten years old these two men who took him to the White House He'd heard the stories from other boys and he said these two men picked me up carried me into a small room Nothing in it, but a bunk bed and a pillow Put me down on the floor ordered me to lie on the bed facing the wall Crying I pulled myself up to the edge of the bed and wiped the blood from my nose onto my shirt sleeve When I looked up at the men's faces, they were plain cold and hard they had no expression whatsoever

and Then those adult men beat that little boy to within an inch of his life So you have to like the real criminals in in the story of the Florida Reform School the dozer school Weren't the boys that were incarcerated there for skipping school or petty theft The real criminals were the adults who were put in charge of taking care of them and so And without accountability There's there's no justice for these children There's no justice and the number of times that legislation has come up in Tabled and you know set aside it's all performative What they want what they want is for those men to die So that the story of what happened at Dozer school dies with them. Yeah, and You know, that's just not that's not acceptable It's not acceptable and that's one of the reasons why we're telling this story in this episode Because I ask people like when we're working on different true weird stories like Have you ever heard of the Dozer school? Like I have a really good friend who lives just outside of Orlando and grew up Was born raised high school college everything in the Sunshine State Do you know about the Dozer school? No, I've never heard of it. Let me tell you a few things. Maybe it'll ring a bell Nah, no, nothing Nothing. So the forces of history that seek to bury these kinds of truths is winning in this particular case It's winning So I have a little um interesting fact for you max if you remember in the very beginning of the episode when building one was on fire and Willie Bell woke up Because he heard a noise and he didn't know what he heard but there was something that disturbed his sleep and he left his room and he went into the hallway and he saw everything in flames and he knew that the Firescape doors were locked from the outside with these big old-time heavy brass yell padlocks because Willie Bell was the assistant superintendent for the Florida Reform School for boys and he he was as heroic that night as Anybody could have been but what you don't know about Willie Bell what we didn't put in the episode is That before he became the assistant superintendent at the Florida Reform School for boys He was an inmate at another reform school as a child and That experience didn't break him. It built him and it built him into this Decent ethical person who wanted to do better by the kids than had been done by him and he tried He tried to save those boys from that fire that night But again, you have to say what that what the hell kind of facility are we running here?

If you're padlocking the fire escape doors from the outside, like what did you think was going to happen? I? Think the fact that this went on for so long at this school is the thing that's most haunting and we've done I don't know how many episodes we've done now, but I will say out of any of the episodes We've done of true weird stuff. This is the one that's haunted me the most. This is the one that I've thought about the most That's that I like when I close my eyes at night that I thought about that this ever could have occurred It just it is the most haunting My husband listens to the podcast and he's not a true crime guy Like he I mean bless his heart. He goes to sleep at night to me watching 48 hours or whatever, right?

That wouldn't give him pause He's more of a sports and nature documentary kind of dude. He's like, oh Is this one about you know murder? I'm like, that's not that it's about murder. It's about a terrible Terrible injustice and an act of evil so vast and deep that it's like a cancer and nobody knows about it and and We have to the world needs to know these stories. We can't let them get forgotten He's like, oh, but it's so bad and it is because it's haunting because these were little boys These were little boys You didn't have kids landing at Dozier school that were mass murderers These are pretty petty criminals and a lot of them were Runaways, right a lot of these boys Were runaways and we haven't even talked about I mean the episode is called unmarked graves They haven't even found all of the graves yet They know because they have this incredible techno we have this amazing technology now ground penetrating radar and They can scan the earth and you can find you can see it on the the radar Radio where the earth has been disturbed where there are grave shafts, right? Some of them more shallow than others it an absolute Appalling Crime against humanity happened on the campus of this school and it was not like no accountability It wasn't like there was one or two of these people who were in charge that were cruel I mean there was a hundred years of them You know or 90 years, whatever whatever the exact number of years that this school was open of People that acted this way what's kind of it?

I don't know it's a little scary to think that there's people walking around given the opportunity to act this way because These children have no defense about what's going on. That would be this cruel I mean that's kind of haunting to think about people you run into On the street every day in the store who given the opportunity would act this way so cruelly towards these children Yeah would commit these atrocities With us with a smile on their face These are the kind of people and maybe this is just me trying to protect my sanity But I think to myself well the men who did that There they don't have souls. They're just like Empty skin suits because I really do believe we should do an episode on this, but it's so it's so You know the part of true weird stuff that is tricky is the true part Like I've got to find the true part of what I'm about to say before we can do the episode There's a belief that not every human being has a soul That's that not all of us are carrying an immortal eternal soul Some of us are just you know bags of walking talking meat. I was listening to a podcast about psychopathy and and people who are psychopaths and It's not like You're you're 0% psychopath or 100% there's a lot of people that have varying shades of Psychopathy in between and there's a lot of people and I think what we're fun What you find is given the situation somebody who is on that scale somewhere is one of those people that?

Is able to do that and not have any sort of conscience about it And I think these people as you say have no souls. I Kind of person, but we know that the job attracts this kind of person and there was a lot There are a lot of like social and historical forces that swirl around this story. Yes children were being beaten Brutalized sexually assaulted and murdered their bodies were dumped and discarded But there the the whole issue of racism at the dojo and that part of it as well Oh my god, so the school itself was segregated because you know, everything was segregated and the overwhelming majority of bodies and unmarked graves are believed to be those of black inmates black children because the bulk of the unmarked graves have been found out in the woods and Property closest to that building building two And also what records were kept and it was sketchy at best We have a lot of black children coming in But never leaving very very twisted Hotel, California situation But then the school was also using something called convict leasing that we talked a little bit about So after the 13th amendment was passed abolishing slavery Convict leasing was a little way around it. So in penal institutions reform schools and prisons and jails You could hire out convict labor to work the roads or the farms or the railroads or whatever and Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas We're all big on this convict labor and so the boys at the Dozier school Were hired out to work for free for private entities. So let's say you had a farm, right?

maybe you were a cattle farmer or Because people don't realize how rural and agricultural Florida was and is cattle farmers citrus, whatever free here comes free labor from the Dozier school and And so it was a way around the was way around slavery, which is when you think about it disgusting and The Dozier school had a very very severely bad reputation for Exploiting these kids sending them out to work in the blazing hot Sun with inadequate food or water and then they'd come back to the school and They'd be taken out to the White House, which was the disciplinary building Beaten to within an inch of their lives with a leather paddle that had a strip of sheet metal sewn between the leather layers Some of them died and their bodies were dragged out and they were thrown into really barely dug graves left in the woods You can know what the hell like how did this how was this allowed to go on max for decades?

Decades and Some people did as you pointed out, you know during the course of the episode there were people that came forward It said hey, there's something going on here. You need to look at this and nothing was done. Nothing was done and Even now Even now as we are down to like literal handfuls of survivors of this Institution I Think that the they're just playing politics with it and just waiting for these these men to die and to take their first-person lived experiences with them Because we can't get anything through the state legislature in terms of recognition or acknowledgement And you know why that is because if we recognize and acknowledge what these human beings endured Then we also have to recognize and acknowledge the complete failure of accountability and justice for the perpetrators and I guess that would make people, you know uncomfortable and Nobody ever wants to look at that and you would have to give them some kind of compensation and that makes people uncomfortable, too It's um, it's a nightmare it really it is a nightmare and I would love to say and it's a nightmare in the distant past Except it's a nightmare. That's still unfolding right now you have teams of Anthropologists and archaeologists and mortuary professionals Still dealing with What's in the ground at this school?

And I know that I know that we all have a tendency It's just kind of human nature to feel a little defensive, you know a little bit attacked Like I think can we just let the past lie? Why do you know why do we have to keep re-litigating the past that it happened and it's over we should move forward That would be great except the present is built from the past and And The failures of the past and the failures the abuses the atrocities that happen at the dozer school Those are the bricks that we made the present out of So, how do we go forward as a society?

how do we go forward and and let the past lie if Everything we are today is built out of that foul toxic soil And this school only closed in was it 20 2011, yeah Budget cuts. Yeah hasn't been closed that long It wasn't because of the atrocities that happened there or all the bodies they found there. It was a budget cut. It was budget cuts So yeah, we have to tell these stories and they're hard to they're hard to hear. They're hard to face It's hard to accept that this Really happened and is still happening But if we don't tell these stories then what are the chances that this Happens again Very high because that's the way human nature is you you want to think that we keep on evolving with this But but clearly we don't Because just about the time you think oh, well this could never and nothing like this could ever happen again Then something else is uncovered and you go. How did that happen? How do we let that happen? I Can't um Yeah, I can't and it's a complicated thing because the history of the Florida Reform School for Boys Reflects the very troubled history that this country has yet to deal with in terms of Slavery the Civil War The the switch from Agriculture to industry to information technologies like we're all of this is happening in real time and we're We keep we keep glossing over the mistakes of the past and we're just repeating them repeating them and in this story You see all of that playing out. You see our failure to protect children you see our failure to deal with the horrors of racism and and You see the failures in our government our elected Representatives to hold themselves or anyone else accountable for these atrocities because it might stop the votes or the campaign contributions from coming in and It is I can't think of anything more cynical Than what is unfolding every legislative session?

Around this issue and these handful of living survivors who are all in their 70s and 80s, right? Right. I mean isn't the isn't our youngest Dozier school survivor in their 70s at this point? well, um, I Know what's really surprising is that that school the segregation in that school did not stop until 1968 Really isn't all that long ago. It's super late so I guess I You know as I've thought and thought and thought about this story Here's kind of where I am Like I'm living right now in a moment Culturally where it's all but what about the children? We we can't let them read this book It's so bad for the children. What about the children at the very same time?

That states are passing labor laws that allow the children to work in factories in the middle of the night the very same Political engine that's like oh this kid can't read about Scott's two dads because that would be terrible is kicking this under the table and Doing nothing Nothing to actually Protect the children that were all up in arms about the hypocrisy of it I guess max and is what makes me crazy the hypocrisy you distilled this down into a written Podcast episode there's so much more to this story You could do two years of episodes on this Yeah, pulling this down into one little fireside chat Somebody could and maybe should or is in the process of this is one of those things you could do a multi-season investigative podcast on what happened at the Dozier school, and I think that That might be I can't believe I mean, I can't believe we're alive at a time when we need a podcaster like Sean Kipe to shine the light on this Disgraceful atrocity in the hopes of maybe writing a centuries-old wrong Isn't it crazy the reality that we're living in right now? This is wild. Yeah, it is wild So we thank you for listening to this one. We know it's a tough one But you know the scariest stories are always the true ones Because There's no way at the end to turn the lights on and laugh it off When the monsters are what we see in the mirror There's no way to hide from the monster Thanks for joining us. We'll see you on the next episode of true weird stuff And if you listen to us on Apple podcast hit the plus button in the top right corner And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discover And we really appreciate it if you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff hit our website true weird stuff Calm for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff calm and follow true weird stuff on Instagram and Twitter True weird stuff is a Now! Media production our executive producer is Anthony Garcia The show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by Kevin Nash Original artworks by Olivia Axland true weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash copyright 2023 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered