Is this America’s Haut le Garenne? 50 hidden graves near old school
Scientists are exhuming bodies thought to have been Wards of the now defunct Dozier School for Boys. Last week, soil-penetrating radar revealed nearly 50 unmarked graves that the State had never detected before.
“Like a sorority or a fraternity, everything was closed-mouth,” said a local resident about the attitude in town to the school. But he’d
heard the hushed stories of boys who were beaten, tortured, or worse: “Nobody knew anything or was going to tell you anything,” he said. The 79 year old man tells a story he heard about Dozier boys running away at night. He says a group called the “Dog Boys” would wait for them in the woods.
“The dogs would about tear them to pieces and they would holler and yell,” he says.
It sounds like something out of The Changeling….only worse.
“How many? What happened to them? Were there crimes committed?” U.S. Senator Bill Nelson is asking. Now, after nearly a century of quiet, Nelson, University of South Florida researchers, and a Tampa Bay family searching to solve the mystery of their missing child may have made enough noise to answer these questions. They are pushing for a massive exhumation of an unknown number of bodies.
“We were uncovering what was clearly grave shafts,” says Dr. Erin Kimmerle. Her team of anthropologists have spent months mapping the local cemetery. Their work turned up nearly 20 more graves than the Florida Department of Law Enforcement originally documented. Now they are asking family members of missing boys for DNA samples to help them identify the skeletons.
Dozier School for Boys survivor Captain Bill Nelson (no relation) is blowing the whistle for the first time about his time at the Dozier School for Boys. As an 11-year old, he was sent there for a crime of which he was later completely cleared. “I was raped over there as a kid, and there were several boys raped. A lot of boys didn’t make it. They weren’t strong enough to make it. Sometimes at night you could hear the screams.”
The state shut down the Dosier School for wayward boys in 2011, following allegations of abuse and suspicious death. But for fifty kids, that was too little, too late.
The classic signs are all there: systemic, sadistic, sexual abuse, pleas ignored by law officers and the Courts, and more than a hint of cover-up.
The potential murder element in paedophile cases is far too often ignored. When kids are abducted and then almost inevitably turn up dead, the perpetrator is dismissed somehow separately as ‘a sex maniac’. The truth is that many paedophiles are violently sadistic, there is a huge market for child ‘snuff’ movies, and hundreds of kids are on the run from care homes at any given time hoping to escape the abuse.
But the networks remain in place, the checks are as sloppy as ever, and the trail back to the Mother of Parliaments continues to somehow resist detection. WTF is happening at Rocks Lane? Before even this latest case, why have so many dossiers disappeared, later proven guilty murderers been let off, paedophiles allowed to skip bail, rape records been erased, and high-level interference been allowed to stop investigations in their tracks? Why is the only place raided by police to date the HQ of an abuse victims’ support agency?
Tom Watson’s Commons question appears to have been swallowed by a Black Hole. Plod appears to be a rabbit in the headlights of senior bods with a mission to destroy evidence. Will it ever change? Or is this just another symptom of human depravity’s dominance of life at the top?
Stay tuned.
Last week at The Slog: paedophile cover-ups from the recent past.
The Slog 