Seven former residents of New Bethany Home for Girls make emotional return to Arcadia to file charges of sexual assault

December 9, 2013 by tomaswell Visit: Article Link

Former New Bethany Resident Now Dedicates Her Life to Helping Sexual Abuse Victims Report the Crimes

Former New Bethany resident Teresa Frye brings abuse allegations to light
Teresa Frye arrived at the New Bethany Home for Girls, in Arcadia Louisiana, when she was 14 years old in 1982. Frye endured psychological abuse at the home and witnessed physical abuse. Since then, allegations of sexual abuse have surfaced. Frye has been a galvanizing force in bringing the New Bethany abuse allegations to light.

Print By Rebecca Catalanello, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
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on April 04, 2014 at 11:54 AM, updated April 04, 2014 at 10:00 PM

Special multimedia presentation of the entire multi-part series
Live chat with former residents
Part 1: One woman's journey
Part 2: 30 years of controversy
Part 3: Couple remembers a runaway
Part 4: Former resident helps victims
Timeline: New Bethany 1971-2014
Video: Former residents return
Video: Reporters question Mack Ford
Video: Sheriff remembers a runaway
Video: Former resident helps victims
Photos: Former residents return
Photos: A look back at New Bethany
Diagram: New Bethany compound
How we reported this story
All Stories | All Photos | All Videos

Teresa Frye knows that what she is about to say could make some people angry but she needs to say it anyway.

"It's wrong," the 46-year-old says in her North Carolina twang, "for me to say that it's perfectly acceptable for an adult survivor of sexual abuse to stay silent about what happened to them."

Frye, a single working mother of four, feels so strongly that sex abuse victims should report their abusers that she recently traveled 900 miles and spent hundreds of dollars to help support a woman she knew only through Facebook on her quest to tell investigators her story of childhood molestation.

The trip, which she helped coordinate with several other like-minded women, was the culmination of a core-shaking journey that Frye started about seven years earlier as she sought to make sense of the eight months she spent as a child at New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, La.

For some in the general public, the religious boarding school for wayward youth had been little more than fodder for occasional newspaper stories throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Accusations of children being abused there bubbled into local and national media over the years and lawsuits between the school and the state wound their way into and out of state and federal court.

But for residents like Frye, the boarding school became a memory they tried to forget. She says that while she was there, she witnessed abuse and degradation, but was not herself the victim of sexual abuse. In 2007, when Frye stumbled across an online message board containing hundreds of conversations between former residents, she felt her life pivot.

"I started reading it and probably for a week I did nothing else at night besides read and read and read," Frye says. "After getting away from it and not thinking about it and shoving it to the back of your head and trying to live your life, it's not real anymore."

It wasn't enough to read the comments; Frye wanted answers -- and solutions -- and quickly found herself as one in what is an expansive and tightly woven network of people interested in exposing and ending institutional abuse of children. She joined with national groups like Survivors of Institutional Abuse and HEAL, which offer resources and support for people who say they were abused in religious boarding homes similar to New Bethany.

"I started finding out that there were places opening up all over the United States that had the same theological teachings," Frye says. "I thought at the time that (New Bethany) was a one-of-a-kind place and that no one would ever believe what happened there."

1 / 6
Jennifer Halter, front, and Teresa Frye walk arm-in-arm towards the Bienville Parish Courthouse building where Jennifer planned on making a rape report. Halter claims she was repeatedly sexually abused during her time at the New Bethany Home for Girls. Both women attended at different times. Frye says she was never sexually abused while she lived at the home as a teenager, but she witnessed physical and encountered psychological abuse. Over the years, Frye has become a galvanizing force behind the movement to bring the New Bethany abuse allegations to light. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com l The Times-Picayune)
Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Over the course of the past seven years, Frye has found herself on the phone with journalists, filmmakers and police investigators. While looking for answers, she rediscovered her faith in a higher power, one she feels opened doors that for so long have appeared shut.

Frye and a team of friends hunted down answers for a man who was haunted by his last memory of a friend from New Bethany Home for Boys in Longstreet, La., a school that was later shuttered amid complaints of abuse. The man said he remembered a boy named "Guy" being beaten so badly that his eyes bled. The next day, he told Frye, Guy disappeared from the home.

Frye, who worked as a private investigator assistant before becoming a legal case manager in a North Carolina law firm 10 years ago, spent hours and months trying to find out what had happened to him before finally confirming he had died as an adult -- information that came to her through what she has come to believe was divine intervention.

"I told God that I couldn't find him and He needed to show me where he was," she says. Seconds later, she says, she did a Google search for a name that she had searched hundreds of times before and the information popped up. "That's what really knocked me off my knees."

In Frye's determination to find answers and solutions, though, she sometimes manages to rub others the wrong way. Of the four women who recently went to law enforcement to file reports of sexual abuse at the New Bethany while they were residents there, one said she just had to do it in her own time and felt Frye was abrasive in her zeal to get people like her to report.

Frye says she recognizes that her actions and statements can seem harsh to some, but she doesn't see a way around it. Sexual abuse doesn't end, she says, when one victim grows up; perpetrators who aren't stopped find other children to harm.

"The general consensus that I have seen is that a victim of a childhood sexual crime doesn't have to report it if they don't want," Frye says, "but yet these victims will go and post what happened to them online. We're not going to 'awareness' people to death."

Frye thinks of her recent trip to Arcadia to support another woman on her quest to tell police about her childhood abuse as a rough model of what should happen more often. Statistics indicate that one in five girls and one in 20 boys are victims of child sexual abuse.

"Look here!" Frye says with urgency. "Get a posse of people together and report the (perpetrator). Raise a stink! Raise a big ol' stink! This is what's working and other people need to see what's working."

Rebecca Caatalanello can be reached at 504.717.7701 or rcatalanello@nola.com.

To New Bethany and back: One woman's journey to report the man she says sexually abused her.

New Bethany Home for Girls: Women allege childhood sex abuseTwenty-five years ago, 14-year-old Jennifer Halter arrived at the gates of New Bethany Home for Girls excited about a new start at a boarding school. What happened there, she says, nearly killed her will to live. Now, Halter is on a painful journey back to Arcadia, La., to fulfill her dying wish: to report the man she says sexually abused her.

By Rebecca Catalanello, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 02, 2014 at 3:36 PM, updated April 02, 2014 at 10:03 PM

She hobbled down the jetway carrying a suitcase, a pillow, a teddy bear for good luck.

At the plane's entrance she stopped, paralyzed by dread and memories: blood, Pine Sol, broken glass, shame, God - and those barbed wire fences. God, those fences. She hugged the stuffed animal.

What if they say it was my fault? Will they call me a whore? What if I die?

Someone in the line behind her asked, "Is she OK?"

Jennifer Halter’s Story

The Long Road: To the Gates of New Bethany and Back

Twenty-five years ago, 14-year-old Jennifer Halter arrived at the gates of New Bethany Home for Girls, excited about a new start at a boarding school. What happened there, she says, nearly killed her will to live. Now Halter is on a painful journey to Arcadia, La., to fulfill her dying wish: to report the man she says sexually abused her.

Wednesday: Halter travels back to New Bethany.
Thursday: A look back at 30 years of New Bethany Home for Girls.
Friday: An experience with a New Bethany runaway still haunts a couple 20 years later; and a former New Bethany resident takes on the mantle of activism.
Sunday: A rich, multimedia repackaging of the entire series.
About this story

For 25 years, Jennifer Halter, 39, had been living with memories of what happened to her at a religious girls' home in Arcadia, La. In her mind, the fences towered 15 feet high and stretched for miles, every chain link pinning her in with the man she says sexually abused her, destroyed her faith and led her to try to kill herself.

Halter, a mother of five, was dying of a rare cancer-like condition called histiocytosis x. Her body hurt. Her mind was tired. If her doctor's prediction held, she would have four more years to live.

She had made it to the edge of Spirit Airlines redeye Flight 298 from Las Vegas against doctor's orders. She had come this far because she had decided she was ready to tell Louisiana law enforcement about the crimes she says were committed against her so many years ago.

In Halter's best-case scenario, the man she says abused her would be forced to answer to a judge and jury for what he had done. He would admit the things he had done to her in small rooms in churches and hidden spaces. And her kids, the ones she had struggled to mother through heartbreak, anger and loss, would see her as brave and strong. They would believe her.

Jennifer Halter, of Nevada, describes physical, mental and sexual abuse she says occurred to her while in the care of Mack Ford when she was a teenager at New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, Louisiana. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune)

Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Worst case? There were a lot of worst cases. The tumor in her head would cause her brain to swell under the pressure of flight. The plane would fulfill her fear of flying and fall from the sky. Police in Louisiana would ridicule her, tell her she was lying and remind her of all the ways she had messed up her life. Her children would never understand that her brokenness had roots, that she was not crazy, that she had loved them as best she could.

Jennifer Halter needed a best case.

She squeezed her pillow, found her seat on the plane and closed her eyes.

***

In the summer of 1988, before Halter had ever heard of a place called New Bethany Home for Girls, state officials arrived at the north Louisiana boarding school and cut a lock off the gate at 120 Hiser Road, where they had been denied entry.

The fenced-in 18-year-old school was the ministry of Mack W. Ford, a tire-repairman-turned-preacher who marketed the school as a Christian-based residential facility for wayward youth.

New Bethany Home for Girls compound layout

Two runaways from the home told police they had been abused. Social workers went to investigate.

They interviewed 47 of the 52 residents and offered all of the girls the opportunity to leave. Twenty-eight took them up on the offer. Twenty-four remained.

A few weeks later in Laughlin, Nev., Halter's mother told her daughter to pack her things. She had enrolled her in a boarding school a few states away.

***

Here's what Jennifer Halter remembers:

She remembers seeing her mother wipe her eyes as she steered the car.

"What's wrong, Mom?" asked Halter, then 14.

"Nothing," said her mom.

The road to the small town seemed to stretch forever.

Halter thought her mom was driving her to a Catholic boarding school. Her mom and grandmother had both attended Catholic schools and Halter had been begging her mother to let her do the same.

Back home, Halter had been involved in fights. She had tried drugs. She ran away from a juvenile police officer. Her mother told her she was veering down the wrong path.

Halter liked the promise of starting over at an exclusive school far from the drama at home. But as the highway between towering pines got longer, a pit formed in Halter's stomach.

Barbed wire fences came into view.

"This is the best thing for you," she recalls her mom saying. The car pulled up to the gate.

"What is this place?" Halter asked.

The New Bethany Home for Girls property is worn from the years, but stands much like it was when it closed it's doors in 2001. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

A white-haired woman, three girls and two boys came to the entrance. The boys unlocked the long chain on the fence.

Her mother edged the car forward.

"Where are we?" Halter asked again. "What is this?"

Panic raced through her body. I'm sorry for running away. I'm sorry for not listening. I'm sorry for not eating my dinner. Anything she could think of, she apologized for.

Her mother parked and got out of the car. Halter stayed inside and hit the door locks. The white-haired woman told her through the window that everything would be OK. She talked Halter out of the car, showed her inside to an empty footlocker and then led her to a bathroom with a curtainless shower.

From the next room, Halter saw her mother turn to leave. She bolted after her. Come back!

She remembers holding onto the inside of the chain link fence. She remembers the car driving out of sight. She remembers screaming so loud her voice cracked.

Barbed wire lines the gates at the New Bethany Home for Girls compound in Arcadia, La. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

That night, she says, she couldn't stop crying. A staff member grabbed her by the hair, she says, dragged her from her bed and hit her in the head with a Bible until she fell to her knees. She begged to go home. She begged to call her mom.

The next morning, she says, she awoke with bruises on her knees.

***

On a Wednesday night last December, five women gathered in Room 723 of the Sam's Town Hotel and Casino in Shreveport.

They had been emailing and messaging for months about this trip, about trying in whatever way they could to support Halter in her quest to make a police report about the abuse she says she suffered at New Bethany.

Simone Jones greets Tara Cummings, left, Teresa Frye, middle and Joanna Wright, right, as they arrive back at their hotel room in Shreveport after Halter made her sexual abuse report in Arcadia. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

Besides Halter, the group included Joanna Wright, an opinionated 53-year-old preacher's daughter from Houston. Five months before, she had filed her own report with the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office describing sexual abuse by the school's founder.

Also there: Teresa Frye, a 46-year-old North Carolina legal case manager who attended the school for eight months in 1982. Although she says she didn't suffer sexual abuse at the home, she had spent years piecing together from former students so many stories of abuse -- physical, psychological, spiritual and sexual -- that she formed an unwavering conviction that the best weapon survivors have against their attackers was the right to go to police and make a report.

Tara Cummings of Metairie drove up, too. At 43, Cummings maintains a polished veneer that often hides the years of abuse she says she endured at the hands of an adoptive father who, when faced with police charges of child abuse, sent her to New Bethany.

Some of these women had never met in person. They weren't all at New Bethany at the same time. But most said they knew what it felt like to be stripped down, sprayed for lice and ordered to shower while others watched. They recalled standing at the bathroom door waiting for their toilet paper allowance: four squares to urinate, six squares to defecate, eight squares for any girl who said she was menstruating.

They remembered the scent of Pine Sol used for cleaning -- clothes, floors, walls, everything. They remembered being awakened at night by someone lifting their sheets and shining a flashlight on their hands and in their faces to make sure they were there and that no one was masturbating.

They knew the term "sister treatment" and could remember the pain of being physically attacked and beaten by other residents without the staff intervening.

But of all the unpleasant memories, these were some of the least painful. The ones that really cut were the ones they say left them scarred: the beatings, the sex abuse, the sermons from the pulpit that ensured they knew they were whores and Jezebels without the saving grace of God.

Jennifer Halter, left, wipes away tears as Simone Jones and Teresa Frye hug during a conversation about the abuse that they say occurred at New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, Louisiana. Sylvia McMillan sits between them. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

Each woman seated in Room 723 had a story she had tried to forget in the blur of adulthood and marriage and childbirth and divorce. Each had sought in her own way to shove the remembrances of New Bethany into corners of life where they wouldn't require tending. Some of them had battled drug or alcohol dependence. Two attempted suicide. One terminated a pregnancy, convinced she was incapable of mothering without repeating the abuse she had endured. Several found themselves involved in more abusive relationships. Most struggled with intimacy.

Halter's life was no exception. She married soon after leaving New Bethany, but says it was a volatile relationship that ended after 17 years. She maintains regular communication with only one of her five children, her 19-year-old daughter, the one she calls "my strength." Her twin boys, age 14, are in the care of a relative in Louisiana. She has seen them once in seven years and says she misses them daily. Her oldest son, 17, is estranged. She worries about him, but doesn't know where he is. Her youngest, a baby named Veagas, was born premature and lived less than two hours outside her body before he died.

She still struggles to forgive her mother for delivering her to New Bethany.

***

As the New Bethany girls got older and the Internet grew, they found themselves sitting at keyboards seeking answers. They met online through message boards and on Facebook. They found names they remembered and shot off emails. Some lurked for years on a message board for past New Bethany residents before feeling strong enough to chime in with a written comment or question.

When Halter said she was ready to report her story to police, these women sprang to action. There is no statute of limitations for forcible rape in Louisiana. And many of the other things that Halter says happened to her can still be prosecuted under state laws that allow victims to report until age 48 abuses that happened to them when they were younger than 17.

Jennifer Halter carries a teddy bear with her on the trip from Shreveport to the Bienville Parish Courthouse in Arcadia Louisiana. Jennifer wanted to report sexual abuse that she says occurred some 25 years before while she was a teenage resident at New Bethany Home for Girls. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

The women collected $1,828 through friends and sexual abuse survivor groups to help Halter make the trip. They contacted an attorney and a victim's advocate. They asked a woman from Las Vegas who had survived sex abuse to accompany Halter on the flight and bought two $474 round-trip tickets from Las Vegas to Houston. Wright, the preacher's daughter, drove them four hours from Houston to Shreveport.

They gathered in a plush hotel room with a view of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. Amid white linens, fluffy bleached towels and miniature soaps, they laughed and hugged and smoked Marlboro 100s and Winston Ultra Lights until the room was hazy. They relived scenes from their lives that they never should have had to endure.

Here, nothing was shocking except the feeling of being believed.

"Mack Ford would tell us that he would make sure that New Bethany was embedded in our heads for the rest of our lives," Halter said. "He wasn't lying."

***

The first time it happened, Halter says, she had asked to go to the bathroom.

Mack Ford was milling about after a church service, talking with congregants who had gathered to hear the New Bethany girls' choir.

The traveling singing group was one of the mechanisms by which Ford promoted and raised money to fund his boarding school. The girls would load up in a bus or van, travel to nearby towns and other states. They would sing before churches and give testimonies of being saved from lives of prostitution and drug use. Ford would talk about New Bethany and the churches would take offerings to support the home.

Halter doesn't remember what state they were in. Mississippi, maybe, or North Carolina.

An archive photo of Mack Ford, center, who was the founder and pastor at the New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, Louisiana. Numerous confirmed reports of child abuse surfaced over the years. Ford was never prosecuted. In the last year, four women have made reports to law enforcement claiming sexual abuse at the home. (handout photo)

She remembers singing in a beautiful, large sanctuary under a crystal chandelier. The congregation had gathered in pews arranged in a stadium formation. The pianist led the group from a balcony overhead.

When the service ended, Halter urgently needed to go to the restroom. But she knew she was not allowed to step away from the fold without permission. Two girls had already gone together.

She approached Ford and asked if he would take her to the restroom. She waited for his conversation to end.

"Are you ready?" he said, finally turning to her. "Let's go."

The hallways to the restroom felt never-ending -- a maze of walls and turns. When they reached a single-stall bathroom, she says, Ford went in with her. He was a tall man with rough hands. His whitish hair was perfectly cropped. He wore a blue tie. He unbuttoned his pants, she says, told her to get on her hands and knees and demanded oral sex.

Halter says she asked what that was. She says Ford told her not to mock him. He grabbed her hair, she says, and forced her to perform. She heard the noises and voices of people walking through the church. When he was done, she says, he touched her privates, then threw folded tissues at her.

He told her it was her fault, she says: She had a scent of a whore and she needed to bathe better.

She says he told her to apologize.

These were some of the things she wanted to tell police.

Asked to talk about the allegations recently, Ford declined to be interviewed. He referred NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune to attorney John Hodge of Shreveport. When contacted, Hodge said he had no knowledge of Halter's case and had not represented Ford or New Bethany in decades. Additional attempts were made to contact Ford, including calls to the New Bethany compound, which he still owns and where he is believed to still reside, and a letter delivered to the home by FedEx. Ford did not respond.

***

Halter says she came to expect Ford's sexual abuse during choir trips. The trips out of state offered a break from the physical abuse at the girl's home, but not from its leader, she says.

"I could stay home and work in the kitchen and not get raped or travel and not get beat," she says. But it was not long, she says, before the sexual abuse followed her into the home.

Halter did not know then that for years children had been running away from New Bethany and making reports to police about physical violence. She did not know that in the mid-1970s, a teenager named Joanna Wright believed she had developed a consensual relationship with Ford, 31 years her senior, and would later tell police he had raped her. She had no idea that just a few years before, between 1982 and 1984, a 14-year-old named Simone Jones was doing her chores, feeding a horse in the pasture when she says Ford approached her, asked her if she was a "pure lady," reached into her uniform culottes, unbuttoned his coveralls and then forced her to perform oral sex. She too would give her statement to investigators three decades later.

"At the time, I thought I was the only one," Halter said. "Each day that went by, the worse it got and the more it got easier for me to accept what was happening and allowing it and not fighting and giving in."

She says she tried to let her mother know, writing code words and phrases in letters home. Nothing changed.

She tried to kill herself three times. The last time, she cut her wrists with a shard of broken glass. When staff discovered the blood, she says, they wrapped her wrists with gauze and paddled her.

Halter says she never saw a doctor.

***

A day in, the trip to Shreveport was taking its toll on Jennifer Halter.

The women swapped stories of love and loss, of things done to them in God's name. But when the others nodded off to sleep the first night, Halter crept out from the covers, locked herself in the bathroom and called her boyfriend to cry.

She did not know if she could make this report. She shuddered to think what the police would say about her once they learned more about her.

She struggled to stop the thoughts and memories from racing. When she arrived at New Bethany, she believed in God and heaven and hell. She said prayers at bedtime. Now, she could not bring herself to talk to God. Nighttime was for recurring nightmares -- like the one with the faceless man who stands over her bed breathing.

In her mind, her life had been a failure. She had run-ins with the law -- arrests for drug possession and writing a check for insufficient funds. After leaving New Bethany, she continued to be abused in her relationships with men, as studies indicate many child victims are.

When she became a mother at 20, she couldn't bring herself to breastfeed her baby girl because it felt awkward after years of being fondled and shamed for her large bosom. Instead, she let her mother bind her milk-swollen breasts flat.

When she had her second child, a boy, she went three weeks without touching him. She feared the possibility of her son doing to others what had been done to her. "I didn't want my boys turning into one of those monsters and to have to still say he's my son and forgive him," she said.

The simple act of bathing her children terrified her. "I was afraid that if I liked it," she said, "then I would become one of them."

She tried not to blame herself for the things that had happened to her. But, even now, she gasped while retelling the details of what she described as her first molestation.

"Oh my God. Oh my God," she said in the middle of telling her story in the hotel room. She squeezed her eyes shut. "I asked him to take me to the bathroom. He had never touched me before. If I would never have asked him, he would never have touched me."

That night, over dinner at the Sam's Town Casino, Halter told the other women she was worried the detectives would criticize her, doubt her, ignore her.

Tara Cummings leaned in. Unlike Halter, she had spent years in and out of therapy.

"All of us have had these moments," Cummings told her. "Things are getting brought up, you don't know how you're going to act in a given moment, it feels private. You feel vulnerable and scary, but you just have to go inside that place before you go tomorrow and know that you're just there to do one thing.

"Their opinions do not matter. You have to ask: Do you care what these policemen think about you?"

***

Fifty miles east of Shreveport, wind whipped through the nearly empty parking lot outside the Arcadia courthouse. Temperatures hovered in the mid-30s.

Halter stepped out of the passenger's seat of the Sebring.

Jennifer Halter, front, and Teresa Frye walk arm-in-arm through the biting cold towards the Bienville Parish Courthouse building where Jennifer planned on making a rape report. Tara Cummings and Joanna Wright, left, join the women. Louisiana Voice reporter Tom Aswell, right, makes a photo. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

A straight black skirt fell below Halter's knees, exposing the tattoos covering her bare calves. Loosely tied tennis shoes concealed her pastel cow booties -- the slippers she wears for shoes when her feet swell from her disease.

Halter passed through the metal detector into the lobby. She walked with the others toward the glass doors with the word "Sheriff" above it.

"We need to report a rape," said one of the women.

Joanna Wright of Houston went back first, her red bob disappearing behind a glass door. She had filed her own victim statement in July, and had been asking for a copy of the report. At 53, most of what she says happened to her at New Bethany no longer meets the statutes of limitations for sex offenses in Louisiana. But Wright says that she was raped by Ford when she was 17, and believes the circumstances of that incident meet the definition of forcible rape, which has no statute of limitations.

In the doorway, Halter cupped her hands over her face. Sobs came. The other women embraced her.

"You're just giving a statement," one of them told her. "You're not a criminal."

Wright returned, her face serious.

"He's pissed off," she said, referring to Sheriff John Ballance.

Wright said Ballance told her the case had been turned over to the Louisiana State Police and that he wouldn't see Halter.

"He handed me a piece of paper and escorted me out," Wright said, furious.

The women buzzed and talked, indignant and scrambling for a plan. One of them started to dial Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, which had planned to have a victim's advocate en route. Others stepped out for a smoke.

Tara Cummings approached the Sheriff's Office receptionist again.

"Can I please have a piece of paper so that I can write the sheriff?" she said politely.

The receptionist handed her a pink post-it note. Cummings scribbled something and handed it back to the woman behind the glass. The woman left, then returned and called her back.

Cummings came back with news. "They're going to take her," she said, then turned again to Halter. "Don't be scared. Just try to be comfortable."

A detective opened the door and waved Halter in.

She walked down the hall, sat down in a chair, leaned her head back, closed her eyes and began to tell her story. Three hours later, she appeared through the doors again and hugged the women who had helped her get here.

"I got to tell everything," she said.

Jennifer Halter is comforted by Teresa Frye just inside the Bienville Parish Courthouse building in Arcadia, Louisiana. Jennifer was there to report sexual abuse that she said occurred to her 25 years before, when she was a teenager at the Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia. She was nervous and hadn't slept well since arriving in Louisiana. Frye also attended New Bethany, but was not sexually abused. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

***

The next morning, Halter awoke at Sam's Town Hotel and Casino after the first full night of sleep she'd had in three days.

There was one more thing she needed to do.

The women bundled up and piled into two cars.

By now, two more former New Bethany residents had joined the group. One was Halter's old roommate, the one who found her locked alone in a bloody room after her most violent attempt to take her own life with pieces of glass.

The women drove onto Interstate 20 and headed east toward Arcadia. They turned off at Exit 69, south toward Highway 9, through lanky pines. At the crest of a hill, they slowed. Barbed wire fences came into view. A giant green cross marked the side of a large metal building ahead.

They turned onto Hiser Road and stopped.

About 60 feet ahead of them, a man sat in a small orange Kubota truck.

"That's him!" one of them said.

Snowflakes swirled through the damp air. Four German shepherds rushed to the fence barking.

Halter stepped out of the car, stuffed her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and began walking down the dirt road in the direction of the man.

Jennifer Halter looks from a distance towards Mack Ford on a public road which runs through the New Bethany property. As of December, Ford, 82, still owned the compound. Previous residents of New Bethany accompanied Halter on her trip to visit the site of the school. She felt compelled to do so while she was in town making her police report. "I need to see if I can let it go," she said. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

Fences on both sides of the street rose roughly 8 feet with inward-facing barbed wire lacing the top, so much shorter than the towering barricades that haunted her memories. How she had wanted to see these gates again.

"This is the road where I yelled and called for my mom," Halter said.

As she spoke, the man climbed down from his rattling truck and stood watching them silently, his shoulders tilted forward, a bright orange knit cap pulled snugly around his head. He looked small there from where she stood.

The women tried to ignore him. They stood together, taking in the decay of empty buildings. White paint peeled from wooden boards. The curtains were pulled back and a door stood ajar on the old dormitories, named Martha, Mary and Happiness.

"I was raped on this compound so many times in so many areas," Halter said. "I'm pretty sure if I walked this compound I would probably find something that belonged to me. I always said I wonder how much we left behind here besides our souls and our faith."

She walked to the aluminum gate, spread her arms and placed her hands on the metal and stood silent.

Dropping her hands to her sides, she turned back around.

"I'm done," she said.

Jennifer Halter places her hands on the gates at the New Bethany Home For Girls property in December. Ford, 82, still owns the compound. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)

Halter climbed back in the car and shut the door. She did what she had come to do. She wondered now if she would ever be back to take a stand and tell a jury the things it took her a quarter of a decade to be brave enough to tell police. Would anybody do anything?

The car backed down Hiser Road and onto Highway 9.

The man at the end of the road watched, silent.

***

THURSDAY: A look back at 30 years of New Bethany Home for Girls.

***

Photojournalist Kathleen Flynn contributed to this report. Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@nola.com or 504.717.7701.

New Bethany Home for Girls endured 30 years of controversy, leaving former residents wondering why

Reporters approach New Bethany founder Mack Ford
NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune reporters attempt to speak with New Bethany Home for Girls founder Mack Ford on a public road which runs through his compound in Arcadia, Louisiana.
Print By Rebecca Catalanello, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 03, 2014 at 1:50 PM, updated April 07, 2014 at 9:25 PM

In late December of 1991, a 20-year-old woman sat down in a room with a cassette recorder and two other women more than twice her age.

Tell us everything that happened, one of the older women said. Then she pressed a button to record.

Shannon Scott says she did as she was told. In five years living at New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, La., that was one thing she knew to do.

Three days later, she says, one of the women handed Scott a plane ticket, directed her to a car with keys in it and instructed her to drive herself to the airport where she would board a plane back home -- far away from this place where she had lived since she was 15 years old.

The Associated Press reported a few days later, on Jan. 8, 1992, that New Bethany had closed. After years of legal entanglement with state and local authorities, the school had decided to send all the residents home.

At the time, there was only one reason given for the sudden decision: that the home's board of directors was reorganizing.

Thelma Ford, wife of the then-59-year-old preacher who founded and led New Bethany, said it was time to rest. "After 21 years," she said in the AP story, "everyone deserves a break."

Ford made no mention of Shannon Scott.

Nor did Ford speak word of the story Scott says she told her: that Ford's husband, Mack Ford, the man everyone knew as the face of New Bethany, had coerced Scott into having sexual contact with him against her will.

Scott says she rejoiced when she learned later that the home closed after she complained. As far as she was concerned, New Bethany was the most horrible place on earth and it should never have been allowed to exist in the first place.

1 / 20
A photo of Mack Ford, center, with his wife taken from a brochure for the New Bethany Home for Girls. Mack was the founder and pastor of the New Bethany Home for Girls and Boarding Academy for Boys in Arcadia, Louisiana. Numerous confirmed reports of child abuse surfaced over the years. Ford was never prosecuted. In the last year, four women have made reports to law enforcement claiming sexual abuse at the home. (handout photo)
Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

But New Bethany did not stay closed. By the mid-1990s, documents show, residents at the home were once again trying to draw attention to what they described to police and politicians as abusive and inhumane conditions at the compound.

These days, Scott says she doesn't want to talk about what she told the women with the tape recorder 23 years ago. She has a new name and asks that it not be used.

She says she has never spoken to police.

For three decades starting in the early 1970s, New Bethany took girls no one wanted. It was the outreach ministry of Mack Ford, a high school dropout who worked for a time as a tire repairman before he said he heard God's call to preach.

He once told attorneys he was inspired to build New Bethany after meeting two blonde twins who had been impregnated by their father, a drunk.

"We are reaching out as a mission project to the incorrigible, unwanted rejects," Ford told attorneys in a 1997 court deposition. "Destitute, lonely, prostitutes, drug addicts ... These kids haven't been loved and haven't had a chance in life."

Until its final closure in 2001, hundreds of children and young women from across the state and country arrived at the high chain-link gates of the school, tucked off a rural highway in north Louisiana about 50 miles east of Shreveport.
Timeline: Read about the history of legal issues surrounding the New Bethany Home for Girls
The census at the girls' home fluctuated over the years, according to news reports and legal documents. The number of girls residing there was said to be as low as a couple dozen at times and as high as 250 at others.

To some who heard of its mission -- and others who encountered the school through its traveling girls' choir -- New Bethany seemed a charitable cause worthy of support and prayer.

But as often as the girls charmed congregations with songs of praise and testimonies of salvation from darkness, records, interviews, news reports and other documents show they sometimes also went to extraordinary lengths to seek refuge from the darkness they say enveloped the compound.

Stories of physical and mental abuse plagued New Bethany for almost as long as it was open, documents and news stories show.

Girls who ran away from the school described brutal paddlings and harsh physical punishment to anyone who would hear, but the opportunity to interact with outsiders was rare. Calls home from the compound were limited to a few minutes a month and, by accounts of those who lived there, were often monitored.
New Bethany Home for Girls compound layout
Residents who wanted to get the word out say doing so first required scaling a tall chain-link fence, crawling over the inward facing barbed wire at the top, and running through dense woods to find someone -- a driver, a cop, a state trooper, a social worker -- who might believe them.

One resident told investigators her head was slammed against the wall repeatedly by another girl while Ford's wife, Thelma, stood by and watched, according to court records. Another told authorities she had refused to take off her jewelry as instructed and Mack Ford slapped her repeatedly across the face until she was quiet. A girl who didn't eat her meal told an investigator she was tackled and held down while a staff member forced peas into her mouth. When the girl spit them out, they were shoved back in until she started to gag, then was paddled 15 to 20 times until she became hysterical.

Ford also opened a boys' home in nearby Longstreet, La., soon after creating New Bethany. That compound was shuttered in 1981 amid charges of child abuse, and its manager, L.D. Rapier, was arrested and charged with cruelty to children. Charges against Rapier were soon dropped. A year later, Ford moved the boys' home to Walterboro, S.C. In 1984, two administrators for that school were arrested on abuse and neglect charges and the facility was closed. The men, Olin King and Robert King, pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of false imprisonment and the charges were dropped.

There are no records of anyone at the girls' home ever being prosecuted on similar criminal charges.

Runaway sightings were common. In 1983, Joe Storey, former Arcadia police chief from 1962 to 1980, reported that he had encountered 50 runaways during his time as chief.
Bienville Parish Sheriff John Ballance remembers a runaway from New Bethany
Bienville Parish Sheriff John Ballance recalls his encounter with a New Bethany Home for Girls runaway in 1975 when he was a rookie state trooper.
Current Bienville Parish Sheriff John Ballance recently recalled seeing a New Bethany runaway on the side of the road in 1975, when he was a state trooper. Her legs were bleeding with scratches and, at age 18, she begged to be freed from the home but had been denied, he said.

A couple from Shreveport is still haunted by the memory of the night they picked up a runaway who rose out of a roadside ditch and begged them to take her to the sheriff. When they started to drive, they said, two cars blocked them in and men, including Ford, forced them to relinquish the girl back to the home.

Ford has denied allegations of physical abuse at the home, though he has also repeatedly acknowledged using a wooden paddle to administer corporal punishment.

"Let's watch our terminology," Ford told a reporter in 1988 after the state officials raided the compound and removed 28 of 52 girls from the home. "If we strike someone and you call it a beating, that's offensive. ... If we call it a spanking, that's not so offensive."

Ford's resistance to outside interference became well documented.

He filed federal civil rights lawsuits twice after state officials from child protective services and the state fire marshal sought to inspect the facility or question children and staff about their complaints of abuse. In 1992, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit in which Ford asked the government to keep officials from interfering in New Bethany operations. Seven years later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision determining there was no evidence that state officials were plotting to shut down New Bethany, as Ford complained.

Now, more than a decade after New Bethany's board voted to close the facility for good, women are coming forward with not only tales of continued harsh physical and emotional treatment, but reports of sexual abuse.

At least four women in the past year have made statements to law enforcement claiming they were sexually abused and naming Ford as chief among their abusers. All four have spoken with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune.

Louisiana State Police and the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office confirm they are investigating the claims.

The man at the center of the investigation, Mack Ford, now 82, said he doesn't want to talk about it. He has denied any kind of abuse at the home in the past.
Mack Ford sits in a Kubota on the public road which runs through the New Bethany property. As of December, Ford, 82, still owned the compound. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune)

When reporters from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune approached Ford at the New Bethany compound in December, Ford declined to talk and asked if the journalists were trying to cause trouble.

"Are you going to hell or are you going to heaven?" he asked.

Ford demanded the journalists leave and threatened to throw a photojournalist's camera in a creek. He then referred reporters to attorney John Hodge of Shreveport. When contacted, Hodge said he had not represented New Bethany in years and was no longer qualified to talk about it. Ford did not respond to additional attempts to reach him by phone and letter.

So many questions remain about the three decades New Bethany operated under Ford's oversight.

It survived years of residents' complaints, outlasted social workers' documented abuse findings and largely fended off state and local authorities' efforts to intervene. And while the home was shuttered from time to time, it always reopened. No one at the girls' home was ever prosecuted over claims of abuse.

***

Tara Cummings had just turned 12 when she arrived at New Bethany in 1982 after law enforcement was notified that her adoptive father, a minister, had severely beaten her, records show.
Tara Cummings had just turned 12 when she arrived at New Bethany in 1982 after law enforcement was notified that her adoptive father, a minister, had severely beaten her, records show. Cummings, says she was never sexually abused at the home, but like many of the students, said she remembers being subjected to isolating conditions, harsh paddlings and torturous physical punishment for infractions as small as asking an unwelcome question or forming friendships with other girls. (handout photo)

Cummings, like many of the students from the home, said she remembers being subjected to isolating conditions, harsh paddlings and torturous physical punishment for infractions as small as asking an unwelcome question or forming friendships with other girls.

"The only way you weren't in fear of some kind of negative repercussion was if you walked around and read the Bible," said Cummings, 43, of Metairie.

One night, she and two other girls devised an escape plan. They went to bed with their clothes under their pajamas and, mid-morning, climbed out though a window they had secretly propped open earlier in a way that would not trip the alarm. They ran across the yard with the Ford family's German shepherds howling and trailing them and scaled the fence. An electric jolt shook Cumming's body when she touched the barbed wire. She tried again, finding a corner spot where two posts met and hoisted herself over.

A law enforcement officer stopped when he saw the girls running near the edge of the woods. He put the girls in his car, drove them to the station, where he asked if he could call their parents.

"Don't you want to go home?" he asked.

As desperately as Cummings wanted to leave New Bethany, the prospect of returning to her adoptive parents terrified her. Social workers had concluded she had been beaten there. It was in papers and court documents. But she feared returning to New Bethany meant a similarly harsh physical punishment awaited her.
Recently, Tara Cummings talked to reporters about her experiences at the New Bethany Home for Girls. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune)

"They are going to beat the s--- out of us," Cummings remembers pleading. It was not uncommon, she said, for her to get 45 licks with a paddle in one sitting. "Enough licks," she said, "that the other person's arm would get worn out."

The officer listened. He asked the girls if they needed anything before he returned them to the home. Cummings requested scissors for a haircut, which she said was forbidden at the home. The officer drove the girls back to New Bethany. When the metal gates of the New Bethany compound closed behind the cruiser, Cummings said, her dread "felt like getting sucked in by a moldy vacuum cleaner."

The officer stood before the house mother and put his hand on Cummings' shoulder.

"I will be back," he told the woman, Cummings remembers. "If she has a mark on her -- anything -- this whole place will be shut down."

That was in 1983.

***

Because Scott won't talk about the details of that taped interview in 1991, it's not clear what New Bethany leaders knew or suspected when they closed the home, albeit temporarily.

But four women who have filed recent police reports saying they were sexually abused by Ford give accounts of abuse from various periods. One lived at the home from 1976 to 1977; another from 1981 to 1984; the third in 1980 and again in the early 1990s; and the fourth resided there from 1988 to 1990.

Despite persistent, documented allegations of physical abuse over the years New Bethany was open, it's difficult to find any similarly documented allegations of sexual abuse.

Storey, the former Arcadia police chief who went on to serve as Bienville County Sheriff, now 82, says he doesn't remember it coming up in all the conversations he or his deputies had with runaways from the home.

"I had never talked to the first one who told me that they had been sexually abused," he said. "Not the first one."
An archival photo from the New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia Louisiana. Numerous confirmed reports of child abuse surfaced over the years. No one was never prosecuted, including founder and pastor Mack Ford. (handout photo)

Jeffrey Dion, an expert in child sexual abuse, said that's not uncommon -- and the reasons why child sex victims may take decades to go public with their stories of abuse are numerous.

Dion is deputy executive director of the National Centers for Victims of Crime and a child sex abuse survivor himself. He said that often children either block out the experience or else don't realize until later that they were harmed by what happened to them. Because children who are sexually abused are at higher risk of suffering from other problems later in life -- alcohol or drug abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, sex addiction or even further involvement in abusive relationships -- they often find themselves dealing with the cycle of fallout from those issues before they make the connection between those problems and their childhood abuse.

By the time adults work up the courage to report their abuse to authorities, if they ever do, they can find themselves besieged with mixed emotions including outrage, guilt, sadness, anger and vulnerability.

"That's why false allegations of old abuse are really quite rare," Dion said. "Because it's not a pleasant thing to deal with. Oftentimes, survivors will do everything they can to get on with their lives and avoid making their report."

***

In December, several women journeyed from different parts of the country to help support a woman as she made a statement to police describing abuses at the home, including repeated sexual abuse by Ford.
Jennifer Halter is comforted by Teresa Frye just inside the Bienville Parish Courthouse building in Arcadia, Louisiana. Jennifer was there to report sexual abuse that she said occurred to her 25 years before, when she was a teenager at the Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune)

John Ballance, sheriff of Bienville Parish, listened to Jennifer Halter, 38, of Nevada, recount part of her story to his detectives. As she described years of sexual abuse starting at age 14, he stepped back in his office. Seated at a desk beneath a plaque that reads "My boss is a Jewish carpenter," he thought back to the runaway he had encountered years ago when he was a state trooper.

"If that home was in operation when I was sheriff, me and the preacher would have had a problem," he said.

Ballance said that back in 1975, he didn't know what he knows now about how to help runaways. So, he put the girl in his cruiser and drove her to the courthouse, where he phoned her father in the Midwest. "Daddy, I'm 18 today," she said. She handed the phone back to the trooper.

"I don't want her," the man on the other end told Ballance. "Take her back."

Ballance hung up and looked at the tearful girl. "As far as I'm concerned, you can walk out of here." He left her sitting in the courthouse and, he said, never saw her again.

He said he wishes now he had done more.

***

Shannon Scott says the other person who was in the room at the time she gave her report was Nora Carter. She's 72 now, goes by Nora Carter Shepherd, lives in Indiana and said she can't figure out why women who were residents at New Bethany can't stop dwelling on what happened to them there.

"That's so long ago, a person should have been able to go on with their life," she said in a phone interview.

Shepherd won't discuss Scott's memory of the tape-recorded conversation. "I did what was needed to be done. That's all I'm going to say."

Several of the former residents who talked to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and others who commented online over the years say they remember Shepherd for her wide and forceful swing with a paddle. Asked about the reports of physical abuse at the home -- and the memories some of these women have of her -- Shepherd said the standards for abuse back then were not the same as today. She said adults today could get in trouble for "looking crooked" at a child.

"No punishment was ever administered unless Mack Ford sent down a directive to do it," she said. "I don't know about physical abuse. I know some of the kids there had never had any correction in their lives and that's why their lives were out of control."

Asked if she ever knew of sexual abuse there, Shepherd says she was unaware.

Then, she qualifies it.

"Not with any children," she said.

She paused and then declined to go into detail.

A political dust-up last spring at Louisiana College, a private Christian school in Pineville, dredged up some of these lingering questions about who knew what at New Bethany Home for Girls in late 1991 and early 1992.
Former Louisiana College vice president Tim Johnson was at one point on the board of New Bethany Home for Girls. Johnson is Mack Ford's son-in-law. (AP Photo)

Timothy Johnson, former executive vice president of Louisiana College, says he can't talk about it now on advice from attorneys. But while he was embroiled in a political battle with the college's president, an anonymous blog called Chuckles Travels claimed that Johnson, 57, Mack Ford's son-in-law, knew about a girl's complaint of sexual abuse at the home in 1991 and failed to contact authorities.

The blog post said that a girl tape-recorded a sexual assault by Mack Ford, and, when Johnson became aware of it, he chose to send the girl home and shutter the compound for a time instead of reporting the matter to police.

In a March 13, 2013, email to other Louisiana College leaders, Johnson acknowledged a girl complained about sexual abuse while he was involved with the school. He said he did not send one girl home, but "sent all girls home and closed the doors."

"That night, after the girl's complaint, I gathered girls together and asked if there were any girls abused by Mack Ford," Johnson wrote. "If so, please speak up. NONE expressed anything and they had a great opportunity to do so without him present."
An archival photo from the New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, Louisiana. Numerous confirmed reports of child abuse surfaced over the years. No one was never prosecuted, including founder and pastor Mack Ford. In the last year, four women have made reports to law enforcement claiming sexual abuse at the home. (handout photo)

Johnson wrote in the email that he never heard a tape, but that his mother-in-law, Thelma Ford, was in possession of what he called "the supposed tape." He wrote that Mack Ford passed a lie detector test.

Johnson acknowledged in his email that the school reopened some time later, but said his in-laws had little contact with him after that. He wrote that he learned in 2001 that he was still listed as a board member, and he voted to close the school.

When asked recently by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune about whether he contacted police about the girl's complaint that she had been sexually abused, Johnson said he isn't allowed to discuss the matter because he could be a witness in a legal case involving his now estranged father-in-law.

"Once we are confident that there will be no trials, I will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have," he wrote in an email.

For her part, Nora Carter Shepherd said that she did speak up: "If there was something that was wrong, I reported it. Not to the sheriff's department, but to other board members or preachers or others," she said.

She said she's still glad she worked at the home, as imperfect as it may have been. Asked if she had any regrets about her time there, she said she has one.

"I regret that if these girls had these things happen to them that they didn't come down and talk to me about it."

***

Part 3: An experience with a New Bethany runaway still haunts a couple 20 years later.

***

Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@nola.com or 504.717.7701.

Correction: An earlier version of this post gave the incorrect name of Jeffrey Dion's affiliation. He is deputy executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime.

New Bethany Home for Girls: Timeline
Print By Dan Swenson, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Email the author
on April 03, 2014 at 1:49 PM, updated April 08, 2014 at 9:12 PM

New Bethany Home for Girls survived for three decades amid law enforcement inquiries, court battles and accusations of abuse. A chronology of key events in the compound's legal history:
Mack Ford, left, is pictured with a girl in an archival photo from the New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, Louisiana. (handout photo)
1971
New Bethany Home for Girls is founded in Arcadia, La., by Mack Ford, a preacher with the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church denomination.
1975
December: Ford is arrested on four counts of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon after the Bienville Parish Sheriff receives a report that another employee of New Bethany fired a shotgun into the back of a car carrying four brothers and driving on a road that cuts through the compound. A witness would tell The Times-Picayune in 1983 that Ford was one of several to arrive at the scene after the four young men bailed out of the car and started running for safety -- and that Ford emerged from his vehicle with a rifle. The case was never pursued in court, according to news accounts.
1980
Louisiana Department of Health and Human Resources tries to close the school for refusing to allow state inspection and licensing. A district judge rules the state lacks the authority to do so.
1981
May: L.D. Rapier, manager for New Bethany Home for Boys in Longstreet, La., is arrested and charged with cruelty to children after four boys who ran from the home say they were beaten. Ford is quoted in a wire story saying the school is being harassed, the boys can't be trusted and the school uses "old fashioned ways -- discipline." The school is soon closed and the charges against Rapier are dropped.
1982
October: New Bethany Home For Boys in Longstreet home is relocated to Walterboro, S.C.

Two girls keep watch on the road as their classmates cross at the New Bethany Home for Girls in this archive photo from 1983.
1983
March: Woody Jenkins, then a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, writes an article for the Christian Law Association Newsletter stating that New Bethany, which had 250 girls, was not only cleared of charges that girls were abused there, state officials conclude that "no abuse occurred in the case in question" and "the home was found to be operated in an outstanding manner."
June: A graduate of New Bethany Home for Girls who says she attended the school for two years sends a letter to law enforcement, then-Gov. Dave Treen, Jenkins and other elected state officials saying she witnessed abuse.

August: Then-Bienville Parish Sheriff Arvis Whitman is quoted in The Times-Picayune saying the home is "a little penitentiary."

1984
May: New Bethany Home for Boys in Waltersboro, S.C., closes and 37 students are taken into protective custody after authorities find a 14-year-old boy sleeping in a windowless padlocked cell, where he had been for several days. Two employees are charged with unlawful neglect of a child and conspiracy to commit unlawful neglect as well as kidnapping.
September: The Waltersboro employees plead no contest to a single, lesser charge of false imprisonment.

1986
September: Ford opens a new entity called the New Bethany Church Boarding Academy in the old, shuttered New Bethany Baptist Home for Boys facility in Waltersboro, S.C. A judge finds Ford in contempt of court, saying Ford admitted residential students under the new name against a court order. But the judge doesn't fine or jail Ford and instead allows him to keep operating the new school.

A newspaper clipping from The News-Star in 1988 shows girls leaving the Home following a raid.
1988
June: Twenty-eight students are removed from New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, La., following complaints of abuse by two runaways. Though all girls are given the option of leaving, 24 at first remain. New Bethany staff members refuse to cooperate in the investigation, decline to identify themselves and take photos of state workers. According to court documents, interviews with 47 girls produce information that supports allegations of abuse, extreme emotional abuse and threat of further harm or injury: "Many of the residents were exhibiting great anxiety." Ford denies allegations of abuse, but says the home does use a wooden paddle for discipline.
July 7: Social services director for the state of Louisiana signs an affidavit saying that he has reasonable cause to believe children have been abused and that male residents were hidden from the facility prior to investigators arriving at the home. He demands a full list of names of kids enrolled as well as employees, volunteers and patrons, and says it is imperative that he interview Ford and other staff. Judge Robert Butler signs an order authorizing him to enter the facility and conduct interviews.

July 12: New Bethany files a motion for protective order from Butler's order.

July 26: Ford delivers a sermon before about 300 people at Merrywoods Baptist Church and acknowledges paddling girls who misbehave "as a last resort." Behind him, 16 girls from the home wear navy dresses, white blouses and red vests. "The bureaucrats don't want us to teach them our faith," The Associated Press quotes Ford as saying.

November: The Louisiana 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal rules state officials have the right to enter the compound without infringing on New Bethany's rights of notice or due process. But it also finds that the state was not authorized to require physical or psychological exams of staff, nor was it authorized to remove students. The court's argument against removal of children hinged in part on the fact that child welfare officials did not see cause enough to remove all the children, but left some behind.

1989
May: Ford files a federal lawsuit against the State of Louisiana, requesting a permanent order to keep government officials from interfering in New Bethany operations.
1992
January: The Associated Press reports that New Bethany Home for Girls has closed, at least temporarily. Ford's wife, Thelma Ford, cites reorganization of the nonprofit. "After 21 years," she says, "everybody deserves a break."
July: A judge dismisses Ford's federal lawsuit. Both parties are ordered to bear their own costs and attorneys fees.
Diagram of the New Bethany Home for Girls
1996
June 21: State fire marshal and child welfare investigators arrive at New Bethany Home for Girls. Welfare workers want to interview about 80 of 200 students about allegations of abuse and neglect. They are turned away. "It's a conspiracy," Ford is quoted saying in a newspaper article. "They are after my hide." The home had not been inspected by the state fire marshal in 10 years, even though policy required such facilities be inspected once a year. Court records indicate the child welfare inquiry was prompted by a child who suffered head injuries and, as a result of untreated puncture wounds, impetigo. But an attorney for Ford contends they wanted to question the children about the school's religious teachings.
June 28: Ford agrees to let fire marshal inspect the premises but demands the inspectors must be from Baton Rouge. But he fails to deliver students to state child welfare workers to be interviewed about the child abuse allegations.

August: Ford closes the home, then files a lawsuit in federal court against the state fire marshal and the Department of Social Services, charging the state has violated his civil rights in an attempt to shut the school down because it opposes his fundamentalist Christian views.

1999
September: 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a lower court's decision, determining that Ford has shown no evidence that fire inspectors and state social workers are plotting to shut down New Bethany Home for Girls.
2001
June: The board of directors for New Bethany Home for Girls votes to close the residential boarding school and turns over all property and bank accounts to New Bethany Baptist Church. "Having lost state and federal cases and with no further recourse available, it has become necessary to seek other options for the holdings," minutes from the meeting state.

Jennifer Halter, front, and Teresa Frye walk towards the Bienville Parish Courthouse building where Halter filed a rape report.
2013
July: Joanna Wright, 53, of Houston, Texas, drives to Arcadia, La., to make a report with the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office claiming sexual abuse by Mack Ford.
August: Simone Jones, 46, makes a report with local law enforcement at Elk County Sheriff's Office in Kansas claiming sexual abuse by Mack Ford.

December: Jennifer Halter, 39, of Las Vegas, Nev., travels to Arcadia, La., to make a report with the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office claiming sexual abuse by Mack Ford and others.

2014
January: A fourth woman in Massilon, Ohio, confirms making a report to her local law enforcement claiming sexual abuse by Mack Ford.
Sources: News clippings; state and federal court documents; and interviews; compiled by staff writer Rebecca Catalanello.

Read the stories in this series:

Part 1:
One woman's journey Part 2:
30 years of controversy Part 3:
Couple remembers a runaway Part 4:
Former resident helps victims
View full size
Mack Ford, left, is pictured with a girl in an archival photo from the New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia Louisiana. Numerous confirmed reports of child abuse surfaced over the years. No one was ever prosecuted, including founder and pastor Mack Ford. In the last year, four women have made reports to law enforcement claiming sexual abuse at the home. (handout photo)

New Bethany runaway still haunts a Louisiana couple 32 years later

The New Bethany School For Girls was located in Arcadia, a town about half way between Shreveport and Monroe Louisiana, off of Interstate 20. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Nola.com / The Times-Picayune)
Print By Rebecca Catalanello, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 04, 2014 at 11:52 AM, updated April 04, 2014 at 12:16 PM

The girl rose from the ditch like an animal in headlights.

In 32 years, Ralph and Elizabeth Jordan haven't forgotten the sight.

"We just saw a kid," Elizabeth Jordan remembers. "I thought if she was desperate enough to come out of the ditch, something was wrong."

Ralph slowed his green van along Highway 9 in Arcadia, La. The couple's two young daughters were in the back seat. Elizabeth cracked her door to speak to the girl. Without asking, the girl climbed in.

"Take me to the sheriff's office," she begged as she crawled over Elizabeth. "Take me to the sheriff's office!"

As the Jordans discussed what to do, a car passed them on Highway 9, then slowed and pulled across the road to block them. Four or five men jumped out, according to a story in The Times-Picayune from the time.

"Do you have a girl in there?" one man demanded. Another pulled open the passenger side door before Elizabeth jerked it back shut.

"We're taking her to the sheriff's office," she said.

A second car appeared and blocked the van's rear before the two cars guided the vehicle to the New Bethany Home for Girls and forced them to relinquish the girl back to the home.

"We'll visit you," Elizabeth Jordan said before watching the girl disappear into a circle of people at the home.

Then, a man she says she recognized as Mack Ford, the preacher who started New Bethany as a ministry to wayward youth, spoke up.

"No," Ford said. "You can't do that."

They never saw her again.

Over the years, Elizabeth and Ralph Jordan have wondered about the girl and whether she was OK. Until that August night in 1982, they had always heard good things about New Bethany. Elizabeth's older brother had grown up with Ford. The couple supported their own church's efforts to raise food and money to support the home. But this strange scene left them ambivalent and worried. They went on and reported to deputies what had happened near the rural compound.

"It still weighs on my mind," Elizabeth said. "I just always hoped that she got her life back on track and it got beyond that and whatever was troubling her, it got better."

The Shreveport couple own a cabin in that area that they travel to on weekends. Over the years as they have passed this same stretch of highway near New Bethany, they've remembered the girl and the night. They have watched the girls' home deteriorate, with vines growing over buildings, grass creeping, unmanicured.

She wonders about the preacher. She wonders more about the girl.

She can't remember how she looked or what she wore. But there is one detail she never forgot.

The girl's last name was Silva.

***

Rebecca Silva was 14 that August night she decided to run. She had been at New Bethany about a year.

She remembers walking out of church with the other girls and seeing the opening in the fence that surrounded the New Bethany Home for Girls.

Thirty-two years ago, 14-year-old Rebecca Silva tried to run away from New Bethany Home for Girls. Silva now lives in the San Antonio, Texas, area and says she is still dealing with the scars of her time at New Bethany. (handout photo)

"I don't know what my thought process was," she said. "But I knew I wanted to leave."

Silva scaled the fence, tore an arrow-sized hole in the inner side of her left arm, then ran down the road, desperately hoping to find help before the New Bethany staff found her.

A big green van passed and slowed. She saw the face of a woman in the passenger seat and begged her for help.

"I remember apologizing for New Bethany," she said, "saying it wasn't a bad place. I just wanted to go home."

When NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune located Silva and told her about the Jordans' memory of her, she began to sob into the phone.

She remembers the Jordans and imagines they were scared for their safety, for their children. She doesn't blame them. She was scared, too.

"I don't remember what happened to me when I came back," she said.

Silva said she has struggled hard not to relive the details of her experience at New Bethany. "I don't think I want to remember that because if everything everybody says is true, I don't want any more memories triggered," she said.

Silva, who now lives in the San Antonio area, developed a 20-year career as a nurse. But she simultaneously spent a lifetime combatting an inner voice that tells her she is not a good person. "The mental abuse, the spiritual abuse, it's embedded in me and it's shaped who I became."

She battled a rare type of uterine cancer, survived two suicide attempts and recently lost her job and entered treatment for alcohol dependence.

Silva, who had never sought therapy until now, said the home wounded her in ways that haunt her.

"I still struggle to this day with my belief in God," Silva said. "And I think that was a lot of the root and cause of this. I think my time there was detrimental to my well-being."

She said she is both happy and sad that after all this time, the Jordans still remember her. She hasn't forgotten them, either.

"You can thank them for me please," she said. "They must be very good people."

***

Part 4: A former New Bethany resident takes on the mantle of activism.

***

Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at 504.717.7701 or rcatalanello@nola.com.

About this story: How we reported 'The Long Road: To the Gates of New Bethany and Back'

Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

By Rebecca Catalanello, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 02, 2014 at 3:35 PM, updated April 02, 2014 at 9:05 PM

The story of Jennifer Halter's journey to file a police report alleging child sexual abuse is derived from a combination of firsthand observations, interviews, court documents, and archived news reports.

Reporter Rebecca Catalanello and photojournalist Kathleen Flynn, both of NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, spent Dec. 4 to 7, 2013, in Shreveport with Halter and several other women as they set out for the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office and New Bethany Home for Girls.

The Long Road: To the Gates of New Bethany and Back

Wednesday: Halter travels back to New Bethany
Thursday: A look back at 30 years of New Bethany Home for Girls
Friday: An experience with a New Bethany runaway still haunts a couple 20 years later; and a former New Bethany resident takes on the mantle of activism.
Sunday: A rich, multimedia repackaging of the entire series

The opening scene in which Halter boards the plane is based on interviews with Halter and her travel companion, Jeneen Miller of Las Vegas. The details about Halter's arrival at New Bethany as a 14-year-old girl are based on interviews with Halter. Halter's mother did not respond to requests to be interviewed about her memory of the event.

Descriptions of the shared memories of New Bethany were based on extensive interviews with -- and observations of conversations among -- Halter, Joanna Wright, Tara Cummings, Teresa Frye and Simone Jones. Many of these details are also described in court documents, past news accounts, and written accounts by former New Bethany residents.

Scenes at the Sam's Town Hotel & Casino in Shreveport and the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office are based on firsthand observations by Catalanello and Flynn, except for what happened after Halter was called back to talk with a detective. That moment was observed by Jeneen Miller, who accompanied Halter as she gave her statement behind closed doors. Miller later spoke with Catalanello about what happened as Halter was being interviewed.

Details about what Halter says was the first time Mack Ford sexually abused her are based solely on interviews with Halter. She says she gave the same account to Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office investigators. While the agency and Louisiana State Police confirm they are investigating the claims, neither agency will release details of the report in an ongoing investigation.

The Dec. 6, 2013, scene as the 39-year-old Halter arrived at the gate of the former New Bethany Home for Girls was observed by Catalanello and Flynn. The man who stood down the road did not identify himself to the women, but they all believed it was Ford. After the women left, Flynn and Catalanello approached the man and asked to speak with him, capturing photos, video and audio of the interaction. He declined to be interviewed and referred the journalists to an attorney. Flynn and Catalanello shared audio and photos of the interaction with people who know Ford; they identified the man as Mack Ford.

Neither Ford nor his wife responded to letters sent to the home at 120 Hiser Road. The attorney to whom Ford referred the journalists said he had no knowledge of a current investigation, had not represented New Bethany in decades and did not feel qualified to talk about the allegations.

Renewed Allegations of Sexual Assault at New Bethany Home for Girls

December 9, 2013 Religion Child Abuse, Christianity, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, Jack Hyles, Lester Roloff, Mack Ford, Sexual Abuse

Tom Aswell, in a post titled, Seven former residents of New Bethany Home for Girls make emotional return to Arcadia to file charges of sexual assault, had this to say to Mack Ford and the New Bethany Home for Girls:

The decades-long controversy surrounding New Bethany Home for Girls in Bienville Parish was renewed last Friday, Dec. 6 when seven former residents of the home returned to Arcadia so that two of the women could file formal charges of sexual assault against the now-defunct home’s owner, Rev. Mack Ford…
…Although only two of the six who flew in from North Carolina, Nevada, Florida and Texas, claimed to been sexually abused while living at the home, the others said they were there to lend moral support to the two, one of whom is said to be terminally ill with an inoperable brain tumor.
Sheriff John Ballance, who had his own experience with the home during his career as a state trooper some 30 years ago, met with the women, took the statements of the two claiming sexual abuse, and promised to do everything possible to resolve the matter.
An earlier statement of one of the alleged victims was turned over to state police in Bossier City in October, Ballance said.
In September, Ballance told Louisiana Voice he had picked up a runaway from the home decades ago when he was a state trooper. Instructed by the sheriff’s department to return her to the facility, he said he refused to force her to go back because of her claims of abuse.
Allegations about beatings, handcuffing and other forms of punishment of girls at the home first came to light when the Baton Rouge Advocate began an investigation of the home in 1974. Editors, however, quickly killed the investigation before any stories could be written and the issue lay dormant until the late 1980s when the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Resources began looking into abuse allegations. In 1988, the state raided the unlicensed home located south of Arcadia on LA. 9 and removed 29 girls from the facility…
…There were claims of girls at New Bethany having to clean toilets with their bare hands, being locked in isolation with only a bucket for a toilet, girls being handcuffed to their beds and being made to stand all day with no restroom breaks, beatings with wooden dowels, PVC pipe, paddles, belts and limbs…
…The claims of physical abuse and rape are not new to the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) Church with which New Bethany and Ford are affiliated.
The First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, received a great deal of notoriety over the sexual trysts two of its ministers had with female church members over a period of several years. Their misconduct was subsequently repeated at other churches where they ministered.
And when their behavior was revealed, it was the women victims who were required to stand before the congregation and apologize and ask forgiveness for tempting the men, who invariably went unpunished and indeed, continued to receive near idol status from the congregation.
Likewise, group homes where abuse has been documented tend to receive devout support from area churches. Instead of asking those who run the homes to explain their behavior, their accusers are routinely treated as pariahs while the accused are welcomed as heroes at church rallies on their behalf.
Adherents to IFB dogma, for example, discourage intermarriage or even any contact with those of other religious beliefs, distrust government, favor home schooling, and believe that spankings should commence as early as 15 months of age…

Please read Aswell’s entire post. It is quite informative.

I appreciate Tom Aswell bringing the heinous past of Mack Ford and New Bethany back into the public spotlight. The only way to eradicate these kind of homes and the influence men like Lester Roloff, Jack Hyles, and Mack Ford have over IFB churches (even from the grave) is to shine the light on their vile, dark secrets.

HT: Teresa Frye for making me aware of Aswell’s article.

Notes

Article on Mack Ford

Mack Ford posts on Chuckles Travels

Mother Jones article that mentions New Bethany Home for Girls

Another article by Tom Aswell about New Bethany Home for Girls

Survivors of New Bethany Homes Facebook group

Google web search for New Bethany Home for Girls