MO boarding school promised ‘Christian education.’ Ex-students call it ‘hellhole’ of abuse

In their days, months and years at a secluded boarding school in southeast Missouri, they say they lost their childhood.

Instead of slumber parties with friends, family dinners, campouts — even prom — they spent their time outside doing labor and extensive exercises, were given ice bucket showers and forced to stand at a wall for hours when in trouble, and too often went to bed hungry when food was withheld.

All of this was at a faith-based unlicensed school where they say the smallest of students would get the worst treatment.

These are not students of Circle of Hope Girls Ranch and Agape Boarding School, facilities in Missouri that were investigated in 2020 and 2021 and are now closed. They attended Lighthouse Christian Academy, yet another Missouri unlicensed boarding school that until recently operated for two decades unchecked by local and state authorities.

Some were taken to the campus by force, others were dropped off by parents who were lured into thinking the school, run by ABM Ministries, would help their children and straighten them out through strong discipline and the word of God. Literature promoting the school touted horses and other animals, and parents were told their children would learn responsibility by caring for them.

Former ABM students, though, say they learned little at the school, other than how to endure the harsh environment and live with the pain.

“After a certain amount of time out there, I realized it was just keep your head down. Don’t ask questions,” Aaron Blackburn, now 32, said. “We knew what needed to be done to make your time easier if possible. … It was a survival thing.”

The Star has spoken to more than a dozen former students in the days before and after owners of the school — Larry and Carmen Musgrave, ages 57 and 64 — were charged with kidnapping in March and the school ultimately closed. Both have pleaded not guilty and their attorney did not respond to multiple calls for comment.

Their arrests, says Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch, were just the beginning of an extensive investigation.

When investigators spoke to Larry Musgrave after his arrest, he denied everything, the sheriff said.

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

For many former students, hearing that Finch had arrested the owners of the school was also the beginning of their healing — something they say they’ve been desperate for.

“It’s the first time I could breathe in 13 years,” said Michael McCarthy, who left ABM in 2012 and cried after he learned that “Mr. Larry” and “Miss Carmen” had been arrested. “It just felt very vindicating. People were listening to us.

“It’s all amazing, you know?”

‘Children are screaming for you to help them’

Weeks before the Musgraves were arrested and charged, Aralysa Baker told The Star that the couple had fooled authorities and others for decades.

“They’re not what you think they are,” the former student said in February after several current students had run away. “They might have painted themselves as really doing the Lord’s work. They are not. They’re abusing those kids just like they abused me and my fellow classmates.

“And even though you walk through the door (of the school), and you think that everything is fine, those children are screaming for you to help them.”

Baker said she knows that because nearly two decades ago, she was one of those children. And she still thinks about the time she could have said something and didn’t.

Today, Baker — a stay-at-home mom in Oklahoma — is one of the leaders of a group of former students who stay connected on Facebook and a group chat. Many of them went to the Wayne County unlicensed school between 2004 and 2015.

Several years ago they tried spreading the word on social media and forums about the abuse they say they suffered there. Their main goal was to help the kids still at the school.

Nothing came of that effort. But when several boys fled the school over a period of three weeks in January, they came together again. Knowing that they would need to be the voice of those attending the school now. And wishing that someone had done that for them.

In 2007, when girls were still part of the school and Baker was a student, she was “yanked out of the shower” one day to talk to a law enforcement officer. He had come to do a “welfare check on me.” After she had been at the school for nearly two years, her great-grandparents finally found out where she was and wanted to make sure she was OK.

“Carmen told me … don’t even say a word,” Baker said. “I threw on all my clothes. And whenever I went out there, (the officer) asked me if I was OK and I just shook my head.

“I didn’t make eye contact with him. I stepped away from him. We were in the hallway and Larry and Carmen were like, staring me down. I know they had eyes on me.”

She said she also knew that if she said anything about the constant berating, the withholding of food and students being restrained by staff leaders, she would be punished once the officer left. Plus, she said, the Musgraves constantly drilled into students’ heads that authorities were on their side.

“The fear that runs through your head is he’s not going to believe me,” said Baker, now 31. “I’m gonna say that something bad is happening. And then it’s gonna get back to Larry and Carmen and I don’t know what they’re gonna do with me. I just keep my mouth shut, so I don’t get in trouble.

“... I barely answered yes or no to anything that (the officer) said and he ended up leaving,” Baker said. “And then Carmen gave me a pat on the back and told me I did a good job.”

On that day, she wasn’t punished.

But throughout her more than two years at the school, Baker said she was mentally and physically abused and saw many other students treated the same way.

“Carmen could manhandle anybody,” Baker said. “She could take down the girls, she could take down the boys — it didn’t matter. That woman is strong, at least she was whenever I was there. She had no problem throwing us around.”

Larry, she said, “liked to put people in headlocks.”

“I thought I was the only one,” Baker said. “I was not.”

What she struggled with then, and still does, is how staff treated the little kids, as young as 8 and 9.

“The older boys, they (staff leaders) had no problem taking them down,” Baker said. “But they didn’t instigate those physical altercations the way that they did with the smaller kids.”

One young boy in particular, who she and other former students said was constantly taunted and abused by staff, has stayed in her mind since she left the school in December 2007. She never knew how long he stayed at ABM and how he survived, both physically and mentally.

“He was so little,” she said. “He very much had the brunt of the treatment.”

During Baker’s interview with the Wayne County sheriff, she spoke about this student and the abuse she said he endured.

“I drew a diagram of the dining hall so I could show the sheriff, ‘You know, this is the table (the young boy) was sitting at whenever (a staff leader) picked him up and slammed him between the wall and the table. I wanted him to know I saw it with my own two eyeballs.”

When one of the former students in the group chat said in March that he found that student online and he was doing well, “it was like an explosion went off,” Baker said. Everyone wanted to know how he was doing and where he was.

Her former classmate is living in the Midwest and is married. Baker was able to talk with him over the phone.

“Goosebumps,” she said of her reaction when she learned he was doing well. “I started crying.”

‘Nothing ever came of it’

Aaron Blackburn remembers a woman showing up at the secluded southeast Missouri boarding school more than 15 years ago and wanting to talk with students individually.

Josh, a classmate, had run away again, and this time the state had apparently taken notice. Multiple former students of Lighthouse Christian Academy, whom The Star has spoken to, said the woman was a social worker with Missouri’s child welfare agency.

One of her questions has stuck with Blackburn all these years: “Has anyone been restrained here?”

“Everyone I talked to from the school said they didn’t say anything,” Blackburn said in late February. “I damn sure said something.”

He and another former student told The Star that they reported mental and physical abuse at the unlicensed school to the state investigator in 2008 or 2009. They described treatment that included students being restrained, forced to do extensive labor and exercises in extreme weather, and often not given enough food.

“Nothing ever came of it,” Blackburn said. “That was the scary thing. Josh went home. And I never saw a police officer, just that one lady I talked to from social services. … I felt no one was listening to me or anyone else around me.”

From Mississippi, Blackburn attended Lighthouse Christian Academy from the beginning of 2007 until mid-2009. His dad dropped him off when he was 14 and only visited him twice; his mom went to Wayne County once during his time there, he said.

He hadn’t been at the school long, he said, when he realized he needed to keep his head down and do what he was told just to get by. It was a lesson he ultimately learned one afternoon six months into his time at the school.

“I liked to look up to see who was walking by me — that’s all it was,” Aaron said. “Looking up at a girl walking by.”

Afterward, “Mr. Larry” and another male staff leader took him outside, he said.

“They told me that if I felt like I was man enough to look at girls around here, I was man enough to fight them,” Blackburn said. And the men began to hit him, he said.

“They were fighting me,” he said. “Punching me in the face and stomach.”

There were moments that hurt Blackburn even more. These were when he saw what happened to others, especially the younger ones.

“I’ve seen specific kids that were folded up like a pretzel (by staff) because they just wouldn’t eat,” he said. “This one particular kid … he used to get folded up all the time, headlocked, hands behind their back all of the way up to the top of his head.

“I’m surprised that little man’s arms weren’t broken,” Blackburn said. “Because they would twist him up like a pretzel.”

(Blackburn identified the boy as the same one Baker saw being abused.)

Seeing what happened to Josh, the boy who ran away, also stays with Blackburn. After one of the times he ran, he said staff put a heavy “tree chain” around Josh.

“They padlocked him with a chain around his waist and made him drag it around,” Blackburn said. “There was a river, creek or something like that around the school and every now and then they’d take us down to go swimming and of course they made Josh get in the creek with the chain on.

“He slept in it all the time until I think he could convince them to get it off.”

For more than a decade now, Blackburn said he’s pushed the memories and experiences deep down into a place where he rarely revisits them. He’s had to move on, for himself and his family and his son.

It was only earlier this year, after current allegations of abuse surfaced, that he said he’s been forced to face his years at the school.

“It f----- me up in the head,” Blackburn said. “Trust in people is hard. Physically, I’ve been able to make the right decisions, but in my head, it’s still pretty tough.”

When a group of former students joined forces earlier this year to get the word out about what they see as the mistreatment at the Wayne County school, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to get involved. He and others had tried this before, to get leaders and law enforcement to do something. And that effort went nowhere.

But now that the Wayne County sheriff is actively investigating, Blackburn said he hopes officials in the state are listening.

Though the doors of Lighthouse Christian Academy closed in early March, he said he knows there are other schools like it that are still open.

“There are a lot of kids that need you all’s help to get them out of situations like this,” Blackburn said. “They really feel like no one’s there to help them.”

‘Some nights I did go hungry’

Philip McNair, now 22, admits he caused some trouble as a preteen. Always testing limits, talking back.

After his parents caught him stealing a computer from his middle school, he said it was their “final straw.” And in 2012, when he was in the sixth grade, they drove him from St. Louis to the school in southeast Missouri where he stayed three years.

“I felt like I deserved to be there,” said McNair, of Missouri, who does not blame his parents for his time at the school which he called a “hellhole.”

“It may look like a nice Christian place but it was like a prison to us.”

By the time McNair was a student at the school, it only accepted boys. The school stopped accepting female students after principal Craig W. Smith Jr was accused in a federal lawsuit of grooming a female student after she enrolled in 2005.

Court records show that Smith and the Musgraves were the subjects of that 2009 civil suit. It alleged that Smith “committed multiple acts of sexual bodily contact” with the student — including intercourse — from September 2007 until June 2008.

The lawsuit says the girl’s parents notified the Musgraves in late 2007 that they were concerned about the degree of Smith’s personal relationship with their daughter, but nothing was done to prevent further contact between them. The lawsuit was settled in 2010, court records show, with a $100,000 judgment entered against Smith and a $750,000 judgment against ABM Ministries and the Musgraves.

Many of McNair’s waking hours at ABM, he said, were spent in the kitchen. Washing dishes, putting them away. Preparing food for the next day. Pouring cereal in bowls at night for breakfast in the morning.

After dinner, when most boys were dismissed from the table to go play board games or watch TV, the younger boys, like Philip, stayed to clean up.

“From 7 to 10 (each night) I was in the kitchen,” he said. “Miss Carmen told me it was because she didn’t want to see me get in trouble.”

So she put him to work, he said. Yet he still got in trouble, for talking back or not doing exactly as he was told.

“I was on red chip a lot,” McNair said of one of the harshest discipline levels at the school.

When he first arrived at Lighthouse Christian Academy, McNair realized kids were classified by a chip system. There weren’t actual chips, just references to the level of discipline each child was on.

Kids in good standing were on white chip, which meant they ate first and had big portions. They could sit on the couch when they watched TV and take showers first.

And basically, McNair and other former students said, those kids were on “Miss Carmen’s good side.”

Kids on blue chip — meaning, McNair said, “you’re not doing too good, you’re not doing too bad, you’re doing right” — still had some privileges. They wouldn’t get as many advantages as students on white chip, though.

If a student was put on red chip, they were considered to be on “Miss Carmen’s bad side” and had to stand for hours at a time, often looking at the wall. They didn’t get to eat what some classmates ate, McNair and others said. And by the time they could take a shower, the water was cold. Black chip was the harshest level of discipline, which McNair said he fortunately was never on.

When on black chip, students said they got even less food, more physical punishments like hours of exercise and more time standing at the wall.

When McNair was on red chip, he said he would work in the kitchen “almost the whole entire day.” From the time he was 11 years old to 14.

“There’s not one time I would go to the school room and do my school stuff,” he said of being on red chip. “I’d be in the kitchen working, sweeping, doing the dishes, breaking down boxes. I’d do more chores to make it look nice for Miss Carmen. … Hell yeah, it was child labor.”

While on red or black chip, the food was the worst, he and other former students said. Breakfast could be a tortilla with peanut butter on it or one pack of unflavored oatmeal.

Standing as they ate, students on red or black chips would have to watch their classmates enjoy big portions of good food, McNair said.

“I would think, ‘ Why are they eating more than I am?’” McNair said. “ … Some nights I did go hungry.”

Because he was so young, he said he didn’t truly know “what’s right, what’s wrong.”

“Or what’s supposed to happen, what’s not supposed to happen,” McNair said. “You’re so young your brain doesn’t comprehend. To them, they can use that power against you, like, ‘Oh yeah, this is fine. This is normal.’

“I didn’t know any better.”

‘Where the Hell Am I?’

After Michael McCarthy’s mom and dad left him at Lighthouse Christian Academy in the summer of 2010, he began to cry.

That’s when, he said, co-owner Larry Musgrave began to laugh and make fun of him in front of dozens of kids his age that he’d never met.

“‘What are you, a pickle lover?’” McCarthy said “Mr. Larry” asked, taunting him.

Just 16, the teen from a Philadelphia suburb felt alone and scared. And with each passing hour and day, he said recently, it only got worse.

“Mr. Larry, from almost the first day was like, ‘You look like your dog just died. At least your parents brought you. You’re lucky we didn’t have people come and kidnap you in the middle of the night.’”

Lighthouse Academy, operated by ABM Ministries, is one of many boarding schools in Missouri and other states that have used transport companies to pick kids up — often in the middle of the night while they’re sleeping.

McCarthy said all he could think of back in those early days at the school was, “Where the hell am I?”

One of the first orders that staffers gave him when he got to campus was not to make eye contact with anyone. “Keep your head down,” he was told when he walked through the campus. For the next two weeks, he said, he wasn’t allowed to look any student in the eye.

“They claimed that I was new and that I was worldly and someone who would, you know, cause problems for the other boys,” McCarthy said, referring to the fact he was coming from the “outside.” .

Musgrave’s wife, “Miss Carmen,” also gave the teen a rundown of rules. She would “tell me about the punishments, about how they would take mattresses and blankets off of the bed if you got in trouble and you would have to sleep on the wooden boards of the bed, or the bars of the bed.”

“I think she was trying to scare me,” he said.

Like several other former students The Star spoke to, McCarthy said “Miss Carmen” could be, at times, one of the better things about the school especially because she was a good cook. Former students remember meals like tater tot casserole that were a treat if they were on the two top chips (white and blue) and were able to eat it.

She could also be the worst, McCarthy said.

“She’d like love bombing you at times,” he said. “She would like to make us feel very important, to have you watch other students when we’re cleaning the bathrooms. You know, she’d give you an extra dessert here and there. Sometimes she’d smile at you and say something nice.”

Then — and this was most of the time, McCarthy said — another side came out.

“She was very, very mean. Condescending,” he said. “If you looked at her, you could get screamed at, you know. At the beginning of my stay there, I felt like Miss Carmen somewhat liked me. She trusted me. I would do dishes with her in the kitchen. I’d help her cook meals.

“But then when she found out that I was gay, she totally cut me off.”

She wouldn’t even look at him, he said.

“Anytime I would try to speak she would say ‘Don’t talk to me,’” McCarthy said. “It did feel very hopeless.”

McCarthy grew up in a religious home. And he knew as a young teen that his parents were “worried” when they learned he was gay.

“They sent me to ABM in hopes that I would get a Christian education,” he said.

At home, he was also struggling with depression and teen angst and his parents thought he needed help. He didn’t blame them for sending him to ABM — “I think they were just trying to help me, in their own way.”

It was after he turned 18, and felt he couldn’t leave the school because he had nowhere to go, that it became unbearable to be there, McCarthy said.

“I was kind of under the impression that I had to stay there,” he said. “That was something that the staff members would tell us a lot. You know, ‘When you turn 18 you’re still ours. You can’t leave. And even if you did leave, where would you go? Your parents don’t want you back home.’”

McCarthy said “Mr. Larry” told him at one point that he could leave, “but I would likely get shot by one of the neighbors for wandering around in the middle of Missouri. I was scared.”

Leaders would berate him over his sexuality. He was taken into “Mr. Larry’s” office one day.

“He was like, ‘You are a leech on society, you always have a bad attitude,’” McCarthy said the owner told him. “... He called me a pickle lover. And then he said that, ‘If you look at or speak to any of the other students for the rest of your time here, we will call the police and get you arrested for pedophilia and you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.’

“And that scared the shit out of me, because I knew that nobody would believe me.”

Soon after, he went home for a visit and on a beach day with his family, he approached his father.

“As drama-free as I could, I just said, ‘Hey, you know, I’m willing to be homeless rather than go back there. I don’t have to live with you. I can go to a shelter or something. But I do not want to go back,’” McCarthy said. “And my dad was like, ‘Well, I think it might be good for you to come home. You can go to high school at a school near here.’”

McCarthy didn’t tell his parents about the abuse at ABM. Not until earlier this year when The Star began covering the recent abuse allegations.

“He just apologized profusely and told me that if he had known, he would never have sent me there,” McCarthy said of his dad’s reaction. “Then he started crying a little bit.”

When asked what he would say to the Musgraves if he could talk to them, McCarthy said he wouldn’t say anything.

“They made a career of abusing children and taking advantage of vulnerable parents,” McCarthy said. “All in the name of God. They deserve everything that’s coming to them.”