“Rockmart”

Anneewakee opens up a third campus for troubled girls in Rockmart, Georgia. We hear from former patients about the abuse and the long term effect it has had on their bodies.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Campell Annawaki is a production of I Heart Radio. The
views and opinions express in this podcast are solely those
of the author and participants and do not necessarily represent
those of I Heart Media or its employees. Due to
discussion of traumatic, sexual, and violent content, listener discretion is advised.
The Girls campus was set back, I don't know, maybe

(00:23):
a mile and a half along a very winding gravel road.
When you pulled into North campus, the first building that
you saw was the lodge. Off to the right and
straight ahead was a bell tower, and then a stone

(00:45):
path with steps leading up to the administration building and
the clinic across the way, and what was called the
dorm behind the nick, which originally was only for v
I p S coming to stay on campus for whatever reason.

(01:10):
And that was it. That was literally all we had.
I believe that there were some trailers kind of tucked
away where more of the administration maybe clerical offices were,
but it was very primitive. Everything was painted in what

(01:30):
they called an awake beige, and it's very eerie to
find out later that these colors and the design of
the buildings, with the arches in the doorways and the
tile on the wrap round port was reflective of Mexico.

(01:57):
I was admitted to an Awake April eleven, nineteen eighty three,
and I terminated May thirty one, nineteen and I was
one thirty eight c. This is Sandy. She's as survivor

(02:18):
of Annawaki. By the late nineteen seventies, Annawaki had expanded
its reach into Florida and was now annually taking trips
into other countries, but there were still one demographic the
Annawaki Foundation was yet to reach, troubled female youth. Louis Petter,
once again using his skill as a community outreach, now

(02:42):
with a reputed treatment center with a history of working
with the state, opened up the Annawaki North Campus in Rockmar,
Georgia in nineteen seventy nine. In a letter to the
John Below Campbell Foundation, a Christian grant organization, Louis Petter
lays his plans for the new facility, quote the girls

(03:04):
program will be located on three acres of land outside
of Yorkville in Polk County. Anna Waki has been very
fortunate in having one of its very good friends provide
a financial loan to secure the land at a purchase
price of one d and thirty thousand dollars. By the
time Sandy was admitted, the program had already had over

(03:27):
one hundred patients. Sandy remembers the event that led to
her admittance. I was dating a boy that was a
little bit older than myself, and I told him at
that point that I wanted to run away from home,
so we made plans to do that, and I actually

(03:48):
was a runaway for about three weeks and turned myself
in finally, and I actually told the police it. I
wanted to be put in foster care because I was
so unhappy with my home life. And my parents showed

(04:10):
up to take me home, and they lied to me
and told me that those arrangements couldn't be made until
the following week. And so I got home, and about
an hour after I got home, they sat me down
and told me that they were going to take me

(04:32):
somewhere for evaluation, and they literally bodily threw me in
the car and they drove me straight there. I went
through a battery of testing, at which point at the
end of this they told me they were going to
admit me, and I became hysterical and ran to my

(04:57):
mother in the lobby and fell to my knees and
begged her, crying, please don't leave me here, please, you know,
I promise I'll be good. And she had some tears
running down her cheeks, but without a word, she just
turned away and walked away and left me. So that

(05:17):
was how I was told. There was no warning at all.
It was devastating. The physical labor was forced upon the
girls at the rock Mark campus, just as it was
the boys in Douglasville and Carabelle. A new campus had
to be built the rest of our day. After breakfast,

(05:40):
we would work from probably eight thirty or nine until
eleven thirty, I believe, and we did various projects, and
all of them were very physical. Sometimes we would work
on lance aping projects, working with heavy wheelbarrows, rakes, shovels,

(06:06):
digging holes post hole diggers. The hardest project that I
remember doing my first summer, we were building a campsite
at the top of a very high ridge. We were
hauling two by four's and a frames and shingles and

(06:29):
bags of mortar and cement. So at age fifteen, they
would have us bend over and they would put a
bag of mortar on our back, which weighed forty six
pounds or a bag of cement on our back which

(06:51):
weighed four pounds, and we were to hold and carry
that bag of mortar or cement bent over up a
mountain in order to make the footings for the cabins.
The girls in my particular group were fourteen and fifteen

(07:13):
years old, maybe sixteen years old, and I can't imagine
how hard it must have been for the girls that
were twelve and thirteen. And this was the middle of
the summer, in a terrible heat wave, and even though
we were in the mountains, it was very, very hot

(07:36):
temperatures well into the nineties. Sometimes up to a hundred
girls were getting heat exhaustion and heat stroke, and they
would discourage us from sitting down and taking a break
and drinking water. They would give us very very short

(07:57):
breaks we were allowed to sit down and stop working.
This type of grueling forced labor would lead to a
number of health issues for Sandy as well as others.
All of the physical labor that I did, and they

(08:20):
kept me in Takkada for fifteen months, so I was
in a work group longer than most girls were, and
shortly after getting out of an Awaki, I developed back problems.
Very very young in my twenties, and I was actually

(08:42):
diagnosed with degenerative di disease when I was thirty one
years old, which they told me was very young to
have that condition. Already, my spine has literally disintegrated to
the point where I am now fifty two years old

(09:05):
and I am almost bedridden. I have severe spinal stenosis,
which is a narrowing of the spinal canal that protects
and houses the nerves. I have spinal stenosis, severe spinal
stenosis in my neck and my lumbar area, and it

(09:30):
is excruciatingly painful and the only option that I have
is major surgery. I contracted a very rare neurological condition
called complex regional pain syndrome acronym CRPS when I was

(09:54):
in my early forties. It is an extremely rare condition
that is a disorder of the sympathetic and parasympathetic set
parts of the nervous system, and it results in my
brain constantly sending pain signals to various parts of my

(10:20):
body believing that there is an injury there so there
is subsequent redness and swelling and pain where there is
no injury. And there are many of us from North
campus that have contracted a lot of rare diseases. Many

(10:46):
of us are already deceased, and we're only in our
early to mid to late fifties m M. Over the
past several weeks we have received the number of very
serious allegations concerning both the facility out there in a
number of individuals involved with him. It was just a

(11:09):
form of their therapy. They were told to do it,
and at the time he was fourteen and a half
fifteen years old, they didn't know any better. I asked him,
why are you letting this happen? Why are you covering
up for Louis Packer. He had no answer to that question.
Involved having in this situation paid a little could be

(11:30):
such a district way, and to do absolutely the contrary
of what they should have done. I'm disturbed little the
fact of something. It gets still one on it. Anyway.
I'm Josh Stein and this is Camp hell in a Waki.

(11:52):
I think they opened the campus in January of seventy nine,
and I came in August. My name is Kelly Lewis,
and at the time I had a laundry number, and
that laundry number was thirty three F I was the
thirty third girl. My last name then was Fisher. Kelly

(12:12):
says at that point the girls would receive two laundry numbers,
one to show your number from the rock Mart campus,
and the second an overall number from the boys and
girls combined. The first number was the number of girls,
so I was the thirty third female. Then it was

(12:33):
always your last name initial, and then the number of
persons who had come through the door at Anawaki. So
when I came, I was the nine hundred and fifty
five person to come. I attended from A D to
eighty three, and I was fifteen to eighteen years old.

(12:54):
I left the day after my eighteenth birthday. Kelly says
that Annawak's female campus was also receiving patients from wards
of the state or through the juvenile court system, as
in her case. I was sent to Annawaki because I
had a long history of behavior issues. I had been

(13:16):
placed in foster care and group homes and even did
time in a y d C. And they had told
me that I would be sentenced to due time at
the Makin y d C, which was the girl's y
d C. It's the Making Youth Detention Center, and someone

(13:37):
in the court took a liking to me and found
annawaky for me and said uh in court one day
that they would like to consider that if my parents
insurance would cover it. I was a ward of the
state at that point, which meant the state had custody
of me, but they required my parents to continue my insurance.

(13:59):
Both my parents were truck drivers for the same company
and they drove eight two wheelers. They had good insurance.
We had Blue Cross Blue Shield and it covered most
of my stay there until my parents lost their employment.
A week's fees for enrollment had increased exponentially since being
accredited as a medical hospital. Kelly's family would soon see

(14:23):
the result of not being able to keep up with
these payments. As I was looking through my records, I
noticed that there were letters about how much in arrears
my parents were and paying their part, and it was
decided that I would work and did work details at
Aniwiki just like everyone else. But on Sunday, everyone else

(14:46):
was off quote unquote and they would not have to work,
but I had to go and work in the kitchen
to pay the arrears on my parents account. So I
worked my way through reform school. I guess we laid
brick and block until our hands bled. We carried brick

(15:08):
and block on our backs and shingles on our shoulders,
and we would mix cement on the road and then
we would fill wheelbarrows full of it and push them
a mile up the side of a mountain. And you know,
we were girls. I was five ft tall and weighed

(15:29):
hundred and twenty eight pounds, and I was probably pushing
my weight or more in that wheel barrel. The mortar
bags weighed ninety odd pounds, and we would put them
on our shoulders or on our backs, and bundles of shingles.
I was famous for four bundles of shingles up the

(15:53):
side of a mountain. I was very strong. I'm low
to the ground. I have torque. I was a mule
for them. I'm a physical person, so I was always
focused on working, and I felt like we just needed
to get done whatever we needed to get done, no
matter what the costs to our bodies. I saw lots
of bloody and blistered hands where we would have to

(16:16):
dig footings for our cabins, and we did those with
shovels and picks and maddox, and uh, it was hard work.
Especially in the side of a mountain. Rock marked is
called rock mart for a reason. The dirt is full
of rocks and we would have to dig them out,
and we also dug out houses, which had to be

(16:37):
eighteen feet deep. We would climb into these holes and
with an army shovel and pick and maddox and phillip
buckets and send them up while we dug these holes.
I loved that part. I loved being inside the earth digging.
I loved, you know, the smell of it, in the
closeness to you know, nature. I really did enjoy that.

(17:00):
But a lot of the work was very hard and
and very hard on on bodies, on hands, and the
focus during those first years was on building the campsite,
which I look back now, we we built an empire
for a pedophile. That's a very difficult thing to to

(17:24):
think about, but that's what we did. He made millions
of dollars off what we needed to house more people
so that he could pull in more money. Kelly too,
would suffer great health issues due to the backbreaking labor
from her time in Anawiki. This seems to be a
constant from every survivor who attended the Rock mart campus

(17:47):
I spoke with. As I look through my records time
after time after time, I see Kelly was in the
clinic being treated for back pain. And I have struggled
with back pain in my entire life. I've not had
surgery for it. Um. They wanted to do surgery on
my back since I was twenty seven, and I've refused

(18:09):
because I didn't want to run the risk involved. But
I've I've seen a chiropractor and many doctors and taking
medications all for back pain my my entire life. Here's Terry.
She attended in a Waki during the same time as Kelly.

(18:30):
She remembers the physical labor and how it has affected her.
Still as I sit here now, my back still hurts.
I think I've had a backgate since I was fourteen
years old because we literally would fill wheelbarrels with huge
cender blocks and bricks and we would have to haul

(18:51):
on these hills out in the woods to the sites
where we were building buildings and so um it is
very very hard. The other thing that was really painful physically,
I remember we had to carry creosotes, these huge I
guess like what telephone poles are made out of, and

(19:13):
it would be like two of us up on our
shoulders going up these hills. It was like a black
tar something that would yeah rub off on our necks
and our shoulders. We would get burns and blisters. All
they would do is take us to a clinic, but

(19:33):
basically they would just wipe you off and put a
band aid on you, and you go right back out
to work. Even when you were sick, like in the wintertime.
You know, imagine having a bad cold and having to
work outside in the pouring, freezing rain. It didn't matter.
We had to work in all conditions, especially living in tepee's.

(19:58):
When it would rain in the wintertime, the rain would
run down the teepee poles and our beds are cuts
were up against the poles and so it would literally
just so the bottom of our sleeping bags. And there
were times we would wake up with like a block
of ice at the bottom of our sleeping bag from

(20:19):
the rain and when it froze. Talk about not being
able to warm your feet, it was. It was brutal.
My back and my neck will never be the same ever.
Here's Sheryld, another survivor of In a Weeki's North Campus
in Rock Mart some of us were really tiny girls.

(20:42):
I know when I went there, I probably weighed hundred pounds,
hundred pounds. I just like that. We were physically abused
on the sense that we were having to do some
things that you know, eighteen year old, strapping young boys do,
and we were some of us were eleven, twelve years old,
you know, even sixteen, we were fully grown and developed.
We would have to carry you know, five gallon full

(21:05):
water jugs up the side of the mountain to get
to the campsites. I remember carrying almost a hundred pound
bags of cement on our backs. I remember we'd have
to bend, you know, bend forward, and people would put
the cements on our back, on our the bags of
the dry cement on our backs. We would have to
clear trees, and I mean big trees. We would have

(21:27):
to haul the big logs to clear ways for campsites,
retention ponds, stuff like that. I got there after the
building of most of the campsites were completed for the women.
I stayed in a frame tent for the first my
first group, and then the second group. I was in

(21:50):
a cabin which was a lot nicer, but we still
used lanterns it was freezing. It was freezing in those
storage mountains. We were basically helping to develop land for them.
We were free labor. I think a lot of us
when we were there, we wanted to just get there
and get out, and we pretty much did whatever they

(22:13):
told us. In comparison to in a week these other

(22:36):
two campuses in Douglasville and Carabell. The women's campus does
have a lot of similarities, forced labor for hours on end,
resulting in injuries, using this labor to build out the campus,
denying education to the miners who did said work. But
with these similarities, the mentality of the campus seemed to
be a little different. Often, the boys campuses would be

(22:59):
described as a Lord of the Flies type situation where
only the strong survive and the boys would often punish
and regulate each other. While this may have not been
the case of the girls campus, the dynamic between counselors
and patients was largely the same. We were very affectionate
with one another. We were encouraged to hug, we were

(23:22):
encouraged to stroke each other's hair. I remember sitting and
laying my head in someone's lap and having them stroke
my hair and feeling very full of love and affection
for this person. It wasn't sexual. We were encouraged to
be affectionate with each other. And I don't know if

(23:43):
that was something that the staff enjoyed to see or
if it was something that they encouraged to build a
family type structure. It's confusing because I think they mask
it with the fact that they were trying to build
family type structures within our groups, but it ended up

(24:04):
being we were teenagers and there were hormones everywhere, and
it ended up a lot of times being interactive. The
mentality it's hard to explain because nobody wanted to be there.
It wasn't really a good atmosphere. It was depressing having

(24:24):
to work like that. It felt like jail or something,
and everybody just wanted to get as many brownie points
as they could and do whatever they could to get out.
That was the main goal was just follow the rules,
do everything they say, and do everything you can to

(24:46):
stay on the group leaders good side and the counselors
and um, you know, and hopefully get out. There was
one time when we were having like a group meeting.
We would have you know, group meetings in the evenings
to talk about our day and feelings and how people
got along and different situations that might have come up.

(25:09):
And I can remember a lot of the group meetings
started turning into the counselors confronting girls about not being opened,
like physically, like they have a wall up and you
need to let that wall down. And they did different exercises,
like they made one girl lay on the ground and

(25:29):
everybody had to like rubber and massager until she would
feel comfortable. And that felt very uncomfortable. And one girl
in particular, I mean was crying. I I felt like
being forced to have to rub her and touch her.
I felt like I was assaulting her. But you do

(25:50):
what you're told. You know, you don't want to go
against the group leader. I don't want to lose any
brownie points. So Terry remembers one particular trip to Cumberland
Island near Savannah, Georgia. It is here where she was
informed that an impromptu ceremony was held between a counselor

(26:12):
and patient. The group I was in we went on
a trip to Cumberland Island. It's hard to remember how
long we were there. I want to say at least
ten days. It felt like two weeks. It was a
long time, and we literally camped out on this island
and that was I was in the group where my

(26:34):
two group leaders had a relationship with each other, and
so they were much more affectionate on this trip. We
would see him kiss, we could hear him, you know,
I guess, having sex in their tent. And then we
started a couple of girls, one of my best friends

(26:55):
out there. We noticed another girl was getting really close
with one of the group leaders, and she shared with
us that she had a marriage ceremony out on the
beach and that they were a couple. And I was
just so surprised. I didn't really understand, but I knew
it probably wasn't right. I don't know, and I kind

(27:17):
of felt sorry for my friend who um was in
the relationship, because I think she was really naive. I
don't know it changed her, but it didn't seem like
in a good way. Here's Sandy again. She says that
at the rock Mark campus, counselors and patients alike tended
to be physical with each other in normal day to

(27:40):
day activities. She says this could be very confusing for
a young child at the time. Allegedly, the group itself
was to represent the family that we don't have anymore.
And there was a lot of physical touch that was

(28:07):
encouraged by the staff. There, girls who were constantly hugging,
holding hands, sitting in between each other's legs during group psychotherapy,
things that looking back on, it was so inappropriate. It

(28:30):
was almost like they were pushing a certain you know,
same sex culture, and yet forbidding it to happen at
the same time. I am just appalled when I looked
back and realized how incredibly inappropriate that was, and that

(28:55):
that was encouraged. If a girl tried to sit by herself,
she would have been called out for doing that by
the group or by the group leaders as trying to
be isolating, you see. So that was very uncomfortable to
think about. And I was fourteen. I was kind of

(29:19):
naive for my age, and so I really didn't learn
what lesbian was till I got to an awake and
saw how some of the girls had intimate relationships and counselors.
A couple of my group leaders were intimate with each other,

(29:40):
and I understood then that they were like a couple,
and so that's kind of how I learned about what
lesbians were. They were to hold hands, they would kiss,
they would sleep in the same tp or cabin, depending
on what group I was in, because I went through
different groups that it was. It was a pretty common

(30:03):
thing out there. I mean, it happened frequently. It didn't
take long once a group was formed and you had
your counselors. I mean, it was just a matter of
time before people started building different relationships. I started noticing,
like a counselor would favor a certain girl and they

(30:26):
would spend a lot of time together, and and then
it would, you know, be that they would sleep in
the same tent or cabin together, and you know, and
then everybody knows that something's going on. Eventually we figure out, okay,
they must be having a relationship. And it happened a
lot different counselors with different girls. I just happened to

(30:48):
be in a group where both of our counselors fell
in love with each other, but they were also very
flirty with us as patients. Here Survivor Cheryl again. She
also says that close relationships were encouraged between the patients

(31:09):
and group leaders. This encouragement would soon lead to the
same type of sexual abuse seen on the other Nawaki campuses.
I feel like that it was encouraged for us to
have close relationships with both our peers and our group leaders,
and specifically me, I had a problem with some of

(31:32):
of the people, some of the group leaders. I tend
to kind of shy away from the people that were
really loud, really boisterous, even though I was kind of
loud and boisterous too. The group leaders just kind of
scared me. I remember feeling kind of at their mercy.
Every night if we pissed them off. They had these
sticky notes that they would write about us every night

(31:53):
by lantern. They would write them in their cabin or
the tent or whatever. They basically would just write little
excerpts about how we were that day, what our attitude
was like, what group was like, whatever. One night, I
was sleeping in my cabin and I woke up and
one of the group leaders was down between my legs.

(32:17):
I woke up and I remember she put her hand
over my mouth and told me to don't say a word.
And basically, as it went on, I if I had
said anything, I was told that. I mean, for once
she would get in trouble, she would have to leave,
and then Basically my life would be screwed because I
would get things written about me that would make me

(32:39):
have to stay longer because I thought I was there
as you know, had to be there. I didn't know
that I could have walked when I was eighteen years old.
I wasn't there as a ward of the state or
through d CFS or whatever. So that's kind of how
that started. It didn't go on for a really long
period of time, but there was, you know, jealousy on
her part. She had a hard time. I was close

(32:59):
to another group leader that was you never did anything inappropriate,
and I think she had a hard time with that.
I think she was just scared me my being close
with the other group leader, that I was going to
wrap her out. And I was scared out of my
mind to wrap her out. There was no way that
I was going to stay there, not one day longer

(33:21):
than I had to. So, you know, I feel like
she kind of had me over a barrel, so to speak.
Here's Jill. She was another victim of the abuse going
on at Rock Mart. She says that this type of
abuse was known among counselors, even shared when it first began.

(33:42):
I was in the Nichia group, and we were building
our camp site, so we would all sleep in this
one tent that the floor was actually done in the
rest of the camp site wasn't complete. We would all
pile up in this one place on the tongue and
group floors that we had put in. And there was

(34:02):
this one group leader that kept coming onto me and um,
I didn't even know what. I hate to say this,
I didn't even know what gay was at that point.
I was so young and wild and in my own
little element. I wasn't even sure what homosexuality was back then.
To tell you, it's roof so she would she molested me.

(34:28):
After that incident, I got moved to another group. It
was like they were passing me around. There was another
group with another group leader that molested me. Also. I
did not try to report it. I didn't understand it.
It made my life easier, so I didn't say anything.

(34:49):
I would like the favorite. I couldn't do anything wrong.
Kites of Things survivor Kelly Lewis says that while the
sexual abuse was happening between ouncers and patients, it was
being presented in a consensual way to other patients. We
were convinced by the staff there that anything that had

(35:11):
happened sexually was consensual, and that the girls and the
group leaders had relationships. And what I know now as
an adult is that they were victims. They weren't part
of the of the relationship. It wasn't a relationship. It

(35:31):
was an authority figure, it was an adult, and it
was a child who was held captive. And in that situation,
your choice is gone. You don't have the choice to
say no, I don't want to be doing us. You
just don't. I was in a group with one student
who was transferred to another group because it was discovered

(35:57):
that she had feelings for the group leader. Well, it
never came out that they had a sexual relationship until
later when that same group leader was confronted by me
for having a relationship with another student. Kelly shared a
group with Cheryl while her abuse was taking place. She

(36:18):
recalls an incident during a group meeting where she chose
to speak up about what she thought was happening. While
at the time she believed this to be a consensual relationship,
she sees today that in actuality, it was a child
being taken advantage of the situation happened over the course

(36:39):
of several days where a group leader and one of
the students kept having snippy little arguments, and there was
a level of frustration. And I ended up, after probably
the second or third day of that tension going on,
we were behind schedule, and I was a stickler for

(37:01):
being on schedule, and it was because of this argument
that they were continuing to have. So I ended up
calling a group meeting in the middle of a trail
in the woods, and I said, everybody's circle up. I
need to get this, I need to say something. I
need to get this off my chest right now. And

(37:22):
I said to this student and to this group leader,
I don't know exactly what's going on between the two
of you, but all of this lover's quarrels going on
are putting us behind schedule, and it needs to end.
It needs to stop. Cheryl remembers Kelly speaking up that
day when she called a group meeting. Everything came to

(37:44):
a head with my situation with a group leader. Went
a fellow group member stopped us on the trail. I
specifically remember her saying basically, what the hell is going
on with you two? You need to knock it off,
and talking with her. She remembers looking at it as
a lover's quarrel, a lover lovers spat and back. Then

(38:08):
basically she stopped us. Things got confronted, the counselor had
to leave, and my group basically was mad at me.
They were told that it was a consensual relationship, and
it was not a consensual relationship by any way, shape
or form. I do know that there were several other
girls in the same situation as me in the sense

(38:30):
that they had group leaders. Some of them the same,
some of them are different, different group leaders. I have
actually been reached out to by some group members, some
former group members that have told me they remember that
night having a group meeting and wishing that they could
just scream out and say this is happening to me too,
and they have a hard time sleeping at night knowing

(38:51):
they feel like that they could have done something to
help me or to help themselves, but they were terrified
of that and so nobody really said anything. The group
was basically presented that I was having a relationship with
the group leader and because of me that she had
to leave. Kelly says that while the punishment of the
counselor was not known Cheryl as a victim endured the

(39:15):
brunt of many restrictions and punishments at Anna Waki for
her involvement. That first night, actually we thought she might
run away, so we all slept in one giant room.
There was a building. There was just one big room
for the you know, the evaluation observation unit, and we

(39:35):
slept in that room that night with her in the center,
and we circled her to keep her from running away.
I think I remember her being on what we called
three foot We also called it belt looping because you
had to hold on to someone else's belt loop, you know,
to be within three ft of another person at all times.

(39:56):
And she was put on what was called board campus,
which was a really strong restriction. You couldn't go on
home visits, you couldn't go on nights out, you couldn't
go on store runs. You were basically restricted and had
to stay on on campus at all times. The student
has carried that with her, has had to carry that

(40:18):
with her, and that she was punished for being raped,
and this group leader took advantage of the situation and
took advantage of her. It still is astonishing to me
that she was punished for it. For the girls who

(40:51):
attended the Anawaki North campus in Rockmart, the abuse they
were subjected to did not end with just the counselors
a wing to Terry. There were other visitors who too
were taking advantage of the girls, some even from the church.
I was Catholic and my parents wanted them to approve

(41:13):
to have a priest come out at least once a
month so that I could have communion and confession and
anna wake. You wouldn't allow that, but they did offer
that I could meet with their chaplain like once a week.
My understanding of the chaplain at and awake you, I
guess he was like a preacher and he volunteered to
come out and give spiritual guidance, but that never happened.

(41:41):
The first time I met him, I immediately like got
the creeps. I could just tell um the way he
talked to me, the way he looked at me when
he would hug me, like he would like purposely press
my breast up against him or his hand would you know,

(42:02):
touch my breast, and um, he would say, oh, you
were looking so pretty today, and just um commenting about
my clothes or my tops. You could tell he was
like coming on to me, and I wasn't the only one.
He did it to other girls too, so it was
just a I don't know. We called him the happy chappie,

(42:23):
but um it was really in a bad way. He
we didn't trust him at all. Terry says the girls
would all be taken to a dentist who was connected
with an Awaki. She says he too would take advantage
of the patients physically and financially. They would put us

(42:46):
all in the van to go to the dentist and
I remember the first time we went. I didn't have
any toothaches or anything, but somehow they I didn't believe him,
but they said I had like set it or eight cavities.
I mean, I got a mouthful of fillings. I mean,
to this day, I've got all these feelings in my mouth.

(43:08):
I just don't think I needed them. And we all knew.
We laughed because we're like, he's just making money off
of us. That the worst part was the dentist was
a pervert. There was no doubt about it. I think
I was the first one to go in and so
I remember when they laid me back on the chair
and they gave me laughing gas. But even before the

(43:31):
laughing gas. The it's like a cloth napkin that they
would pin around your neck, you know, so you don't
soil your clothes. He would lay his instruments across that napkin,
in other words, across our chest instead of them remaining
on the little table where the instruments probably belonged. And

(43:53):
so every time he would go to grab an instrument,
you know, I would feel them like pinch my nipple
or of my breast, and it was it was a
horrible feeling, and I just wanted to get out of there.
And so I remember after I got all my teeth
filled and went out, I told the other girls. I
was like, watch out, he's gonna put the instruments on

(44:16):
your chest and touch you. And everybody said the same thing.
I mean, I wasn't the only one. The same thing happened.
Here's survivor Kelly Lewis. When I was at Anna Wiki,
I went to the dentist, and as an adult, almost
every tooth in my head is full as with a filling,

(44:39):
and over the years my teeth have become brittle because
they're they're the mercury fillings. I never had them replaced
so they're the metal fillings. But obviously they had some
sort of deal going with the dentist because I never
had a cavity before I went to Anna Wiki Ever,
never a cavity. I don't have genetically bad teeth, and

(45:04):
when I left there, almost every tooth in my head
was filled. During Terry's time at Antawaki, she chose to
write about her experience there. Probably around my second year
at Atawaki, I earned my music privilege, my guitar privilege.
So my parents sent me a guitar, and I taught

(45:27):
myself how to play and loved to sing, and so
I decided to write a song about an awake. The
first song I wrote was I guess, kind of like
a survival song. I tried to make it really positive
and make it a good thing and maybe get some

(45:48):
brownie points, because everybody teased me, They're like, you're really
gonna get on Doc Petter's good side, you know when
he hears this song, and I did, so I did.
I have the opportunity to record it in a studio
and ended up writing two songs. Terry provided me with
a copy of the record, which Antawaki funded to produce.

(46:10):
It is a forty five with two sides, a full
scale eighties production, including a string section, dual guitar solos,
and everything you would expect from something you may hear
on the radio at the time. The first song is
a tribute to an awake and what it claimed to be.
It's title an Awakey Love Pine Tree. It's just what

(46:42):
God take these things again. Branch sing Chess. That's the

(47:06):
B side of the record. While seemingly still a pro
and a waky song, has a bit of a darker
undertone to the lyrics. Terry sings tears may fall of loneliness.
In each drop, You'll see a child hurting deep inside,
yearning to be free. He need see child deep inside.

(47:39):
To Lewis Petter had high hopes for the record, wanting

(48:03):
to sell it to the families and an upcoming fellowship,
an Awak's annual fundraiser. I was going to perform it
at their fellowship where all the parents come once or
twice a year, and they were going to sell the
record to raise money. And my parents, I mean I
was only like fifteen or sixteen at the time, so

(48:25):
my parents were concerned about the money part of it,
and also Doc Petter was wanting the copyright of the music,
and so my parents ended up having to get a lawyer.
They had like a legal battle over it, which was unfortunate.
And I don't think they ever sold the records at
that fellowship. I can't remember they did let me sing

(48:48):
it though. In a correspondence to Terry's parents from one
of an Awaki's lawyers, three concerns are mentioned which her
parents wanted addressed. In an Awak's reply, their only response
is to point out the outstanding debt of her parents
for not just her, but her two brothers time in
the program as well. There seems to be the same

(49:10):
shuffling of correspondence from one lawyer to another board member
with nothing really being addressed. In a final letter from
board member Sarah Tillis, it is finally stated what other
concerns Terry's parents had, That their children had not received
the treatment for which they were paying, the concern over
the rights to Terry songs, and finally that they were

(49:34):
aware that Lewis Petter had been bringing their two sons
to a brothel in Mexico. Things were starting to leak
out about the wrongdoings at Inawaki for so long they
had gone on with no oversight that nobody thought anything
about it. With the number of students attending and the
price of admittance skyrocketing, parents were starting to question what

(49:58):
type of treatment their chidren we're really being provided. The
inner structure of an awaki was beginning to crumble. Next
time on Camp Help an Awaki. My name is Chris
Newland and I am the executive director at the National

(50:21):
Children's Advocacy Center. We were actually the first child advocacy
center in the world. At Children's Advocacy Centers, what we
do is coordinate the multidisciplinary response to child abuse in
our communities. And this model includes partnerships and collaborations with
law enforcement, child protective services, medical providers, mental health professionals, prosecutors,

(50:44):
victim advocates, so all of us working in a coordinated manner.
At a child advocacy center, we conduct forensic interviews, we
do medical exams, We provide victim advocacy for children and
families when there's allegations of abuse. And this whole model,
which started in nine has revolutionized our nation's response to

(51:05):
child abuse and how we are making the process much
more child friendly and trauma and form and not causing
children to be re traumatized by a system that should
actually help them. Camp Hell anna Waki was created and
hosted by Josh Thane, with producer Miranda Hawkins and executive

(51:29):
producers Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. The soundtrack was written
and performed by Josh Thane and Adrian Barry. Archival footage
provided by WSB and CBS News. Find us on Instagram
at camp hell pod. That's c A m p h
E L l p O D educate yourself about the

(51:49):
issue of child abuse and things that you should look
for at the Darkness to Light website D two ll
dot org. That's d the number two l dot org.
Campell anna Waki is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.