The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (35 page)

ONE COLD SPRING MORNING
in 2008 CeCe said Serene woke her up and demanded that she wash the dishes immediately. CeCe lagged, saying that she needed to get dressed, but Serene was adamant. She called Sam and told him that CeCe had declared she was sick of the family and was leaving the house. Though CeCe denied that she said that, she decided she agreed and went upstairs to pack a suitcase. “I told her I’m sick of everything that you guys have been doing to us. You don’t send us to school, you don’t feed us the right food.” CeCe took her suitcase and hid in the woods until nightfall, at which time Serene called the police to report that CeCe had run away. CeCe sat among the trees and watched the police look for her.

That night CeCe decided she couldn’t leave without Isaiah and Cherish, so she returned to the cabin. She said she could see the Allisons inside and banged on the door, but they ignored her. She banged harder, and Sam came out and pushed her; she fell hard on her back and said Sam then sat over her and hit her. CeCe kneeled in front of the house and wailed until the Allisons called the police. When they came CeCe said the police told her she had the option to obey her parents or go to jail.

Sam then took CeCe and Kula, who claimed the day before she had been beaten to the point of bleeding, to the home of “Sis Sherena,” a black woman who knew the Allisons from a church in nearby Franklin, which
they attended in addition to Colin Campbell’s small congregation. The next morning CeCe awoke in pain and she said that Sherena took her to the hospital. According to CeCe, Sherena helped them call CPS and later accompanied them to court when they said they didn’t want to return to the Allisons.

The children said the Allisons complained bitterly that Sherena had betrayed them, goading the girls into lies. When they saw her at the courthouse, CeCe said, they told Sherena to leave, then they took CeCe and Kula to Sam’s mother’s house until they figured out another place to send them. That day, while Buford was sitting on her porch with a visiting social worker, she saw CeCe walking up the road dragging a suitcase. When she asked CeCe what she was doing, CeCe replied that she was just exercising and would soon go home. The next morning, during a rainstorm, Buford awoke to the sound of the doorbell. CeCe and Kula were standing outside, drenched. They had left their grandmother’s house in the morning, unsure where they would be taken next.

“Kula asked, ‘Lady, can you help us?’” Buford said she would take them to the Department of Children’s Services, but the girls told her that the agency had already been to the house and done nothing. Buford persisted, going to the Hickman County DCS. The agency, which would not comment for this story except to acknowledge that a case had existed regarding the Allisons, eventually allowed Buford to take the girls home with her that day, where they stayed for some weeks until a custody hearing was held. Kula had an uncle living in Eastern Tennessee who became her guardian. Her brother Alfred left with her. CeCe was sent first to Sam Allison’s sister in nearby Franklin and eventually to the North Carolina home of the director of the Daniel Hoover orphanage. “[I felt] homeless, no parents,” she said, “like a street dog that nobody cared about.”

IN NOVEMBER 2008
the Allisons sent CeCe from North Carolina to Atlanta, where she stayed with Kate and Roger Thompson, wealthy family friends of the Campbells. The Allisons meant to keep her there temporarily, en route to a home for wayward girls. Kate Thompson has known the Campbells for decades, since they had appealed to the Thompsons—fellow Australians and Christians—to watch Serene and another sister while they went on a mission trip to Florida. After the Allisons adopted the Liberian children, Serene had gotten in touch with Kate to ask her advice
about Engedi, who was slow in learning to talk. The Allisons had been hitting her to get her to speak, without results. Kate gave Serene speech exercises to try instead. Later the Thompsons gave the Allisons a gift of $5,000 to drill themselves a new well.

On paper Kate seems to fit the profile of an
Above Rubies
devotee: a Christian singer-songwriter with an album about adoption called “Broken Hearts and Broken Wings,” she has fourteen children, eight of whom were adopted through foster care. But, she said, “We are not the Duggars,” referencing the nineteen-child reality TV family admired by many
Above Rubies
fans. They hadn’t set out to have so many children, Roger explained, but years of working with the local foster care system—they estimate that between forty and fifty children have passed through their house—left them with multiple sets of siblings the state hoped to keep together.

The Thompsons didn’t feel that they understood the Allisons. Roger took Sam for a dreamer with half-baked ideas—to build a boat and start a family-run shipping company—but the Thompsons had believed that the Allisons’ intentions were good. “I felt sorry for her. She was barely in her thirties, trying to deal with teenage kids coming from traumatic backgrounds,” said Kate. “Serene always did wildly impulsive things.”

Then in spring of 2009, several months after the Thompsons took in CeCe, Serene called to say that they were sending Isaiah back to Liberia. After the three oldest children left the compound Isaiah felt alone in navigating life at the Allisons; Sam had told him not to talk to his sister again. At an earlier point, Isaiah admitted to touching one of the Allisons’ biological daughters, four years his junior, whom he said he kissed and lay on top of while she was in bed. Isaiah told the Allisons about the kiss, and a report of sex abuse between the children was filed by the Department of Child Services, which instructed the family to keep the boys in a separate bedroom. Now, Serene told the Thompsons, she had caught him watching her in the shower.

CeCe was beside herself. The Thompsons begged the Allisons to send Isaiah instead to counseling or at least to let CeCe see him; they warned them that it was illegal to send Isaiah back to Liberia. CeCe called the Allisons daily, but they hung up on her. The Thompsons called the local DCS and were told that the Allisons had been warned not to repatriate their son.

In Primm Springs the Allisons told Isaiah he would be in worse trouble if he stayed. “They told me, if we told people about what you did,
they’d put you in jail, so the best thing to do is to send you to Africa,” said Isaiah. “I felt so bad, I didn’t even care.”

He was sent first to a series of other homes: to stay with a young man from church; then on a bus by himself to the home of a Liberian pastor in St. Louis, who couldn’t understand Isaiah’s willingness to return to their struggling country and warned, “‘Boy, you’re going to die if you go back there’”; then into the Missouri countryside to the man who would escort him back.

CeCe and Kate spoke to him by phone, imploring him to let them come get him. “He said, ‘Yes, CeCe, I did kiss Serene, I did kiss [the girl],’” Kate remembers. “‘I’m a bad boy. I’ve got to go back to Africa.’”

Just before he left, Isaiah told Sam that an older boy had raped him for years in Daniel Hoover; the admission, however, made no difference. When they arrived in Monrovia Isaiah’s escort found the orphanage closed and left him with another pastor who cared for street children. “When he was about to leave, I was scared and said, ‘Please don’t leave,’” said Isaiah. “I thought, oh my gosh, I’m so dead. Back here again?”

When Isaiah was dropped in Liberia he had only a backpack of clothes and forty dollars he had earned working with Sam. His passport had been brought back to the Allisons; his green card would expire after he was away from the United States for six months. He stayed with the pastor and scavenged for food for three weeks until his grandmother learned, through Liberia’s finely tuned rumor mill, that he was back. She brought him to her home in River Cess, a desolate coastal outpost in the country’s interior where, though Isaiah could no longer understand the Kru language his cousins spoke, he felt safe for the first time in months.

Food was scarce—a bowl of rice a day supplemented by coconuts, mangos, or what fish the older children caught—and disease was harsh. Isaiah slept much of the day to block out his hunger and picked up a foot parasite that burrowed under his skin and had to be dug out with sharpened bamboo. Then he contracted malaria along with a five-year-old cousin, who died one night asleep at his side after weeks of frothing and spasms. Isaiah lay in terrified silence beside her, afraid that her spirit would enter his body. He didn’t know how long he was there; with the Allisons he hadn’t fully learned how to measure time into weeks or months, and to him, it felt like forever. “I remember crying by myself all the time,” said Isaiah. “To stop myself from crying, I would think that what I did”—with the Allisons’ daughter—“was really bad and this is the least I can do for them.”

ALL BUT THREE
of the Campbells’ and Allisons’ original ten adoptions failed in one way or another, formally or informally, leaving only the Campbells’ daughter Mercy and the Allisons’ Cherish and Engedi living at home. Campbell purged her website of all mention of the other children and rumors began to circulate among
Above Rubies
readers about what had happened to the children. In an online video recorded in January 2009, Serene claimed that the missing children were off at school. Campbell’s own biography was amended to say she had adopted “some” Liberian children.

Campbell refused to answer specific questions for this story and refused on behalf of the Allisons as well. In an e-mail she admitted there were difficult situations with the older Liberian children, who “came as adults with no interest in becoming part of a family.” Serene, Campbell told me (as she would also claim to readers who asked), “did have some problems with her older children (who were adults) and wanted their independence immediately. . . . She embraced these children as though they were from her womb and it was terribly painful for her to be rejected by them.”

What happened in the Allisons’ home was extreme but not isolated. In the years after the Liberian adoption boom there came a new wave of reports of troubled adoptions, disruptions, and abuse. Most cases arose from adoptions facilitated by the Christian brokers that Campbell and
Above Rubies
had endorsed.

In 2008, in Washington, Kimberly Forder, whose adopted daughter, Grace, had been pictured on the cover of
Above Rubies
’ first Liberian adoption issue, pled guilty to manslaughter. WACSN had facilitated Forder’s adoption of triplets despite the fact that a previous adoptee, an eight-year-old boy named Christopher, had died of pneumonia in her care in 2002. Forder moved to Monrovia and lived on the WACSN compound after an investigation into that death was opened in 2006, when another of her children alleged that Christopher had died because of their mother’s abuse, beating the child, restricting his access to food and water, making him sleep in the basement and punishing him by dunking his head repeatedly in a bucket of dirty water.

In December 2010 an Oklahoma court stripped a Mennonite Brethren family in Fairview—where WACSN’s “How Big Is God” Monrovia crusade was conceived—of custody of five sisters adopted from Liberia. Penny and Ardee Tyler were charged with felony child abuse as well as their adult son of rape by instrumentation, which revolved around their sense that one daughter was filled with “bad spirits.” The couple, who adopted through WACSN, was accused by one of the daughters of hitting
her with a rake, tying her to a bedpost, making her “fast” for up to twelve days, sleep outside, and attempting to commit her to a mental institution.

Also in 2010 a homeschooling couple in Paradise, California, who had adopted through Acres of Hope, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, beat one of their three adopted Liberian children, seven-year-old Lydia, to death over the course of several hours, breaking down her muscle tissue and causing kidney failure. In their home was found a book,
To Train Up A Child
, written by Michael Pearl, a fundamentalist preacher who lives near Primm Springs, and his wife Debi.

The Pearls’ book has sold nearly seven hundred thousand copies, largely to conservative Christian homeschooling families. It received extensive media coverage after being found in the homes of several families whose adopted children died after severe beatings or neglect, including, in 2011, Hana Williams, an Ethiopian adoptee whose parents were charged with her death by hypothermia after they had put her outside as a form of punishment.
*

Michael Pearl’s methods of “biblical chastisement,” though sometimes misrepresented in the media, champion strict physical discipline starting when children are less than a year old. Perhaps most famously, Pearl recommends flexible plumbing supply line as a spanking instrument and compares proper child rearing to training a mule. Pearl vehemently denies that those deaths followed from his teachings and has defended his book instead as corrective training for abusive parents, who hit out of anger instead of the impassive self-discipline he prescribes. “You must know that they did not kill their children with the little switches that we advocate using,” Pearl told me. “[They were] locking them outdoors, giving them cold baths, denying them food and beating them mercilessly. There’s nothing in our literature that would suggest anything like that.”

What is in the book, though, is a constant promise that “the rod” will bring harmony to a family in chaos, creating “whineless” children who have learned to submit. “Somehow, after eight or ten licks, the poison is transformed into gushing love and contentment,” Pearl wrote of a sullen child who is given a spanking. “The world becomes a beautiful place. A brand new child emerges. It makes an adult stare at the rod in wonder, trying to see what magic is contained therein.”

Nancy Campbell’s own teachings echo this. “It is amazing how peaceful and happy a child can be after they have received a good spanking,” she wrote in one column. A guest essay further argues that children are “little bundles of depravity” that need spanking to drive out original sin.

In a community where the appearance of orderly family life may be the highest status marker, the stakes for extracting children’s obedience are serious. But even Pearl has said that his “conditioning” methods, meant to instill complete obedience from infancy on, are not suited for older children or adoptees from other cultures. “If you haven’t trained a child and won their heart by the time they’re eight or nine, then you’re basically living with an adversary,” Pearl told me. “If you spank them then, it’s not going to reap positive results.”