PIEDMONT (MO)
KFVS [Cape Girardeau, MO]
March 7, 2024
By Kathy Sweeney
Former students of a private boarding school in southeast Missouri are speaking out as we learn new details about the investigation that has the facility shut down and the owners facing felony kidnapping charges.
ABM Ministries covers roughly 250 acres south of Piedmont but on Thursday night, the school is closed and the students who stayed there are back home with their families.
Larry and Carmen Musgrave each face a single felony count of kidnapping.
School employee Caleb Sandoval is charged with felony abuse or neglect of a child.
Sandoval is still in jail, but the Musgraves are out on bond.
The investigation that shut down the school continues, and it’s being fueled in large part by former ABM students across the country who’ve put their faith in a sheriff they say is finally listening to them.
“Um, I feel very validated, right now, and I feel very relieved. My biggest goal in this whole thing is just to get the kids that were there out, and from what I understand that’s happened. So it feels, it feels really good.”
Julianna Davis lives in Albertville, Alabama, seven hours away from the rural Wayne County, Missouri boarding school where she stayed as a teenager.
She identifies herself as the victim in the kidnapping case filed against ABM owners Larry and Carmen Musgrave.
Davis said she’s tried many times over the years to tell others about her experience at ABM.
”Once we found the right people to listen to us and they listened to our stories, and tried to understand what we went through I’m not surprised at all, Because I don’t see how anybody could listen to the things that happened to us and not go wow we have to do something about this.”
Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch sat down with us between phone calls and road trips to talk about his investigation into ABM.
“I’ve probably had 25, 26 phone calls,” he said. “And that may be on the light side. Of former students. Of look this is what happened. So, we’ve got to go investigate all of those.”
The ABM Ministries website is now offline, but a review of it before that described the school as offering a year-round pro-active learning environment to help families with struggling teenagers, helping them grow mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.
“2018 had a runaway, was beginning to wonder what was going on…”
But Finch said he did not find anything at that time that warranted an investigation.
Then in January, five boys ran away from ABM and everything changed.
“On January 28, I was on my way home when two little boys had jumped out of the woods, waving my car down, asking me for help,” Cierra Osborn said.
She said she met those boys that evening a few miles away from the school.
Here’s how she described that encounter: “I asked them what was going on and everything before they had gotten to my car, and they said we had ran away from the boys home. As soon as they said that, I remembered that another little boy had ran away prior to that, like a month ago.”
When asked what sparked his ability to investigate what was taking place there, the sheriff said, “There was one boy that ran away, in that group of five, that made a statement that I said, ok now I can do something. And I went from there.”
Sheriff Finch said he could not tell us, at this time, what the statement was, but that it was enough for him, as a veteran law enforcement person, to move forward.
Cierra Osborn did one more thing that night, after police picked up with those runaway students.
“So once they left I did make a post,” she said. “And I was just concerned. I didn’t know what to do.”
Osborn’s post found its way to Julianna Davis. She recalled being told not to trust the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office when she stayed at the camp, so she called the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
A trooper got her number to Sheriff Finch.
“It was a little surreal, and I’ll be honest I had just this tiny bit of skepticism, very deep down, of its not gonna matter, we’ve tried this before, but especially when he actually came to Alabama and sat down with me and listened and, I mean, I knew he believed me, from the first time I spoke to him I knew he believed me,” Davis said.
After Finch met with Davis, he traveled to Oklahoma where he interviewed three former ABM students, including Aralysa Baker.
“I was ready, I was very ready,” Baker said. “Whenever he first talked to me about the possibility of setting up an interview, I was ready to jump into my car and drive to Missouri that night. So, I thought I would be nervous, I wasn’t. I broke down a couple of times just discussing some of the things that happened. But overall it went very well and I’m pleased I’m thrilled that he took the time and opportunity to come talk to me.”
Sheriff Finch’s contact with both Julianna Davis and Aralysa Baker did not end with those interviews. They are now helping him reach other former ABM students as his investigation stretches across the country.
“Actually, this weekend, I have a gentleman who will be traveling to Indiana. And then within the next two weeks, we’ll be going back down here to Tennessee.”
He said Davis and Baker are letting the former students know there’s someone they can trust to talk to.
“And, I think, also me being willing to speak out first and speak to him officially first and then to see he did something with it, it gave a lot of other people in the group a lot more faith and reassurance that he was serious,” Davis said. “So it was very good, the response was very good, and I think that allowed a lot of other people to feel more comfortable in coming forward.”
“Over the years, we’ve stayed in contact,” Baker said. “At first it was just finding each other on Facebook, um, we started a Facebook group a long time ago. We’ve posted on forums, you know we’ve called each other, texted each other over the years and every time we tried to get together and kind of blow things up a little bit it just kind of fell through or fizzled out. This time we have a united front.”
Two other former ABM students from that group shared some photos with us. You can see students in choir groups, at dances. They’re smiling.
We asked Davis what she sees.
“So, those pictures are really hard to look at,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was going to make me emotional. Those pictures are really hard to look at because they are, when I look at them now, I kinda have all of these emotions of like how were we smiling? How were we doing that? How were we…Who thought to take a picture? Because what you’re not seeing is that probably right before that there were some of them that had just woken up from sleeping on a piece of plywood for several days. There were people who had just gotten out of ice bucket showers. There were people who had been running for 12 hours.”
When we asked Sheriff Finch if he takes it personally, he replied, “I do.”
“Because I have kids,” he explained. “And grandkids. So I do take it personal.”
Baker was 13 years old when she arrived at ABM.
She said having law enforcement reach out to her about her time at the school is something she never thought possible.
“So we’re fully trusting in Sheriff Finch and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department and highway patrol and it’s just pretty much a 180 from where we were two months ago,” she added.
We asked Sheriff Finch what the community’s reaction has been like.
“They’ve been upset because of what they have heard. The social media posts. The victims speaking out also. The community’s response is, it’s about time something’s being done.”
However, there has been some pushback. He said some people have asked why did they do something sooner.
To them, he says, “I didn’t really have anything to go on until about three weeks ago.”
We reached out to the Musgraves’ attorney, Michael Hackworth, for comment on this report. We’re waiting to hear back.
Now, Sheriff Finch would like to hear from anyone affiliated with ABM Ministries and the Wayne County boarding school, that includes former students, their parents or anyone in the community who feels they have information about the school. He asked that you contact the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office at 573-224-3219.