(NIGERIA)
Foundation for Investigative Journalism [Nigeria]
July 16, 2025
By Sodeeq Atanda
Editor’s Note: Reader’s discretion is advised as this article contains explicit sexual assault descriptions.
Now 58, Daniel Robinson attended Hillcrest Schools in 1980 and again between 1982 and 1984. In 1980, he was in the 8th grade. He schooled there because his dad was a missionary with Serving In Mission USA, a funding mission for the multi-mission-run school founded in Jos, Plateau State, in 1942.
MALE PRINCIPAL ABUSING A BOY
In the second quarter of 1980, Daniel was involved in an altercation during an Industrial Art class handled by Parlane, a teacher. Parlane referred the issue to James McDowell, the school principal at the time. Over the incident, he was directed to report to McDowell in his office for several days. During those days, the male principal sexually abused him.
“He then stood behind me as I sat in a chair and proceeded to grill me at length about the incident. As he was talking, he began to massage my neck and caress my hair and ears. I recoiled at this contact that seemed inappropriate for the occasion, but McDowell laughed it off saying he was merely trying to get me to relax. At this point, I was far from relaxed. Something felt very off about this whole encounter. McDowell then continued his unwelcome touching of my head and neck and then down onto my chest, stimulating my nipples,” said Daniel.
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“I felt completely shocked and spooked by McDowell’s actions for a very long time after this incident. I made every effort to avoid both McDowell and Parlane after that and for the rest of the school year. The next year, I transferred to Kent Academy in Miango, as my father was going to be managing the Miango Rest Home, a guesthouse. Two years later, I found myself back at Hillcrest for grades 10 to 12. I made every effort to avoid McDowell for that period of time. Some years later, it dawned on me that I was being groomed for abuse.”
ADMISSION OF SEXUAL ABUSE
At 16 in 1991, Letta Cartlidge started her senior secondary school at Hillcrest. Founded by Christian missions to provide education to missionary children, the school receives funding from 12 Christian local and foreign missions.
The funding missions are the Church of the Brethren Mission (CBM), the Sudan United Mission, Assemblies of God Mission, the United Missionary Society, the Lutheran Church of the Missouri Synod (LCMS), the American Lutheran Mission, the Nigerian Baptist Mission, the Mambilla Baptist Mission, the Serving in Mission Nigeria (SIM Nigeria), the Great Commission Movement, the United Methodist Church of Nigeria and the Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Cartlidge had thought she would be safe in the hands of Owen Fine, her English teacher, married to a lady she fondly referred to as ‘big sister’. But she was not. Fine groped and fondled her many times, an adolescent experience that has remained with her since then.
“I was a girl groomed and groped by her high school English teacher,” Cartlidge told FIJ. “I was one of the two female students Owen mentioned to have sexually abused when he was questioned by the Lutheran Church of the Missouri Synod (LCMS) offices between 1991 and 1992, where he admitted to having two simultaneous sexually abusive relationships with female students in the school year between those years. I was one of the students.”
These physical and sexual violations went beyond Robinson and Cartlidge. In fact, they only illuminate the terrifying stories of many other minors who have had their lives defined by the unhealed traumas of abuse at the hands of their teachers and house parents at Hillcrest. The forms of abuse they suffered included sexual assault, racial profiling, religious intolerance and groping.
Hillcrest School is a choice school for many parents for some reasons. It is built on Christian values. It has boarding facilities and operates an American curriculum that appeals to foreign nationals in Nigeria and the Nigerian elite class.
During their schooling days and even decades after they had graduated, the abused kids, who are now grown adults and even parents, were unable to speak out. Though heartbroken, many could not tell their parents how unsafe the place was for them.
But in April 2021, the silence was broken. A child abuser removed the veil from his own face. James McDowell, a former principal of the school from 1974 to 1984, self-confessed on Hillcrest Baby, a Facebook page with 1,500 members, to molesting two students towards the end of his stay.
“I spent 10 YEARs teaching and in administration at Hillcrest. I have many memories of good people and experiences,” McDowell wrote in a Facebook group.
“I have also carried a most painful memory. With deep sorrow and shame, I acknowledge that I am guilty of molesting two students towards the end of my time there.
THE CONFESSION THAT ENCOURAGED 252 SURVIVORS/WITNESSES
“Today I have reached out to them to express my apology, seek forgiveness and offer restitution. To the entire community, I apologise with a broken heart for this breach of trust, which these days is considered criminal. This led me to step down from HC [Hillcrest] in 1984.”
McDowell’s confession marked a watershed moment in the history of abuse at Hillcrest. It provided courage to abuse survivors and eyewitnesses to these un-Christian acts to come forward to share their stories and experiences.
Cartlidge created a private Facebook page to serve as a safe space for survivors and eyewitnesses to share their stories. Then, stories upon stories came in. The group has 252 survivors and eyewitnesses. She was later chosen as president of the Hillcrest Survivors Steering Committee that was formed to help champion this cause.
“It’s been a very long, tough road but now we have real hope that the horrors so many of us endured will be brought to the surface,” Cartlidge said in a statement.
Six survivors were interviewed for this investigation. So many others could not be contacted for a direct interview but their written testimonies were contained in a packet the steering committee submitted to the school. Because the permission to mention their names could not be obtained, FIJ only reviewed their testimonies alongside other investigative findings and court filings aimed at getting closure and justice.
Aside from those investigative reports and court filings, FIJ documented the stories of 15 persons. While these violations predated the current Hillcrest leadership, evidence suggests it had been foot-dragging in taking responsibility.
Despite McDowell’s confession and the ensuing revelations of abuse by other staff and dormitory parents, many of those responding on behalf of Hillcrest blamed the survivors and those who expressed disgust at McDowell, said Cartlidge.
These abuses occurred between 1962 and 1992 when the victims were kids and in their formative years. The survivors whose testimonies are documented in this report were missionary children. Since its founding, it is estimated that at least 6,000 students have attended Hillcrest.
Like the survivors’ parents, many of the abusers were also missionaries seconded to Nigeria by various mission bodies.
SURVIVORS’ TESTIMONIES
McDowell’s confession did not come out of self-reflection but was triggered by a hand that wanted justice done to his victims and victims of other perpetrators.
DALE GILLILAND: It was Gilliland, a victim of sexual abuse by Doc Shank, a dorm parent, on or about 13/14 April 2021, who met with the former principal and warned him that he had 48 hours to confess or he would be exposed publicly.
“So, my contact with him would have been the day he confessed and perhaps a day before as well. At that time, I knew he was the one after putting so many stories together in my head. I took a risk but was 99% sure he was the historical figure that was talked about for so many years. I was a bit surprised that he did confess but was glad you had solid evidence at that time to squash all doubters,” Gilliland said.
“My full intent was to have he himself confess. It worked and more accusations followed. The lady on HB [Hillcrest Baby, a Facebook page mentioned earlier] that admitted that a principal took her son out on his motorcycle and had her son jerk him off was the final nail I needed and I texted him to confess.”
Gilliland was himself a survivor of abuse. He said Shank serially molested him in Studebaker Hall, fondling him from buttocks to penis both during shower times and in the room. This happened to him when he was between five and eight years old. Today, he is 68.
He said, “Doc Shank fondled my naked body after showers, opened up my buttocks and fondled my penis and testicles with his fingers. He came into my room at nights doing the same. He soaped the halls and had me slide down naked in front of him with many other naked boys were doing the same. He would smash rabbits’ heads with hammers in front of me with hammers enjoying my fear at the rabbits’ screams.”
MELANIE JANSEN: She was another survivor interviewed by FIJ. “Because he didn’t know, it couldn’t have happened,” Melanie Jansen, a daughter of a missioner, said of her father who disbelieved her abuse story.
Jansen was at Hillcrest in 1970 at age seven in second grade. She lived in Heckman Hall, built in 1961. Her dad, a member of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), was an administrator at Mkar Hospital in Benue State. She left Hillcrest in third grade. When her dad became General Secretary of the CRC — another administrative position that basically oversaw the missionaries of the CRC in Nigeria — she returned to the school for her fourth and fifth grades. This time she chose to study as day student.
“I was sexually abused on a regular basis by multiple people — two adults and two students — during the two years that I boarded. The two students were brought in by one of the adults and then they started doing it on their own. My abuse stopped when I became a day student. In 1992 I began to deal with the trauma of my abuse and tried to commit suicide. This led to hospitalisation and lots of treatment over the years,” Jansen, now 61, recalled.
“In the late 90s, I brought forward my experience to the CRC mission board and then spent the next six to seven years trying to get them to first of all believe that it had happened and then to try to get them to investigate my experience.”
At some point, those she accused to have sexually abused her denied the accusations.
“They did finally interview the people I had named, all of whom denied any such thing,” she added.
“There was no follow-up after these interviews. It was basically my word against theirs and who will believe the words of someone who was a child at the time of the abuse. Even my parents have never believed me. My dad was on the board of Hillcrest at the time and said that he would have known if something like that was going on. And because he didn’t know, it couldn’t have happened.”
Long before McDowell’s confession, several survivors had been individually exploring ways to seek justice and get closure. The reactions to their experiences were suppressive until the principal’s public admission boosted their confidence to come out to press for investigations and institutional reforms using the power of their numbers.
BARBARA JO GILLILAND: Gilliland, whose dad Dean Gilliland was a staff of the United Methodist Mission (originally the Evangelical United Brethren), also had a bad tale to tell about Hillcrest. She was at Hillcrest from 1964 until 1976 and stayed at Studebaker Hall.
“My abuser was Doc Shank,” she said. Shank was her dorm parent. She said he used to be present in the shower room with students on many occasions.
“As we showered, he forced us to bend over in front of him after our shower so he could ‘inspect’ us to make sure we were clean. He often lurked just outside our bedroom door to catch us if any of us whispered during rest hour or after lights out at night. The punishment for this was a beating with a long stick,” the 66-year-old woman recalled.
“I was frequently called up to the dorm parent’s apartment at the end of the hallway after lights out and told to pull my pajama bottoms down. I would not ever do this. I was then forced to kneel in front of his sofa and he would hit my buttocks over and over with that stick.”
Describing him as a monster, Gilliland also said that Shank did not stop at individual abuse. He would ask a group of students to watch how he mistreated a live rabbit, using their fear as a source of pleasure.
“I was a very tiny girl. Another form of twisted abuse from him came in the form of forcing a group of us to gather outside where Shank had hung a live rabbit on a tree with its hind legs. He had a hammer and we had to watch while he bashed its brains out and listen to it scream as it writhed at the end of the rope. The man was a monster. The missions created an environment where monsters and predators were allowed to operate, unchecked, for too many years,” she said
Her molester has died. But before his death in US State of Indiana, she located him in 1990 through a phone call. She vowed to him that as long as she lives, she was not going to “keep these ugly secrets forever”.
LETTA CARTLIDGE: She was repeatedly abused by Owen Fine, an ex-English teacher, between 1991 and 1992 in multiple locations in Jos. She has a twin sister with whom she related with Fine’s family.
Fine’s wife is also an alumna of Hillcrest. She graduated four years prior to Cartlidge’s enrolment. The couple’s front door was 60 feet from Cartlidge’s parents’ front door as their homes shared a common wall.
“My twin sister and I revolved in and out of their door, tripping over their toddler, spending hours chattering with Katy in a manner reminiscent of our childhood-sisterhood relationship,” Cartlidge said.
Fine’s wife was someone Cartlidge viewed with reverence and considered her a big sister since 1981.
Fine taught Cartlidge English in senior class. His relationship with her was that of grooming for sexual pleasure: playing music, telling them stories about college, learning his poetry, and memorising his music. His intentions were clear but unknown to the student.
“Fine loved Garth Brooks,” Cartlidge said. “He taught us all the words. Late nights. Dim lighting. Wife gone to bed.”
According to Cartlidge, Fine read and stressed the stanzas below to her and her twin sister, a behaviour that suggests sexual grooming.
A man cheating on his wife:
“The city’s lookin’ like a ghost town on a moonless summer night
Raindrops on the windshield, there’s a storm movin’ in
He’s headin’ back from somewhere that he never should have been
And the thunder rolls
And the thunder rolls…”
A man pining for a lover:
“Cause what she’s doin’ now is tearin’ me apart
Fillin’ up my mind and emptyin’ my heart
I can hear her call each time the cold wind blows
And I wonder if she knows what she’s doin’ now…”
A man claiming a lover:
“Well I’m shameless
When it comes to loving you
I’ll do anything you want me to
I’ll do anything at all
You see in all my life I’ve never found
What I couldn’t resist, what I couldn’t turn down
I could walk away from anyone lever knew
But I can’t walk away from you
I have never had anything have this much control on me
I’ve worked too hard to call my life my own
And I’ve made myself a world, and it’s worked so perfectly
But it sure won’t now, I can’t refuse
I’ve never had so much to lose
And I’m shameless…”
“He sang the words. And, as he taught the words of poems in the classroom, line by line with inflection and emotion, having us repeat them back to him, and reciting them together with us, we repeated and memorised the words and inflections and emotions of his love songs, singing with him late into the night, in the dimmed lamplight, after his wife had taken to bed.”
‘HE MADE ME PROMISE NOT TO TELL’
Cartlidge had immersed herself in Fine’s family without easily realising what awaited her in the relationship. During the rainy period of 1991, Fine with his wife took Cartlidge and her twin sister on an overnight camping trip to Rayfield, a tourist centre in the city of Jos.
When it was night, they all settled into their sleeping bags. The couple slept side-by-side and the young girls on the other side. Hours into their sleep, Fine woke up and crept to Cartlidge’s side. “His fingers slipped into my unzipped sleeping bag, hot and searching. He found my breasts. My panty line. Stroked along the outside of it between my legs. I thought his wife would wake up, but she slept on,” she told FIJ.
The next day, Fine said nothing. Neither did Cartlidge. He continued to play his songs. “I was tormented,” said Cartlidge, who now chairs the survivors’ steering committee.
Cartlidge also explained that the four of them went to Yankari Game Reserve sometime between March and May of 1992. On a king-size bed, Fine slept between his wife and her.
“Again, the hot hands and now his stiffness between his legs pressed up against my buttocks, until he vaulted out of bed and fled to the bathroom where he remained for several minutes. When he returned, I pretended I had fallen asleep and he climbed back over me and slipped back under the sheets between his wife and me. He did not touch me again that night,” Cartlidge said.
Another event that afforded Fine an opportunity to sexually violate his usual victim was the school’s May 1992 prom night. He and his wife were chaperones for the school’s senior prom. His wife borrowed a black and white floral print dress with poofy sleeves that fell off the shoulders from Cartlidge to wear that night.
Cartlidge wore a white dress with a full skirt. She said that she skirt spun out when dancing.
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“I didn’t have a date. After the dinner and before the open-air dancing had ended, Katy left to tend to their children at home. My twin had a date and they rode home. Fine proffered to deliver me home after the prom. It was an obvious choice. The chaperone drives the student home. In his car, he kissed me. He put his fingers inside me. I felt I was going to hell. Owen Fine was my senior English teacher. Owen Fine sexually abused me throughout my senior high school. I was 17 years old. He made me promise not to tell.”
Katherine Mueller, a friend whom Cartlidge had narrated her experience to in 2001, explained that she told Rev. John Mueller, her own father, about Fine’s action to see what the church could do about it. But nothing positive came out. Mueller’s dad was then the director of personnel for the Global Missions of the Lutheran Church of the Missouri Synod, the mission that sent Fine to the school.
Fine was called into LCMS offices where he admitted to having sexually engaged in abusive relationships with Cartlidge and one other female student between 1991 and 1992. LCMS contacted her but she said she was not prepared to talk about it. She then spoke with Bruce Hartung, who assured her that the church would cover any counselling bill for her.
ONE SURVIVOR COMMITS SUICIDE
A non-disclosure agreement shared with FIJ reveals a troubling truth: the outcomes of the conduct of these compromising leaders, who saw vulnerable schoolchildren as objects of sexual pleasure, varied from one victim to another.
A victim killed himself because of the trauma.
As far back as 2007, the Church of the Brethren (COB), the original founder of Hillcrest before partnering with other missions, had been made aware of the spate of abuse at the school, according to a June 18, 2007, confidential Negotiated Settlement Agreement signed by Criag H. Smith of the Atlantic Northeast District and obtained by FIJ.
For privacy reasons, the names of the victims have been redacted.
“This brief correspondence is official notification that the ministerial ethics case in which you have been involved has been brought to conclusion with mutual agreement of all concerned parties. A copy of the Negotiated Settlement Agreement has been signed by all persons and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Atlantic Northeast District (ANE) Church of the Brethren… This understanding by the Ethics Committee is based on the Statement of Confidentiality which is a part of the Negotiated Settlement Agreement and states that: As a signer of this Settlement Agreement, I understand that this action is ecclesiastical in nature and that inquiry and investigation has been done in a protected manner to insure a high level of confidentiality for ALL parties. By signing this agreement, I agree to hold this action in confidence,” the document read in part.
While FIJ does not have all the details, there is no doubt that some sexual harassment complaints against four agents associated with COB gave life to the investigative report. The agents are Monroe Good, Heinie Driesinga, Jean Shank and Doc Shank, a dorm parent earlier mentioned to have molested Barbara Jo Gilliland and Dale Gilliland.
The document named 10 proven victims of Monroe Good and Doc Shank, and seven others who may have experienced abuse by the two. Specifically, Shank abused four females and two males while Good abused four females.
One of the male students unfortunately “committed suicide, allegedly due to abuse by Shank”, according to the settlement agreement.
Out of the seven others who may have been abused, Good, who died in 2019, accounted for four female victims and Shank accounted for two males. The abuser of the remaining one victim was an “unknown person”.
David Steele, General Secretary of the COB in America, and Sharon Norton, Executive Global Director of the Church of the Brethren Missions (CBM), were in Garkida, Nigeria, recently to honour the memories of Good and other eight other early members of the church.
Among other things, the ethics committee recommended Monroe’s withdrawal from Atlantic Northeast District (ANE) “sponsored Nigerian Workcamp scheduled for June 2007”, gradual “phase out [of] all formal positions of ministerial leadership….no later than December 31, 2007”, informing current of future congregations to which he belongs “of the general charges of previous sexual misconduct and be asked to monitor any potentially compromising situations”, and “sexual abuse counseling for” him.
This is the first part of an investigation into how missionary workers sexually abused schoolchildren at Hillcrest School in Jos, Plateau State. The second part is here.