JOS (NIGERIA)
Foundation for Investigative Journalism [Nigeria]
July 17, 2025
By Sodeeq Atanda
This is the second and final part of an investigation into how missionary workers sexually abused schoolchildren at Hillcrest School in Jos, Plateau State. The first is available here.
“We have amongst us the wounded.”
Finding closure for the gruelling decades of trauma for the survivors has been tough. It is not available on a silver platter. Thanks to a molester’s public confessions, the survivors started a movement to demand accountability, starting with a messaging for an independent investigation to dig into the old records of Hillcrest School in Jos, Plateau State, and that of its partner missionary agencies about previous sexual abuse complaints at the school.
James McDowell’s 2021 confession was not important enough to inspire some people to demand accountability and justice for the victims. Rather, comments like “stop ruining our memories”, “God forgives all things” and “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” came from those opposed to the call for justice.
“I put myself up as a ‘guinea pig’ in an effort to try to reestablish some trust between the current Hillcrest administration and the survivors,” said Letta Cartlidge, one of the survivors abused by ex-English language teacher Owen Fine and who currently chairs the Hillcrest Survivors Steering Committee, a platform created by survivors to campaign for a full investigation into child abuse at the school.
When some of his victims and concerned individuals contacted him to honourably report himself to local authorities in Canada, McDowell said he was advised against that. Instead, he would be open to the management of Hillcrest.
The enquiry was expected to lead the authorities to formally apologise to the survivors in recognition of the injuries suffered by each person, provide therapies and embark on institutional reforms to make the school safer for students.
THE PUSH FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
From teenagers and defenceless kids, the abused have grown to become men and women and even grandparents and have become activists in order to fight for themselves. Some stories may not be heard because those who owned them may have died.
The confession created the conditions for deeper enquiries into the past to seek complete truths and unravel any reported or suppressed reports of harmful actions against school kids. But the school authority’s attitude apparently was unfavourable to any investigation.
Calls for a thorough investigation were initially ignored. Anne Lucasse, then superintendent of Hillcrest, only acknowledged the confession on April 15, 2021, and stated the school’s willingness to safeguard everyone within its community while quoting McDowell’s confessionary statement.
“We are working with the Child Safety Protection Network (an international organization, of which Hillcrest is a member, dedicated to the safeguarding of students), members of the Board of Governors, Mr. McDowell’s mission and current Hillcrest Administration to address Mr. McDowell’s abuse. It is very important that we respond in support of these students and their families, and potentially, others who suffered abuse at Hillcrest. Hillcrest adopted and has rigorously implemented our Student Protection Policy and set of protocols from January 2015. This policy was designed to safeguard all students from potential harm,” Lucasse and John Brown, Hillcrest Board of Governors’ Chairman, wrote in their August 15, 2021 official statement.
These survivors continued their push for accountability and kept messaging the school’s leadership because the buck stops at its table. On April 25, 2021, 139 former students petitioned Hillcrest, requesting for a larger investigation into any previously reported or unreported sexual harms against students at the school. They looked up to the school to fully investigate McDowell and other abusers.
McDowell’s indication of his availability to communicate with Hillcrest prompted the survivors to look to the school for action. His initial statement, cited and responded to by Hillcrest administration on April 15, 2021, publicly demonstrates Hillcrest’s explicit knowledge of an admission of molestation of Hillcrest children. This required that Hillcrest contact the relevant authorities and encourage the admitted molester to do the same, the petitioners wrote.
Some of the survivors and eyewitnesses, numbering at least 252, went ahead to create a private Facebook group, away from the general group where McDowell confessed, and shared their stories. To muster a coordinated voice, they formed the Hillcrest Survivors Steering Committee, a medium through which they interfaced with the school and mission bodies, in May 2022. Ten people made up the leadership rank and they have recorded some progress but not without delays, roadblocks and apparent reluctance on the part of the school and its partners. The committee members are individuals with varied experiences: some are survivors, some are eyewitnesses and others are supporters of the cause.
But there is more.
PUBLIC INQUEST OR NOTHING
The committee did not want the matter treated internally or behind walls. It is a matter of public importance that an independent investigation is launched to cover the period from 1942, the school’s founding year, up to date. This is the first time stories like these are emerging from the school, an institution least expected to harbour such, and arguably the first reported case in Nigeria. For the survivors, therefore, it is full transparency and justice for all categories of persons who worked or schooled at Hillcrest “then, today and tomorrow” or nothing.
On multiple occasions, the representatives of the survivors met with Lucasse to push the school to investigate all the reports of abuse that might have occurred on the premises of the school in the past. Beyond this, they wanted the school to create a section on its website for people to report historic abuse, provide updates about investigative milestones and apologise to the survivors for being ignored by Lucasse when they were trying to report their experiences.
The committee felt rattled with the inconsistent communication from the school and its discouraging disposition to the call for an external investigation.
“We continued to meet with Superintendent Lucasse from January to July of 2022. Our requests included: publish McDowell’s confession on the school’s website; a written apology to the survivors for the abuse they suffered during their time at Hillcrest; support an independent investigation; full transparency to all current and past contributing missions of Hillcrest School regarding the allegations of abuse. On July 10 of 2022 we met with Lucasse. I met with her face to face in Denver, Colorado, and Daniel Robinson, my vice president, joined us via WhatsApp video call,” Cartlidge told FIJ.
In email correspondence and meetings, the superintendent expressly gave her support and committed to making the information visibly available on Hillcrest’s website in a week. But she did not meet that timeline until August 5, 2022 when she communicated the school’s efforts.
“Attached is the work we have completed on behalf of our Hillcrest Alumni – so far. On the website, a tab will be placed under ‘Alumni’ this weekend. At this time, we are working with the creator of our website template to put ‘Employment’ under ‘About’ and where ‘Employment’ is, place ‘Safeguarding.’ As we are working with the creators of the template (through RenWeb), it may take a bit. In the meantime, we are placing links and articles both under the ‘About’ tab and the ‘Alumni’ tab. As the reporting form was created within the Hillcrest network, you, at this time, may or may not be able to fill it in. This, too, is being worked through,” Lucasse said in an email to the steering committee’s chair on August 5, 2022.
Vocal campaign reached a crescendo on September 1, 2022 and the school and its board of governors, an organ consisting of mission representatives saddled with oversight functions over the school, voted in support of engaging an external task force to look into reports of abuse.
“At their August 25th and 29th meeting, the current Hillcrest Board of Governors adopted four minutes in support of our alumni in seeking an independent external investigation. The minutes read:
“The Superintendent gave the Board of Governors an update — moved, seconded and carried that the Hillcrest Board of Governors tasks the Hillcrest board members to encourage their church or mission bodies to strongly support an independent, extemal inquiry.
“Moved, seconded and carried that the Hillcrest Board of Governors contacts former Cooperating Bodies to encourage them to strongly support an independent, external inquiry.
“Moved, seconded and carried that an Ad Hoc Committee be tasked to find out the former Cooperating Bodies (1960-present) of Hillcrest School and draft a suitable letter to be used in contacting Cooperating Bodies asking them to support an independent, external inquiry. The following are appointed as members of this committee: Mrs. Oluwatoyin Adgebite-Moore (Alumni Representative), Rev. Professor John Brown (BoG Chairman, AGJ), Mrs. Anne Lucasse (Superintendent), Mrs. T. Todd (SIM Representative), Mrs. E. Miner (Student Protection Officer) and a lawyer (to be named).”
Contributing missions received the mandate and they keyed into the call for an investigation. In particular, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the General Board of Global Ministries of the The United Methodist Church (Global Ministries) specifically invited other missions to also support it.
NOT WORKING TO EXPOSE THE TRUTH
“ELCA and Global Ministries were recently asked to support an independent investigation into these allegations and both organizations agreed to do so. The Hillcrest Board of Governors also recently voted in favour of asking mission agencies associated with the school to support an independent investigation. Likewise, the Hillcrest Survivors Steering Committee, a group of Hillcrest alumni, have requested mission agencies to support an independent investigation. Global Ministries and ELCA will work to support this important, independent investigation,” Rafael Malpica Padilla, Executive Director, Service and Justice at ECLA, and Roland Fernandes, General Secretary at Global Ministries, both expressly said of their organisation’s cooperation with the investigation in a September 22, 2022 letter.
Former students of Hillcrest relate with the school through the Hillcrest Alumni Association. To make their voice heard directly by the authorities, the abuse survivors elected Oluwatoyin Adegbite-Moore, the association’s non-voting representative on the Board of Governors, to be their representative and advocate for an investigation.
A Coalition of Missions was subsequently formed and they held a meeting on November 9, 2022. A meeting was set up with the governors board but Adegbite-Moore was told that she was ineligible to attend. To prevent this, the committee emailed Lucasse on December 13, 2022 but received no response. She was prevented from attending the meeting and was eventually removed from the board because she was accused of conflict of interest: she was representing the survivors who are themselves members of the alumni association.
“We learnt on good authority that Lucasse had, in fact, not been working to bring about truth and justice for the survivors. She had, in fact, worked to silence and devalue our voices despite her proclaimed support. When we responded to an email by Brown, the chairman of the Board of Governors, she told him not to respond to us,” the committee president said.
FIJ received no response to a request for comments sent to Lucasse on WhatsApp on June 30.
Much of the conversations about these developments occurred via emails and virtual meetings as most of the stakeholders, including the survivors, the school leaders and mission representatives, are scattered in multiple countries.
More survivors had come out against McDowell, suggesting that student molestation was widespread in the school. One such victim emailed Brian Archer, a regional minister with the EMCC in the Canadian Western Region, on February 24, 2022, saying that they hoped Archer would recognise the enormity of the wounds the confession had opened up, including theirs. The person added that McDowell was only one of over 20 who had been called out for having done very bad things in those days.
On July 1, 2022, a former student who escaped McDowell’s sexual dragnet by a whisker recounted their experience in an email to Archer. McDowell had called them into his office and he was in the process of abusing them when someone knocked at the door. They exited and intentionally avoided a one-on-one private conversation with him throughout their stay in Hillcrest unless an adult, preferably a parent, was present.
Both individuals accused Archer of retraumatising them and dodging their attempts at getting the EMCC’s attention for justice.
FIJ’s email to Archer and Friesen on July 1 for their response to this story got no response.
When the steering committee met with Archer and Dalene Friesen of Friesen Solutions, a human resource consulting firm, on October 20, 2023, they said the EMCC was unaware of any independent investigation. Prior to the meeting, the committee had shipped a 90-page docket to the EMCC on September 14, 2022 through the United States Postal Service, detailing testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses, but Archer said at the meeting that no such document was received. The committee had to resend the same document via email. Confirming receipt of the docket in an email, he said that the EMCC President John Cressman had assigned the two of them to handle the communication, according to the committee in a note obtained by FIJ.
On November 9, 2023, the Global Ministries of the the United Methodist Church of America and the Evangelical Lutheran of America hosted a joint Zoom meeting with Friesen, Archer and other mission leaders as well the leadership of the steering committee primarily to discuss the agenda of the enquiries into the historical abuse.
On February 15, 2023, the EMCC became one of the few Hillcrest’s funders that had tendered a public apology for initial communication lapses about the sexual complaints and indicated support for a third-party investigation.
AN UNUSUAL APOLOGY
“I write today with a heavy heart. I remain deeply grieved at the abuse you have suffered at the hands of individuals who were in positions of trust and authority while you were students at Hillcrest School in Nigeria…. Further, when this news came to me and our current leadership, we mishandled, fumbled and stumbled in our response, for which I am deeply sorry….This letter comes with my personal apologies. No excuse,” Cressman wrote.
Hillcrest has a long list of mission agencies sending kids and teachers to learn and work there. But, over time, some organisations stopped sending students and teachers to the school, effectively ending their affiliation with it. The mission groups are essentially categorised into two: cooperating missions and participating missions. A cooperating mission can vote at meetings while a participating mission has the privilege of attending meetings but cannot vote.
In 2024, eight mission agencies, together with the committee, appointed Zero Abuse, a third-party investigator specialised in child sexual abuse and prevention mechanisms, to investigate all the sexual abuse claims against Hillcrest. According to a statement on the investigator’s website, the Christian missions that supported the investigation through a cost-sharing agreement are: Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, General Board of Ministries of the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Resonate Global Mission, SIM Nigeria, Church of the Brethren, North American Baptist Conference and Pioneers UK.
But there are other organisations currently or historically affiliated with the school but with no public evidence that they supported the cause financially. These agencies include Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Lutheran Church of the Missouri Synod (LCMS), Serving in Mission USA, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Mission Afrika and Assemblies of God AG World Missions (AGWM).
ASSEMBLIES OF GOD WORLD MISSIONS HEARTBROKEN
FIJ requested comments from the non-funding organisations for this story. The AGWM, Mission Afrika, SIM USA and the SBC responded at press time.
Even though Zero Abuse did not list it as one of the supporters of the probe, an official wrote to FIJ in an email on July 1 to say the church contributed financially to the investigation.
“Assemblies of God World Missions (AGWM) has been heartbroken to hear of the allegations related to Hillcrest, a Christian boarding school in Africa. AGWM has been supportive of the investigation and has contributed financially to the funding of the investigation. AGWM families ceased sending their children to the campus over 40 years ago and AGWM is not aware of any allegations which involve its personnel,” the official said.
LEGAL HURDLES FOR MISSION AFRIKA
As for Mission Afrika, Secretary General Daniel Toft Jakobsen said on July 4 that the church stayed out of the process because of jurisdictional issues.
“The agreement is governed by U.S. law, which makes it difficult for us, being a smaller Danish mission agency, to be part in. We are hesitant to commit to obligations under a legal framework that we are not familiar with, especially if we might later discover that certain obligations conflict with Danish law, including in relation to privacy regulations,” Jakobsen wrote.
“After reviewing the agreement with our counsel, the board of Mission Afrika decided not to sign the contract. Instead, we intend to initiate an investigation from a Danish perspective, as we believe this is how we can use our resources best to support potential victims related to Mission Afrika´s activities in Nigeria and other countries over the years.”
For SIM USA, Tim Allan, the international communications director for SIM International, spoke generally for the church.
“SIM Nigeria has signed the agreement with Zero Abuse on behalf of SIM globally. It is our normal practice that the entity closest to the location concerned signs any contractual agreements,” Allan wrote on July 8.
“I can confirm that SIM USA is helping fund the Zero Abuse initiative through its relationship with SIM International and SIM Nigeria and that SIM globally is fully supportive of the investigation.”
Somer Novak, the director of abuse prevention and response administration for the SBC, declined to comment, saying, “we do not have information to contribute to your story”.
Interestingly, the SBC is not new to such a probe. In 2022, Guideposts‘ investigation found pastors of the church culpable of molesting minors and THAT the church executives mistreated those who attempted to speak out. This prompted a US Department of Justice’s investigation into the church.
A PREVIOUS PROBE INDICTS A TEACHER
Even as the EMCC claimed it was committed to an investigation to unearth these crimes, it had yet to investigate Dan Snyder, a 7th Grade Math teacher, it seconded to the school from 1984 to 1998. During this period, Snyder was lewd and sexually harmed teenagers under his authority, according to an investigative report by the Greater Europe Mission (GEM) USA, a mission he later worked with starting in 2007.
[IMAGE: A watermarked copy of the GEM’s report indicting McDowell of child sexual assault.]
Some survivors, including steering committee President Cartlidge, traced his current employer and filed their reports in May 2021, the year he was billed to retire from GEM. He was immediately placed on indefinite administrative leave and a team investigated the complaints.
“While it was clear from reporting individuals that Dan [Synder] did not progress to a level of sexual conduct with children, there is a high degree of sexualised behaviour consistent in reports. Touching bras or snapping the straps, which may have been given a light pass in its day, normalizes a dangerous behaviour. It produces a crack in the armour of a young girl’s understanding of what is okay and what is not okay, at a pivotal stage of development for these children. It opens the door for vulnerability to other abuses, and it creates shame by producing a situation where a child is forced to either say something against an adult Christian authority, or carry a secret. The weight of secrets in abusive situations is heavy,” GEM’s report noted.
“Our findings strongly suggest that Dan’s behaviour during his years at Hillcrest while in the employ of the EMCC was inappropriate and should have been enough to remove him from his role to prevent further access and potential harm. The volume and consistency of reports should not be ignored.”
Among other recommendations, the report implored the EMCC and Hillcrest to take further steps to ensure justice for those abused by Synder.
In the EMCC’s February 15, 2023 apology letter, it promised to conduct “a third-party investigation of Mr. Dan Synder so as to clearly understand his case and assure that victims have a voice”. Over two years down the line, this has not been done. The same church was the sending mission for McDowell and it had yet to apply any punitive measure against him other than counselling.
‘NO FRESH EVIDENCE AGAINST HIM‘
Back on December 6, 2022, the EMCC updated its website with a sexual harassment reporting directory to enable its workers and others affiliated to it to confidentially any abuse they might be facing. FIJ attempted accessing the portal on June 16 and days thereafter, but it was unreachable.
As they continued to ratchet up pressure on the authorities, Cressman addressed them on March 3, 2023.
“He was candid, apologetic, and took it on the chin. He said he would be available to join us any time we might need him in the future and promised to continue communicating with us,” committee president Cartlidge said. “We have never heard from him again.”
All along, Rich Darr, whose agency Missionary Kid Safety Net provides counselling and technical support to people who suffer abuse in mission settings, sat on the steering committee as an adviser. Darr and his co-founders were themselves survivors of abuse at Mamou Alliance Academy, a missionary school controlled by the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Mamou, Guinea-Conakry, in the 1980s.
On September 21, 2023, EMCC’s consultant Friesen told the committee in an email that an independent enquiry carried out against McDowell’s post-Nigeria life by Veritas Solutions, a Canada-based workplace harassment and risk management consulting firm, found no evidence of moral indiscipline.
“We are working on communication right now and plan on having it up on the website within the next 2 weeks,” Friesen said. But it took months of waiting and relentless demands by the survivors before the report was released to them and the report could not be located on the EMCC’s website when FIJ checked on July 7.
Fundamentally, Veritas said that it reasonably believed that McDowell committed additional child abuse beyond the scope of its work..
The INVESTIGATOR concludes that during the period 1974-1991:
MCDOWELL credibly admitted to committing several instances of sexual child abuse beyond those referenced in his April 14, 2021, confession;
There is a reasonable likelihood that MCDOWELL committed additional instances of child sexual abuse during the period 1974-1991.
[IMAGE: A watermarked copy of the Veritas Solutions’ summarised report proving child abuse against McDowell.]
FIJ learnt that the EMCC had fired McDowell following the report.
When McDowell left the Jos missionary school, he proceeded to work at the United Missionary Church of Africa Theological College, Kwara State, for another seven years, starting in 1984. Interrogating his time at this college was important to the truth-finding process, particularly to ensure his Nigerian victims receive proportionate attention, according to the committee. But Veritas Solutions skipped the period, prompting the steering committee to insist that the scope must be extended.
In another email, the EMCC insinuated it thought the steering committee had agreed to the scope of the investigation into McDowell’s actions to be limited to his years after Nigeria. But the committee strongly rejected this insinuation.
“It was clear in our conversation regarding an independent investigation of McDowell that he would be investigated for ALL the years he worked for EMCC outside of his time at Hillcrest. The scope of your investigation, in fact, did not include the seven years he continued to work in Nigeria after he left Hillcrest,” the survivors committee replied to the EMCC’s email.
“From the beginning of our Steering Committee’s work, we have emphasised that the abuse by missionaries must be brought to light and restitution must be offered. Most importantly, those abused by missionaries were not just missionary kids, but also Nigerian locals and expats. By ignoring the seven years McDowell remained in Nigeria, you have done exactly what we most loathe, bypassed, dismissed, ignored and disrespected the Nigerian community in which McDowell lived and worked.
“We emphatically denounce and repudiate any illusion that we helped guide that decision [to restrict investigation of McDowell’s actions to only his life after leaving Nigeria] and will say so to the press as well as that we consider your investigation of McDowell to be incomplete.”
Subsequently, the EMCC told Randal Rauser, director of faith-based organisations investigations at Veritas Solutions, to keep the investigation open until June 15, 2024. It was after the extension that the EMCC’s Cressman informed Ebenezer Kayode, provost of the Ilorin college, of McDowell’s confession and the church’s decision to involve the college in the investigation to lend a voice to any potential victims and/or individuals from the college who have knowledge of abuse, according to an email of April 15, 2024 by EMCC’s consultant Friesen.
On June 3, the college provost told FIJ during a phone call that the college was aware of the investigation and that nobody voiced out any negative story about McDowell.
“I was officially informed and I announced it to the staff that worked with him then. I also announced at the headquarters that anyone with a story should come up, but nobody did. And I reported that back to those who sent the message to me,” he said.
He said there was no discreet mechanism for people to personally reach out to the investigator. It was just a general announcement.
“We cannot say he never did anything [bad] but at least there is no record and nobody came up with anything. They did not provide any discreet channel for people to narrate whatever story they may have. I reported back to them and I said I had nothing to say for or against the man.”
Keep in mind that Ilorin college students who may have been abused by McDowell would certainly have become adults scattered across locations. If any of them, by chance, was still at the college at the time of Kayode’s announcement, there is a little possibility that they would have felt safe to respond to the message. At any rate, such a general method could be faulted, as it failed to guarantee respondents’ safety and confidentiality, and it was not designed to reach the right audience to elicit a response.
SIM USA PAYS $100,000 IN COMPENSATION BUT WITH A CONDITION
Despite staying away from the probe as an entity and expressing a surprise at a lawsuit launched against it by steering committee vice president Robinson and five others in 2021, SIM USA had discreetly settled two victims with $100,000.
Records copiously demonstrate that SIM was part and parcel of Hillcrest Board as far back as 1968 although internal records failed to indicate any country office’s name. J.R. Custer, representing the organisation, attended the 27th Board of Governors’ meeting of Hillcrest on December 10 1968 as an observer. While the church started its own school Kent Academy at Miango in Jos in 1945, its relationship with Hillcrest continued and blossomed beyond that year. Indeed, the church became a full cooperating member of Hillcrest on the high school level in 1963.
Furthermore, Charles R. Frame, a representative of SIM, attended the 40th meeting of the board on June 1, 1974. He also attended the 42nd meeting held May 31, 1975 and the 44th meeting held on May 29, 1976. The same representative was present at the 47th meeting of December 10, 19707.
From January to June 1977, Hillcrest staff list contained at least 10 workers affiliated with the SIM. These workers were Joyce Oyetunde, Vall Vee Benedict, Sheila Pritchard, Roger Anderson, Moreen Stringer, Cora Zobrist, E. Bower, D Bower, Mr. and Mrs. R. Hodges and Mr. and Mrs. F. Godwin.
In the same January to June, 1976, SIM had 47 children and 35 missionary families posted to Hillcrest. In 1977, it had 32 families and 42 children in the school. And between 1978 and 1980, the group was assigned a staff quota of 8.
Robinson was one of the six survivors who had sued SIM before the General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 2021 but the court rejected their application on technical grounds.
“SIM is broken up into every country that has its own sending office. There’s SIM USA, there’s SIM UK, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, and in other countries. They are not under one leadership. So this makes SIM as a whole as a bit problematic when looking for justice because you’ve got jurisdictional issues. How do you find justice in a civil court when you’ve got a Canadian perpetrator who has abused a New Zealander student in Nigeria? Which court do you go to?” Robinson wondered.
“And then, of course you have the problem with the length of time that has passed in some cases; you know some of these cases go back to the 1960s and, and so then you have, statute of limitations issues and so on. In our case, we had problems when we launched the lawsuit. There were six of us at the very beginning. The North Carolina judge threw the case out on the grounds that he didn’t have jurisdiction over crimes committed in Nigeria. Our lawyers argued that he did, because the organisation that was funding that school in large part had both its country and international headquarters in the US.”
The judge ruled that the suit was incompetent and struck it out. They reassessed their case and re-filed.
A HASTY OFFER OF OUT-OF-COURT SETTLEMENT
It was at that point that our team released a press release and it was reported by local radio and TV stations as well as some Christian magazines. As soon as those news releases became public, SIM International and SIM USA approached their lawyers with an offer to settle out of court. Under North Carolina law, no settlement can be reached out of court without an official government mediator being involved, and this mediator is a completely unbiased person who has no knowledge of the case until he is given the file.
“Subsequently, they went into an eight-hour long bargaining session over who is paying what and for how much. Eventually we arrived at a settlement. There is a nondisclosure agreement included in the settlement, but I don’t care because North American non-disclosure agreements mean nothing to me as a Canadian citizen,” he said.
“So my co-plaintiff cannot discuss these things because even though he lives in Missouri. He is still bound by the judge’s orders. I just don’t care anymore because I’ve been trying, trying to get some action out of these people [SIM] for, inactively 45 years, but more actively in the last FIVE years. We ended up settling.
“And my co-plaintiff and I both decided we weren’t going to keep the money because it is dirty money. I kept enough to take myself out for a steak dinner, and the rest of it I donated to worthy charities. I know my co-defendant did as well, but I have no idea which charities he donated to because he didn’t disclose it to me. The sum was $100,000 and it was split between the two of us.”
The lawyers received 30% of the compensation and they shared the rest in two equal parts. Robinson spent only $250 of his own share on a steak dinner.
“I didn’t feel comfortable keeping that kind of money buying a new car or something stupid like that because the reality is missions are charitable organisations,” he said.
“For all their faults, they do do some good work, and this is money that has been donated to this mission by bricklayers, welders, taxi drivers, people that are writing their cheques every month and donating like clockwork. I didn’t feel that it would be mentally and psychologically okay just to sit on that money for my own benefit.”
On the third party investigator Zero Abuse’s side, it had interviewed 31 witnesses and collected 640 material documents since the work commenced. It had distributed a public survey link to collect more useful information from those who may have, according to updates it published June.
About a month after McDowell’s confession, Katy Fine, the wife of Owen Fine, admitted in a text on May 28, 2021 that she was solemnly aware of that her husband sexually assaulted Cartlidge. As a step towards accountability, she offered an initial compensation of $5,000 to the victim.
“He [Owen Fine] was 100% to blame and we both acknowledge that. He was the teacher. Yes this was his fault and his alone. We both want to acknowledge the wrong that was done to you and make it right…. A damaged 25 year old Owen made a huge mistake that has caused you so much pain and so much pain for us too,” Katy’s text read.
Cartlidge voided the cheque because “it does not feel right to me at all”.
Seven months after Katy’s message, Letta emailed Matthew Harrison, the president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LMCS), that she was ready to tell her story publicly. He did not respond but referred the email to the church’s chief administrative officer Frank Simek. Finally, LCMS legal representative Krissa Lubben was involved and she said “we’re working on it”.
Katy’s confession buttressed her husband’s 2001 confession to the LCMS that he had an amorous relationship with two Hillcrest female students between 1991 and 1992. Despite this, the church did not join other agencies to engage the task force for an independent investigation.
“We have amongst us the wounded,” the steering committee said. “Missionary, Nigerian and expatriate kids have been devastated by the abuse suffered at Hillcrest School. We are hoping everyone will get justice this time round.”
This is the second and final part of an investigation into how missionary workers sexually abused schoolchildren at Hillcrest School in Jos, Plateau State. The first is available here.