The Dozier School for Boys

This episode contains discussion of child abuse, physical and sexual violence against minors, and descriptions of deaths in state custody. Listener discretion is advised.

For more than a century, the state of Florida ran a place in the panhandle town of Marianna that called itself a school. It opened on January 1, 1900 and didn't close until June 30, 2011. In those one hundred and eleven years, it operated under four different names. The Florida State Reform School. The Florida Industrial School for Boys. The Florida School for Boys. And finally, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Same campus. Same staff. Same building, set back near the trees, that the boys inside called the White House.

In this episode of Disturbing History, we walk through the gates of one of the most brutal institutions ever operated by an American state. We trace it from its origins in the late 19th-century "child savers" reform movement to the small white concrete building where boys were beaten with a weighted leather strap until they passed out. We sit with the survivors who carried it in silence for half a century before finding each other on the internet and going public in 2008.

And we walk into the woods behind the cemetery, where University of South Florida forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle and her team finally answered the question families had been asking for generations. Where are our boys.

You'll meet Thomas Varnadoe, the 13-year-old who died 38 days after arriving on a malicious trespass charge for stealing a typewriter.

George Owen Smith, the 14-year-old whose family was told he'd been found dead under a house. Earl Wilson, the 12-year-old killed at Dozier in 1944. Robert Stephens, identified through DNA from a nephew named after him who had never been told his uncle existed. You'll hear from the White House Boys themselves. Roger Kiser. Jerry Cooper. Robert Straley. Dick Colon. Bryant Middleton. And from the Black survivors whose accounts of the North Side rarely make the front page.This is also the story of how an institution survived six state investigations in its first 13 years, a 1958 U.S. Senate hearing, a 1968 governor's visit that called for a whistleblower, a 1983 ACLU class-action lawsuit, and decades of media reporting, before it was finally shut down.

It's the story of the FDLE's 2009 report that found 81 deaths and the 2010 finding that no one would be charged. It's the story of the 2017 state apology, the 2024 compensation bill, and the 55 burials Kimmerle's team pulled out of the Florida dirt, including the ones under a roadway and a mulberry tree where no cemetery was ever supposed to be. It's a story about what we built. About who we let it happen to. And about how many other institutions across this country called themselves schools while functioning as cages.




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Send your suggestions to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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