Who is Amanda Householder? Daughter of abusive Missouri couple says cops ignored her complaints for a decade
HUMANSVILLE, MISSOURI: The daughter of Boyd and Stephanie Householder, a couple who have been charged with 102 counts of horrific sexual, mental and physical abuse of as many as 16 students, has spoken up against the negligence of Missouri police and prosecutors. Amanda Householder told DailyMailTV that she had been trying to expose her parents for a decade, but authorities did not take her seriously.
The 30-year-old disclosed the horror she and "hundreds" of other young girls allegedly endured for years at the hands of her parents before they were charged last week for carrying out the abuse at the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch in Cedar County, Missouri.
Amanda claimed that her 71-year-old father used to use golf clubs to beat her and other girls and forced his "students" to assault other girls. Boyd also made them drink laxatives and stand facing a wall all day, every day for months. He has also been accused of raping at least two of the girls at his ranch.
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The daughter of the accused pair said several complaints were made against them to Child Protective Services and law enforcement over the years, but the probe was only launched recently after several social media users bombarded the Cedar County sheriff and district attorney's offices with demands for justice.
Amanda told the TV program that her parents were first reported to Child Protective Services by her maternal grandmother in 1993, but they did not take the complaint seriously and instead told her to hide her brutal spanking bruises from the police.
Again in 2007, a parent of a child at Circle of Hope made complaints against the Householders to the Attorney General and the FBI as well as nine other law enforcement agencies, but no action was taken.
In fact, when a Missouri Highway Patrol officer went to the district attorney of a neighboring county three years ago with the statements from all the victims, he was sent back. “Every time he called me after an interview he was crying. He said he doesn't appreciate that someone is using his God to abuse these girls,” the mother-of-two said.
However, recently, Cedar County’s law enforcement launched a probe into the alleged duo's abuse after facing pressure from Amanda’s social media followers. She had spoken out on TikTok about the alleged abuse she and other students underwent. The prosecutor, Ty Gaither, said that they “requested the office of the Missouri Attorney General to assist in the investigation and prosecution of this matter.”
According to Amanda, Boyd started beating his kids after being convinced by Stephanie to start going to church in Florida, though they had recently left the military to get away from religion.
“We were always spanked because that's how my mom and dad were raised. But it just changed. Now they were being preached that what they were doing was right and that the bible says, ‘spare the rod, beat the child’, and that it's better to have a pink bottom than a black heart. Our beatings were pretty much every time we came home from church. Eventually, me and my brother got smart and wanted to stop the pain, so we put on as many pairs of underwear as we could,” she said.
The Hesperia-resident continued, “That didn't work so we started putting books in our underwear. When my dad found out... he eventually started spanking us bare-bottom. We literally could be beaten for anything. We would have our mouths washed out with soap, baking soda, hot sauce, things like that.”
Explaining how Boyd and Stephanie started the so-called notorious Circle of Hope, Amanda said initially, the pair started working together at extreme religious children's homes in Florida and Virginia in the mid-1990s. Then in 1998, Boyd became the principal of Hope Children's Home, a hard-line co-educational boarding school in Tampa.
Three years later, the pair shifted to Agapé, an all-boys Christian boarding school in Stockton, Missouri, that claimed to “turn around rebellious boys”. Agapé was the place where Boyd and Stephanie got their inspiration for their alleged torture techniques, which they eventually used after setting up Circle of Hope, their daughter claimed.
Amanda said at Agapé, she used to see boys being “dragged'' to the “restraint room”. “That's where you're slammed to the ground and five staff members sit on your pressure points pushing as much weight on you as they possibly can to put you into pain,” she stated before adding that boys as young as nine at the school were forced to do unpaid labor in its “boot camp”.
“Boot camp is basically like military boot camp multiplied by 20 because these were little kids that didn't willingly sign up and they were tortured. I was under the impression that most of these kids were court-ordered gang members. But when I grew up and started talking to them I found most of them were adopted and their parents didn't want to deal with them,” she shared.
However, the real torture started when Boyd and Stephanie set up their own school in 2006, Amanda said. “At this time I was still brainwashed into believing that any time I was beaten it was because I did something wrong. Eventually, I started realizing my dad opened up Circle of Hope for his own sick perversions,” she stated.
She went on to describe the hell she and others had to suffer at the school. “Push-ups, jumping jacks, standing on the wall and the restraints, all of the Agapé programs, started at Circle of Hope. Other young teenagers had to come running over and put weight on all of their pressure points until they were screaming.”
“My dad looked at us and said ‘If she's not screaming loud enough, you are next’. You could be restrained in chicken poop, horse manure, gravel, it didn't matter. This is what haunts me the most. Hurting another person, causing someone else pain. I have apologized to all the girls,” Amanda said.
The alleged hell life of Amanda ended in 2009 when her parents threw her out of the house. After that, she slowly started healing and eventually, started her five-year campaign that eventually resulted in her parents' prosecution.
According to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Boyd was charged with 22 counts of sexual contact, including sex with a minor. Overall, he has been pressed with 79 felony and misdemeanor charges while his wife, 55-year-old Stephanie, is charged with 22 counts of abuse and neglect of a child. Currently, they have been held at Vernon County Jail.