Especially when I first shook your hand and walked in here because I thought you're gonna be some creepy guy. I would be like, I ain't talking to him.

Well, I'm glad you don't think I'm creepy.

I didn't. But to look at you, see you eating pizza and smiling. Do you have any idea what that's like for me to have to tell you this shit? I don't want you to hear this. You shouldn't have to hear this, any of it.

There's also a lot of power in telling.

Is there? Am I. Is this going to be the same thing as one here? I thought I was helping them all the time I was working there. All it was doing was fueling those guys to hurt the moors.

This is Karen Lemoyne, a former employee of the youth development center, the juvenile jail in New Hampshire. For the last 30 years or so, she's been afraid to speak publicly about YDC. But after she decided I was not some creepy guy, Karen told me her story. And it was like a dam breaking loose. She had so much to say. We spoke for 6 hours in a studio across two days. We stopped only for Karen's smoke breaks and for me to eat that pizza she mentioned. Karen is a really warm and earnest person. She feels this story deeply, even all these years later. Karen's story begins with her first day on the job at YDC back in 1989, just a couple years before Andy Perkins from the last episode was there.

There really was no training. I wasn't told anything other than here's the key and it works for every door in here and checked. Hit the clock. There's a clock. You turn to prove that you checked everybody and you have to do that every 15 minutes. One's on one end of the building, the other clock's on the other end of the building. So what that would show is you have walked through every room and that was the amount of training that I got.

Karen is 31 years old when she starts at YDC. She just moved to New Hampshire as a single mom with four kids. This job at YDC seemed like a good fit for her. She could walk to work, which helped because she didn't have a car. Plus, Karen had worked for a couple of police departments in Massachusetts. She'd spent time in jails and around incarcerated people, including kids. She was even thinking about a career in juvenile justice. Karen says she believed that the juvenile justice system was there to help kids, not punish them for what they did.

Well show you the real world of how things could work, and you could have a smooth life that would lead you on, you know, to a happy, fulfilling life for the best. Good.

So Karen starts her new job with that earnest, maybe a little idealistic attitude. Karen works the overnight shifts in a few of the boys cottages at YDC. She would get there at 845 just before bedtime for the kids. They'd go to sleep in their cells. And then every 15 minutes, Karen would do her rounds.

Every 15 minutes, you would take a flashlight. You would look visually at each kid through the window. You didnt open the door. For the most part. You would just look. What I did was count to make sure they would breathe in three breaths and then go to the next one.

It doesnt take long for Karen to start noticing a few things, like the kids seem unusually frightened of her. She says sometimes if she needed to come into a kids cell, they'd get out of bed and stand as far away from her as they could, like up against the wall.

They didn't even have a response. They didn't even say, get out or I hate you, or I don't want to be here. There was no response. They were just frozen or crying. Uncontrollable, but no words.

About a month in, Karen notices a kid with a bruise. She takes her colleagues aside, asks them about it and the story they give her. It seems kind of plausible, but also not. Eventually, Karen decides to go to her bosses. She complains to her supervisors about these things she's noticing.

I complained. I made staff aware of different incidents. I keep using the word complaint. I made who I thought was an authority aware of some of the incidents that were happening because I thought they should be aware. I was told, I am not a psychiatrist, I am not a psychologist, and I need to not delve into their personal mental problems because these kids are in here, because they lie. They manipulate adults. And I didn't know what I was doing. And there was just something in my gut instinct that knew that that was not true.

Karen didnt arrive at YDC looking to start trouble. She needed this job. And Karen believed in the work. She bought into YDCs mission to nurture, protect, and educate the kids. But Karen was about to learn the real culture of YDC, a culture of violence, retaliation, and secrecy, a way of doing things that was harmful not only to the kids but to anyone who didnt go along. In the last episode, we saw inside the black box and heard how the power dynamic between staff and kids helped create the conditions for abuse. Remember that warning Andy Perkins says he received? You know, they wont believe you. Well, in this episode, a staffer who does believe a kid who tries to do the right thing and what that ends up costing both of them. From new Hampshire Public Radio, I'm Jason Moon and this is the youth development center. Karen is beginning to realize YDC is not what she hoped it would be. She hasnt witnessed any abuse firsthand. But the red flags are starting to pile up. Then things get a lot more serious. It starts with a kid were going to call John Doe. We agreed to not use his real name.

John is in his early fifties now. When we met, he wore a silver chain necklace and wraparound sunglasses that sat on top of his head. He was nervous to talk about what happened to him at YDC. So nervous his hands were shaking. His wife came with him to support him.

You know, I almost canceled today. There was sick to my stomach on the way down, smoking like a chimney and I almost didn't come down.

Today, John owns an antique store and likes to work on cars. As a kid, he says his journey to YDC began with an abusive father. I heard that a lot from people who ended up at YDC. They came from abusive and chaotic homes or had parents with addictions.

I was a hard kid to deal with. My parents didn't know how to, I guess, control me. I was just, you know, I was a kid, you know, kids get out of control.

John says he runs away from home and a judge puts him in foster care. Then he says he sets his foster parents barn on fire. He says it was an accident, but that sends him bouncing around the juvenile justice system for pretty much the rest of his childhood from 1984 to 1991, ages eleven to 17. This included several stays at YDC.

A.

Heads up that this next part discusses attempted suicides. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text the suicide and crisis lifeline at nine eight eight, John Doe attempts suicide multiple times while he's held at YDC. In fact, this is how Karen says she first learned about John Doe because, she says, some staff were joking about it.

The guys would just laugh about it, talk about it, say it loud enough for the whole tier to hear it. Well, next time we hope he kills himself. Oh, my gosh. You know, I mean, we could hang him up like Carrie. Apparently, I didn't know it at the time. Carrie was a movie that had blood in it. Somehow.

Karen was disgusted by the jokes about John Doe. By this point, she had become the butt of off color jokes herself. Karen says some of her male coworkers were regularly sexually harassing her, even in front of the kids.

Um, she's your new night shift. Look at her beautiful ass. You know why? Because she rides horses. I felt my role there, in the eyes of the male staff who were doing these things was as, like a prop as a show to show these boys what kind of authority that they could have over this building, over them and over me.

One night, Karen says she was assigned to the cottage where John Doe was held. She went to do one of her usual rounds, and then she sees something weird. And just a heads up that we've beeped out any time where Karen uses John Doe's real name.

So I go to look into his room, and there's a staff member there bending over at the door.

A staff member bending over near the closed, locked door to John Doe's room. Karen says in the days before this moment, the kids had told her they'd seen a mouse around the cottage. They wanted to keep it. Asked Karen if they could train it. So Karen says when she sees this staffer bent over looking at the floor, she thinks, oh, he must have caught the mouse.

And I said, did you get it? And he's like, he stood up and looked at me, and it kind of startled me.

Karen says this staff member was not assigned to work the cottage that night, which she thought was strange. So she walked over to him, and they both stood outside John Doe's cell door.

Karen looked inside and was standing at the door. I could see he was standing up.

On the other side of the door.

On the other side of the door. I could see him through the window. So I just took my key and I didn't really know what to do. And I unlocked the door, and I said, are you all right? Is that mouse in here? And he looked at me. I was looking for a mouse, and he looked at me like he saw her. A ghost.

Karen says John Doe would not answer her. The other staffer kept standing in the doorway. Karen can't quite make sense of what's going on. Obviously, it's not about a mouse. Maybe there was some kind of exchange underneath the door. Karen says she searches the room, but she doesnt find anything.

So I locked the door and said, all right, go back to sleep. And I thought the incident was over.

The next morning, when the day staff arrives, Karen says she tells a YDC administrator in the main office about what happened. Someone on staff who wasnt supposed to be working was hanging around John does cell last night.

He has no idea what Im talking about. No staff would possibly be in that building that wasnt clocked into work there and it hadn't happened. It's like, wow, this is just so weird.

Karen says the very next night she's at work in a different cottage when she sees the nurse go running. Something had happened with John Doe.

She came back and she said, this blood, this is all from. He tried to kill himself and he cut himself really bad this time. I was like, what? Right away my head thought, what did that guy give him?

It was a razor blade slid under the door of John Doe's cell as a kind of taunt about his suicide attempts. John told me about it. He says it actually happened more than once. And did they, were they saying anything to you, or was the implication clear enough?

The implication? It was clear enough. On occasion they'd say something, but they'd knock on my door and then I'd hear shit underneath the door and it'd be a razor blade.

John Doe recovered, and Karen says the suicide jokes resumed. Karen had had enough, so she went to a supervisor again to complain about.

The jokes and said they were only kidding. And it's, you know, I mean, it's a stressful job. They were there when he had that suicide attempt. They saw it, and they're just trying to deescalate their stress, basically, is what the message I got. You weren't there, so, you know, you didn't have to deal with it. They're just trying to, you know, take it the best they can. I could see that nobody was listening to me, even at the point where somebody would die. And I was at that point, I was scared. I realized I was working in the wrong place.

After a break, Karen says it's her own life that's in danger at YDC, and John Doe tries to protect her. Sometime after the razor blade incident, Karen says she came in for a night shift and the boys weren't getting ready for bed like usual. It was a holiday. Karen can't remember which one, but the kids were being allowed to stay up late in the cottage living room. Karen says most of the kids were doing some kind of crafts, but off to one side, she noticed two boys who weren't really doing anything. One of them was John Doe.

I had said, hey, you know something? Do you guys know how to make cookies? I said, um, do you want to learn? I have the ingredients in here in this building. I was like. And they were fascinated, like, yeah, we'll eat cookies with you. I said, no, we're going to learn to make.

So Karen gets the ingredients out, bowls and spoons, they start mixing. One kid is making chocolate chip, the other oatmeal.

And I could see they were like, interested because I wanted to eat them. But they were also like, we want to talk to you. I kept saying, we want to talk to you. And I did blow it off because I didn't want any personal talk between us.

So what did you say to them when they said that?

I just kept talking about the cookie. I just kept talking about what we were doing. I said, all right, all right, that's good. And I hate to say it, but the truth is I thought they were up to something because they were looking at each other and then saying that to me. So I thought, all right, this is gonna be a problem somehow.

But the kids don't give up. Karen says the kid next to John Doe finally gets her attention. Just a heads up, we're gonna beep out his name, too.

Looks me right in the eye and said, we need to talk to you. These guys are planning to attack you. I was like, I almost fell out of my chair. And I thought, all right, I'm being manipulated. They're just trying to screw with me, the boys. I said, you shouldn't be talking that way about people who work here. I said, really? I said, you guys are going too far. I said, we can sit and do this and we can chit chat, but you can't be accusing people of stuff like that. I really didn't believe them at that point, so I started to just say, all right, well, give me your three bowls and we'll bake some of these.

And this is the other kid, not.

John Doe, just pushed all three of those balls out of the way and he leaned over the table and never that I worked there unless it was like some physical problem where you had to restrain a kid. Had any of those kids ever touched me? And he put his hand over my hand and he held my hand, which I thought was so odd, but in a nice way. And he looked me right in the eye. He said, karen, they're gonna rape you.

John Doe and this other kid tell Karen they heard YDC staff trying to bribe kids into assaulting her.

Couldn't fucking believe it. My heart sank to my stomach at that point. I believed him and said, that's true.

John Doe confirms this story. He says he and the other kid warned Karen because they liked her and they wanted to protect her from the other staff.

The staff were trying to get together a group to actually rape and beat her because she wasn't conforming. When she first came there, she made an impression on a lot of kids. She made the impression that she wasn't there for the money. She was there to make a difference. She bucked a lot of the staff members. The staff members did not like that.

Back at the table with the bowls of cookie dough, Karen is reeling.

I don't even know if we baked those cookies. I was just terrified because all these people are in this room with me, the staff, right that second. Everybody went to bed and I finished out the rest of my shift uneventful and literally, I don't even remember the rest of it because I felt like a zombie. I was petrified. I was walking down that dark, echoing hallway by myself, wondering who was behind me.

John Doe says the staff were planning this assault on Karen because she wouldn't conform. She was speaking up, resisting the toxic culture of YDC. Other YDC staff who resisted faced similar blowback. Another YDC employee from the 1990s says she tried to raise the alarm about abuse in the girls cottage. She says she complained to one of the same supervisors Karen did. She says staff told her she was, quote, digging her own grave. Then one day, this staffer says she left work, got in her truck to drive away, and then the wheels of her truck came off. Someone had loosened the lug nuts. This is corroborated by an internal YDC memo. Another former staffer says he received reports about employees getting mysterious, threatening phone calls at home after they filed complaints at YDC. The staffer says twice an employees tires were slashed, once at YDC and once at an employees home. Multiple former employees say there was a time when many YDC staff wore stickers that read no rats. It was taken as a warning. Karen was scared. She didnt feel safe going to work. But yet again, she decides to speak up and tell a supervisor, this time one who's not assigned to her cottage.

And to her surprise, there's a response. According to Karen, the supervisor interviews some of the kids. And eventually, Karen says one staffer emerges as the culprit, a guy named Bob Willett. Karen says there's the disciplinary hearing and Bob gives his side of the story.

He said, that's not really accurate at all. I said that they could have sex with you, and I'm thinking semantics here.

You know, he admitted to that.

Oh, no, he absolutely admitted to it. He took the fall for everybody. Yeah, so he admitted, yes, he had done that, but it was a joke and he didn't know how it got spread through there because there were a bunch of teenage boys. One heard it. They repeated it. They all heard it.

According to Karen, the result of this hearing is that Woollett will give a public apology to the whole cottage for starting this joke. But Karen says on their next shift, that apology never comes.

And I waited and I waited and I said, all right, wait a minute, Bob. Don't you have something. You boys all be quiet. I said, don't you have something that you want to say to them? And he said, no, I don't. I said, what do you mean? I said, we agreed to that. That was in that hearing. He's like, you shut up about that hearing. And I was like, wait a minute, you guys. I want you boys to realize, you know, and I started to say it, that Bob here wants to apologize. And he said, no, I don't fuck her. And it got really hostile in that room.

Bob Willett died in 2014. A few days after Bob's non apology, Karen says she sees the nurse go running again.

Like, I mean. I mean, running with stuff behind her. Didn't even put it on her coat. And she said, oh, my God. Cut his finger off.

It's John Doe.

And a couple hours later, she came back, and she's like, oh, yeah. Kid was throwing such a struggle. So we don't know what happened, but I. He wouldn't get in his cell, and he had a fistfight with one of the staff, and his finger get cut off.

Somehow it was found out that it was me and this other individual that blew the whistle. The beatings almost started the next day. This is where it gets hard. They subdued me with a pressure point behind the earth and put my hand in a door and slammed the door. They let go at the last minute. I got most of my hand out, except for this one.

John Doe opened his hand and showed it to me. He was trembling a little. I saw a long scar near the tip of one finger.

They took me over to the infirmary, and I was forced to tell him I slammed my own hand in the door.

John Doe says it was just the beginning of months of beatings that he received in retaliation. Meanwhile, Karen thinks the whole episode is over. Well, it wasn't one night, Karen says she was attacked. It happened while she was letting the kid out of his cell to use the bathroom. Karen says she was able to fight him off, but she was badly hurt. Her teeth were knocked out. Blood was dripping from her mouth. She says there was supposed to be another staffer with her during the bathroom checks. Instead, he was downstairs and only came up after the struggle. Was over.

He said, what the hell happened? What happened? I mean, I don't know. I wasn't sure if I should be thinking, you bastard. You set that up with them. You let them set that up.

Karen wasnt sure what to think except that she knew it was finally time to quit. After a little less than two years on the job Karen left YDC in 1991.

Suddenly you cant feed your kids. Suddenly you have no power in the world. You have no job reference in the world.

From her telling the parting was not amicable. She says she was forced to sign a document that said she wouldn't talk about her time at YDC with anyone under penalty of perjury. Remember the black box of juvenile privacy laws? Karen's story was put inside of it. Karen left New Hampshire today. She lives hours away from YDC in a rural spot where she rides horses. She came to YDC optimistic about working in juvenile justice. She left disillusioned.

And I'm sure I wasn't the only one who knows what happened years after that or years before me. But I guarantee you it got worse after I left because if you start letting a dog bite you and thinking it's, oh, that's okay, the dog bites, it's going to escalate. Of course it is.

If you let a dog bite you once, it will happen again. This was Karen's way of saying that when you have a culture where it's okay for staff to joke about a kid's suicide attempts or to sexually harass a female colleague in front of the kids it creates an environment where even more serious types of abuse can flourish. As for John Doe and the other kid who warned her Karen says she never saw them again.

I genuinely feel saved my life that I wouldn't have let you. That they changed my kids lives, my life at risk to their own. I never forgot them.

Then one day about 30 years later Karen Lemoyne saw something on the news about YDC just like Andy Perkins from the last episode. And she picked up the phone. Karen found out there was a reckoning brewing. Investigations had been launched into YDC. Lawyers were putting together massive lawsuits. Karen spoke to the investigators and then the lawyers and she told them about John Doe. The lawyers tracked him down but John wasn't sure he wanted to talk to them. The things that had happened to him at YDC, he buried them, he said. But then John Doe thought about the possibility that this kind of abuse might still be happening and it lit a fire inside of him.

No kid in this world, if somebody did something like that to my granddaughter, I would kill them. Nobody deserves that. Nobody.

John Doe decided he was in and that's how he became John Doe. Actually, he's John Doe hash 441 because he was the 441st person to file his lawsuit over abuse at YDC, the reckoning had arrived.

There was this hypocrisy and what we were told to do, like, you cannot be violent. You cannot be aggressive whatsoever. Rebellious whatsoever. But we can do whatever the hell we want to you.

They were beating us. They were grown men and we were children.

I don't have them quite as frequent anymore. But I used to wake up shaking and sweating and horrified. I'd have dreams I was locked in a room again.

The horror of the whole thing is not what they did to us. Nobody believed us. Just somebody fucking pay attention.

Being violated. You know, they look at you different. You had to be the stronger person and be tough to show that you're not that type of person. Nothing like that happened to you.

Justice in my eyes. If they were all dead, yeah, that would. That's how I feel. I would like to personally line them up, each one of them, and shoot them dead through the fucking head. That's how I feel. I'm sorry if that's too graphic, but that's my honest opinion. And then I would sit down and have a steak and potatoes and have a better life.

What I wanted was to hear somebody look me in the eye and say, I'm sorry. Sorry. They're not sorry. The only thing they're sorry is they're sorry that we come forward. That's what they're sorry. They're sorry me. Chuck Miles victim number whatever I am is coming forward. And I'm saying you're gonna leap me in the eye. You're gonna know my face and you're gonna know what you did to me.

This flood of almost 1300 people who've come forward to allege abuse, it all started with one man.

They didn't just hurt me.

This is generational.

That's next time on the youth development center. Just a reminder, if youve suffered abuse and need someone to talk to, you can call the national sexual assault hotline at 1806 564673. If youre in a mental health crisis, call the suicide and crisis lifeline at nine eight eight. You can also find these numbers in the show notes. The youth development center is reported, written and produced by me, Jason Moon. It's edited by Katie Culinary. Additional editing by Lauren Shuljan, Dan Barek and Mariba Knight. Fact checking by Donia Suleiman to fully wrap your head around the sheer scale of the abuse allegations at YDC, go to our website, ydcpodcast.org dot. We partnered with Russell Somora and Alvin Chang with the digital publication the pudding to analyze data from more than 1000 of these YDC lawsuits. They visualized the findings in a way that gave me goosebumps when I first saw it. There's a timeline of the alleged abuse from 1960 to 2021, examples of patterns that emerge across all the alleged victims accounts, and much, much more. It's all done with the help of original illustrations by Julia Louise Pereira and Jan Deem. There are also gorgeous and empowering photos taken by Gabby Lazzada and Raquel C.

Zaldivar of some of the voices you've heard so far, including Andy Perkins, Karen Lemoyne, and John Doe 441. Again, it's ydcpodcast.org dot. Huge special thanks this episode to Joel Wiggin and to those people who shared their stories of abuse that you heard at the end, including Jason Peters, Michael Gilpatrick, Ronaldo Bruner Cummings, John Doe 141, Chuck Miles, Andrea Martin, and David Meehan. Thanks also to my colleagues Sarah Plord, Zoe Kay, Olivia Richardson, Casey McDermott, Todd Bookman, and Taylor Quimby. NHPR's news director is Dan Barrok. Rebecca Lavoy is director of podcasts. Original music by me, Jason Moon. The Youth Development center is a production of the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio.