For one hundred and eleven years, the Dozier School for Boys operated under the guise of ‘reforming’ wayward school boys.
But within its concrete detention halls and buried beneath its grassy pastures lies evidence of neglect, abuse, forced labour and suspicious deaths.
The school was only closed in 2011, but even then, it seemed like no one knew what really happened there. That’s when forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle decided to investigate.
Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle shares what she found buried beneath the Dozier School for Boys on the Crime Insiders podcast:
“Florida, like most of the American South, didn’t have prisons. They had a convict lease system. So children, like adults, were basically arrested for a crime and then put out for labour,” Kimmerle said.
The school allegedly aimed to give children job skills so they could become productive citizens, including farming, carpentry and printing.
“It was a huge dairy farm and cotton fields and agricultural fields and pastures. And it was there in the pasture where they had put up these crosses that commemorated the burials,” she said.
“Men came forward with allegations of physical and sexual abuse and also stories about boys who had died. And it was sort of unknown who had died there.”
Her research received backlash from some locals and authorities who didn’t want to open a century-old can of worms, so she used a historical permit for permission to excavate the grounds.
Kimmerle’s excavations revealed decades of institutionalised abuse and physical evidence of what victim-survivors and families had been claiming since the beginning.
“We went in with just a really basic research question: Can we find the cemetery? Can we find the burials and how many are there?”
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