The Homeschoolers
It’s not clear what life was like for Hana Alemu in Ethiopia, but it’s hard to imagine it could have been worse than it became when the eleven-year-old was adopted by the Williams family in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.
* * *
Larry and Carri already had seven children of their own and wanted more, but her last pregnancy had left Carri Williams unable to bear more children. It had become a trend for homeschooling evangelical Christians in the mid-2000s to adopt needy children into their already large families. The families felt that it was a duty of their faith to rescue children that needed a good home and then homeschool them according to a conservative Christian curriculum. Other families from their Bible study group had adopted as many as eight children into their lives; Carri and Larry wanted the same.
Larry Williams worked from noon until midnight as a millwright for Boeing, while Carri stayed home to homeschool their kids. Carri had attended a women’s retreat run by a ministry called Above Rubies. During the retreat, they spoke of the trend among evangelicals to adopt children from Liberia, a west African country experiencing political instability caused by multiple civil wars.
In 2008, the Williamses contacted Adoption Advocates International (AAI), a secular adoption agency based in Port Angeles, Washington. AAI was run by a woman named Merrily Ripley who had twenty children; three biological and seventeen adopted. Merrily informed Carri that there were two orphaned children in Ethiopia that needed a loving home. One child was deaf and Carri had studied American Sign Language before getting married, so it seemed like a perfect match.
To prepare for the adoption, the Williamses took a quick home-study course provided by AAI and filled out the necessary paperwork. AAI apparently missed the fact that Carri had left one section of the paperwork blank: the part about their beliefs on child discipline.
* * *
In the months leading up to the adoption, Carri and Larry saw a one-minute video clip of the children crying and begging for a good home. It was heart wrenching. Seven-year-old Immanuel was deaf and eleven-year-old Hana was slightly underweight at only 77 pounds.
Immanuel and Hana had been living in the Kidane Mehret orphanage in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Abada. Both had been abandoned at an early age. Though they were not related, they were excited that they would soon become brother and sister living in the United States.
Learning that their new parents lived in the idyllic countryside of the Pacific Northwest, Hana naively read Little House on the Prairie in preparation for her new, exciting life.
In the months after Hana and Immanuel’s arrival in 2008, the Williams’ post-adoption reports came to AAI as per the adoption agreement. According to the adoption agency, everything in the reports seemed normal and Hana had filled out to a healthier 105 pounds. However, in June 2009, the reports suddenly stopped. Although the adoption agreement stated that Carri and Larry would continue to send reports throughout the children’s lives, technically they were under no legal obligation to file the reports. The adoption agency had no way of knowing the atrocities that were going on in the Williams household.
Larry and Carri Williams believed in a strict fundamentalist Christian lifestyle. In addition to homeschooling their children, almost all television and Internet access was prohibited. They believed women should never wear pants, only skirts or dresses and never swimsuits, and certainly never vote. The children were rarely seen in a public setting and only socialized with a select few like-minded families. Larry regularly preached to the children in the backyard of their rural five-acre property.
As for disciplining the children, the Williamses adhered to the teachings of a controversial book called To Train Up A Child by Michael and Debi Pearl. The book taught that the principles and techniques for training an animal and raising a child were the same. It instructed parents to begin spanking their children within the first few months of birth to “break their will.”
In his book, Michael Pearl’s argument for beating a child came straight from his interpretation of the Bible. Pearl believed that Proverbs 13:24 justified his beliefs:
“He that spareth his rod hateth his son.”
Pearl said, “A child properly and timely spanked is healed in the soul and restored to wholeness of spirit. A child can be turned back from the road to hell through proper spankings.”
The book went into great detail of specific implements for parents to use; a wooden spoon, spatula, or the most popular weapon — a short length of small plastic plumbing tubing. This was a particularly well-liked implement because it could be easily curled up and kept available in a parent’s pocket at all times. The book also taught parents to withhold food and put children under a cold outdoor garden hose as punishment.
The Pearls’ book was extremely popular with fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers and, according to the author, sold almost 700,000 copies in the first seven years of its publication. The Pearls’ No Greater Joy ministry generated upwards of $1.7 million tax-free dollars per year.
* * *
For the next two years, Hana’s hopes of the American dream quickly washed away. Life with the Williams family was nothing like the Little House on the Prairie life she had envisioned.
Within months after Hana arrived in the United States, she began menstruating. This infuriated Carri, who told members of her knitting group that she had wanted to adopt “a little girl, not a half-grown woman.” She complained that Hana was rebellious, telling her knitting friends, “I wouldn’t wish her on anyone.”
Friends and neighbors of the Williams family had noticed that Hana and Immanuel were often absent from public family outings, holidays, trips to town, or to church. On the rare occasion that they were brought to church with the family, one parishioner that knew sign language often attempted to sign with Immanuel, but Carri and Larry didn’t want him communicating with anyone. One of them would quickly whisk the boy away before he had a chance to converse.
Neighbors noticed the seven children would be seen actively playing together at the front of the Williams’ home, while Hana and Immanuel would be left standing alone near the driveway staring at their feet.
At home, the discipline was much worse than anyone could have imagined. Hana had Hepatitis B, which again infuriated Carri, who accused her of purposely smearing blood on the bathroom walls. Because of this, Hana was not allowed to use the bathroom in the house. She was only allowed to use a filthy outdoor portable toilet behind the barn that was only serviced twice a year.
The indoor shower was off limits too. Regardless of temperature, Hana’s shower was a garden hose propped up with sticks in the front yard. Hana was often forced to use the cold makeshift shower while the other children watched from the windows of the warm house.
When Hana made any sort of complaint about the clothes that Carri had chosen for her to wear, she would lose her right to wear clothes at all, and given only a towel to wear for the day.
Hana had long braided hair that she was proud of. Her hair was the one thing she could take pride in and Carri knew it. The first spring of Hana’s new life, she was told to cut the grass in the yard. When she finished, the grass was cut shorter than Carri had wanted it. As punishment, Carri shaved her head. She would later shave her head on two additional occasions.
The daily punishments had begun almost immediately after the children were adopted. Most of the time, Immanuel and Hana had no idea why they were being punished. It could have been for standing in the wrong place or getting an answer wrong on their schoolwork. They were never quite sure.
A few months after arriving in the United States, traumatized by the change of environment and daily punishments, Immanuel began wetting the bed. Carri and Larry were convinced he was doing it on purpose just to anger them. The boy was taken outside and was given a shower with the cold hose, then sent to sleep in the dark shower room.
To add to his trauma, Carri often teased him by running the plastic tubing she called her “switch” up and down his face. On one occasion, Larry hit Immanuel on the top of the head with his fist and caused blood to run down his face. That night, he was made to sleep outside and the other children were told not to sign with him.
The punishments themselves were often straight from the To Train Up A Child book and involved beatings with a piece of plastic tubing that Carri kept in her bra. Sometimes it was one of Larry’s belts folded in half, or a long, flexible piece of glue stick. Other common forms of punishment that the Williamses adhered to from the book included denying food, denying clothes, forced outdoor sleeping, and cold outdoor showers.
The Williams’ biological children were punished, too, but never to the severity of Hana and Immanuel. The adopted children were fed different meals than the biological children. While the other children had sandwiches, Hana and Immanuel would have the same sandwich, but with a glass of water poured over it. Sometimes they would get cold leftovers with unheated frozen vegetables. Almost always, the two children were forced to eat outside while the other children ate inside, regardless of the cold, rain, or snow.
Because of Hana’s menstruation, Larry and Carri took the initial steps to change her official age. Carri told her knitting group that if they could get her age bumped up a few years, they could kick her out of the house sooner when she turned eighteen. When another member of the knitting group asked how the girl would survive in the outside world, Carri snipped, “It wouldn’t be my problem.”
In the three years that Hana lived with the Williamses, she went from sleeping alone in the barn behind the house, to being locked inside a bathroom with no light, to eventually being kept in a four-foot by two-foot closet for up to twenty-four hours at a time. Larry’s recorded bible sermons and religious music played outside of the closet the entire time, depriving her of sleep.
* * *
In the afternoon of Wednesday, May 11, 2011, Carri sent Hana into the backyard as one of her daily punishments. It was a rainy spring day and the temperature was in the mid-forties. When Hana, only wearing shorts and a t-shirt, complained that she was cold, Carri commanded that she do jumping jacks in the yard to stay warm. After a few hours alone outside, the children noticed Hana’s lower lip quivering. She seemed unable to control her own movements, had fallen a few times, and eventually had trouble standing up at all.
Carrie went out the back door of the home and grabbed Hana by the arm and led her to the outhouse behind the barn. She continued to fall repeatedly, which infuriated Carri. She believed Hana was only trying to create attention. Unable to get her to stand, Carri left her lying alone in the yard.
Hours later, Hana’s clothes were soaked. Carri set dry clothes on the back porch and yelled at her to come back inside the house. When Hana didn’t return, Carri called on her two eldest sons. She gave the boys a length of plastic tubing and told them to hit her on her bottom for not following orders.
Strangely, as the boys whipped her, she started to remove her own clothing and Carri called the boys back inside. By 5:00 P.M. Hana began throwing herself down on the pavement, gravel driveway, and grass. Her knees and hands began to bloody as Carri watched from inside the warm house. When she couldn’t watch anymore, Carri turned away from the window and ignored Hana for the rest of the evening.
Near midnight, the seven biological Williams children giggled as they continued to stare out the window at Hana, who had removed all of her clothing and was still uncontrollably throwing her body around in a fit. She was wallowing in the mud and pounding her own head into the ground. They watched in amusement as Hana was experiencing what’s known as “paradoxical undressing.” In the final stages of hypothermia, the nerves can become damaged causing irrational behavior. This final stage of hypothermia tricks the mind into thinking it’s extremely hot, causing the person to remove their clothes and attempt to burrow themselves into the ground.
When Hana finally stopped moving, one of the daughters called their mother to come check on Hana. She was face-down in the yard with a mouth full of mud. Carri, upset with Hana’s nudity, grabbed a bedsheet and wrapped it around Hana. She then instructed her boys to drag her into the house.
First Carri called Larry, who was driving home from work. When she hung up, she finally dialed 911.
“I think my daughter just killed herself.… She’s really rebellious, and she’s been outside, refusing to come in. And she’s been throwing herself all around. And then she collapsed.”
“Is she breathing?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“I don’t know. We adopted her almost three years ago.”
“You don’t know how old she is?”
“She’s somewhere between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. She was throwing herself all over the gravel, the yard, the patio. We went to bring her in. My sons tried to carry her in, and she took her clothes off. She’s very passive-aggressive. I don’t know how to describe it.”
During the call, Carri sounded more annoyed than saddened or shocked. The 911 operator coached Carri through CPR, but it was no use. Hana was gone. When emergency crews arrived, Hana had a large lump on her forehead and she was covered in blood. Her hips, knees, elbows, and face had fresh red bloody markings from repeated whippings. She also had a stomach infection.
The postmortem examination of Hana’s body revealed she was abnormally thin for just thirteen years old. At only five feet tall, she was emaciated and had gone back down to 76 pounds. She was lighter than 97% of girls her age and thinner than she was when she originally came from Ethiopia three years earlier. The official cause of death was hypothermia compounded by malnutrition and gastritis (stomach infection). It was determined that her body had been too thin to retain enough heat on the day she died.
* * *
When Child Protective Services knocked on the door of the Williams home the following day, Larry refused to let them in. Two weeks after Hana’s death, the entire family were interviewed by detectives and Child Protective Services. All the children gave the same story, obviously coached by their parents: Hana was rebellious and “possessed by demons.”
When Immanuel was interviewed, he told detectives, “People like Hana got spankings for lying and go into the fires of Hell.” When Larry heard Immanuel give that answer, he immediately stopped the interview and took the children home.
Two months had gone by with no charges brought against the Williamses when Child Protective Services received an anonymous tip. Someone claimed that Carri didn’t like her adopted children and Immanuel was being treated much like Hana. With that news, CPS worked with detectives and opened a formal investigation. All eight of the Williams children were taken into foster care. During a search of the house, police found a copy of the book To Train Up a Child.
Even after months in foster care, Immanuel was afraid of his foster parents and nervously apologized for every little mistake he made, even asking his foster mother why she wasn’t beating him. He told his therapists of repeated nightmares and constantly worried that he would be the next to die. Immanuel was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
That September, more than four months after Hana’s death, Carri and Larry Williams were arrested on charges of homicide by abuse and first-degree manslaughter for the death of Hana, as well as first-degree assault of a child for the abuse of Immanuel.
Carri and Larry each faced a potential life sentence. Both posted bail of $150,000 each, but were given strict orders to not contact each other or any of their children — either directly or through third parties or other means. However, when Larry continued to send highlighted bible verses to the children, the prosecution believed them to be coded messages encouraging them to come to his defense. Larry Williams was arrested again and placed in a state jail where he remained for almost two years awaiting trial.
* * *
This wasn’t the first time that the book by Michael and Debi Pearl, To Train Up a Child, had been linked to a child’s death. Two other sets of fundamental Christian parents that employed tactics from the book had recently killed their adopted children: Sean Paddock and Lydia Schatz. The three deaths happened in different parts of the United States, but all were adopted, homeschooled, and beaten with a length of 1/4 inch plastic tubing, as recommended by Michael Pearl.
Seven-year-old Lydia Schatz’s parents, Kevin and Elizabeth, held her down and beat her for nine hours with a piece of the tubing for pronouncing the word “pulled” incorrectly. Four-year-old Sean Paddock’s mother Lynn Paddock smothered him in a blanket wrapped too tightly around him because she wanted to stop him from getting out of bed in the middle of the night. Like Hana, the abuse that eventually killed these children was just the tip of the iceberg.
* * *
At trial, Carri and Larry turned on each other. The couple sat at opposite tables in the courtroom, rarely looking each other in the eye. Larry testified that the discipline was all at the hands of Carri, while Carri testified that her discipline was at the instruction of her husband. Carri also admitted that she told her children not to talk to detectives about any of the abuse. The children, however, testified that lying was considered one of the most serious offenses in their household.
One of the Williams children, Joshua, confirmed that Hana had not been homeschooled or eaten meals with the other children for at least a year before her death. The child told the court that she would sometimes go two days without anyone speaking to her and none of the biological children liked her, “but it didn’t matter because she was always in the closet.”
Immanuel testified using sign language with the help of three interpreters. The courtroom was silent as he was asked what he thought happened to Hana. “I don’t know” he signed. “She disappeared. I think maybe she’s dead.” He also testified that he was often beaten with a stick or plastic tubing until blood ran down his face, telling the court, “I would suffer with the pain until it eventually went away.”
The biological children admitted that they were coached to tell authorities that Hana slept in the bedroom with them, when in fact she slept in a tiny locked closet. The jury was shown the closet that she slept in and were shown photos of the scars on Hana’s body from repeated beatings.
Larry testified that he trusted his wife’s discipline choices with the adopted children because she had done such a good job raising the other children. Carri rebutted that her husband was an equal participant in the discipline and even came up with some methods on his own, like hosing off Immanuel and locking him in the shower room after his bedwetting. She also testified that Larry was the one that installed the lock on the closet door.
During the trial, the defense attempted to argue that Hana was actually sixteen-years old rather than thirteen. If she had been sixteen at the time of her death, the homicide-by-abuse charge could not be applied as it only applies to children younger than sixteen.
Since there was no documentation of her birth from Ethiopia that proved her age either way, the trial was postponed to have Hana’s body exhumed for examination. Tests on her teeth and bones, however, were inconclusive and experts couldn’t confirm that she was sixteen.
The defense agreed that Larry and Carri may have been bad parents and their choices were bad, but they weren’t killers and had no idea that their form of discipline would lead to the child’s death.
After seven weeks of testimony, the jury didn’t agree with the defense and both Larry and Carri Williams were convicted of first-degree manslaughter and first-degree assault. Carri was also found guilty of homicide by abuse and was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison. Larry Williams was sentenced to nearly twenty-eight years and given credit for the almost two years he had been in jail awaiting trial.
