Nuns Of Shuttered Vermont Orphanage Could Face Murder Charges

BURLINGTON, VT — Investigators will look at decades-old allegations into the mistreatment of children at the shuttered St. Joseph’s Orphanage, authorities said Monday in Burlington. An investigative reporting piece published last month by BuzzFeed News detailed stories from adults who grew up at the Burlington orphanage accusing the Sisters of Providence of beating and burning children, keeping them in seclusion, and restraining them for hours or days.

BuzzFeed senior reporter Christine Kenneally’s chilling look inside the orphanage details unrelenting physical and psychological abuse inflicted on the children who were basically held captive. It revisits stories of children who were forced to kneel or stand for hours or eat their own vomit, and who were dangled upside down out of windows and over wells and laundry chutes.

In one of those instances around 1944, a boy was thrown to his death from a fourth-floor window, according to a 1996 deposition of one of the former St. Joseph’s Orphanage residents who filed lawsuits against the nuns, the diocese and the social service agency that oversaw the orphanage until it was permanently closed in 1974.

Read the full BuzzFeed report, “The Ghosts of the Orphanage.”

Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan and Burlington police said Monday they are creating a task force to bring a “public accounting” of the alleged abuse a the St. Joseph’s Orphanage and others in the state. The investigation will be tedious with both legal and logistical obstacles, Donovan said, but is intended to “give voice to the victims.”

“Justice doesn't always occur in a courtroom,” Donovan said at the news conference. “Justice oftentimes means that the perpetrators and those that represent perpetrators acknowledge that what is alleged is to have occurred, that victims are given an acknowledgement, an apology, and an opportunity to share their story.”

Mayor Miro Weinberger said the children at the orphanage “were some of the most vulnerable residents of our community, and our community failed to protect them.”

Bishop Christopher Coyne said the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington will cooperate with investigators, the Burlington Free Press reported. He said the church hasn’t properly responded in the past to allegations of abuse by clergy.

“As someone who loves the church, I am filled with shame and sorrow,” Coyne said, referring not only to the allegations of abuse against the nuns, but also of sexual abuse of boys by Catholic priests — most recently in Pennsylvania, where 300 priests are accused of sexually abusing 1,000 children.

“The only way we can get to the truth of these matters is to be cooperative,” Coyne said.

Kenneally said the children’s stories might be given more credibility today after the Boston Globe's Spotlight investigative reporting team's 2002 look at the extent of child abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston brought awareness of the long-hidden problem in the Catholic Church.

“What the former residents were struggling with before 'Spotlight' was that enormous wall of disbelief,” Kenneally told the Burlington Free Press. “The world has changed in lots of ways.”

When the victims did come forward in the lawsuits, they got little satisfaction. They were emboldened by Joseph Barquin, a Florida man who settled his lawsuit alleging abuse at the orphanage for $100,000. They were rebuked, though, when a federal judge ruled the statute of limitations had passed and many of their claims couldn’t move forward.

“The incredibly cruel thing about that was the former orphans did not get anything out of that,” Kenneally told the Burlington Free Press. “They did not benefit from what had happened in the early 2000s. They’d done all the work, and it cost them personally so much to tell their stories.”

Weinberger said at the news conference that it’s “remarkable how many people, the dozens and dozens of people, came forward and summoned the courage to talk about these incredibly difficult events.”

“The result of that bravery was at the end of the day, people turning away and not fully believing these events,” he said.

Sam Hemingway, a former Free Press reporter who wrote about the lawsuits and shared documents with BuzzFeed, said in an interview with his former paper the people who brought the claims “would up basically abused again, this time by the court system.”

As a reporter, he attended a survivors’ meeting in which “people collapsed in tears in front of me, telling stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse — about what happened at the orphanage,” he said.

"It’s one of the great tragedies," Hemingway said. "One, it didn’t settle anything for the diocese. They had suffered a wicked black eye in the process."

It’s unclear where task force investigators will focus their investigation, but it could focus on the deaths of residents since there is no statute of limitations on murder.

“If it is possible to make murder charges at this point we will, whether the perpetrators are living or dead,” Weinberger said.

The task force includes representatives of Donovan’s office, the Burlington Police Department, the Vermont State Police, the Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations and the Chittenden County State's Attorney's Office.

There are “countless” victims of physical and sexual abuse who haven’t received justice, Donovan said, and the investigators will go in the direction evidence takes them.

Photo: This Feb. 22, 2015, file photo shows buildings and property of Burlington College in Burlington, Vermont. Prior to housing the college, the building was home to St. Joseph's Orphanage. Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan said Monday, Sept. 10, 2018, a task force is being launched to investigate abuse allegations at the orphanage, which closed in 1974. The Roman Catholic bishop of Burlington said the diocese will cooperate. (AP Photo/Wilson Ring, File)