Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week,
Speaker 1: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
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Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good evening.
Speaker 2: In this timely and deeply personal true crime memoir, James Renner,
Speaker 2: acclaimed journalist, author and creator of the True Crime This
Speaker 2: Week podcast, and former boy Scout, explores the dark side
Speaker 2: of an American institution, it's pervasive culture of sexual abuse,
Speaker 2: and the traumatic, even deadly, repercussions of its long buried secrets.
Speaker 2: In the summer of nineteen ninety five, at the largest
Speaker 2: Boy Scout camp in Ohio, a night of sexual violence
Speaker 2: ended with one councilor dead and another hospitalized. The death
Speaker 2: was ruled accidental, but it wouldn't be the last death
Speaker 2: associated with Seven Ranges Reservation. James Renner two was a
Speaker 2: counselor at Seven Ranges that year. He was always sure
Speaker 2: there must be more to the story of Mike Klingler's
Speaker 2: death because Renner also knew firsthand that the nine hundred
Speaker 2: acre camp was not the safe getaway it was portrayed
Speaker 2: to be. On Friday nights, the boys were ushered into
Speaker 2: the woods for a frightening ceremony in which they learned
Speaker 2: the rules for becoming good young men and above all,
Speaker 2: that keeping secrets was a Scout's duty, no matter how
Speaker 2: dark the secrets were. Determined to face his demons, Renner
Speaker 2: embarks on a journey back to that tumultuous summer and
Speaker 2: exposes a clandestine society that left indelible scars on the
Speaker 2: Scouts and the staff who were there. For Renner himself,
Speaker 2: it meant opening up about his twisted upbringing, his issues
Speaker 2: with trust and sexuality, and a lifetime of self medication.
Speaker 2: The result is a deeply personal, no holds barred and
Speaker 2: vitally important true crime memoir. The book that were featuring
Speaker 2: this evening is Scout Camp, Sex, Death and Secret Societies
Speaker 2: Inside the Boy Scouts of America, with my special guest,
Speaker 2: investigative journalists, podcaster and author James Renner. Welcome back to
Speaker 2: the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 2: James Renner, Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's become a tradition.
Speaker 3: I love it, Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Yes, and congratulations on your latest Scout camp.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, this one was. It's a
Speaker 3: book I knew I would get to eventually and kind
Speaker 3: of had to grow up a little bit in order
Speaker 3: to be comfortable enough to talk about some of the
Speaker 3: things in here.
Speaker 2: So right away, this is about the Boy Scouts of
Speaker 2: America and what happened to you and your friends regarding
Speaker 2: the Boy Scouts of America. So let's go to the
Speaker 2: as you write, the origins of the Boy Scouts of
Speaker 2: America take us back, sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, the Boy Scouts has been it's become
Speaker 3: such a staple in American life that most people don't
Speaker 3: really even you know, consider these things like why they
Speaker 3: do what they do and where the Boy Scouts came from,
Speaker 3: how it started. But it's an interesting story and kind of,
Speaker 3: you know, it may have some effect on the things
Speaker 3: that went wrong within the Boy Scouts that led to
Speaker 3: their bankruptcy a couple of years ago. The Scouting was
Speaker 3: started by a guy named Robert Baden Powell who was
Speaker 3: out of England, and he was actually first known as
Speaker 3: kind of a quote unquote hero of the Boer Wars,
Speaker 3: which were these wars that were going on in South
Speaker 3: Africa that the British troops were involved in around the
Speaker 3: turn of the century of eighteen hundreds into the nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: and Baden Powell was this officer in the British military
Speaker 3: stationed in South Africa. He while he was down there,
Speaker 3: and I believe he was there for several years, he
Speaker 3: wrote these books called you know that we're about scouting,
Speaker 3: but scouting in the sense of military scouting, like how
Speaker 3: to scout your enemies, how to do reconnaissance, things like that.
Speaker 3: They he sent them back to England and they became
Speaker 3: pretty popular. But Baden Powell got into what's not told
Speaker 3: when you talk about the history of the Boy Scouts
Speaker 3: is Baden Powell kind of gotten a lot of trouble
Speaker 3: down in South Africa. He there was a tribe down there,
Speaker 3: a native tribe, and they were causing some issues and
Speaker 3: he had the leader, the chief of this tribe, arrested
Speaker 3: and basically went in front of an ad hoc military tribunal,
Speaker 3: not really a trial, and he had this leader executed
Speaker 3: in order to control the tribe down there. Now, the
Speaker 3: tribe considered their chief a god. So you know, some
Speaker 3: people say he's guilty of d a side down there,
Speaker 3: certainly of war crimes. Got a little bit of trouble
Speaker 3: with that. Eventually, the Dutch were invading of parts of
Speaker 3: English territory in South Africa, and they were what they
Speaker 3: were fighting over really was gold. The largest gold reserves
Speaker 3: on the planet are down there, and they were in
Speaker 3: Dutch territory. The English wanted them. It's kind of longer story,
Speaker 3: but Baden Powell had a job to kind of engage
Speaker 3: with the enemy and keep them occupied so that Britain
Speaker 3: could send reinforcements and and go after these people. But
Speaker 3: he decided to kind of set up shop in this
Speaker 3: town called Mayfa King. He basically fortified this little town
Speaker 3: and he was surrounded by the enemy and was able
Speaker 3: to fend them off for quite a while. And he,
Speaker 3: you know, he did all sorts of little tricks, like
Speaker 3: the enemy didn't know how many people he had in
Speaker 3: that town, and he made it seem like he had
Speaker 3: a whole lot when he didn't really. He would build fake,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of platoons. He would have people shine
Speaker 3: lanterns around during the night so it looked like they
Speaker 3: had you know, spotlights and things and and then he
Speaker 3: sent a bunch of people out to bury things in
Speaker 3: the sand out there, and to the enemy it looked
Speaker 3: like they were bearing land mines, but really they were
Speaker 3: just like empty you know, coffee tins and things like that.
Speaker 3: So it was very much of psychological war. During that time,
Speaker 3: he was also living with a young man that became
Speaker 3: very important to him, and you know, they shared they
Speaker 3: shared a little cottage for a while. They had a
Speaker 3: pet pig named Algernon. They shared a bed at times,
Speaker 3: and this friend of his, he would Baden Powell, would,
Speaker 3: you know, gift this young man scarves. So you see
Speaker 3: kind of the beginning of the Boy Scouts shaping here
Speaker 3: because the when he was at Mafficking, he he would
Speaker 3: use the town, the boys in town to do some
Speaker 3: reconnaissance and he would call them scouts. You know, they
Speaker 3: had scarves to denote who they were. So after the
Speaker 3: war when he returned home, by that time his books
Speaker 3: were selling quite well and he turned those scouting books
Speaker 3: into Scouting for Boys, and that became the handbook of
Speaker 3: what became the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts came over
Speaker 3: to America and you see the first troops forming around
Speaker 3: nineteen ten, using Baden Powell's books their as their handbook,
Speaker 3: and that's kind of where it started. But you know,
Speaker 3: when he gets to Baden Powell, you really look at
Speaker 3: his history, you know, you see that he was a
Speaker 3: somewhat closeted homosexual. And then later in life, you know,
Speaker 3: when he gets into seventies and eighties, he starts corresponding
Speaker 3: to Scouts around the world. He seems particularly interested in
Speaker 3: their sexual proclivities and how to you know, he talks
Speaker 3: to them a lot about handle how to handle your
Speaker 3: own you know, your own member, for want of a
Speaker 3: better word, and it gets really kind of creepy, and
Speaker 3: they kind of keep the you know, his foundation, his
Speaker 3: legacy and all that. They kind of keep that part quiet.
Speaker 3: But you know, stuff like that was in the first
Speaker 3: he tried to get it in the first Boy Scout Manual.
Speaker 3: So kind of a weird backstory, this guy that started scouting,
Speaker 3: and you have to wonder, you know, how much of
Speaker 3: an effect that had on the abuse scandal that led
Speaker 3: to its bankruptcy later on.
Speaker 2: You say that scouting for boys also taught the conservative
Speaker 2: values that were being neglected supposedly in the progressive era. Yes,
Speaker 2: patriotism self reliance, deference to elders, and respect for God.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, the more things change, the more they
Speaker 3: stay the same. The world as it was at the
Speaker 3: turn of the century, at least in the United States,
Speaker 3: it was a time where children were going to school
Speaker 3: for the first time and being taken out of the
Speaker 3: minds and you know, factories and things like that and
Speaker 3: allowed to have essentially a childhood. So that's when the
Speaker 3: major public school systems began. And suddenly these kids who
Speaker 3: before had to work twelve hours a day or whatever,
Speaker 3: they had all this free time and their parents and
Speaker 3: you know, the society was afraid that they would use
Speaker 3: this free time to you know, become more liberal, get
Speaker 3: into trouble, and do crazy things. So that one of
Speaker 3: the reasons the Scouts formed was it was a way
Speaker 3: to indoctrinate these conservative values on a generation of kids
Speaker 3: that suddenly had the free time to take part in
Speaker 3: these things. And yeah, so it was it was definitely
Speaker 3: a reaction to the society's move into a more liberal
Speaker 3: viewpoint at that time.
Speaker 2: What were boys and boys like yourself, what were they
Speaker 2: attracted to? Right from the very beginning of reading this
Speaker 2: Baden's book, Baiden Powell's book, But what were boys attracted to?
Speaker 2: What activities did these camps offer that was a lure
Speaker 2: of sorts for boys?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think scouting particularly appeals to those boys that
Speaker 3: aren't very active in sports and other membership programs and
Speaker 3: looking for something to do. You know, they're looking for
Speaker 3: something to do, and what scouting offered was an opportunity
Speaker 3: to go with your friends into the woods and go
Speaker 3: hiking and exploring. Gave you an opportunity to learn archery
Speaker 3: and marksmanshift and go swimming and canoeing. So, I mean,
Speaker 3: it was a lot of fun. Some of my best
Speaker 3: memories are within the Boy Scouts and the campouts we took.
Speaker 3: We went camping every month, even in the middle of
Speaker 3: the winter. You know. We were camping in tents in
Speaker 3: you know, parks around Ohio, and I had the most fun.
Speaker 3: You know. I'd spend all day playing with my friends.
Speaker 3: We'd play Capture the Flag, and we'd make meals and
Speaker 3: have smores and tell spooky stories around the campfire at
Speaker 3: the end of the night. And I learned a lot
Speaker 3: about leadership and self reliance through scouting as well. So
Speaker 3: it definitely served me in some very good ways.
Speaker 1: Too.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, some of my worst memories are also from scouting
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: You take us to nineteen eighty nine and you were
Speaker 2: eleven years old, But tell us about your personal life
Speaker 2: at that point. In nineteen eighty nine, you rite that
Speaker 2: your parents were divorced when you were three years old.
Speaker 2: So tell us your situation, your personal life at that time,
Speaker 2: and the Boy Scouts of America.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I joined the Boy Scouts in eighty nine. I
Speaker 3: was eleven years old, and I was looking for essentially
Speaker 3: an escape from home. I had a kind of a
Speaker 3: rough childhood, many of us do. My parents divorced when
Speaker 3: I was three, and they were very young when they
Speaker 3: had me. My mother was eighteen when she got pregnant
Speaker 3: with me. My father was a few months older than her.
Speaker 3: You know, I had very young parents, and I think
Speaker 3: that's what led to the divorce so quickly. Then my
Speaker 3: father married a woman who was very abusive, physically, in mentally,
Speaker 3: invaribly and all that. So just looking, you know, for
Speaker 3: any way to get away from her. You know, Scouting
Speaker 3: presented an opportunity where, you know, every Tuesday night I'd
Speaker 3: have we'd have our meetings, and once once a month
Speaker 3: we'd have these camp outs for a whole weekend, I
Speaker 3: could get away. So it was there was a lot
Speaker 3: about it that I liked. And you know, unfortunately that
Speaker 3: first summer I had gone to summer camp again eleven
Speaker 3: years old. That summer, you know, there was they put
Speaker 3: us all in intense together and you know, somewhere during
Speaker 3: the night, another young boy initiated sexual contact, you know,
Speaker 3: and looking back on it, I don't know that it
Speaker 3: qualifies as you know, what I would call abuse. But
Speaker 3: what worries me most about that is where he learned that.
Speaker 3: And you know, I've long suspected that there was an
Speaker 3: adult that was abusing him. And you know, so that
Speaker 3: sexual awakening at boy Scout Camp when I was eleven
Speaker 3: ripple effects throughout throughout my life and the way I
Speaker 3: dealt with sexuality and depression and and all that, all
Speaker 3: that stuff, you know. But again, I'd return to camp
Speaker 3: every summer. When I got to be about seventeen, I
Speaker 3: signed up to be a member of staff at Seven Ranges,
Speaker 3: this Boy Scout camp in Ohio, and most of the
Speaker 3: book takes place during the summer of nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 3: That summer, things became quite difficult and strange after a
Speaker 3: councilor sexually assaulted another one of our staff members and
Speaker 3: then went home and died by suicide.
Speaker 2: Let's get to the Seven Ranges Reserve and some of
Speaker 2: the traditions there and what they're based on.
Speaker 3: Seven Ranges is in i believe, Carrollton County, Ohio. It's
Speaker 3: very rural and it's away from any sort of major city,
Speaker 3: which I think is one of the issues here is
Speaker 3: they don't have much oversight from any sort of police
Speaker 3: or any other service, so a lot of things can
Speaker 3: go on there under the radar. This is a community
Speaker 3: of men nights where they're still rolling around town and
Speaker 3: their horse and buggies, that sort of place. It's the
Speaker 3: largest boy Scout camp in Ohio. It's a beautiful place.
Speaker 3: There's a nice lake and all sort of all sorts
Speaker 3: of activities for boys, and every week at summer at
Speaker 3: least back then, we'd have six to eight hundred Scouts.
Speaker 3: I mean, just so many local troops came to that
Speaker 3: summer camp. Now, Seven Ranges has a tradition that is
Speaker 3: now one hundred years old, and it's a secret society
Speaker 3: which they would love us to call a honor society
Speaker 3: called Pipestone and Pipestone is a It happens every Friday night,
Speaker 3: and it's based off the trials and traditions of the
Speaker 3: Lakota people, but it has been very much changed to
Speaker 3: the white people's perspective over the years. So what happens
Speaker 3: is Friday night, the scouts are left into the woods,
Speaker 3: a part of camp that they're not allow to go
Speaker 3: to during the week. The first year I took Pipestone,
Speaker 3: I was eleven. It was that summer of eighty nine,
Speaker 3: and I didn't really know what we were in for,
Speaker 3: but a scout master led us into the woods. We
Speaker 3: ended up at this hill of bluegrass and at the
Speaker 3: bottom of the hill was this great bonfire, and the
Speaker 3: scout master left us there, and I was with probably
Speaker 3: forty or fifty other scouts my age, and we weren't
Speaker 3: told what to do. We're just told to wait. And
Speaker 3: we waited and waited and waited, and I think at
Speaker 3: least an hour went by, maybe more. We waited until
Speaker 3: the sun went down and the fire died out and
Speaker 3: just became members and it was all dark, and then
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, about a dozen what I thought
Speaker 3: at the time were Indians, Native Americans came running out
Speaker 3: and pulled us to our feet, and they were dressed
Speaker 3: in nothing but loincloths, and their skin was red. I
Speaker 3: learned later that these were just, you know, white people
Speaker 3: that had painted their skin, but at the time, at
Speaker 3: age eleven, I sure thought they were real Indians. And
Speaker 3: they ran us through the woods, through narrow paths, down
Speaker 3: ravines and uphills, and it felt like we ran forever.
Speaker 3: And then we came to another clearing, and this one
Speaker 3: was a circle in the woods, and on the trees
Speaker 3: around the circumference of the circle there were the skulls
Speaker 3: of dead animals tied to the trees, looking down at us.
Speaker 3: And in the middle was another fire, and behind that
Speaker 3: fire was a chief with peacock feathered headdress. And this
Speaker 3: man was morbidly obese and skin also painted red, and
Speaker 3: his belly was rolled over his loincloth. And through a
Speaker 3: series of weird events, I ended up being the first
Speaker 3: in line to go through the trials that night, and
Speaker 3: I had to step forward and kind of mimic the
Speaker 3: actions of one of the Indians, and so eventually I
Speaker 3: ended up in front of the chief and I was
Speaker 3: made to drink a liquid out of like a clamshell,
Speaker 3: and it was the most bitter substance I'd ever tasted,
Speaker 3: and I knew I couldn't spit it out because then
Speaker 3: I'd have to go to the back of the line again,
Speaker 3: so I swallowed it. I learned. I learned years later
Speaker 3: that what I was drinking was something called bitrix, which
Speaker 3: is what they put in anti freeze so that kids
Speaker 3: don't drink it. So then I was made to lean
Speaker 3: down neil in front of the Chief, in between his legs,
Speaker 3: and he brought out a human skull, and inside the
Speaker 3: skull where the brain used to be, right, you look
Speaker 3: through the eyes and there's a little light back there,
Speaker 3: and you're supposed to look inside the skull to see
Speaker 3: the password for the next year of Pipestone, and the
Speaker 3: password was secrecy. And then I was given the pipestone itself,
Speaker 3: which is a little token that you can wear on
Speaker 3: your boy scout shirt and sense to stand with the others.
Speaker 3: And at the end, after every boy had gone through,
Speaker 3: the Chief came forward and gave a speech. And this
Speaker 3: happens every year. The speeches are different each year of Pipestone.
Speaker 3: You take that first year, the speech was all about
Speaker 3: the importance of secrecy and that real men keep secrets
Speaker 3: from their parents, and we must never talk about what
Speaker 3: happens at Pipestone with anybody else that hasn't gone through it.
Speaker 3: So you know, that was a crazy summer for many reasons.
Speaker 3: But again I came back year after year. I took
Speaker 3: more Pipestone. Eventually I took Year four and that was
Speaker 3: a that was a wild one. The speech for year
Speaker 3: four that the Chief gives begins, and I've committed this
Speaker 3: to memory verbatim. Chief comes forward and says mastervation leads
Speaker 3: to curiosity, and then he talks about how you should
Speaker 3: leave your friendships with the same sex behind because homosexuality
Speaker 3: is a sin. So this is what they were talking
Speaker 3: to boys about in the middle of the woods at
Speaker 3: night as young as fourteen. You know that Secret Society
Speaker 3: operates at seven Ranges to this day, and during the
Speaker 3: research of my book, I was surprised to discover there's
Speaker 3: actually about one hundred and forty other honor societies secret
Speaker 3: societies that have operated at Boy Scout camps around the
Speaker 3: United States. So it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now you have this dramatic scene for me
Speaker 2: anyway reading this, and I think for others, is that,
Speaker 2: as you mentioned, every summer you would ask your father
Speaker 2: if you could work at Seven Ranges, and sometimes the
Speaker 2: CAP took on younger recruits as councilors in training or
Speaker 2: as you write, CITs sits. But your father when he
Speaker 2: dropped you off, you were seventeen years old, and I
Speaker 2: had to I waited to ask you this question. You
Speaker 2: have this in the book. Your father says, I have
Speaker 2: a bad feeling about that place. Be careful, be aware
Speaker 2: of your surroundings. Why was it your father? Where did
Speaker 2: your father? Where did he get this idea? What did
Speaker 2: you believe at the time was the foundation of his
Speaker 2: fear that he expressed in what he said to you.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I've asked them this recently. You
Speaker 3: know what he says is, you know, you got to
Speaker 3: understand we're coming from Ohio in the late eighties, and
Speaker 3: you know he's very conservative too. What he saw that
Speaker 3: upset him was the former program director for Seven Ranges,
Speaker 3: a guy named Dave Wagner, who is really just he
Speaker 3: was just a fantastic person and never any issues with him.
Speaker 3: He's somebody that I looked up to, is kind of
Speaker 3: a mentor. But apparently when my dad dropped me off
Speaker 3: that summer, Dave Wagner was walking around in short shorts,
Speaker 3: and my dad picked up pretty quickly that this man
Speaker 3: was gay, and he was and that upset my father
Speaker 3: and he didn't like the idea that I was spending
Speaker 3: a week at a camp that was run by a homosexual.
Speaker 3: So Dave was never an issue or a danger to
Speaker 3: anybody at camp, but there certainly were a lot of
Speaker 3: other dangers and a lot of other dangerous people there.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't know if it was more than that,
Speaker 3: but that's kind of the story he tells me. But
Speaker 3: there was an odd vibe in general about that camp,
Speaker 3: you know, the you know it just it has bad mojo.
Speaker 3: There's a bad vibe there, and there always was.
Speaker 2: All this what happens in nineteen ninety five, despite your
Speaker 2: father's warning, despite you not having so many reservations, what
Speaker 2: happens in nineteen ninety five, And you write in this
Speaker 2: book that to put this all together too, you had
Speaker 2: to correspond with people and hopefully talk to as many
Speaker 2: people as possible to fill out this story of what
Speaker 2: happened in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had to track down my old friends who
Speaker 3: I hadn't talked to in like thirty years to kind
Speaker 3: of get at the truth of what exactly happened. There
Speaker 3: was a counselor there named Mike Kleinler and was in
Speaker 3: charge of the CITs and those are counselors in training,
Speaker 3: and I was a staff member, but I signed up late.
Speaker 3: So my bunk originally was in Citville, which is this
Speaker 3: group of tents down by the dining hall that you
Speaker 3: that are hidden behind a bunch of pine trees. And
Speaker 3: Kleingler was kind of the lead staff member that was
Speaker 3: kind of keeping an eye out for every buddy down there.
Speaker 3: And so that's how I met him at first. And
Speaker 3: kind of a weird guy. Just gave me a weird vibe,
Speaker 3: you know, he said I had. He made a point
Speaker 3: to talk about my ears. He said they looked like
Speaker 3: elves ears, and just I don't know, just kind of
Speaker 3: a funny feeling. I ended up moving out of CIVL.
Speaker 3: I lived out of ADMIN for the rest well half
Speaker 3: of that summer anyways. But so what happens is about
Speaker 3: halfway through the summer, Kleingler follows another staff member on
Speaker 3: an overnight camp out in the middle of the woods.
Speaker 3: And this other councilor is in charge of very young
Speaker 3: kids and for one of their merit badges, they have
Speaker 3: to sleep outside for a night. And so he led
Speaker 3: these kids up, you know, up to the top of
Speaker 3: this hill and had this camp out and then laid
Speaker 3: into the night. Like after midnight, Cleingler shows up by
Speaker 3: himself and asked the staff member to come out with
Speaker 3: him and he's like, hey, I'm not counting enough boys
Speaker 3: out here. I think you're missing one and the staff
Speaker 3: the staffer comes out with him and then he's like, no,
Speaker 3: We've got everybody here. And then that's when Kleingler begins
Speaker 3: to assault him and pulls him aside, and it's a
Speaker 3: sexual assault. I'm not going to go into graphic detail here,
Speaker 3: but it was particularly brutal. And then he left the
Speaker 3: staffer there to you know, fix himself up, and Cleanler
Speaker 3: walked away. The next morning, the staffer comes to breakfast
Speaker 3: and I was there when he showed up, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's you know, I knew right away something was wrong.
Speaker 3: His skin was ashen gray. I've never seen anybody in
Speaker 3: shock like that, and he was certainly in shock. He
Speaker 3: wouldn't talk to anybody. He just kind of sat there. Luckily,
Speaker 3: a really, really good counselor noticed what was going on
Speaker 3: and pulled him aside, and that's how he got this
Speaker 3: story about the assault. Mike was quickly a score off
Speaker 3: camp drove home, and then you know, flash forward to
Speaker 3: the next morning and I and the other staff members
Speaker 3: were called to an emergency meeting and the program or
Speaker 3: the camp director was there and he told us that
Speaker 3: Mike was dead. And we were told at first that
Speaker 3: he had gone home and shot himself and committed suicide.
Speaker 3: And then we were pulled back together about an hour
Speaker 3: later and we were told, oh, that it wasn't a suicide,
Speaker 3: it was an accident. He was shooting at cans and
Speaker 3: at ricochet. We weren't told anything about the assault. We
Speaker 3: didn't know why this other staff member had left. They
Speaker 3: were keeping a lot secret from us, and I don't
Speaker 3: think necessarily because they wanted to cover it up, but
Speaker 3: because they didn't want to affect us and have this
Speaker 3: tragic story be something we remembered. In any event, we didn't
Speaker 3: know much about it at the time. Years later, I
Speaker 3: was reporter and I got curious, and so I pulled
Speaker 3: the police reports and I talked to the corner down there,
Speaker 3: and the corner told me that it was ruled accidental
Speaker 3: because they couldn't determine whether Mike had been murdered or
Speaker 3: if he had in fact shot himself and committed suicide.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of the ruling to this day. So
Speaker 3: at the beginning of the book, I make contact with
Speaker 3: an old friend of mine from camp, and I asked him,
Speaker 3: I said, do you think there's any chance that Mike
Speaker 3: Klingler was murdered? And so that led me down a
Speaker 3: path of discovery it trying to figure out what exactly
Speaker 3: happened to Mike and who was responsible for making him
Speaker 3: the way he was. And there are a lot of
Speaker 3: little mysteries wrapped up in there too.
Speaker 2: You take us to the downfall of the beginning of
Speaker 2: the downfall of the Boy Scouts of America starting in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety one with the Washington Post and some reports
Speaker 2: and a reporter named Doyle tell us about these first
Speaker 2: breakdown of the Boy Scouts of America.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was this initial article that you talked about
Speaker 3: that came out around ninety one that I believe the
Speaker 3: first sentence is something like, for most boys, you know,
Speaker 3: scouting is a place for refuge, but for some men,
Speaker 3: it's an open buffet of boys or something like that.
Speaker 3: It was the first major article written about this scandal
Speaker 3: of abuse within the Boy Scouts. It kind of was
Speaker 3: the first fissure in the dam, and I don't think
Speaker 3: it was stoppable after that, And eventually Scouts started to sue.
Speaker 3: Former Scouts started to sue the Boy Scouts, and so
Speaker 3: many sued them that by you know, I think like
Speaker 3: five to ten years ago, they had to start thinking
Speaker 3: about bankruptcy in order to figure out how to to
Speaker 3: pay out all these victims. And what came out of
Speaker 3: that is, you know, a lot of people make a
Speaker 3: connection here between what happened in the Catholic Church and
Speaker 3: what happened in the Boy Scouts, and they say that
Speaker 3: this is like the scandal in the Catholic Church. But
Speaker 3: that's only because we don't really understand the scale of it,
Speaker 3: and the scale of it hasn't been properly reported. In
Speaker 3: the Catholic Church, you had eleven thousand victims in the
Speaker 3: United States sue the church for abuse in Boy Scouts.
Speaker 3: So far, you've had eighty two thousand former Scouts sue
Speaker 3: the Boy Scouts for abuse. So it's not really comparable
Speaker 3: to what happened in the Catholic Church. It's nearly exponentially
Speaker 3: greater than what happened there, and it should be talked
Speaker 3: about more. There should be books and movies written about it,
Speaker 3: and there just hasn't really been. There's been a couple,
Speaker 3: but not enough.
Speaker 2: You write about the integral difference between the Catholic Church, however,
Speaker 2: and the Boy Scouts of America, enabling almost all of
Speaker 2: this information to come to light.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know. I ended up speaking with the former
Speaker 3: head of the Boy Scouts for the book, and he
Speaker 3: pointed something out to me. The reason the Boy Scouts
Speaker 3: are in so much trouble is because, like good, good Scouts,
Speaker 3: they kept records. Unlike other institutions like the Catholic Church,
Speaker 3: where things were not written down or shredded or burned
Speaker 3: or whatever. The Scouts kept records, and they had their
Speaker 3: own system for identifying dangerous men, and they would put
Speaker 3: them on an ineligible volunteer list so that if they
Speaker 3: tried to move from one state to another and join
Speaker 3: the Boy Scouts again they would their name would get
Speaker 3: flagged and they wouldn't be allowed in the organization. So
Speaker 3: they had the best intentions at least that upper management,
Speaker 3: although I should say at the same time they were
Speaker 3: doing their best to cover it up, but they did
Speaker 3: keep those records. When they eventually were sued by a
Speaker 3: boy I think out of Washington State, his lawyers were
Speaker 3: able to subpoena those records, and then the lawyers took
Speaker 3: the audacious step, thankfully and posted the entire file on
Speaker 3: their website. So suddenly all these names are out there
Speaker 3: going back like fifty sixty years, and there were so many.
Speaker 3: There were men on there from every state in the
Speaker 3: Union in Washington, DC. So it became a huge news
Speaker 3: story because every news outlet could make it local. They'd
Speaker 3: find us a leader that had been kicked out for
Speaker 3: abuse or suspected abuse. No matter where you lived, you
Speaker 3: could have report from your local city. So it was
Speaker 3: on every major news station, every newspaper, and it just
Speaker 3: became huge at that time. And that was the final
Speaker 3: piece that led to boy Scouts realizing that the only
Speaker 3: way out of it was to declare bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now back to your investigation. Who do you
Speaker 2: speak to about Mike Klingler and what happened that summer
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety five and what do you find out
Speaker 2: about a man named Jim Mills.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I reached out to former friends of mine
Speaker 3: who worked on staff that summer, and there was another
Speaker 3: mystery here that I was trying to figure out, and
Speaker 3: that's we had a serial artist at camp who had
Speaker 3: burned down the trading Post and had done other crazy things,
Speaker 3: and I'd always wondered who that was, if it was
Speaker 3: linked at all. Eventually I speak to a counselor who
Speaker 3: knew Klinglay really well and was able to confirm that, yes,
Speaker 3: Cleanler was in fact the person who tried to who
Speaker 3: burned down the trading post and was setting fires, and
Speaker 3: so he was also this arsonist. And he also explained
Speaker 3: Kleingler's connection to another leader at camp named Jim Mills.
Speaker 3: Now Mills was actually the man in charge of youth
Speaker 3: protection for Pipestone, and I knew Mills personally because at
Speaker 3: the end of that summer in ninety five, even after
Speaker 3: Kleingler died, Mills was working at Pipestone, and I had
Speaker 3: got my fifth year, so I was allowed to see
Speaker 3: behind the scenes and see how they put it together.
Speaker 3: So that last week of camp, I went over across
Speaker 3: the road and was shown behind the scenes of Pipestone,
Speaker 3: and they have this. The first red Flag was they
Speaker 3: had this secret shower house on the others out in
Speaker 3: those woods, and to get ready for Pipestone, the men,
Speaker 3: you know, some of these men are in their fifties
Speaker 3: and sixties. They would undress and get completely naked and
Speaker 3: get the showers to take a rinse off, and then
Speaker 3: they would stand around naked and have a spaghetti dinner.
Speaker 3: And then after dinner they would take turns painting each
Speaker 3: other's body with this red paint so that they could
Speaker 3: look like Native Americans. And they would sometimes ask the
Speaker 3: teenage boys to help them, you know, get their back.
Speaker 3: You know, nobody can paint their own back. The showers
Speaker 3: were also shared between the men and boys as young
Speaker 3: as fourteen, So red flag there for sure. And I
Speaker 3: watched the ceremony that night, and then the next morning
Speaker 3: everybody was packing up to leave. This man who's in
Speaker 3: charge of youth protection invites me to go with a
Speaker 3: couple other boys with him to a sweat lodge and
Speaker 3: he had built the sweat lodge on the like the
Speaker 3: edge of the forest out there, and after everybody left,
Speaker 3: he took me and I think four other boys inside
Speaker 3: the sweat lodge and he said, look, we got to
Speaker 3: do it the way they used to do it back
Speaker 3: in the old days, and it's best to do it
Speaker 3: completely naked. So he was able to talk us all
Speaker 3: into getting naked and climbing in the sweat lodge, and
Speaker 3: then we all got dirty from the soot. And afterwards
Speaker 3: he he had pulled up his little van camper. He
Speaker 3: had this like big van that he had converted into
Speaker 3: an RV and he hung a gravity shower out the
Speaker 3: back and held it himself, and one by one we
Speaker 3: took a shower in front of him, and he commented
Speaker 3: on our bodies. You know, I to this day, I
Speaker 3: think he probably videotaped that whole thing. There was a
Speaker 3: VCR and camera equipment in the car, And this will
Speaker 3: come into play later too. But I realized that I'd
Speaker 3: gotten myself into a situation that was not right at all,
Speaker 3: But you know, I just kind of pushed it aside
Speaker 3: and went back home and went back to school and
Speaker 3: went on with my life. Now, Mills was very close
Speaker 3: with Mike Klingler, and one of the other staff members
Speaker 3: that eventually tracked down and talked to confessed to me
Speaker 3: that he had been assaulted quite regularly by both Klingler
Speaker 3: and Mills. And Mills eventually got caught I think it
Speaker 3: was about ten years ago, with a number of images
Speaker 3: of boys. By the time the cops caught up with him,
Speaker 3: he had a couple of teenage boys living in his
Speaker 3: house in Ohio and he was allowing them to stay
Speaker 3: there and giving them money in exchange for sexual favors.
Speaker 3: And he got arrested, and he was goin to be
Speaker 3: charged with state crimes and federal crimes. And then he
Speaker 3: ends up dead too. Now that was a rule of suicide,
Speaker 3: but I have my doubts. The gun he used was
Speaker 3: not his own, and the guy, the friend of Mills
Speaker 3: who found him, owned the gun that was used to
Speaker 3: that Mills supposedly used to kill himself, And his suicide
Speaker 3: note was typed. I just don't know who types out
Speaker 3: a suicide note instead of writing it. You don't hear
Speaker 3: that too often. But yeah, so that's Mills, that's who
Speaker 3: Jim Mills was.
Speaker 2: Now part of this book or a big part of
Speaker 2: this book is your personal experience reaching out to these people.
Speaker 2: When you do reach out to them, you find them
Speaker 2: in rehab or and or find them in a certain
Speaker 2: psychological state after all of these years with this story,
Speaker 2: So tell us about some of the travels that you
Speaker 2: have to meet these people, talk about where they are
Speaker 2: psychologically now and where you were at psychologically during all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well sure. The book opens up with me being
Speaker 3: admitted into a psychological a psych unit in Akron, where
Speaker 3: I spent a couple of nights when things got real bad,
Speaker 3: and as part of the I Guess healing process, I
Speaker 3: wanted to I Guess close this chapter of my life.
Speaker 3: I was dealing with substance abuse. At that time. I
Speaker 3: had not been sober in two years. I hadn't been
Speaker 3: sober longer than about twelve hours in two years, and
Speaker 3: so when I started working on this book, I was
Speaker 3: very much looking into ways to get healthy, to find
Speaker 3: a better way of living. The more people I reached
Speaker 3: out to that were staff members in ninety five who
Speaker 3: went through this with me, are suffering from similar things,
Speaker 3: and some have it a lot worse because they were
Speaker 3: victims of abuse by these men, and I was not,
Speaker 3: at least not directly. You know, one guy has had
Speaker 3: a couple strokes, and you know, we're still like forty five.
Speaker 3: You know, we're not that old. We're forty five years old. Now,
Speaker 3: you know, one guy's had a couple of strokes. He's
Speaker 3: living in hospice every once in a while. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of us have dealt with substance abuse issues. Some
Speaker 3: have gotten help and made it through, some have not.
Speaker 3: Some have psychological conditions similar to mine that they deal
Speaker 3: with a lot of PTSD, a lot of depression. And
Speaker 3: so one of the things that I really tried to
Speaker 3: research was how to how to start healing people, because
Speaker 3: the Boy Scouts are trying to figure out how much
Speaker 3: to pay these eighty two thousand victims, but nobody's really
Speaker 3: considering how to heal them. And one of the routes
Speaker 3: that I took was researching how certain groups are trying
Speaker 3: to cure PTSD in veterans of war. And there's a
Speaker 3: group called Maps out of DC that is experimenting with
Speaker 3: the use of psychedelics in curing PTSD, and their results
Speaker 3: are pretty wonderful. They have found that they have a
Speaker 3: success rate of sixty six percent a meaning not just
Speaker 3: treating PTSD in former in veterans war, but but curing it.
Speaker 3: And the government and the military is starting to have
Speaker 3: great interest in this because if you can cure a
Speaker 3: soldier of PTSD, you can put them back on the
Speaker 3: front line. So that's their interest, which is a little morbid,
Speaker 3: But the main interest for this group is to make
Speaker 3: psychedelic therapy legal again like it was in the sixties
Speaker 3: and seventies, and to try it out. Of course, I
Speaker 3: went to DC and partook in a psychological psychedelic therapy
Speaker 3: session where we used psilocybin and an I tripped out
Speaker 3: and had a person walking me through some therapeutical issues
Speaker 3: and the immediate effect. There's some immediate effects that you
Speaker 3: get from this, and there are some long term effects
Speaker 3: that kick in like months later. The immediate effect for
Speaker 3: me is I stopped creating alcohol almost overnight. It was
Speaker 3: like it rebooted my brain, and that was nice, that
Speaker 3: was helpful. But you know, I started noticing months later,
Speaker 3: and you know, towards six months out is when I
Speaker 3: really started feeling really good again. And I think the
Speaker 3: psychedelics helped to get away from those patterns of thought
Speaker 3: and those those cycles of thought that we get caught
Speaker 3: up in that you know, the bad voices that speak
Speaker 3: to you in you know, try to put you down
Speaker 3: in all the shame, and it allows you to see
Speaker 3: yourself objectively for the first time and to realize that
Speaker 3: you deserve forgiveness and grace as much as as much
Speaker 3: as anybody else, and you're just another person in this
Speaker 3: dance of life. And it was it was extremely helpful. So,
Speaker 3: you know, as as this abuse scandal gets, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't want to say solved, but dealt with. That's
Speaker 3: something that I hope that they pay a little more
Speaker 3: attention to.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now you talk about the your life now,
Speaker 2: and in the end of this book you talk about
Speaker 2: picking your son and driving them to a youth camp,
Speaker 2: a YMCA youth camp despite what happened to you. Why
Speaker 2: no reservations and why is your son interested in this
Speaker 2: youth camp?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that was difficult. It was difficult for me
Speaker 3: to do that. But my son he started going to
Speaker 3: camps through the y m C A five, five or
Speaker 3: six years ago, and he really unexpectedly connected with with this,
Speaker 3: and you know he's at the time, he wasn't very
Speaker 3: he wasn't very social, but it broke him out of
Speaker 3: his shell and he made friends there and he had
Speaker 3: such a wonderful time. As years went by, he started
Speaker 3: thinking he'd want to be on staff. And the reason
Speaker 3: I was okay with letting him do that was because
Speaker 3: when you when you work at a y m c
Speaker 3: A camp, there are a lot of women leaders. And
Speaker 3: I think one of the reasons why the abuse was
Speaker 3: so pervasive within the Boy Scouts is the lack of women.
Speaker 3: With with the women involved in in the y and
Speaker 3: now with with Scouting, they've allowed women. The women will
Speaker 3: keep the men in check. You know, they will be
Speaker 3: looking out for the boys in ways that that that
Speaker 3: other men can't they you know, these men won't have
Speaker 3: enough opportunity to be alone with boys. You know, men
Speaker 3: make up ninety nine percent of these abusers, and you know,
Speaker 3: so when you start packing women into it just by
Speaker 3: sheer number, you you start to bring that that percentage down.
Speaker 3: And so I knew there were women in charge of
Speaker 3: the YMCA camp. I wasn't really afraid so much and
Speaker 3: he has a he has a good head on his
Speaker 3: shoulders and a real drive for justice, and I just
Speaker 3: trusted that he would know warning signs when he saw them.
Speaker 3: But it was still very difficult to drop them off
Speaker 3: and know that he was going to spend the summer
Speaker 3: at this place and I wouldn't be there to protect them.
Speaker 3: At the same time, I can't, you know, I can't
Speaker 3: lock him up in a room and keep him safe forever.
Speaker 3: He's going off to college next year and ount into
Speaker 3: the world. It's it's very scary. But he had a
Speaker 3: great time at that camp, and in fact, he's going
Speaker 3: back this summer. It has more of a leadership role there.
Speaker 3: The leadership role is what appeals to him. He likes
Speaker 3: to teach other kids, and so he has an opportunity
Speaker 3: to do that there.
Speaker 2: You're right about the damage that you write the Jim
Speaker 2: Mills did untool damage to a generation of boys at
Speaker 2: the Seven Ranges Reservation. But he's only responsible for a
Speaker 2: single claim in the bankruptcy settlement. There are at least
Speaker 2: eighty one nine ninety nine others just like him.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that takes the win out of your sales
Speaker 3: a little bit. It's that sense of the scope of
Speaker 3: this thing. It's just a it's enormous. I had no
Speaker 3: idea I really got into this book.
Speaker 2: You offer some graphic testimony from one of the friends
Speaker 2: I believe it's Andrew that you spoke to about Tommy
Speaker 2: and the abuse by Mike Klingler. It is a harrowing
Speaker 2: story about this rape and abuse. But more importantly was
Speaker 2: the Again we talked about secrecy being so important in
Speaker 2: this perversion of the law of the Native American law
Speaker 2: to be used in this to the advantage of these
Speaker 2: pedophiles at these camps.
Speaker 3: I think one of the reasons that they, you know,
Speaker 3: some of these groups were so homophobic and so ready
Speaker 3: to attack that, you know, the the LGBTQ community, is
Speaker 3: to add that sense of shame because you had with
Speaker 3: that character that you mentioned, who's a real person, Andrew
Speaker 3: lund In that in my book didn't report it, told
Speaker 3: his parents, you know, even when his parents found out
Speaker 3: about it, didn't want it reported because he didn't want
Speaker 3: people to know he was gay or had you know,
Speaker 3: or had homosexual encounters. And so, you know, these men
Speaker 3: would assault these boys, and the boys were too shameful
Speaker 3: to report it because everybody would think they were gay,
Speaker 3: and that was a terrible thing in their minds because
Speaker 3: of what they've been told by the same leaders that
Speaker 3: abuse them. So it was it was pretty clever of
Speaker 3: them to do it that way.
Speaker 2: And interestingly too, the whole prosecution for these criminals was
Speaker 2: miird by the statute of limitations, and so there was
Speaker 2: a flight as a result to extend that or to
Speaker 2: eliminate that statute of limitations regarding these heinous crimes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was one of my you know, personal you
Speaker 3: know I very much, which was grateful that I could
Speaker 3: play a part in that. I testified with a number
Speaker 3: of other victims in front of the Ohio Congress to
Speaker 3: get this bill passed that would eliminate the statute of
Speaker 3: limitations for abuse in scouting, and they were able to
Speaker 3: pass that. So that'll allow victims in Ohio to receive
Speaker 3: full compensation from the Boy Scouts, even though some of
Speaker 3: these crimes happened beyond what used to be the statute
Speaker 3: I limitations for these crimes.
Speaker 2: I know it's a cliche, but how cathartic was the
Speaker 2: writing of this book, Because in the beginning of this
Speaker 2: book you write that in nineteen ninety five you kept
Speaker 2: everything of any information and value about your experience, knowing
Speaker 2: inherently you said even then that there was a story there.
Speaker 3: It was a wonderful journey. Every step of the way.
Speaker 3: I felt a little more clear and a little just
Speaker 3: a little better psychologically. I think this had been stewing
Speaker 3: in my mind and really wanted to come out for
Speaker 3: a number of years, and might have been a point
Speaker 3: of how I got to the level of substance abuse
Speaker 3: that I was into. You know, I could just feel
Speaker 3: myself getting more and more clear the more and more
Speaker 3: I track the story down. It was very difficult, and
Speaker 3: you know, taking in all those stories and trying to
Speaker 3: shape them into a narrative. But man, I've never been
Speaker 3: more proud of a book. I don't think I'll write
Speaker 3: something that's good again. I think this is kind of
Speaker 3: this is kind of it, and everything else is just gravy.
Speaker 3: But you know, so I hope people. I hope people
Speaker 3: read it. People are you know. I'm starting to get
Speaker 3: emails from people who've read it that have gone through
Speaker 3: similar things and are grateful for it. So I hope
Speaker 3: it has that effect for many many readers.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I think it to certainly had some shaping
Speaker 2: of your further career as a journalist and author and
Speaker 2: now much more. Since twenty nineteen, you've served as director
Speaker 2: of the Porch Light Project, and nonprofit organization that provides
Speaker 2: a genetic genealogy for cold cases in Ohio. And also
Speaker 2: I've interviewed you on the podcast for your book Little
Speaker 2: Crazy Children and True Crime Addict. And you have two podcasts,
Speaker 2: The Philosophy of Crime and True Crime this week. For
Speaker 2: people that want to find out more about this book,
Speaker 2: tell us about a website or any social media that
Speaker 2: you do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything you can want to know about you can
Speaker 3: find on James Renner dot com.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 3: James Renner, thank you so much. Dan.
Speaker 2: You have a great evening, and thank you very much
Speaker 2: for this interview anytime.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, good night,