Dark Downeast - The Dark History and Demise of Élan School (Maine)

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

Élan School was founded as a drug treatment program in 1970, pairing controversial confrontational attack therapies with education, all in the wooded setting of Poland, Maine. It's founders, Joe Ricci and Dr. Gerald Davidson, promised rehabilitation, reform, and a future for many children of wealthy and well-known parents.When outside state officials took a closer look at what really went on behind closed doors, it was just the beginning of unending allegations and controversy.For more information and resources on the Troubled Teen Industry, visit breakingcodesilence.net. View source material and photos for this episode at darkdowneast.com/elanschoolFollow @darkdowneast on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTokTo suggest a case visit darkdowneast.com/submit-caseDark Downeast is an audiochuck and Kylie Media production hosted by Kylie Low.

He showed up on their doorstep wearing worn-out jeans and a ratty t-shirt. It was clear he hadn't washed in days. The boy, no older than 16, had bruises along his arms and was visibly nervous, shaking. Obviously scared of something or someone. Not knowing what to do but determined to help, the family called the one man they thought might have an answer, Lieutenant Max Ashburn, Officer Smiley, as he'd come to be known around Lewiston, Maine in the late 70s. So as the two sat together in his police cruiser, Lieutenant Ashburn tried calming the small, crying teen.

He gained the boy's trust, and finally, he spoke up. The boy was a runaway, and he'd run for his life from a place that had become all too well-known to Lieutenant Ashburn. A place the boy had been staying for several months and vowed he wouldn't return if it was the last thing he did. It's been 10 years this month since that place closed its doors for good. Only 10 years. I'm Kylie Lowe, and together with researcher and writer Olivia Gunn, we're examining the origin and dark legacy of this recent and yet often unheard of piece of Maine's history. This is the story of Elan School on Dark Down East. Lieutenant Ashburn had a decision to make.

In recalling the event to the Sun-Journal nearly 40 years later, he described the moment he knew what to do. Quote, He was crying, and he was begging me not to take him back. He reminded me of me when I'd been a punk kid." Should he take the runaway back to the place he was so desperately fleeing? Any other officer might. In fact, other officers did.

The boy wasn't the first, and he would not be the last of the students to accept the risk that came with attempting to escape the residential school situated in the Poland Main Woods. One last look at the boy, so clearly broken and terror-stricken, and his decision was made. Lieutenant Ashburn drove the boy to Jimmy's Diner along Route 100 in Auburn. At the time, it was a popular stop for truckers passing through. You can actually still find vintage postcards with the diner and the Texaco gas station sign out front. The officer was sure that the boy would be able to catch a ride and hopefully

get back home. It seemed the officer felt the boy's odds were better on the road. The officer had heard the rumors of the happenings at Elon, mandatory fighting rings, confinement, physical and verbal abuse. The whisperings and allegations were so rampant that Lieutenant Ashburn had already made a visit to the school to find out just what was going on. And he wasn't the only one. Elan School opened in 1970 as a private behavior modification program and boarding school.

Founded by Joseph Ritchie, a man who Maine would come to know well from local headlines and as the owner of Scarborough Downs Racetrack, and child psychiatrist Gerald Davidson. Elon's school was originally established as a drug rehabilitation center that would practice so-called confrontational or attack therapy. This unconventional style of treatment had its roots in the anti-drug organization known as Synanon. One simple Google search of Synanon turns up a myriad of articles, blog posts, and videos describing a cult-like group with shaved heads that used violent attack therapy to rehabilitate drug addicts and alcoholics. In 1958, Charles E. Diederich dreamed up Synanon in Santa Monica, California, and it eventually became the Church of Synanon. The organization approached drug addiction with

a tough-love, cold-turkey philosophy, as opposed to jail time. Throughout the 60s and 70s, Diederich attracted thousands of members, and even some of Hollywood's curious elite, Jane Fonda, Eartha Kitt, Milton Berle, to name a few. People were seemingly finding what they needed at Synanon, which featured group confrontation sessions that were known as The Game. During these sessions, members would be verbally confronted by other members. This was the attack therapy. But eventually, Diederik's philosophies grew more extreme. A 2020 story in the Daily Beast describes Synanon as, quote,

a veritable cult where angry, screaming therapy sessions were the norm, forced vasectomies and abortions were rampant, and where everyone at Synanon's multiple locations received orders from their unimpeachable master via a wired PA system, unquote. Synanon would ultimately shudder when Diederik was prosecuted and convicted of abducting a woman and forcing her to join the group. He then went on to hire two men to hide a rattlesnake in the prosecutor's mailbox. As you can imagine, that added a bit more time to his sentence. But the tentacles of Sinanon would reach far and wide, spurring multiple variant programs, including Phoenix House, CEDU, and

Daytop Village in New York. That's where a reluctant, troubled teen from Port Chester named Joe Ritchie would overcome his own heroin addiction. Joe Ritchie was born in 1945 to a first-generation Italian family in the working-class village of Port Chester, New York. According to Maura Curley, a former marketing consultant for Joe and the author of Duck in a Raincoat, The Joe Ritchie Story, he was raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother signed over custody. Joe is remembered as having quite the strong personality. Although an altar boy for a local church and a patron of the community center, a childhood peer remembering Joe in the biography said, quote, we called him Joe Rich and what a character he was. He was a good guy, but I've never seen anyone as wild. He always had

a group with him and they were tough guys. Joe was really tough. If you were nice to him, he'd be your friend, but you didn't want to mess with him. He was always looking over his shoulder, and if you did something to cross him, he'd never let you forget it. Joe was sharp, knew how to survive. I used to think he had nine lives. If he did something really wrong, he'd get out of it. Somebody else would take the heat. He always had himself covered. Unquote.

Throughout his youth, Joe was in and out of trouble. A story about Elon for Corrections magazine written in 1979 states he was addicted to drugs by age 12. And it was in 1963 at age 18 that a rough and restless Joe was arrested for robbing a mail truck. Authorities had had enough. He was given a choice. Spend seven years in jail, or go to a rehabilitation center. Joe chose Daytop Village. It's hard to find the full story behind Daytop Village, which is now called Samaritan Daytop Village, after merging with the health and human services non-profit Samaritan Village in 2015.

It seems Daytop has taken on the identity of Samaritan these days, and there's little to no history of Daytop on the current website, just one note that the two had merged, and there's no mention of Daytop's connections to Synanon. Daytop opened in 1963 through a group effort by psychiatrist Daniel Harold Casriel and Father William O'Brien, who had both visited the Synanon location in Westport, Connecticut. Daytop practiced a therapeutic community-style treatment and took a few cues from Synanon's own tactics. Joe, noted as one of Daytop's greatest success stories by Corrections Magazine, said of his experience there, quote,

I'd done the therapy bit, but this blew my mind, unquote, though he didn't agree with the shaved heads or the lack of education. Daytop and this certain subset of therapeutic treatment evolved from Synanon's methods appeared to have a lasting impact on Richie. He was not only a student success story for the program, but he also aimed to become a leader in the field himself. When Joe left the program, he actually went on to open

his own branch in Hartford, Connecticut. Then, he worked with Dartech House and Survival Inc., two other drug treatment programs. He was a leader, charming and enigmatic. People were drawn to him, important people. Even a seasoned Boston psychiatrist couldn't resist his charisma. They were an odd couple. Dr. Gerald Davidson, a child psychiatrist working for Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University, and Joe Ritchie, a former drug addict with a not-so-squeaky-clean record. With Joe's first-hand experience in DATOPS programs

and subsequent professional background and leadership in the space, paired with Dr. Gerald Davidson's psychiatric expertise, something between the two of them clicked. Their visions and goals aligned. Together, Ritchie and Dr. Davidson were set on establishing a new kind of rehabilitation option, one that would utilize the tough therapy that Joe claimed to owe his own recovery to, while offering education and ultimately a future. They'd call it Elan School. Elan, a word of French origin meaning momentum, energy, style, enthusiasm. To do it with Elan is to do it with flair and vigor.

Used in a sentence, he pursued his goals with great Elan. For Joe Ritchie, those goals were thinly veiled. For Joe Ritchie, Elon's school meant money. Having grown up poor, in and out of the system, Joe Ritchie made no bones about his goal of becoming rich. A former Elon employee recalls in Duck in a Raincoat that, quote, becoming rich was definitely an obsession that seemed to drive Joe. Money was extremely important to him when he was earning $10,000 a year and driving an Oldsmobile. It represented the power to really be somebody important, who would be accepted by everyone around him,

and that meant a lot, unquote. This new alternative behavior modification program for youths set in Androscoggin County of Maine, surrounded by freshwater lakes and rolling green hills far from the broken factory town he grew up in, seemed to be the ticket. And when Joe finally did make it, he made sure everyone knew it. Years of headlines described Joe as Maine's maverick millionaire, often portraying a David and Goliath success story, an outlier fighting for the underdog. He even ran for Maine governor, twice, albeit unsuccessful. Joe was a role model for many, especially the teens coming into Elon. In the 2016 documentary, The Last Stop, by filmmaker and former Elon student Todd Nilsen, interviews of other former students described themselves as being

awestruck by Joe. He dressed well, wearing fur coats and cowboy hats. He had a big personality and a lot of money that he'd earned himself. And the biggest draw? He had once been just like them. Registered with the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, Elan was a private organization and charged around $1,200 a month for its treatment program. At the beginning, most of that money went back into the school, which had at the time six locations around Maine. For the first few years, Elan gained momentum through positive buzz in the media and references in Gerald Davidson's network of contacts at Harvard and Massachusetts hospitals. In the beginning, the goal seemed to be to take the positive

therapeutic tools used by groups like Synanon and Daytop, those that had helped Joe through his own journey of recovery, and used them to help struggling teens. Describing Elan in an interview for U.S. News and World Report in 1971, Gerald said, quote, therapeutic communities largely are run by ex-addicts who have become extremely sanctimonious, like all converted heathens. They shave their patients' heads, make them wear diapers, hang degrading signs on them, things like that. In our therapeutic By the mid-1970s, residents respond in fashion, and we have no trouble whatsoever with people leaving, unquote. By the mid-1970s, Elan's annual tuition cost about $30,000, and it was considered a well-worth investment for many of the wealthy families that made up most of the school's clientele. They were drawn in by the promise of rehabilitation and the school's brochure showcasing Maine's great outdoors, hiking and horseback riding.

But Alon's reputation among the rich and elite was about to be tarnished by controversy. When outside state officials finally took a closer look at what really went on behind closed doors. In July 1975, investigators from the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services arrived at Ilan for a routine inspection. Headed by Mary Lee Leahy, the team spent 48 hours at the school evaluating daily routines, sitting in on therapy sessions, and observing the group as a whole. Immediately after the visit, Leahy wrote to Maine's governor, James Longley, demanding a full-scale investigation into Elan. Summarized in Duck in a Raincoat, Leahy's report states, quote, unquote. who conform to acceptable behavior patterns after they find it hopeless to resist the will of their masters.

Unquote. On top of noting that most of the staff were former Ilan residents, not trained therapists, Leahy reported seeing forced labor, a child who was handcuffed to a table, humiliation tactics such as pouring a mixture of food and human feces over a child's head. There was denial of food, improper medical care, lack of privacy, and physical abuse like spankings and forced fightings in a boxing ring. The outcome of Leahy's report was that 11 kids from Illinois were immediately removed from Elan.

But according to a 1975 story by the Associated Press, upon his own visit to Elan, Governor Longley stated, I was very impressed that the kids were saying that the program was helping them." The same story would note that one of the Illinois students would return to Elan, claiming it was the only place that could help him. Maine's Department of Health and Human Services conducted their own investigation of Elan that August. And unlike the Illinois inspection, Maine gave the school a generous heads-up beforehand. The investigation found

no evidence of unjustifiable denials of civil liberties or of mistreatment brutality or anything that could be considered abhorrent to all acceptable standards of child care. Joe would later counter Leahy's scathing report with a $10 million lawsuit alleging slander, which the state of Illinois responded to with a lawsuit of their own for damages and reimbursement for the child care services the state had paid Ilan. The suit was ultimately settled, but the Illinois report was only the beginning. That same year, in the fall of 1975, a horrific murder in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the prime suspect's later stay at Elon would further reveal the very, very different reality of the school's peer therapy. On the night of October 30th, 1975, in a wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut named Bell Haven, neighborhood kids celebrated the oncoming of Halloween. They donned ghoulish

costumes and pulled off innocent pranks on neighbors, doorbell ditch and toilet papering, the typical and altogether harmless antics of bored suburban teens. Groups of teenage friends took over the neighborhood, lined with beautiful mansions owned by Wall Street giants, New York City lawyers, and doctors. But of course, mischief wasn't the only thing stirring. Two friends, a 15-year-old lanky blonde with a warm smile named Martha Moxley, and 17-year-old Tommy Skakel, nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, slipped away from the group of mischief-makers. They were last seen kissing in the Skakel's backyard around 9.30.

Several hours later, when the excitement of the night had quieted and friends dispersed, headed back to their respective homes, Martha was nowhere to be found. According to the New York Times, her family reported her missing in the early morning hours of October 31st. The next day, a little after noon, a school friend discovered Martha's body in the backyard of her home. There she lay, just 200 yards from her front door, bludgeoned to death with a golf club. The murder weapon would eventually be traced back to the Skakel family home.

Tommy Skakel was last seen with Martha, but after he passed the lie detector test, police moved on. Tommy Skakel was never charged. Martha Moxley's murder case spanned decades, eventually leading the investigation to follow a lead, 300 miles away in a small western Maine town called Poland. Three years into the investigation, in 1978, the younger sibling of Tommy Skakel, Michael, was in a downward spiral. It seemed that much like their relatives the Kennedys, the Skakel family was prone to tragedy and controversy.

Michael was arrested for drunk driving at the age of 17. And just three years after his hometown made national headlines for the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old girl, Michael found himself in the back of a car driving along a densely tree-lined road in Maine. Michael spent two years at Elan, a place he remembered as a hellhole. He left in 1980, but nearly 20 years later, it all came back to haunt him and the school itself. In 2000, Michael Skakel was charged with the murder of Martha Moxley, and at the center of the media swarm was Elon School and its founders. The web of abuse allegations unraveled, and the school's practice of corporal punishment finally faced the light.

Since the unflattering 1975 report by Illinois' Department of Child and Family Services, Elan's school seemed to go on marketing defense, even welcoming NBC's Robert Rogers to do an in-depth televised story titled, For the Child's Own Good. The 26-minute segment, which you can find on YouTube, hides none of the startling practices that took place at Elan. From group therapy sessions of residents screaming obscenities at one another, to the humiliation tactics used to keep them in line, Joe Ritchie and Gerald Davidson made no excuses for the way things worked at Elan. When asked about Elan's use of corporal punishment, Joe said, quote,

Corporal punishment is a harsh term. We use the ring, which everybody misinterprets. It's not a boxing ring. It's a ring of human people, unquote. The infamous ring Joe was referring to was a tactic used to control any bullies among the residents. The so-called bully would be encircled and forced into a fistfight against one resident after another, after another, until they eventually broke. The NBC report may have shown the ring to the public for the first time, but Mary Leahy from Illinois reported it back in 1975. the ring, saying boys were used to fight both boys and girls, and that they'd witnessed a girl hit with bare fists while wearing no headgear when she refused to fight. The author goes on to write, quote, of particular concern to the investigators was the incident of one of their DCFS residents

who had been determined to be pregnant, but subsequent to her physical exam, was put in the ring and defeated. Years later, it was this same ring that was said to force a confession out of Michael Skakel. During Michael's trial, a former classmate at Elan testified that Michael confessed to killing Martha Moxley after a session in the ring. Another classmate went on to testify that Michael was made to wear a sign that read, Confront me about the murder of Martha Moxley. Yet another witness testified that Michael had bragged about the murder, saying, quote, Michael's defense team denied all of it and was set on having Joe himself testify that he'd never heard Michael confess. But they never got the chance.

Joe Ritchie died in 2001 of lung cancer at the age of 54. The Michael Skakel trial went on for two years before Michael was convicted in 2002. Though according to the New York Times, there was never physical evidence to connect him to Martha's murder. He was sentenced to prison for 20 years to life. For nearly all of those 20 years,

Skakel's legal team appealed and fought his conviction and sentence. Ultimately, Michael's conviction was dropped in 2020. The murder of Martha Moxley remains unsolved to this day. If there was any good to come out of the Michael Skakel trial saga, it was that a modern audience was hearing of the practices at Ilan's school. From the national papers to local news outlets, Ilan was being watched. In 2007, reporter Maya Slavitz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times questioning the practices of behavior modification programs

that rely on corporal punishment disguised as aversive therapy. Ilan was her prime example. As more states evaluated the school with a critical eye, the New York State Department of Education conducted a surprise investigation into Elan. What they witnessed during the unannounced visit ultimately led New York State to end its relationship with the school. They cited compliance issues, including the restraining of students, isolation as punishment, students counseling other students, and sleep deprivation. With more negative publicity circling the once-respected behavioral modification program,

past students joined in the chorus. The first post appeared on Reddit, authored by the username gzasmyhero. The headline read, Even skimming this post once will blow your mind. Most probably think that it's made up, but you would be dead wrong. The post claimed to give a detailed, first-hand experience of life at Ilan in 1998, when the author was just 16 years old. The post described the amount of quote normal kids, unquote, that were sent to Ilan simply for smoking marijuana or other typical teen acts of rebellion. GZAS, my hero, wrote,

I believe that the internet is our number one tool for exposing these horrid blind spots for what they are. The fuse was lit. It exploded into a campaign of hundreds of accusations and over a thousand responses to the post. In internet searches, Elan became synonymous with abuse. Finally, in 2011 and after 41 years, Elan School closed its doors for good.

Regarding the choice to close in 2011, Joe Ritchie's widow, Sharon Terry, wrote that the school would close due to the declining enrollment and resulting financial difficulties. She pointed to the internet campaign as the cause. In a faxed letter to the Lewiston Sun-Journal, she stated, The school has been the target of harsh and false attacks spread over the internet with the avowed purpose of forcing the school to close. She noted that several investigations throughout the years conducted by the Maine Department of Education turned up no abuse. At the time of its closing, by the way, Elan School's annual tuition was up to nearly $55,000 for one resident.

Though the doors may have been closed, the story was far from over. And a family who had long believed the sudden death of their son and brother in 1982 was due to natural causes, would soon find themselves with more questions than answers. 15-year-old Phil Williams Jr. was a student at Elan School in the early 1980s. His family believed that the school would help him through the challenges he faced as a young teenager. Phil's sister told News 8 WMTW, I thought it was a wonderful place. I thought they were helping my brother.

I thought he was coming home. Phil Williams Jr. did not make it home from Elan alive. His sister hadn't seen him since the day he was transferred from their foster home to Elan's school. He died on December 27, 1982. Natural causes, the family was told. Pam took the information as fact for over 30 years, until, the Sun-Journal reported, another former Elan student told Pam that before Phil's sudden death, he had been in the ring.

The student witnessed the entire ordeal. The ring had served as Phil's punishment for complaining about headaches. The staff believed he was faking it in an attempt to gain special treatment or avoid chores. In the ring, he was beaten by another student, never fighting back for over 10 minutes. When he collapsed, it was a staff member who transported him from Milan to the hospital, not an ambulance. Phil was in a coma. His father ultimately had to make the heart-wrenching, horrible decision to remove Phil from life support. The Sun Journal published Phil's death certificate in 2016, and his immediate cause of death is cited as brainstem compression due to or as a consequence of massive cerebral hemorrhage as a cause of probably ruptured aneurysm.

Probably. That's the precise word on his death certificate. An aneurysm, if that's in fact what Phil had, can burst on its own. Or it can burst with a blow to the head, one that may have been delivered during his time in the ring. Because the attending doctor reported natural causes, no autopsy was performed, and so the word probably remains on Phil's death certificate. In light of the reports and allegations that a severe beating preceded Phil's death, Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit reviewed the case in 2016. In March of that year,

State Police Lieutenant Brian McDonough told Catherine Skelton at the Sun-Journal that they were singularly focused on investigating Phil Williams Jr.'s death, not greater allegations or complaints against the school. He said, We do death investigations for the purposes of finding out answers and being able to determine exactly what happened. If there are any criminal elements involved that come to light in the investigation, that's always a possibility, unquote. But ultimately, no criminal elements came to light.

In my conversation with Phil's sister, Pam, I could tell the results of the investigation didn't give her any more answers than what she started with. Quote, My brother got no justice. The children there got none. They are the ultimate victims. We all are. I miss Phil Jr. every day. He was my big brother, my protector, unquote. According to Breaking Code Silence, 50,000 children and teens a year enter or remain within the hundreds of residential programs and facilities that claim to treat, reform, or rehabilitate what are considered to be troubled youth.

Breaking Code Silence is a social movement organized by survivors of institutional child abuse and activists who raise awareness of the problems in the troubled teen industry and the need for reform. The troubled teen industry, as it's so called, receives little to no oversight for their treatment programs. Treatment programs that are presented as the answer to any number of issues, from severe psychiatric disorders down to simply a kid not meeting the expectations of their families, communities or schools. Citing ProPublica, Breaking Code Silence notes the shocking numbers that at least 145 children have died from preventable causes in residential treatment centers, and at least 62 from asphyxiation

or injury caused by restraint. Paris Hilton has teamed up with Breaking Code Silence. In her new documentary, This is Paris, she spoke about her time in three different residential treatment centers as a teen, including Provo Canyon School in Utah. Speaking out in the documentary about the emotional, verbal, and physical abuse she endured during her 11 months at the facility was just the start. She testified to the Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Standing Committee at the Utah State Capitol in February of this year, 2021. Paris is determined to make positive change in the troubled teen industry and save other kids the same nightmare she faced. You don't have to be an heiress or a celebrity or even anyone of any

significant fame to create positive change and forward motion to protect children and support survivors. For Ilan, it took a Reddit thread of brave survivors posting about their experiences. Even the widow of Ilan School's founder blamed the power of the internet for the school's ultimate demise. For more information and resources on how to help, visit breakingcodesilence.net. Officer Smiley, 40 years after he dropped the Elan runaway off at that diner in Auburn, told Katherine Skelton at the Sun-Journal, quote, I'm glad I did it, but I know it was wrong. Wrong in one sense and right in another, I guess, if it all worked out."

He still wonders about the boy. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. This episode was researched and written by Olivia Gunn, with additional writing support and production by me, Kylie Lowe. Sources for this case, including work by Katherine Skelton for The Sun Journal and other reference articles in The New York Times, Hartford Courant, Corrections Magazine, and others, are listed and linked in the show notes at darkdowneast.com. If you're new here, I know there's a lot of new Dark Down Easter's in the mix. Hello, hi, thank you so much for listening. I'm so thrilled you're tuning in to

hear these important true crime stories in the history of Maine and New England. If you love the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe while you're there so you never miss an episode. If you're a new listener and you leave a review, put the ocean waves emoji somewhere in your review so I'd know which episode you came from. If you have a story or a case I should cover, one you are personally connected to, I would love to hear from you at hello at darkdowneast.com. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do each week. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases.

I'm not about to let their names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.