This Document last edited Wed, Feb 28, 2024
I have taken to calling the start of my abuse "echo abuse". This is my theory: the adults prey on the children and the children act out and replicate the behavior that has been shown to them on younger kids.
My first abusers were fellow children who I could not get away from. I was 4 or 5 when I experienced the worst of my life's abuse. My abusers were junior high age. Nothing since can compare to the pain those first 5 years of my life have left me. I will not discuss this further at this time except to say that I recognize they were profoundly traumatized children and I am still working on forgiving them.
This letter is about the adults who put my early childhood abuse into motion.
My family belonged to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. The LCMS was founded in the early 1800’s to oppose the Enlightenment and Rationalism. It’s primary congregation was in the slave holding state of Missouri. You will find in its elementary schools and sunday schools a pro-slavery message still – that American chattel slaves were happy and taken care of by their masters, and that it was god’s will for there to be slavery. Members of the LCMS subscribe to an ethno-suprematist view of the world that fetishizes whiteness and purity.
My sister was molested by her godfather, Ron Williams, at Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Billings, Montana. She was 4. My sister reported him like she should have. My family went to the Billings Police Department and filled out a form that was promptly lost. Ron Williams was a major real estate developer in Billings. He molested dozens of other girls. He finally was busted for a sexual relationship with his neighbor's 10 year old daughter. The rich girl's accusation was the one that stuck. He stayed at Mount Olive – he had helped found the elementary school, and given enormous amounts of money to them – and my family left. He tried to adopt a little girl from China after his conviction.
My family then went to Trinity Lutheran Church and School.
Tom Speed was a popular Christian Radio DJ and always around Trinity Lutheran School, his wife ran a daycare out of their house. I was 6 or 7 and at Tom Speed's daycare in his house when he rubbed his erect penis on my back while hugging me in his music room. I froze, and I remember feeling absolutely terrified because of how brutal my previous attacks had been. He could tell something was wrong, and so he backed up. He asked me if I would like some ice cream. I could have as much as I wanted. So we went to the kitchen and he gave me half a box of neapolitan ice cream. Then his sons and their friends came in. He accused me of stealing ice cream in front of them. From that point forward, I was regularly accused of stealing and lying by his sons and their friends at Trinity Lutheran School.
It was my first experience of what is called Mobbing. This behavior has been documented as pervasive around the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that involves a coordinated, constant set of abuses and slanders to those members of the church who are deemed “ungodly”.
Tom Speed's wife would make me apologize for breathing their air, standing on their carpet, being in their presence at daycare. It was repeated to me that I was a burden to them.
School was just as bad as daycare. My second grade teacher at Trinity Lutheran School would knock your desk over in front of the entire class if it was messy. I was regularly knocked down, my pants pulled down and I would be digitally raped by other students at Trinity Lutheran while being called faggot. When I would report my abuse I would get into trouble for crying.
The trial of Tom Speed was overseen by Judge G. Todd Baugh. It was taken care of very quickly, I remember. I was never asked if he abused me. His sons were still at Trinity Lutheran School and were still allowed to abuse me. I was told to “not let them get to me” after being sexually assaulted.
His wife and accesory to these crimes, Cindy Speed, was an employee of Trinity Lutheran Elementary School in Billings Montana until 2019.r
The secretary of Trinity Lutheran School used to embezzle the students' lunch money. I regularly went without lunch at Trinity Lutheran School in second and third grade. I would sit at my desk and try not to cry. When I would insist I brought the check, I would be accused of lying and stealing -- after all, the deacon of the School Tom Speed and his sons were the ones making the accusations. In that school there was a lot of satanic panic and end of days talk. They didn’t read the bible much, but they read a book called “The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey. I remember the school secretary talking about the end of days a lot while she was embezzling student's lunch money.
When I see Q-Anon member after Q-anon member arrested for child porn and pedophilia I see the echo of this culture of abuse.This culture exists in Billings, Montana and is especially prevalent in the Evangelical community. It used to be Reagan and Satanic Panic; now it's Trump and Q-Anon.
Chuck Root, another deacon of Trinity Lutheran School, showed his penis to me when I was in daycare at his house. When I panicked and told his son, his son produced a handgun and put it to my head. We were about 8 or 9. There was another gun to my head by a different little boy, but he was just a country boy being an idiot. You shouldn't leave guns unattended and unlocked around children. The last time someone pointed a gun at me I was in Missoula, MT. I will point out that I've lived in Los Angeles for 17 years now, and have not had a gun pointed at me. The most dangerous years of my life was my childhood growing up in Montana. Anyone who sells Montana as "safe" is a liar. Allegedly as of 2021 there is a recent crime surge in Montana: I think they are just finding it harder and harder to fudge the statistics.
Chuck Root's son gave me my first exhortations to kill myself and started giving me daily death threats.
In 4th grade Tom Speed had been busted and there were other adults who were no longer around -- a lot of this abuse I think got handled "in church". But I remember my 4th grade teacher, Mr. Pullman, giving a screamed sermon about how all sins are equal in the eyes of god, so you should NEVER speak ill of Tom Speed or Ron Williams or anybody else. Most of the little girls in the class were crying. This sermon particularly hurt me as I had admired Mr. Pullman: he had taught me my first lines of the BASIC programming language when I was in first grade.
In 6th Grade my sister and I went to public school. This was far better. I was still regularly assaulted , but the violence was not allowed to take a sexualized tenor in public school.
That year, a hernia I had became a serious issue for me. I had had it for years, but it began to manifest painfully. It wasn't until I had been in therapy for several years that I realized my hernia came from my rape as a child. I remember a pastor's kid knocking me down and kicking me in the groin right after I had my surgery. My family still went to Trinity Lutheran Church. The shunning from leaving the school with the other children at church was palpable. Confirmation was watching typical satanic panic propaganda and rote repetition from Luther’s Catachism.
It was in this period that my parents sent me to a Christian camp without telling me it was a Christian camp. I didn't find out until they took my copy of Jurassic Park away on the bus. I spent my time trying to stay away from the other kids – I didn’t want to be assaulted again. I was told “I walked around like there was a stick up my ass”.
In 6th grade, even though I was in public school, I was sent back to Trinity Lutheran Elementary School to take private confirmation classes with the then new principal. These sessions happened in his office with no other adults present. He taught a vision of the bible where slaves obeyed their masters, children obeyed their superiors, and you quoted things back to him verbatim.
Sometimes in these sessions was a girl named K___ W____. In one of these sessions Thomas showed us a video of the students at Trinity Lutheran Elementary on their ski trip. The video was nothing but the students parading around in their long-underwear, presenting themselves sexually for the camera. In my grown-up perception of the memory they seemed very drunk.
I remember telling the principal this was a really strange video to show students, and I didn't want to watch it. I then got up and walked out of the principal's office. I was planning on walking home. When I walked out the front office,the principal grabbed me and pushed me into a plaque of the Gettysburg Address with all of his weight. I told him I wasn't going to tell anyone, that I just wanted to leave, that I knew nobody would believe me anyway. He laughed, and quoted John 1:5 to me "The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not comprehend it".
My sister was the loudest about leaving Trinity Lutheran Elementary because of rumors of what the ski trips were like. My sister's instincts I believe were correct. I believe that the Trinity Lutheran Elementary School ski trip is a ritual used specifically to begin, or culminate, the grooming of children for sexual purposes in the Lutheran Community in Billings, MT.
I refused to repeat the rote repetitions when I was confirmed. I didn't want to be. At a certain point Vicar Doug Stowe (now a pastor in Wisconsin) asked me to translate John 1:5 from Latin. Of course a junior high student couldn't translate latin. He did it to embarrass me in front of the church. I will point out, the verse was not originally written in Latin. Nor was his translation, nor the translation in the New International Version of the bible correct. The Bible, to this cult, still remains “the inerrant word of god”, though seeking the original texts and sources is strongly discouraged. If they did, their entire theology would fall apart in the face of their own supposed theology. Lutheran theologian Albert Schwietzer wrote a whole book on it called "The Quest of the Historical Jesus".
I was at public school from 6th grade on, but I could not escape Evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christians are not satisfied occupying their own schools, but must invade the public sphere, also. I remember teaching myself trigonometry in 7th grade science-class while the teacher insisted that the reason we had seasons was because the Earth moved closer and further away from the Sun, the cosmos was 5000 years old, evolution didn't exist and he had a First Amendment right to turn his class into a pulpit as long as he didn't call us to convert.
Not even at public school in Billings can you get away from the ideology of Young Earth Creationism.
I remember numerous students at Will James Junior High didn’t see what was wrong with the Oklahoma City Bombings. The ideology and sexual abuse of David Koresh was considered normal and acceptable to them. To oppose it was to be a satanist, or, worse, a communist. Sexual abuse has been so normalized in the Evangelical church that opposition to it is considered wicked. Josh Duggar, Alexander Acosta, Adam Hageman and numerous others in the orbit of the Trump administration’s abuse did not happen in a vacuum – it happened in the purity obsessed, patriarchal and abusive Evangelical Culture that believes in anti-American ideals of power. A good term for this nexus of faith and politics would be “Christo-Fascism”, and you will find wherever there are Proud Boys or Q-Anon there is child-sexual abuse. To quote the LCMS website: In one study, 93 percent of convicted sex offenders described themselves as “religious.” ( https://reporter.lcms.org/2015/most-child-molesters-religious/, retrieved on December 16, 2021 )
During my highschool years there was an explosion of terrorism in Montana. Ted Kacynski, The Montana Militia and the Freemen were all active at this time. An aside: Lutheran can be translated as Freeman. I remember a prison guard came to talk to my highschool. The prison guard described the Montana Militia as “model prisoners” who “really didn’t belong there”. The only thing I took away from that conversation was that that particular guard was not unsympathetic to their politics. I suspect that a social network analysis will demonstrate deep ties between law enforcement in Montana and these Christo-Fascist terrorist groups. In recent news, Richard Spencer, who organized the Charlottesville riots, did most of his planning from Montana. The Oath Keepers, who were deeply involved in the January 6th desecration of the capital are based in Montana.
In Highschool I had to go back to the original church where my sister was abused, Mount Olive Lutheran Church, for function for School District 2 regularly. Mount Olive Lutheran Church and Billings West High School both share the intersection of 24th and St John's street in Billings, Montana. I have pointed out previously how deeply entwined the church and public spaces are there.
My only good memories of Montana are my days with my grandfather. My Grampa Schmidt was a brilliant man who loved picking up garbage, polka music and the two-stroke engine. He would have been a brilliant engineer. We went to polka shows and fishing a lot and I would get to listen to a brilliant man expound on what he loved. He always asked me: "You sure you want to hear this stuff, kid?". Oh, Grampa, I would give anything to get to listen to you talk for another hour. He was terrified to speak about what he loved. Anything that was not drinking, sports or jesus was considered “faggot shit” in Montana. They abused a brilliant man so absolutely he was scared to share what he loved. You will find broken man after broken man in Montana, their fundamental passions destroyed and denigrated by the culture around them.
When I hang out at my hackerspace, CrashSpace in Los Angeles, I meet brilliant person after brilliant person who will talk to you for hours about what they are interested in. I find the fellowship appealing mostly because the people there remind me of my Grampa. In a free society, people are allowed to have interests that aren’t their job or what’s on TV. That is not what Montana is like.
He explained global warming to me in the 1980's -- it used to not be political, and he read the newspaper and books voraciously. One time, while we were fishing, he told me about how he was balded. He was on a WPA project in the 1930's, and was distraught at the encroachment of Petroleum based gasoline. He thought it was a “deal with the devil” -- he knew you could make gasoline out of trees, and you didn't need a complex engine and industrial process to get its benefits. He was chemically balded for speaking above his station. He warned me that they might try to do the same thing to me. I remember telling him "things are different now, Grampa". I wish I had been right. The current term for the culture that chemically balded my grandfather is “Petro-Masculinity” and it is the culture that has given us the recent rash of tornadoes and 70 degree weather in the middle of December, 2020. Culture has consequences.
I remember the boys who bullied me at Mount Olive Lutheran Church. It was a lot of "Faggot". The adults at Mount Olive use the word "Faggot" a lot, too. But, I'm not sure if this was a public school function or a church function. I got called "Faggot" everywhere I went in Billings, Montana, so it's hard to remember. I would be misgendered and assaulted at Billings West High School, and when I would report the assaults to the principal, Dave Irion he would say “So and so wouldn’t do that”.
I remember my grampa telling me that I was in danger in Billings -- I was too capable of putting things together, and the place was too corrupt. He said: "They're going to accuse you of every crime they can, and they're never going to let you leave."
After he had me chemically balded, Dave Irion said to one of my classes that high-school was the best years of his life. He teared up when he said it -- it is profoundly sad to meet a grown up who peaked in Highschool, it's a pity I had to deal with his Residential School politics when I was defenseless. He was a basketball star in High-School. I wonder how many children who went to school with Dave Irion still carry the scars from knowing him. Dave Irion ran Billings West High School not as a principal, but as head jock. Discipline was not about enforcing any sense of fairness, but of ensuring the social dominance of his chosen student lieutenants, who were allowed to prey on other students with impunity. I would call his politics “Christo Fascist”.
It was in one of the bullying sessions at Mount Olive Lutheran Church that I brought up Ron Williams, Tom Speed and the principal of Trinity Lutheran Elementary. I was told to "shut my faggot mouth".
1998-99 was my senior year at Billings West High School. Matthew Shepard was murdered. It's hard to describe how close his murder felt. The principal Dave Irion had made the school a toxic blend of religous hatred and anti-gay abuse. Reports of physical assaults and threats by the unpopular kids (of which I was one) were brushed off by him. He openly despised gay and queer kids, as was part of his faith, Catholicism. The Catholic church and the LCMS were very close in Billings – sharing both services and politics.
A few days after the news of Matthew Shepard’s murder, I remember walking down the hallway at Billings West High and hearing "You're next, Mysse". I didn't bother reporting the threats and the abuse anymore. Nothing would have happened. I had just gotten out of the hospital for a suicide attempt. When I told the psychiatrist at Deaconess Clinic I had been raped she told me I was lying and prescribed me more barbituates. These students, who I remember at both Mount Olive Lutheran Church and Billings West High, jumped me and spread something on my scalp. I had long hair, so they knocked me down and grabbed my pony tail. This gave me a distinctive horn-like balding pattern.
One of the things the ring leader said to me was that "[I] had upset the order, and these were the consequences of that". I hate to impugn the intelligence of anyone, but these weren't the type of boys to use that type of language. I think they were ordered to commit this atrocity by someone else. They mentioned my grandfather, also, which makes me believe this was an orchestrated hit by religious and social leaders in Billings, Montana. They then said that "the people who run this state stick together, and no matter what you do we're going to destroy you".
After highschool I worked for the City of Billings during the summers. One of my tasks was to clean up the graffiti from the policeman's gym. The garbage men and the street workers were very respectful of the facilities of Billings. The police were not. I remember cleaning off "kill all fags" and "white power" from the bathroom walls in the policemens gym.
One day, in the summers of 2000 or 2001, the Billings Police Department Evidence room threw away photographs of abuse victims without shredding them. Garbage men and street workers, as well as summer workers like me looked at them. They were pictures of people's abuse. If you were sexually or physically assaulted in Bilings in the late 90's or early 2000's, your photograph's were looked at by people who weren't the police.
I first reached out to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) about what happened in January of 2019. I reported this abuse to the LCMS, the FBI and the Billings Police Department in September 2019. When I didn't get a response I wrote letters to the state attorney's office, as well as the governor's office and all representatives in congress and senate. I got a call from Detective Rathke from the Billings Police Department in late 2019. I would describe the conversation as dissatisfying and discouraging. He laughed at me. There has been no follow up from any of these entities, save for a few form generated letters from your representatives.
I was stopped in an airport by someone in the early 2010’s. This person pointed out my balding pattern and asked me about Billings West High. They told me that one of the men who had balded me as a child was now a Police Officer in Billings, hired by Rich St John, the chief of police, who is apparently a prominent Catholic. Rich St John was school resource officer when the mass-baldings occured. Dave Irion was fired from West High for having this person balded. Irion later went to work for the Catholic Hospital laundering money that rightfully belonged to the children his church raped -- the Montana Diocese has declared bankruptcy rather than pay restitution to its other victims. His daughter still has a sinecure there.
I am told that Principal Dave Irion and Police Chief Rich St. John both know each other socially.
Judge G. Todd Baugh made national news when he sentenced Stacey Dean Rambolt, who had raped a 14 year old student of his and then waged a campaign of abuse that drove her to suicide, a 30 day sentence. He described the victim as “low-class” during the trial. He was given a lifetime achievement award in 2017 by the Yellowstone Valley Bar Association. In 2021, a Title IX complaint against the University of Montana Law School alleges that “...[a] professor allegedly repeated gay slurs during class and allowed the class to do the same before mocking child sexual abuse.”
I not only have to contend with the rapes and the trauma Montana left me with, but with the knowledge that the legal system finds them hilarious.
I believe my balding was a concerted effort to cover up sexual abuse in the churches of Billings Montana. I believe there are many other victims of this Christo-Fascist culture of atrocity.
Lindsey Carl Mysse
