We Carry Their Bones

Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, a professor at the University of South Florida, recounts her decade-long investigation into the unmarked burial ground at the Dozier School for Boys, a state-run reform school in the rural Florida panhandle town of Marianna that began operating in 1900. The institution was intended to rehabilitate juvenile offenders but became notorious for brutal beatings, forced labor, sexual abuse, and suspicious deaths. The school was racially segregated, with separate campuses for white and "colored" boys. Kimmerle frames the investigation as a human rights issue, arguing that families have a fundamental right to know the truth about boys who died in state custody and were buried in unmarked graves.

The book opens in 2012 as Kimmerle prepares for a press conference to announce her team's findings. Using ground-penetrating radar (GPR), a technology that sends radar pulses into the ground to detect buried objects and disturbances, and shallow test trenches, her team has identified approximately fifty burials at the school's cemetery, known as Boot Hill. This far exceeds the thirty-one graves the state had claimed. Kimmerle reveals that twenty-two boys died in state custody with no one able to identify their specific graves and that nearly 70 percent of those buried were African American.

Kimmerle flashes back to October 2008, when five former wards calling themselves the White House Boys returned to the Dozier campus to tell their stories. Dick Colon, Robert Straley, Michael O'McCarthy, Bill Haynes, and Roger Kiser described being forced to bite a pillow while guards lashed them with a leather strap in a building called the White House. Their decision to speak out was partly triggered by the 2006 death of Martin Lee Anderson, a fourteen-year-old Black boy suffocated by guards at a Florida boot camp. Investigative reporter Carol Marbin Miller of the Miami Herald documented a century of abuse at Dozier, and Governor Charlie Crist ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to investigate. The FDLE's 2009 report concluded that all deaths were accounted for and that no criminal conduct had occurred, but the investigation relied on incomplete records, did not exhume remains, and did not use GPR or ground-truthing, the process of physically verifying radar findings through test excavations. Among the families who came forward was Ovell Krell, a retired police officer whose fourteen-year-old brother, George Owen Smith, died after escaping the school in 1940 under circumstances the family considered suspicious.

Kimmerle describes her path to the project. In early 2011, reporter Ben Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times introduced her to the story. She contacted Dr. Richard Estabrook, a veteran Florida archaeologist, and the two discussed how Dozier fit within Florida's broader history of convict leasing, a system in which convicted people, overwhelmingly Black, were leased to private companies as forced laborers. The reform school was established partly to remove children from that system but quickly became its own labor enterprise. Kimmerle also traces her professional background, from the Smithsonian Institution to forensic work for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where she analyzed remains of war crimes victims. That experience taught her that families' need for truth about missing loved ones was universal.

Kimmerle describes her early fieldwork in Marianna, where she encountered resistance from local officials. At the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, officials insisted the agency had never responded to any case involving the school, despite historical records placing deputies at death scenes. At the courthouse, an archivist dismissed the dead boys as throwaways. Straley became Kimmerle's close ally, helping contact over five hundred former wards to gather leads about possible grave locations. Glen Varnadoe, a retired executive, sought to locate his uncle Thomas, who died at Dozier in 1934. Glen filed an injunction that forced the state to grant access to additional areas of the campus. The GPR survey revealed burials extending into the surrounding woods. Kimmerle provides historical context: Marianna's violent Reconstruction era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the 1934 spectacle lynching of Claude Neal, and Jim Crow vagrancy statutes that funneled Black citizens into forced labor and children into the reform school.

The path to excavation was contentious. Local historian Dale Cox encouraged Kimmerle's arrest for allegedly disturbing graves, though the state attorney found no laws were broken. Circuit court Judge William Wright denied a petition filed by Attorney General Pam Bondi on behalf of local medical examiner Dr. Michael Hunter to exhume remains. The Secretary of State denied an archaeological permit. Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm questioned why the governor chose to obstruct the investigation, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) regional vice president Dale Landry argued that the archaeological community had failed to advocate for Black heritage. Kimmerle also reconstructs a devastating 1914 dormitory fire in which fire escape doors were locked with chains and boys on the third floor were confined in isolation cells, chained to walls as punishment. Superintendent William H. Bell, who held the only keys, was away in town. Three separate investigations produced three different death tolls.

The breakthrough came in August 2013, when the Florida cabinet voted unanimously to approve a land-use agreement giving Kimmerle's team one year to excavate, with $190,000 in state funding. Over Labor Day weekend, excavation began in extreme heat, with CNN broadcasting live. Within hours, the team uncovered skeletal remains near a large oak tree, the teeth indicating a boy of about thirteen or fourteen. Over the following months, using a gradall excavator to remove thin layers of topsoil, the team opened the full site, finding coffin hardware, buttons, and a marble in a boy's pocket. Fire victims' remains were found burned, fragmented, and commingled across seven coffins. By December 2013, fifty-five graves had been uncovered, far exceeding both the state's count and the earlier GPR estimate.

In the lab, analysis revealed only three individuals among the fire victims spread across seven coffins, raising questions about the remaining victims. Dental and skeletal examination showed extensive markers of poverty: untreated cavities in forty boys, nutritional deficiencies, and severe ear infections in more than half. DNA samples were shipped to the University of North Texas Health Science Center.

The first positive identification was George Owen Smith, Krell's brother, who was buried unclothed in a shallow grave. The team also identified Earl Wilson, who died in a sweat box, a small confinement structure, in 1944, though the cause of death could not be determined from the remains. Thomas Varnadoe, who died thirty-four days after arriving at the school in 1934, was identified as well. Thomas's brother Richard Varnadoe, eighty-five years old at the funeral, said he felt "like we plucked my brother out of the depths of hell" (177). Kimmerle also investigates the death of Thomas Curry, who ran away in 1925 and was found dead near railroad tracks with a crushed skull. Working with Pennsylvania authorities, she obtained a court order to exhume Curry's grave in Philadelphia and discovered the coffin was empty. Officials had likely buried Thomas in Florida and shipped an empty coffin to his grandmother.

As identifications continued, families held burial ceremonies. Billey Jackson, sent to Dozier in 1952 for truancy, was beaten in the White House and died shortly after. The White House Boys attended Billey's 2016 burial in Daytona Beach, calling the ceremony a rescue. Straley, who became central to the investigation, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died during the project.

The Florida legislature allocated $500,000 for reburials and later added $1.2 million. In January 2016, Kimmerle presented her final report to the Florida cabinet. Governor Rick Scott publicly commented for the first time, saying he wished it had never happened, and cabinet members apologized. In April 2018, the legislature passed a resolution acknowledging the state's responsibility for the abuse and apologizing to the boys and their families. In 2019, a private firm reported possible new graves on the property, but Kimmerle's team investigated and found only infrastructure remnants.

Kimmerle returns to Boot Hill in 2020 to find Hurricane Michael has destroyed much of the surrounding forest and killed the large oak tree, though the mulberry tree her team transplanted during excavation is thriving. At the time of writing, there are no permanent memorials on-site. Of fifty-five burials exhumed, the team positively or presumptively identified twenty-four boys. Kimmerle closes by asserting that the Dozier School was one institution within a system structured by race and class that treated some people as disposable, and that despite every obstacle, the investigation did not fail.