Charges: Minister sexually abused young 'Maidens' in Minnesota camp for years
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· Article by: PAM LOUWAGIE, JENNA ROSS and PAUL WALSH , Star Tribune
· April 15, 2014
Minister is charged with sexually abusing girls at Minnesota camp.
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FINLAYSON, Minn. - Lindsay Tornambe was just 13 years old when she was chosen to be “sacrificed to God,” she remembers.
That
announcement in July 2000 came from a minister who led an insular faith
community that included her family in central Minnesota. As Tornambe
sat in the congregation with her parents, she remembers the minister
calling out a list of 10 girls for a position of honor. He would later
call them “maidens.”
Soon,
her parents dutifully dropped her off at his isolated camp, where what
she now calls a nightmare of sexual abuse went on for about nine years.
Pine
County authorities announced Tuesday that the minister, 52-year-old
Victor A. Barnard, is now facing 59 counts of first-degree criminal
sexual conduct involving his chosen maidens.
Barnard
ruled “like a rock star” over the camp and sexually exploited girls and
young women at his whim while they lived apart from their families,
according to court papers, which spell out the alleged abuses against
two unnamed teens.
Barnard
had not been apprehended Tuesday evening but was believed to be in
Washington state, where authorities have begun a manhunt for him. He is
the subject of a nationwide warrant.
Pine
County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Steven Blackwell said Tuesday that the 59
counts address only the alleged rapes of the two women who have so far
spoken to law officers and that he is confident Barnard has more
victims.
“We
are hoping to find more that are willing to come forward,” Blackwell
said. “I don’t know how we couldn’t think that” there are more girls and
women abused in Barnard’s “secret little world,” he added.
The
criminal complaint lays out the experiences of two of the girls, now
women and identified in the document as “B” and “C.” Tornambe, who is
now living in the Washington, D.C., area, confirmed in a phone interview
Tuesday that she is one of the girls described in the charges, which
she hasn’t seen.
She
said she was relieved to hear that Barnard is facing charges. “To know
that they actually care, that people actually do care about what
happened means so much,” she said.
The Maidens Group
Tornambe
said she first met Barnard when she was 9. Living in Pennsylvania, her
parents had been following his ministry and home schooling their
children. The family visited Minnesota a lot, she said, and eventually
moved to join the congregation near Finlayson when she was 11.
They lived and worked there and had little contact with the outside world, she said.
It
became clear sometime after her name was called at the meeting with the
congregation that her move to live with Barnard was intended to be
permanent. “My parents dropped me off July 23, 2000,” Tornambe said.
“Victor had us celebrate it every year, it was like our anniversary.”
Within
about a month of the move, she said, Barnard talked to her about sex.
He used terms she didn’t understand, and he grew angry about it,
thinking she was lying about not understanding. She said he raped her
for the first time then and continued sexually assaulting her over the
course of nine years. The frequency varied from about once a month to
about five times a month, she said.
“If
I wasn’t being spiritual or following his orders, he wouldn’t have sex
with us,” she said. “If we were doing well, it was almost like he
rewarded us.” She rarely saw her parents, though they lived only about 5
miles away, she said.
The
complaint says that females ages 12 to 24 were in the Maidens Group and
that Barnard would preach to them about giving themselves to God and
never marrying. They were sometimes called “Alamoth,” a biblical word
referencing virginity, the document says. Barnard taught the girls that
he represented Jesus and that he had left his wife and children to live
on camp property, telling the larger congregation that the move was so
he could dedicate himself to God.
Tornambe
said she tried to leave the group once, when she was 15. Barnard took
back a ring, a veil and other gifts he had given her before she went
home to her parents, she said, and her mother cried for a week with
disappointment. When Barnard called clergy members, the maidens and
their parents together for a meeting shortly afterward, he talked about
damnation from God. Fearful, Tornambe went back with Barnard.
“I was really scared, and I didn’t know what receiving damnation from God would be like,” she said. “I ended up just staying.”
Robbed of childhood
On
a rural dirt road 5 miles southwest of Finlayson, the Salvation Army
now runs the Northwoods Camp, a rustic collection of century-old cabins
and newer buildings. When this property was owned by the River Road
Fellowship, which included about 150 people, it was home to “Shepherd’s
Camp,” where Barnard brought his maidens. He lived in the camp’s “lodge”
and would call for one girl or another “when he wanted to have sexual
intercourse with her,” the charges say.
According
to the complaint, “B” told authorities that Barnard explained that
Jesus had Mary Magdalene and other women as followers and that King
Solomon had many concubines, adding that “God’s word” made having sex
with him normal. She told authorities that Barnard warned her not to
tell anyone about the sex, that he would hit her when angered and that
other girls were called “to see Barnard in the same manner,” according
to court documents.
A
few years later, Tornambe said, she left permanently. She had traveled
to Brazil with another one of the maidens who was originally from that
country, and she decided there that she wanted out of the religion. When
she came back to the United States, the group had moved to Washington
state, she said. She went to live with her parents, who had by then
moved to Pennsylvania. They still had pictures of Barnard in their
house, she said, and continued to send money to him.
She
stopped going to church, she said, and started to adapt to the outside
world that was foreign from the insular one where she had grown up.
“I
didn’t know anything. We made all our own clothes. I didn’t know
anything about the Internet or cellphones,” she said. She took jobs
working at a health club and waitressing, eventually becoming a nanny.
After
ringing in 2012 at a New Year’s party with cousins who happily talked
about their futures, she decided she’d been robbed of too much of her
childhood. That week, she called authorities to tell her story.
Another victim
The criminal complaint details the story of another girl, called “C,” that is similar to Tornambe’s.
C
said her abuse began in 2000, when she was 12. She lived with nine
other girls and also rarely saw her family. C said Barnard also told her
that the sex was ordained by God.
In
February 2001, Barnard, C and her parents met. He told her family that
he might have sex with her, even though that had already been occurring.
That
month, C was part of a ceremony that Barnard called the “Salt
Covenant,” a pledge by the girls to remain unmarried and loyal to
Barnard until death.
C
also said a calendar was kept in the kitchen that chronicled when the
other girls would have sex with Barnard, though all the while the girls
would never speak to one another about what was happening.
C
separated from the group several times in June 2008 until leaving for
good and moving to Wisconsin in September 2009. She became depressed and
attempted suicide in 2011. Her brother, also formerly part of the
fellowship, confronted her. She then told him about the abuse.
Community on its own
The story of both girls, told in the charges, has rocked the normally quiet community near Minnesota’s eastern border.
From
his carefully kept house, Jay Gault would sometimes see women and girls
across the dirt road, in the camp property’s woods, tapping trees for
maple syrup.
But when he would go get his mail, they would scatter, said Gault, 61. “They’d go back in the woods. They wouldn’t look at you.”
In
an area where drivers wave when passing one another, neighbors noticed
that the people at the camp “kept to themselves,” as several put it.
Dick
Bowser, who recently retired from East Central Energy, said the church
wouldn’t let power company or fire department employees on the property —
“and when they did let you in, they watched you very closely.”
“It was strange,” Bowser said.
The men sometimes left to do carpentry or construction work,
but “you didn’t see the women very much,” he said. Bowser, 60, lives
down the road, but even from that distance, he’d hear them, faintly,
chanting and singing.
Then,
a few years ago, the camp cleared out. Gault noticed that businesses
affiliated with the congregation — a construction company among them —
suddenly closed, as well. Then word came about the alleged sexual abuse.
“It’s been the buzz around here,” Gault said, shaking his head.
“I
didn’t expect it to be anything good that was going on down there,”
Bowser said. “But I certainly didn’t expect what it’s looking like it’s
turning out to be.”
Worried for her sisters
Now 27, Tornambe said life is still an adjustment.
The
criminal complaints say that Pine County sheriff’s investigator Matt
Ludwig told “B’s” parents about the abuse in June 2012 and that her
mother “did not want to hear it.”
Her father agreed to speak with Ludwig, explaining that he allowed his daughter to live away from them because she seemed happy.
He
described the “atmosphere in the congregation and said it is a very
powerful force to face the idea of losing everything — family, home,
friends, business
and being cast out of the church — if you do not go along with what Barnard wants you to do,” according to the charges.
B’s
father recalled Barnard coming to him and rationalizing his having sex
with the girls. The father “felt pressured to not say anything,” the
complaint continued. “[The father] said he did not know what he was
thinking at the time but just remembers feeling so much pressure to not
become an outcast and lose everything he had.”
Tornambe
has had bouts of depression where she considered suicide, she said. She
physically hurt herself, she said, feeling that actual pain was better
than trying to confront her emotional pain.
“For
so many years it seemed like I’d never have the chance to … even know
who I was … we didn’t really have a chance to think for ourselves,” she
said. “We were told what time to get up, what time to go to bed, what we
were eating, when we were going to sew.”
Tornambe
decided to speak out publicly, she said, to try to stop Barnard. Her
mother and two sisters are still involved with him, she said. She hopes
telling her story will help other victims, too, she said.
“I definitely don’t want Victor hurting anyone else.”
John O'Reilly
A new improved version of Alejandro Espinosa's latest book, The Illusionist, Marcial Maciel, has just appeared in book form and Kindle on