Some of the Sisters at the St. Thomas/St. Vincent Orphanage in Anchorage, Kentucky had certain specialties:  Sister Delores Marie, for example, was the expert at forcing children to eat oatmeal gruel so sickening it was often vomited back into the bowls; Sister Charlotte was the go-to Sister for drugging the children into submission; Sister Charlie had a number of specialties including stripping and thrashing the orphans with a hard paddleboard and dunking their heads in toilets.  And what did the resident priest, Father Lammers, think of the systematic abuse of his charges? – why, since he was not only the resident priest but also the resident child molester, he was as complicit as the others in this orphanage from hell.

Kim Richardson and her three sisters were beaten, starved, and abused for years at the St. Thomas/St. Vincent Orphan Asylum after the state of Kentucky found their mother unfit.  As an adult, Kim Richardson joined 44 other survivors of the nightmarish orphanage in a lawsuit against the Sisters of Charity for years of institutional abuse.  The Unbreakable Child, her memoir of those hellish years, vividly recalls the terrors she suffered and the long-term damage done to her and her sisters, made all the more horrifying since her abusers were suppose to wear “the face of God.”