SCOUT CAMP-James Renner

ended with one councilor dead and another hospitalized. The death was ruled accidental, but it wouldn't be the last death associated with Seven Ranges Reservation. James Renner two was a counselor at Seven Ranges that year. He was always sure there must be more to the story of Mike Klingler's death because Renner also knew firsthand that the nine hundred acre camp was not the safe getaway it was portrayed

to be. On Friday nights, the boys were ushered into the woods for a frightening ceremony in which they learned the rules for becoming good young men and above all, that keeping secrets was a Scout's duty, no matter how dark the secrets were. Determined to face his demons, Renner embarks on a journey back to that tumultuous summer and exposes a clandestine society that left indelible scars on the

Scouts and the staff who were there. For Renner himself, it meant opening up about his twisted upbringing, his issues with trust and sexuality, and a lifetime of self medication. The result is a deeply personal, no holds barred and vitally important true crime memoir. The book that were featuring this evening is Scout Camp, Sex, Death and Secret Societies Inside the Boy Scouts of America, with my special guest,

investigative journalists, podcaster and author James Renner. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. James Renner, Oh.

their bankruptcy a couple of years ago. The Scouting was started by a guy named Robert Baden Powell who was out of England, and he was actually first known as kind of a quote unquote hero of the Boer Wars, which were these wars that were going on in South Africa that the British troops were involved in around the turn of the century of eighteen hundreds into the nineteen hundreds, and Baden Powell was this officer in the British military

stationed in South Africa. He while he was down there, and I believe he was there for several years, he wrote these books called you know that we're about scouting, but scouting in the sense of military scouting, like how to scout your enemies, how to do reconnaissance, things like that. They he sent them back to England and they became pretty popular. But Baden Powell got into what's not told when you talk about the history of the Boy Scouts is Baden Powell kind of gotten a lot of trouble

down in South Africa. He there was a tribe down there, a native tribe, and they were causing some issues and he had the leader, the chief of this tribe, arrested and basically went in front of an ad hoc military tribunal, not really a trial, and he had this leader executed in order to control the tribe down there. Now, the tribe considered their chief a god. So you know, some people say he's guilty of d a side down there, certainly of war crimes. Got a little bit of trouble

with that. Eventually, the Dutch were invading of parts of English territory in South Africa, and they were what they were fighting over really was gold. The largest gold reserves on the planet are down there, and they were in Dutch territory. The English wanted them. It's kind of longer story, but Baden Powell had a job to kind of engage with the enemy and keep them occupied so that Britain could send reinforcements and and go after these people. But he decided to kind of set up shop in this

town called Mayfa King. He basically fortified this little town and he was surrounded by the enemy and was able to fend them off for quite a while. And he, you know, he did all sorts of little tricks, like the enemy didn't know how many people he had in that town, and he made it seem like he had a whole lot when he didn't really. He would build fake,

you know, kind of platoons. He would have people shine lanterns around during the night so it looked like they had you know, spotlights and things and and then he sent a bunch of people out to bury things in the sand out there, and to the enemy it looked like they were bearing land mines, but really they were just like empty you know, coffee tins and things like that.

So it was very much of psychological war. During that time, he was also living with a young man that became very important to him, and you know, they shared they shared a little cottage for a while. They had a pet pig named Algernon. They shared a bed at times, and this friend of his, he would Baden Powell, would,

you know, gift this young man scarves. So you see kind of the beginning of the Boy Scouts shaping here because the when he was at Mafficking, he he would use the town, the boys in town to do some reconnaissance and he would call them scouts. You know, they had scarves to denote who they were. So after the war when he returned home, by that time his books were selling quite well and he turned those scouting books into Scouting for Boys, and that became the handbook of

what became the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts came over to America and you see the first troops forming around nineteen ten, using Baden Powell's books their as their handbook, and that's kind of where it started. But you know, when he gets to Baden Powell, you really look at his history, you know, you see that he was a somewhat closeted homosexual. And then later in life, you know, when he gets into seventies and eighties, he starts corresponding

to Scouts around the world. He seems particularly interested in their sexual proclivities and how to you know, he talks to them a lot about handle how to handle your own you know, your own member, for want of a better word, and it gets really kind of creepy, and they kind of keep the you know, his foundation, his legacy and all that. They kind of keep that part quiet. But you know, stuff like that was in the first he tried to get it in the first Boy Scout Manual.

So kind of a weird backstory, this guy that started scouting, and you have to wonder, you know, how much of an effect that had on the abuse scandal that led to its bankruptcy later on.

major public school systems began. And suddenly these kids who before had to work twelve hours a day or whatever, they had all this free time and their parents and you know, the society was afraid that they would use this free time to you know, become more liberal, get into trouble, and do crazy things. So that one of the reasons the Scouts formed was it was a way to indoctrinate these conservative values on a generation of kids that suddenly had the free time to take part in

these things. And yeah, so it was it was definitely a reaction to the society's move into a more liberal viewpoint at that time.

it was a lot of fun. Some of my best memories are within the Boy Scouts and the campouts we took. We went camping every month, even in the middle of the winter. You know. We were camping in tents in you know, parks around Ohio, and I had the most fun. You know. I'd spend all day playing with my friends. We'd play Capture the Flag, and we'd make meals and have smores and tell spooky stories around the campfire at the end of the night. And I learned a lot

about leadership and self reliance through scouting as well. So it definitely served me in some very good ways.

that's what led to the divorce so quickly. Then my father married a woman who was very abusive, physically, in mentally, invaribly and all that. So just looking, you know, for any way to get away from her. You know, Scouting presented an opportunity where, you know, every Tuesday night I'd have we'd have our meetings, and once once a month we'd have these camp outs for a whole weekend, I could get away. So it was there was a lot

about it that I liked. And you know, unfortunately that first summer I had gone to summer camp again eleven years old. That summer, you know, there was they put us all in intense together and you know, somewhere during the night, another young boy initiated sexual contact, you know, and looking back on it, I don't know that it qualifies as you know, what I would call abuse. But what worries me most about that is where he learned that. And you know, I've long suspected that there was an

adult that was abusing him. And you know, so that sexual awakening at boy Scout Camp when I was eleven ripple effects throughout throughout my life and the way I dealt with sexuality and depression and and all that, all that stuff, you know. But again, I'd return to camp every summer. When I got to be about seventeen, I signed up to be a member of staff at Seven Ranges, this Boy Scout camp in Ohio, and most of the book takes place during the summer of nineteen ninety five.

That summer, things became quite difficult and strange after a councilor sexually assaulted another one of our staff members and then went home and died by suicide.

There's a nice lake and all sort of all sorts of activities for boys, and every week at summer at least back then, we'd have six to eight hundred Scouts. I mean, just so many local troops came to that

summer camp. Now, Seven Ranges has a tradition that is now one hundred years old, and it's a secret society which they would love us to call a honor society called Pipestone and Pipestone is a It happens every Friday night, and it's based off the trials and traditions of the Lakota people, but it has been very much changed to the white people's perspective over the years. So what happens is Friday night, the scouts are left into the woods, a part of camp that they're not allow to go

to during the week. The first year I took Pipestone, I was eleven. It was that summer of eighty nine, and I didn't really know what we were in for, but a scout master led us into the woods. We ended up at this hill of bluegrass and at the bottom of the hill was this great bonfire, and the scout master left us there, and I was with probably forty or fifty other scouts my age, and we weren't told what to do. We're just told to wait. And we waited and waited and waited, and I think at

least an hour went by, maybe more. We waited until the sun went down and the fire died out and just became members and it was all dark, and then all of a sudden, about a dozen what I thought at the time were Indians, Native Americans came running out and pulled us to our feet, and they were dressed in nothing but loincloths, and their skin was red. I learned later that these were just, you know, white people that had painted their skin, but at the time, at

age eleven, I sure thought they were real Indians. And they ran us through the woods, through narrow paths, down ravines and uphills, and it felt like we ran forever. And then we came to another clearing, and this one was a circle in the woods, and on the trees around the circumference of the circle there were the skulls of dead animals tied to the trees, looking down at us. And in the middle was another fire, and behind that

fire was a chief with peacock feathered headdress. And this man was morbidly obese and skin also painted red, and

his belly was rolled over his loincloth. And through a series of weird events, I ended up being the first in line to go through the trials that night, and I had to step forward and kind of mimic the actions of one of the Indians, and so eventually I ended up in front of the chief and I was made to drink a liquid out of like a clamshell, and it was the most bitter substance I'd ever tasted, and I knew I couldn't spit it out because then I'd have to go to the back of the line again,

so I swallowed it. I learned. I learned years later that what I was drinking was something called bitrix, which is what they put in anti freeze so that kids

don't drink it. So then I was made to lean down neil in front of the Chief, in between his legs, and he brought out a human skull, and inside the skull where the brain used to be, right, you look through the eyes and there's a little light back there, and you're supposed to look inside the skull to see the password for the next year of Pipestone, and the

password was secrecy. And then I was given the pipestone itself, which is a little token that you can wear on your boy scout shirt and sense to stand with the others. And at the end, after every boy had gone through, the Chief came forward and gave a speech. And this happens every year. The speeches are different each year of Pipestone.

You take that first year, the speech was all about the importance of secrecy and that real men keep secrets from their parents, and we must never talk about what happens at Pipestone with anybody else that hasn't gone through it. So you know, that was a crazy summer for many reasons. But again I came back year after year. I took more Pipestone. Eventually I took Year four and that was a that was a wild one. The speech for year four that the Chief gives begins, and I've committed this

to memory verbatim. Chief comes forward and says mastervation leads to curiosity, and then he talks about how you should leave your friendships with the same sex behind because homosexuality is a sin. So this is what they were talking to boys about in the middle of the woods at

night as young as fourteen. You know that Secret Society operates at seven Ranges to this day, and during the research of my book, I was surprised to discover there's actually about one hundred and forty other honor societies secret societies that have operated at Boy Scout camps around the United States. So it's pretty interesting.

have this in the book. Your father says, I have a bad feeling about that place. Be careful, be aware of your surroundings. Why was it your father? Where did your father? Where did he get this idea? What did you believe at the time was the foundation of his fear that he expressed in what he said to you.

a mentor. But apparently when my dad dropped me off that summer, Dave Wagner was walking around in short shorts, and my dad picked up pretty quickly that this man was gay, and he was and that upset my father and he didn't like the idea that I was spending a week at a camp that was run by a homosexual. So Dave was never an issue or a danger to anybody at camp, but there certainly were a lot of other dangers and a lot of other dangerous people there.

You know, I don't know if it was more than that, but that's kind of the story he tells me. But there was an odd vibe in general about that camp, you know, the you know it just it has bad mojo. There's a bad vibe there, and there always was.

that are hidden behind a bunch of pine trees. And Kleingler was kind of the lead staff member that was kind of keeping an eye out for every buddy down there. And so that's how I met him at first. And kind of a weird guy. Just gave me a weird vibe, you know, he said I had. He made a point to talk about my ears. He said they looked like elves ears, and just I don't know, just kind of a funny feeling. I ended up moving out of CIVL. I lived out of ADMIN for the rest well half

of that summer anyways. But so what happens is about halfway through the summer, Kleingler follows another staff member on an overnight camp out in the middle of the woods. And this other councilor is in charge of very young kids and for one of their merit badges, they have to sleep outside for a night. And so he led these kids up, you know, up to the top of this hill and had this camp out and then laid

into the night. Like after midnight, Cleingler shows up by himself and asked the staff member to come out with him and he's like, hey, I'm not counting enough boys out here. I think you're missing one and the staff the staffer comes out with him and then he's like, no, We've got everybody here. And then that's when Kleingler begins to assault him and pulls him aside, and it's a sexual assault. I'm not going to go into graphic detail here,

but it was particularly brutal. And then he left the staffer there to you know, fix himself up, and Cleanler walked away. The next morning, the staffer comes to breakfast and I was there when he showed up, and you know, it's you know, I knew right away something was wrong. His skin was ashen gray. I've never seen anybody in shock like that, and he was certainly in shock. He

wouldn't talk to anybody. He just kind of sat there. Luckily, a really, really good counselor noticed what was going on and pulled him aside, and that's how he got this story about the assault. Mike was quickly a score off camp drove home, and then you know, flash forward to the next morning and I and the other staff members were called to an emergency meeting and the program or the camp director was there and he told us that

Mike was dead. And we were told at first that he had gone home and shot himself and committed suicide. And then we were pulled back together about an hour later and we were told, oh, that it wasn't a suicide, it was an accident. He was shooting at cans and at ricochet. We weren't told anything about the assault. We

didn't know why this other staff member had left. They were keeping a lot secret from us, and I don't think necessarily because they wanted to cover it up, but because they didn't want to affect us and have this tragic story be something we remembered. In any event, we didn't

know much about it at the time. Years later, I was reporter and I got curious, and so I pulled the police reports and I talked to the corner down there, and the corner told me that it was ruled accidental because they couldn't determine whether Mike had been murdered or if he had in fact shot himself and committed suicide.

And that's kind of the ruling to this day. So at the beginning of the book, I make contact with an old friend of mine from camp, and I asked him, I said, do you think there's any chance that Mike Klingler was murdered? And so that led me down a path of discovery it trying to figure out what exactly happened to Mike and who was responsible for making him the way he was. And there are a lot of little mysteries wrapped up in there too.

Former Scouts started to sue the Boy Scouts, and so many sued them that by you know, I think like five to ten years ago, they had to start thinking about bankruptcy in order to figure out how to to pay out all these victims. And what came out of that is, you know, a lot of people make a connection here between what happened in the Catholic Church and what happened in the Boy Scouts, and they say that

this is like the scandal in the Catholic Church. But that's only because we don't really understand the scale of it, and the scale of it hasn't been properly reported. In the Catholic Church, you had eleven thousand victims in the United States sue the church for abuse in Boy Scouts. So far, you've had eighty two thousand former Scouts sue the Boy Scouts for abuse. So it's not really comparable

to what happened in the Catholic Church. It's nearly exponentially greater than what happened there, and it should be talked about more. There should be books and movies written about it, and there just hasn't really been. There's been a couple, but not enough.

or whatever. The Scouts kept records, and they had their own system for identifying dangerous men, and they would put them on an ineligible volunteer list so that if they tried to move from one state to another and join the Boy Scouts again they would their name would get flagged and they wouldn't be allowed in the organization. So they had the best intentions at least that upper management, although I should say at the same time they were doing their best to cover it up, but they did

keep those records. When they eventually were sued by a boy I think out of Washington State, his lawyers were able to subpoena those records, and then the lawyers took the audacious step, thankfully and posted the entire file on their website. So suddenly all these names are out there going back like fifty sixty years, and there were so many. There were men on there from every state in the Union in Washington, DC. So it became a huge news

story because every news outlet could make it local. They'd find us a leader that had been kicked out for abuse or suspected abuse. No matter where you lived, you could have report from your local city. So it was on every major news station, every newspaper, and it just became huge at that time. And that was the final piece that led to boy Scouts realizing that the only way out of it was to declare bankruptcy.

linked at all. Eventually I speak to a counselor who knew Klinglay really well and was able to confirm that, yes, Cleanler was in fact the person who tried to who burned down the trading post and was setting fires, and so he was also this arsonist. And he also explained Kleingler's connection to another leader at camp named Jim Mills.

Now Mills was actually the man in charge of youth protection for Pipestone, and I knew Mills personally because at the end of that summer in ninety five, even after Kleingler died, Mills was working at Pipestone, and I had got my fifth year, so I was allowed to see behind the scenes and see how they put it together. So that last week of camp, I went over across the road and was shown behind the scenes of Pipestone,

and they have this. The first red Flag was they had this secret shower house on the others out in those woods, and to get ready for Pipestone, the men, you know, some of these men are in their fifties and sixties. They would undress and get completely naked and get the showers to take a rinse off, and then they would stand around naked and have a spaghetti dinner. And then after dinner they would take turns painting each other's body with this red paint so that they could

look like Native Americans. And they would sometimes ask the teenage boys to help them, you know, get their back. You know, nobody can paint their own back. The showers were also shared between the men and boys as young as fourteen, So red flag there for sure. And I watched the ceremony that night, and then the next morning

everybody was packing up to leave. This man who's in charge of youth protection invites me to go with a couple other boys with him to a sweat lodge and he had built the sweat lodge on the like the edge of the forest out there, and after everybody left, he took me and I think four other boys inside the sweat lodge and he said, look, we got to do it the way they used to do it back in the old days, and it's best to do it

completely naked. So he was able to talk us all into getting naked and climbing in the sweat lodge, and then we all got dirty from the soot. And afterwards he he had pulled up his little van camper. He had this like big van that he had converted into an RV and he hung a gravity shower out the back and held it himself, and one by one we took a shower in front of him, and he commented on our bodies. You know, I to this day, I

think he probably videotaped that whole thing. There was a VCR and camera equipment in the car, And this will come into play later too. But I realized that I'd gotten myself into a situation that was not right at all, But you know, I just kind of pushed it aside and went back home and went back to school and

went on with my life. Now, Mills was very close with Mike Klingler, and one of the other staff members that eventually tracked down and talked to confessed to me that he had been assaulted quite regularly by both Klingler and Mills. And Mills eventually got caught I think it was about ten years ago, with a number of images

of boys. By the time the cops caught up with him, he had a couple of teenage boys living in his house in Ohio and he was allowing them to stay there and giving them money in exchange for sexual favors. And he got arrested, and he was goin to be charged with state crimes and federal crimes. And then he ends up dead too. Now that was a rule of suicide,

but I have my doubts. The gun he used was not his own, and the guy, the friend of Mills who found him, owned the gun that was used to that Mills supposedly used to kill himself, And his suicide note was typed. I just don't know who types out a suicide note instead of writing it. You don't hear that too often. But yeah, so that's Mills, that's who Jim Mills was.

had not been sober in two years. I hadn't been sober longer than about twelve hours in two years, and so when I started working on this book, I was very much looking into ways to get healthy, to find a better way of living. The more people I reached out to that were staff members in ninety five who went through this with me, are suffering from similar things, and some have it a lot worse because they were victims of abuse by these men, and I was not,

at least not directly. You know, one guy has had a couple strokes, and you know, we're still like forty five. You know, we're not that old. We're forty five years old. Now, you know, one guy's had a couple of strokes. He's living in hospice every once in a while. There's a lot of us have dealt with substance abuse issues. Some have gotten help and made it through, some have not. Some have psychological conditions similar to mine that they deal

with a lot of PTSD, a lot of depression. And so one of the things that I really tried to research was how to how to start healing people, because the Boy Scouts are trying to figure out how much to pay these eighty two thousand victims, but nobody's really considering how to heal them. And one of the routes that I took was researching how certain groups are trying

to cure PTSD in veterans of war. And there's a group called Maps out of DC that is experimenting with the use of psychedelics in curing PTSD, and their results are pretty wonderful. They have found that they have a success rate of sixty six percent a meaning not just treating PTSD in former in veterans war, but but curing it. And the government and the military is starting to have great interest in this because if you can cure a soldier of PTSD, you can put them back on the

front line. So that's their interest, which is a little morbid, But the main interest for this group is to make psychedelic therapy legal again like it was in the sixties and seventies, and to try it out. Of course, I went to DC and partook in a psychological psychedelic therapy session where we used psilocybin and an I tripped out and had a person walking me through some therapeutical issues

and the immediate effect. There's some immediate effects that you get from this, and there are some long term effects that kick in like months later. The immediate effect for me is I stopped creating alcohol almost overnight. It was like it rebooted my brain, and that was nice, that was helpful. But you know, I started noticing months later, and you know, towards six months out is when I

really started feeling really good again. And I think the psychedelics helped to get away from those patterns of thought and those those cycles of thought that we get caught up in that you know, the bad voices that speak to you in you know, try to put you down in all the shame, and it allows you to see yourself objectively for the first time and to realize that you deserve forgiveness and grace as much as as much as anybody else, and you're just another person in this

dance of life. And it was it was extremely helpful. So, you know, as as this abuse scandal gets, you know, I don't want to say solved, but dealt with. That's something that I hope that they pay a little more attention to.

thinking he'd want to be on staff. And the reason I was okay with letting him do that was because when you when you work at a y m c A camp, there are a lot of women leaders. And I think one of the reasons why the abuse was so pervasive within the Boy Scouts is the lack of women. With with the women involved in in the y and now with with Scouting, they've allowed women. The women will

keep the men in check. You know, they will be looking out for the boys in ways that that that other men can't they you know, these men won't have enough opportunity to be alone with boys. You know, men make up ninety nine percent of these abusers, and you know, so when you start packing women into it just by sheer number, you you start to bring that that percentage down. And so I knew there were women in charge of

the YMCA camp. I wasn't really afraid so much and he has a he has a good head on his shoulders and a real drive for justice, and I just trusted that he would know warning signs when he saw them. But it was still very difficult to drop them off and know that he was going to spend the summer at this place and I wouldn't be there to protect them. At the same time, I can't, you know, I can't lock him up in a room and keep him safe forever. He's going off to college next year and ount into

the world. It's it's very scary. But he had a great time at that camp, and in fact, he's going back this summer. It has more of a leadership role there. The leadership role is what appeals to him. He likes to teach other kids, and so he has an opportunity to do that there.

or had homosexual encounters. And so, you know, these men would assault these boys, and the boys were too shameful to report it because everybody would think they were gay, and that was a terrible thing in their minds because of what they've been told by the same leaders that abuse them. So it was it was pretty clever of them to do it that way.

pass that. So that'll allow victims in Ohio to receive full compensation from the Boy Scouts, even though some of these crimes happened beyond what used to be the statute I limitations for these crimes.

shape them into a narrative. But man, I've never been more proud of a book. I don't think I'll write something that's good again. I think this is kind of this is kind of it, and everything else is just gravy. But you know, so I hope people. I hope people read it. People are you know. I'm starting to get emails from people who've read it that have gone through similar things and are grateful for it. So I hope it has that effect for many many readers.

The Philosophy of Crime and True Crime this week. For people that want to find out more about this book, tell us about a website or any social media that you do.