On the 27th of December 1982, a fifteen-year-old boy from Auburn, Maine, died a short drive from the town where he grew up. His name was Phil Williams Jr. He had been a student at a private school in the pinewoods of Poland, Maine, a place that promised desperate parents it could rescue their children. The official record was brief: a brain aneurysm, a sudden catastrophic bleed, a tragedy that no one could have prevented.
For thirty-four years, that was the story his family knew. Then in 2016, his sister learned something no one had ever told her. Former students said that shortly before he died, Phil had been forced into a boxing match as punishment, ringed by other teenagers. The school had a name for it.
They called it the ring. The school was called Elan. For forty-one years, it operated in rural Maine, drawing teenagers from across the country, including the sons and daughters of powerful families. Officials came asking questions.
Journalists came. A documentary crew came, and an Oscar-nominated film put its name before the nation. Still, the doors stayed open. Port Chester, New York, sits on the edge of Long Island Sound, a working town of brick storefronts and narrow streets just beyond the shadow of the city.
It was here that Joseph Reachi was born. By the accounts that survive, his early life was unsettled, and by his teenage years, he had found his way to heroin. The drug led where it so often led in that era, toward crime. In the 1960s, Reachi was arrested for robbing a mail truck.
It should have been the end of his story. Instead, Reachi was offered a choice that was becoming more common in America’s courtrooms. He could go to prison, or he could go to a place called Daytop Village. To understand Daytop, one has to travel to a beach town in Southern California.
In 1958, in Santa Monica, a man named Charles Dederich founded an organization for people fighting addiction. Dederich was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but he had noticed something troubling: those addicted to drugs rather than alcohol were not always welcome in the rooms of AA. So he built something of his own. He called it Synanon.
Synanon’s residents lived together, worked together, and held one another accountable. At its center was a practice Dederich called the game. In a game session, one member would speak about themselves while the others tore into them with harsh, unfiltered criticism. The theory was simple and seductive.
Addicts, Dederich believed, hid behind excuses and lies. Only by stripping those defenses away could a person see the truth about themselves and begin again. To many observers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Synanon looked like a miracle. Here were people that hospitals and prisons had written off, living clean, running their own community, speaking with a fierce and confident honesty.
Visitors came to study it. One of them was a New York psychiatrist named Daniel Casriel. Casriel returned east convinced he had seen the future. In 1963, together with a Roman Catholic priest named Monsignor William O’Brien and a former Synanon resident from the Bronx, he helped found Daytop Village on Staten Island.
The name was an acronym standing for Drug Addicts Yield to Probation. Daytop would grow into one of the largest therapeutic communities in the world. The therapeutic community carried Synanon’s DNA. Residents started at the bottom of a strict hierarchy and earned privileges by showing progress.
They policed one another. They confronted one another. Their mistakes were not handled privately but aired before the group. The idea was that the community itself became the treatment: a place where people felt secure but were held strictly accountable for their behavior.
For Joe Reachi, Daytop was more than an alternative to prison. It became the foundation of his career. He left the program with an intimate knowledge of how a therapeutic community ran from the inside—its rituals, its language, its hierarchy, its pressure points. He would spend the rest of his life building on that model, and everything he later created at Elan would carry its fingerprints.
A program built on confrontation could take hold of a person’s daily life more completely than a prison cell ever could. He was not alone. Across the late 1960s, therapeutic communities spread across the United States, often founded by graduates of earlier programs. Former addicts became counselors.
Counselors became directors. Directors became founders. What almost no one could see at the time was where the original model was heading. In the years that followed, Synanon itself would curdle.
The game grew longer and harsher, eventually stretching into sessions lasting seventy-two hours—sessions that Dederich himself would acknowledge amounted to brainwashing. The community turned inward and paranoid. In 1978, two members placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a Los Angeles attorney who had won a lawsuit against the group. By 1991, facing a $17 million demand for back taxes, Synanon formally dissolved, remembered today less as a treatment program than as one of America’s most notorious cults.
But in the late 1960s, that reckoning was still years away. And there was a crucial difference in where the method would go next. Synanon and Daytop had been built for adults—grown men and women who had reached the bottom and chosen to walk through the door. The confrontation, the humiliation, the total surrender of personal freedom—all of it was framed as the price an adult paid to save their own life.
Joe Reachi had a different idea. He would take the method, strip away the choice, and apply it to teenagers. To do it, he would need a respectable partner, a quiet corner of New England, and a name that sounded like hope. The respectable partner was Dr.
Gerald Davidson. On paper, he was everything Joe Reachi was not. Davidson was a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University, a man whose credentials could open doors that a former addict with a criminal record never could. Alongside them stood a third figure, an investor named David Goldberg, who helped supply the money.
Together, in 1970, the three men founded a new program in the woods of southern Maine. The corner of New England they chose was Poland, a small town in Androscoggin County, better known to most Americans as the home of Poland Spring, the mineral water that had drawn wealthy visitors to its grand hotels since the 1800s. It was a landscape of lakes, pine, and quiet back roads, where a large property could draw little attention. The property itself was a former hunting lodge set on thirty-three acres, where sportsmen had once gathered after days in the woods.
A new kind of community would take shape there, one that would eventually be ringed by dormitories, classrooms, and offices, and cut off from the outside world by distance, by rules, and by design. And then there was the name: Elan, a French word meaning momentum, energy, enthusiasm, style. For a worried parent reading a brochure at a kitchen table, it was a name that promised transformation. In its earliest days, Elan looked much like the programs that had shaped its founder.
It housed primarily adults, and its sole focus was addiction. Its methods came straight from the therapeutic community tradition that Reachi had absorbed at Daytop: a strict hierarchy, residents running the daily operations, and confrontation at the center of everything. But the program soon changed course. Elan began accepting younger residents, and before long its population was made up of adolescents, eventually ranging from about twelve to nineteen years old.
It was no longer described simply as a treatment program. It became a school—a private, co-educational boarding school that offered academic instruction alongside what it called therapy. Students could arrive in the eighth grade and remain until they were adults. This shift changed everything about who came through Elan’s doors.
Many of the teenagers who arrived were not heroin addicts who had reached the end of the road. Some had experimented with drugs or alcohol. Some had skipped school, run away, fought with their parents, or simply been labeled difficult. Some were grieving, struggling, or depressed.
What they shared was that someone had decided they needed to be sent away. And the adults who sent them often had nowhere else to turn. In the 1970s, the options for a family with a troubled teenager were limited. Elan presented itself as the answer when all else had failed.
Joe Reachi reportedly described his students in just those terms: these were not typical public school kids; their parents brought them there to succeed when everything else had failed. The arrangement was also a business, and a profitable one. Elan did not rely on parents alone. State governments and local school districts searching for placements for young people in their care paid to send children there with public money, some from hundreds of miles away.
Tuition would climb steadily over the decades, eventually reaching roughly $55,000 a year, with stays averaging around two years and some students remaining three or even four. Each enrollment represented a significant and reliable stream of income. The program was also cheap to run, in the way that therapeutic communities had always been cheap to run: the residents themselves did much of the work. Students cooked, cleaned, handled paperwork, and kept schedules.
Other students were assigned to enforce the rules. The very structure that was presented as therapy also kept the operation running. As enrollment grew, Elan expanded beyond its original lodge. By 1975, it had acquired a second campus—a property on Maplecrest Road in the town of Parsonsfield, near the New Hampshire border, a building that had once served as a hotel and a hospital.
Over the years, the organization would also operate facilities in other Maine towns, including Sebago and Waterford. Elan was no longer a single experiment in the woods. It was becoming an institution. For Joe Reachi, success in Maine would bring wealth and standing.
For the teenagers who arrived in Poland, it would bring something very different. Because once the door closed behind them, they entered a world with its own rules, its own language, and its own punishments—a world designed so that the only way out was through. From the outside, Elan did not look like a prison. There were no guard towers, no razor wire, no uniformed officers at the gate.
There were wooden buildings among the pines: a lodge, dormitories, and classrooms. But the walls that held students at Elan were not made of stone. They were made of rules, rank, and above all, other students. The genius of the system was that it barely needed staff to enforce it.
The teenagers enforced it on one another. At the heart of the program was a hierarchy borrowed directly from the therapeutic communities that had shaped Joe Reachi. Every new arrival began at the very bottom, with almost no privileges at all. Above them rose a ladder of positions, each carrying more authority than the last.
Students who had been in the program longer, and who had proven their loyalty to it, were given titles and power over those beneath them. Some served as expeditors, whose role was to watch for infractions and report them. Others ran departments, supervising the work crews that kept the school operating. At the top, senior students were entrusted with running much of the daily life of the house.
The only way to rise was to embrace the system, and the surest way to embrace it was to enforce it. Students learned quickly that reporting a peer’s misstep was a mark of progress, and that failing to report one could be treated as a violation in itself. Friendship became dangerous. Trust became a liability.
In a place where anyone might be watching, and anyone might speak up at the next meeting, the safest course was to keep your head down and your thoughts to yourself. Those meetings were the central ritual of Elan. When a student was judged to have broken the rules, or simply to have shown the wrong attitude, the entire community could be summoned to what was called a general meeting. The offending student stood at the center while the gathered community directed a torrent of criticism and verbal confrontation at them.
Former students have described being required to shout at their peers, and understanding that anyone who held back risked becoming the next target. It was Synanon’s game, transplanted from a room of consenting adults to a hall full of teenagers who had never agreed to play. The rules themselves reached into every corner of daily life. Former students and later reports describe restrictions on how loudly one could speak, on smiling at the wrong moment, on looking out of windows, on writing anything without approval.
Even basic hygiene was strictly timed. What might seem like trivial behavior anywhere else could be interpreted at Elan as manipulation, resistance, and evidence that a student had not yet surrendered. Punishments were designed not merely to correct but to humiliate. Students could be made to wear signs around their necks announcing their supposed failings to everyone they passed.
Others were assigned exhausting and degrading labor. Among the most frequently cited examples is the practice of cleaning urinals with a toothbrush for hours on end. Meals could be withheld as punishment. Privileges could vanish entirely.
Humiliation was not treated as an unfortunate side effect of the program; by the school’s own philosophy, it was part of the therapy. Even time itself was bent to the program’s purposes. Academic classes were held late in the evening, from seven until eleven at night, after the long days of work and meetings had already taken their toll. Most important of all was the wall between Elan and the outside world.
Contact with family was not a right but a privilege, and a closely guarded one. Phone calls had to be earned. When they happened, staff could listen in, and a call could be cut short if a student began to say something negative about the school. Parents were left to rely on what the program told them about their own sons and daughters.
For many families, the result was a kind of sealed loop: the child could not speak freely, and the parent heard only what the school allowed through. And there was no fixed date on which it would end. The average stay at Elan was around two years, and some students remained for three or four. Progress depended on advancing through the ranks, and advancement depended on the judgment of the very system a student might be struggling against.
A teenager who arrived at fifteen could find themselves leaving as an adult. For years, what happened inside Elan stayed largely inside Elan. It was the students themselves who eventually began to compare their memories and to describe the world they had lived in. Their accounts, told again and again across the years that followed, are the reason the machine can be seen clearly today.
And of all the things those survivors would describe, one practice stood apart. It was the one that former students named most often. The one that would draw the attention of journalists, prosecutors, and eventually the police. In most schools, a fight between two students is something the adults rush to stop.
At Elan, according to the accounts of those who lived there, a fight could be something the adults arranged. The ring was not a permanent structure. It was a circle formed by bodies. When a student was singled out for punishment, the community gathered and stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a boundary with no way out.
Inside that circle, the targeted student was made to fight—sometimes wearing boxing gloves, sometimes facing a single opponent, and sometimes facing one opponent after another in succession. Often those opponents were older or larger. Those forming the circle were not expected to stay silent. They were expected to jeer, to shout, to take part.
The fights were not hidden from those in charge. They were part of the program. In the language of the therapeutic community, this was a form of confrontation, an extension of the same philosophy that drove the general meetings: break down the defenses, force a person to face the truth about themselves. But outside the pinewoods, there was a simpler way to describe it.
Years later, when the New Yorker examined the school in 2000, it characterized the ring as what it plainly was: compulsory fighting. The reasons a student might be sent into the circle could be serious, or they could be astonishingly small. Former students have described the ring being used against those accused of disrespect, defiance, or refusing to admit to things the community insisted they had done. It was punishment, and it was spectacle, and its most powerful effect may have been on those who watched.
Every student who stood in that circle understood that one day, it could be them in the center. Phil Williams Jr. was fifteen years old. He came from Auburn, Maine, a mill city on the Androscoggin River, just a short drive from the Elan campus.
What the family was told in December of 1982 was simple: Phil had died of a brain aneurysm. His death certificate recorded a probable aneurysm. The date was the 27th of December. It was presented as a sudden, tragic natural event—the kind of hidden medical flaw that could strike anyone at any time, and that no one, the official record implied, could have prevented.
For thirty-four years, that was the whole of it. Then, in the early months of 2016, the family was contacted by a man named Mark Babbitz, a former Elan student from the Chicago area. He told them that there was more to the story, and that other former students remembered it, too. According to those former students, Phil had complained of a headache.
The staff believed he was faking it, and as punishment, he was placed in the ring, where he was struck by teenagers wearing boxing gloves. One former student described the gloves and the punishment. Another recalled seeing him in medical distress afterward. Former students said he collapsed, and he died the following day.
None of this appeared in the official account his family had received. His sister learned of it only weeks before she spoke to reporters, more than three decades after her brother’s death. It is important to be precise about what can and cannot be said. An aneurysm is a real medical event, and no court has ever ruled on what caused Phil Williams Jr.
to die. What can be said is that his family was not told at the time that he had been placed in a forced fight the day before his death. What can be said is that multiple former students described that fight. And what can be said is that no one in 1982 appears to have asked the question publicly.
That silence is perhaps the most revealing part of the story. A fifteen-year-old boy died the day after he was placed in the ring, and the practice continued. The ring did not vanish after 1982. Former students from later years would go on to describe it, too, and it would surface again in a Connecticut courtroom twenty years later.
But in 2016, the story that had been buried with Phil Williams Jr. finally reached the authorities. His sister and Mark Babbitz brought what they had learned to the police. In March of that year, the Maine State Police opened an investigation into his death.
A police lieutenant described it as open and active, saying investigators would look at medical records and at whatever records the school or the state might still hold. A spokesman for the state police acknowledged the obstacle they faced: witnesses had scattered, memories had aged, records were decades old. In the end, no charges were ever filed. The evidence, authorities concluded, was not sufficient.
And yet, the reopening itself mattered. Now, the death of a student at Elan was being treated not as a private family tragedy, but as a question worthy of a police investigation. It happened not because an agency uncovered it, but because a former student picked up the phone and a sister refused to let it go. It also raised a harder question: if the ring was real, and if so many had seen it, how had Elan remained open through the 1970s and into the 1980s?
The first warning came barely five years after Elan opened its doors, in 1975. Officials from the state of Illinois, which had been sending young people in its care to the school in Maine, made a decision that should have echoed far beyond Illinois. They removed eleven children from Elan, citing concerns about mental and physical mistreatment—allegations that later investigations did not substantiate. Instead of marking the beginning of the end, it became the first in a long list of alarms that sounded and then faded.
Illinois had acted for its own children, and Elan went on filling its beds with teenagers from other states. Closer to home, someone else was paying attention. In 1977, a former Lewiston police officer and one-time truck driver named Max Ashburn joined the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department as a school liaison officer. Among the young people he met, he was known by a friendly nickname: Officer Smiley.
In the course of that work, he began to hear stories from former Elan students—stories about what went on behind the school’s doors. Ashburn took them seriously. He began keeping his own records of the allegations, written in a personal shorthand that only he could read. He went to Elan himself, unannounced, hoping to see the place with his own eyes.
He was refused entry and told to leave. With the approval of his sheriff, he continued gathering information, intending to bring his findings to the district attorney or the attorney general. Then in 1979, the stories came to him in person. A sixteen-year-old boy who had run away from Elan turned up at a home in Lewiston, about fifteen miles from the campus.
He had visible injuries, and he described forced fighting and confinement at the school. Ashburn’s duty was to return a runaway minor to the institution responsible for him. He did not. Instead, he drove the boy to a place called Jimmy’s Diner in Auburn, gave him five dollars, and told him to find a trucker who could take him home.
It was an act of improvised mercy, and a measure of how little faith one lawman had in the system. Ashburn never learned what became of the boy. Not long afterward, he left law enforcement, and his investigation into Elan ended with him. He would not tell the story publicly until 2016, nearly thirty-seven years later.
That same year, 1979, the men behind Elan were growing more prominent, not less. Joe Reachi and Gerald Davidson purchased Scarborough Downs, the harness racing track south of Portland. The former addict from Port Chester was now a racetrack owner—a businessman with money, influence, and a public profile across the state. Against that kind of standing, scattered allegations from teenagers carried little weight.
And yet, the allegations were no longer only scattered. By the end of the 1970s, the outside world was beginning to look in. Corrections magazine examined the school in 1979. NBC News turned its attention to Elan in 1980.
The confrontational methods of the therapeutic community were starting to draw hard questions. Then in 1983 came the most powerful warning of all. Filmmakers Ara Chekmayan and Richard Kotuk released a documentary produced for public television. It was called Children of Darkness.
It set out to show Americans how the country treated its most vulnerable young people—those living in state institutions, psychiatric hospitals, and private residential programs. The film visited Eastern State School and Hospital in Pennsylvania, the Sagamore Children’s Center on Long Island, and the South Beach Psychiatric Center on Staten Island, and it went to Poland, Maine. Elan was among the institutions the film examined, and Joe Reachi himself appeared on camera as the school’s executive director. The film placed Elan alongside some of the most troubling institutions in the country and invited viewers to judge for themselves.
Children of Darkness was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It arrived the year after the death of Phil Williams Jr. And still, Elan remained open. Why?
Part of the answer lies in how fragmented the oversight of such places was. One state could remove its children, and another could keep sending them. One deputy could gather notes and then leave the job. A documentary could air, earn acclaim, and then give way to the next broadcast.
There was no single authority whose job it was to connect the dots, and no mechanism that turned alarm into action. Parents, meanwhile, were still desperate, and Elan was still promising to help. The warnings did not fail for lack of people raising them. They failed because no one with the power to act carried them all the way through.
For the students still inside, that left few ways to be heard. Some tried the most direct way of all: they ran. And as the years went on, running away from Elan would prove to carry dangers of its own. Running away from Elan was never simple.
The campus sat deep in rural Maine, miles from any city, surrounded by woods, lakes, and long country roads. Most students were far from home, some by entire states. They had little or no money, few possessions, and no easy way to call for help. And in a system where students were rewarded for reporting on one another, even planning an escape meant trusting no one.
Still, they ran—slipping away from the campus. Some were caught and returned. Some made it home. And some never did.
In the summer of 1990, one of those runaways was a fifteen-year-old named Brad Glickman, from Bedford, New York. Like so many before him, he had left Elan behind. On the night of July 3rd, he was at a house in the small town of Norway, Maine, not far from the campus, spending the evening with several other young people. They were playing video games.
The homeowner kept a revolver in the house; court records describe him as a self-described novice with guns. After midnight, he heard a noise outside and went to check, carrying the weapon. He found no one. When he came back inside, Brad asked to see the gun.
As it was being handed to him, it fired. Brad Glickman was fatally wounded and died a short time later. The case went to trial, and the homeowner was convicted of manslaughter—a verdict that required the jury to find he had acted recklessly or with criminal negligence. But in 1993, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court vacated that conviction, ruling that the trial court had made an error during jury selection.
The legal case turned on a gun in a moment of carelessness. But for those who knew Brad, there was always a deeper question: why had a fifteen-year-old boy been out in the Maine night, far from home, in the first place? Less than three years after Brad Glickman’s death, another student ran. Her name was Dawn Marie Birnbaum.
She was seventeen years old. On the 21st of March, 1993, during a school outing, she slipped away from the group. She set out to hitchhike home. She did not make it.
Three days later, Birnbaum was found dead beside a snowbank at a remote intersection near Interstate 80 in Centre County, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from the school she had left. Investigators pieced together her final journey from fuel receipts, tire tracks, travel logs, and forensic evidence. The trail led to a long-haul trucker named James Robert Cruz Jr. of Waterford, Ohio.
Investigators found that he had falsified his travel records. In June of 1994, after a seven-day trial involving nearly fifty witnesses, a Pennsylvania jury convicted Cruz of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Justice was done.
But the courtroom in Pennsylvania was never asked the question that hung over the case: why had a seventeen-year-old girl been hitchhiking along an interstate highway in the first place, trying to find her way home from a school she had run from? The evidence draws clear lines, and they should be respected. Elan did not fire the gun, and it did not commit the crime in Pennsylvania. The men responsible for those deaths were identified by the courts.
But the two cases share a pattern that is impossible to ignore. Each involved a teenager who had fled a program they could not leave by any other means, into a world that offered them no protection. Neither death led to any public examination of the school they had fled. That was the quiet cruelty of Elan’s isolation.
The same remoteness that kept outsiders from seeing in also left those who escaped with nowhere safe to go. There was no hotline, no advocate waiting at the edge of the property, no official whose job it was to ask a runaway what they were running from. The only road out ran through the dark. The names of those who ran would not become widely known until survivors began gathering them and insisting that they be remembered.
But before the survivors found their collective voice, the ring and the program behind it would be dragged into public view by a very different former student. Not a runaway, and not an unknown teenager from a small town, but a young man from one of the most famous families in America. On the night of October 30th, 1975, a fifteen-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was killed in the gated neighborhood of Belle Haven in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was found the next day beneath a tree on her family’s property.
The weapon was a golf club, later traced to a set belonging to the household of her neighbors, the Skakels. The Skakels were no ordinary family. Their fortune came from the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, founded by the family patriarch, and their name was bound to the most famous political dynasty in America. Ethel Skakel had married Robert F.
Kennedy. Her brother’s children, including a boy named Michael, were Kennedy cousins. For decades, the Moxley case went unsolved, fueling endless speculation about wealth, privilege, and whether justice had been blocked by both. In the middle of that long silence, in 1978, Michael Skakel was sent to Elan.
He was seventeen years old. According to later accounts, the placement followed a drunk-driving arrest in New York State, and it allowed him to avoid criminal charges there. He was meant to be treated for alcoholism. He would spend about two years at the school, and he ran away twice.
Elan’s methods were not softened for a Kennedy cousin, and inside a program built on forced confession and public confrontation, the unsolved death back in Greenwich became something the community would not leave alone. Then in the late 1990s, the Moxley case came roaring back to life. A best-selling book named Skakel as the likely killer and pointed to failures in the original investigation. In 1998, a Connecticut grand jury was convened.
After an eighteen-month investigation, charges were recommended, and in January of 2000, Michael Skakel surrendered to authorities. As prosecutors built their case, they turned to a group of witnesses no one had expected: former students of the Elan School. In May of 2002, the trial opened in Norwalk, Connecticut. And for the first time, the inner workings of Elan were laid out in a public courtroom before a jury, with the national press watching.
One by one, former students took the stand. A former classmate testified that during a long, rambling conversation in 1978, Skakel had said he must have done it. Another classmate recalled Skakel saying he had been drunk and did not know whether he or his brother had killed the girl. A former staff member gave a similar account of Skakel saying that because of his drinking, he could not remember.
The most damning testimony came from Gregory Coleman, who had died before the trial began. His earlier sworn testimony was admitted as evidence. In it, he claimed that Skakel had confessed to the killing and had boasted that he was going to get away with murder because he was a Kennedy. But the trial also exposed how those statements had come to exist.
Former students described the harsh atmosphere of the school and the pressure placed on Skakel to talk about the Moxley case. According to testimony, when Skakel refused to confess, he was placed in the ring, where he faced other students. After six to eight hours, he reportedly said that maybe he had done it. Another classmate testified that Skakel would become visibly distressed whenever the murder was mentioned, insisting he did not know if he had killed her.
The defense argued that anything said under such conditions could not be trusted. The jury was not persuaded by that argument. On June 7th, 2002, Michael Skakel was convicted of the murder of Martha Moxley. He was sentenced to twenty years to life in prison.
The story, however, was far from over. In October of 2013, a Connecticut judge ruled that Skakel’s trial lawyer had failed to represent him adequately and ordered a new trial. He was released on bail the following month. In December of 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated his conviction by a single vote.
Then in May of 2018, on reconsideration, the same court reversed itself, vacated the conviction, and ordered a new trial. On October 30th, 2020, the state of Connecticut announced that it would not try Michael Skakel again, citing its inability to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Martha Moxley’s killing remains officially unresolved, and her family spent decades seeking an answer. For the story of Elan, the trial marked a turning point.
Until then, the ring had been a rumor among former students, a detail in a deputy’s private notes, a line in a magazine. Now, it was part of the sworn record of one of the most closely watched trials in America. Former students had described it under oath. Journalists had written about it for a national audience.
The questions that followed were no longer only about what Michael Skakel may or may not have said. They were about what kind of school could produce such statements, and why it was still open. By the time the verdict was read, however, the man who had built that school was no longer alive to answer for any of it. Joe Reachi died on the 29th of January, 2001, of lung cancer.
He was in his mid-fifties. He left behind a private school, a harness racing track, and a reputation that depended entirely on who was asked. To some parents, he was the man who would save their children when no one else could. To many of the young people who had passed through his program, he was the architect of the worst years of their lives.
He never faced a courtroom over Elan. He never answered for the ring, or for the death of Phil Williams Jr. When the Skakel trial laid bare the school’s methods the following year, its founder was already gone. Elan did not die with him.
Control passed to his widow, Sharon Terry, who took over both the school and Reachi’s interest in Scarborough Downs. The program continued much as before, still drawing teenagers from far beyond Maine, still promising transformation to families who had run out of options. But the world around it was beginning to change. In 2001, Details magazine described Elan as among the most controversial of the nation’s residential therapeutic communities.
The Skakel trial followed in 2002, putting the ring on the public record. Suddenly, people who had never heard of a small town called Poland, Maine, were reading about what happened there. Elan also had connections in state government. Beginning in 1997, the school employed Bill Diamond, a former Maine Secretary of State, as its director of government relations, and later gave him the title of Superintendent of Schools.
In 2004, Diamond was elected to the Maine State Senate, and he continued to list Elan as an employer on his financial disclosure forms for years afterward. Diamond would later describe the superintendent role as primarily a title, and said his job had been to put the school in touch with the right officials. He has said he never had an office at Elan and was never on its campus. Oversight in Maine remained light.
According to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group, the State Department of Education gave advanced warning before its inspections, meaning the school always knew when outsiders were coming. What inspectors saw, they saw on Elan’s schedule. In 2005, the New York State Education Department, which paid for some New York students to attend, reviewed the school and returned a favorable report. On paper, Elan passed.
Two years later, New York came back—and this time, it did not call ahead. In 2007, officials from the New York State Education Department made an unannounced visit to the campus in Poland. What they documented was very different from the picture presented during scheduled inspections. Students were physically restraining other students.
Sleep was being disrupted. Verbal confrontation remained at the center of the program. The officials raised the possibility of withdrawing the taxpayer money that paid for New York students to attend. And in the aftermath, New York stopped sending its young people to Elan.
It was the most significant official action against the school in more than thirty years. And in its outlines, it echoed 1975. Once again, a state had looked closely, disliked what it saw, and protected its own children. And once again, the school itself remained open.
Families from elsewhere could still enroll, and they did. Yet something had shifted, and it was not happening in any state capital. It was happening online. For most of Elan’s history, former students had been isolated from one another almost as completely as they had been isolated inside the school.
They graduated, ran, aged out, and scattered to every corner of America. Many carried their memories alone. The program’s greatest protection had always been that silence. The internet dissolved it.
Former students began finding one another on message boards and websites. They compared memories and discovered that the things they had thought were private nightmares had happened to many others, across different decades, in almost identical ways. Someone who had attended in the 1970s could read an account written by someone who had attended in the 2000s and recognize every detail: the meetings, the signs, the ring. Websites appeared cataloging allegations year by year.
Names that had been lost began to be spoken again. Elan’s survivors were not alone. Nationwide, graduates of other programs in what came to be called the troubled teen industry were doing the same thing, and it was beginning to work. By the end of the decade, online activism by survivors and parents was being credited with helping to close dozens of similar programs.
Elan, however, still stood. By late 2010, a small number of former students had decided that the internet itself could be turned against the school. And this time, the voices would reach the people the school depended on most: the parents. One of them had been a student there in the early 2000s.
He had been sent to Elan as a teenager after being arrested for running away from home, and he spent about two years inside. By his own account to Time magazine, he witnessed the ring at least twenty times during his stay. When he later spoke to reporters, he did so under a pseudonym, not wanting his real name tied to the story. Some years after leaving, he read a news report about New York’s investigation into the school, and beneath it, a comment from a recent graduate describing the trauma of the place.
He later said the moment felt as if a fuse had gone off in his brain. He decided to fight Elan with the one weapon its founders had never anticipated. Elan had always depended on the same thing to fill its beds: a parent, frightened and exhausted, searching for help. For most of Elan’s history, what that parent found was whatever Elan chose to present—a brochure, an admissions call, a reassuring voice.
By 2010, what that parent did first was type the school’s name into a search engine. So the campaign set out to change what those parents would find. It spread across Facebook pages, Tumblr blogs, websites, and other social media, gathering the accounts of former students and putting them where anyone could read them. On the online forum Reddit, a post about Elan drew thousands of votes and an enormous wave of attention.
One poster described a school that isolated students for long periods, used screaming as discipline, humiliated and restrained them, and kept parents at arm’s length. The internet, the poster wrote, was the number one tool for exposing what went on inside places like this. The effect was dramatic. Before long, pages critical of Elan began rising to the top of search results.
A parent looking up the school now met the voices of its survivors before anything else. The campaign did not stop at the screen. The activist who spoke to Time described combing through local sports coverage for the names of current Elan students who played on school teams, then tracking down their parents and calling them directly to warn them. For a program whose income depended on enrollment, every empty bed mattered.
And the beds were emptying. What makes the timing so striking is how official the school still looked on paper. On the 1st of March 2011, Elan received renewed academic accreditation from the National Independent Private Schools Association. By every formal measure, the school was in good standing.
On the 23rd of March 2011, Sharon Terry issued a statement. Elan would close on the 1st of April, citing declining enrollment and resulting financial difficulties. She did not hide what she believed had caused that decline: the school had been the target of harsh and false attacks spread over the internet, she said. In the same statement, Terry defended the program her husband had built.
She wrote that she would miss working with the students, and most of all attending their graduations, which she regarded as regular proof that Elan had saved lives. That view was not Terry’s alone. When news of the closing broke, former students and parents offered sharply different judgments. One parent praised what she called a remarkable program.
Others who had attended described it in terms that could hardly have been further apart. One former student described it in the harshest possible terms: brutal and soul-destroying. On the 1st of April 2011, after forty-one years, Elan closed its doors. The lodge in the pines fell quiet.
For the activist who had helped bring it about, the news was hard to absorb. He told Time that the outcome felt surreal, and that there had been times when he believed the fight was a lost cause. In the end, what closed Elan was not a raid, a verdict, or a new law. It was former students who told what had happened to them and refused to stop telling it until the parents deciding whether to send their children could hear them.
The school disputed their accounts to the very end, but enough parents believed them to empty the beds. The doors of Elan were closed, but the story of what had happened behind them was far from finished. And neither was the reckoning with what it had left behind. After Elan closed, its buildings stood empty in the pines for more than a decade.
Then, on the 17th of November 2024, one of them burned to the ground. In March of the following year, fire destroyed two more. By May of 2025, two eighteen-year-olds had been charged in connection with the fires. Whatever their reasons, the result was the same: the physical place was disappearing.
The survivors who helped close Elan did not stop telling their stories when its doors shut. In 2016, a former student and a grieving sister brought the death of Phil Williams Jr. back to the police, thirty-four years after he died. In 2017, a documentary called The Last Stop, directed by an Elan graduate, traced the school’s history through the voices of those who had lived it.
And a former student, writing under the name Joe, began a web comic called Joe Versus Elan School, drawing his years inside panel by panel. It found a large audience online, introducing a new generation to a place many of them had never heard of. Elan’s story is not only about one school. It belongs to a wider industry of programs for troubled teenagers that grew up across America in the decades after Synanon—many of them borrowing the same methods, same promises, and same isolation.
Elan was one of the oldest and most notorious. It is far from the only one, and survivors of other programs continue to tell their own stories today. What Elan teaches is uncomfortable. The warnings were there from the beginning, and none of them was enough.
What finally worked was the one thing the program had spent forty-one years trying to suppress. Its students, grown now, found one another, spoke plainly, and would not be silenced. The pinewoods of Poland, Maine, are quiet again. But the teenagers who once stood in the circle are no longer standing alone.
They have names, and voices, and a record that can no longer be erased. In the end, it was their testimony, not any institution, that told the truth about Elan. And that truth is now theirs to keep.
