A White Couple Who Adopted Black Kids And Used Them As Slaves Was Sentenced To Hundreds Of Years In Prison
On Wednesday, Jeanne Kay Whitefeather, 63, was sentenced to 215 years in prison for forced labor, human trafficking, child abuse and neglect, and violating the children's civil rights, according to a video of the sentencing hearing from the Kanawha County Circuit Court trial that was posted online.
Her husband, Donald Lantz, 62, who was found guilty of 12 out of the 16 counts against him, including human trafficking, child abuse, forced labor, and neglect, was sentenced to 160 years in prison.
'You brought these children to West Virginia, a place that I know is 'almost heaven,' and you put them in hell,' Eighth Judicial Circuit Court Judge Maryclaire Akers said during sentencing, per WCHS. 'This court will now put you in yours. And may God have mercy on your souls, because this court will not.'
The couple reportedly adopted the five children from a shelter for unhoused and at-risk youth in 2018. At the time, Jeanne and Donald were living in Minnesota and moved to Washington State, and then later to Kanawha County, West Virginia in 2023.
In October 2023, they were arrested after a neighbor called Child Protective Services alleging that two teenagers, 14 and 16, were locked in a shed on the couple's property in Sissonville. Other neighbors claimed the children were 'forced to perform farm labor and were not permitted inside the residence,' according to court documents obtained by WCHS–TV.
When police responded to the home, the two children (brother and sister) in the shed reportedly had no running water and a portable toilet, and had been deprived of "deprived of adequate hygienic care and food." The children said they slept on the concrete floor and were locked in there for 12 hours before being found. Another girl was also found in the home.
Charleston's WCSH–TV reported that when Donald arrived home, he had another child with them and led deputies to a friend's home, where the fifth child was staying.
A 16-count indictment was filed against the couple. 'It alleges human trafficking, human rights violations, the use of forced labor,' Judge Maryclaire said, according to West Virginia Metro News. 'Human rights violations specific to the fact that these children were targeted because of their race and they were used basically as slaves from what the indictment alleges."
Fox 11 / WCHS Eyewitness News
The oldest child referred to the couple as "monsters" in an impact statement, while another child said, 'I will be something amazing. I will be strong and beautiful. You will always be exactly what you are — horrible.' The youngest child said they were "taught to laugh at" their siblings while witnessing the abuse.
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Families armed with shovels, hymnals, rifles, and righteous intent. The Emigrant Aid Company raised funds through an exhaustive network of some 3,000 churches, many of them Quaker or Congregationalist. 'For Religion,' their circulars promised. 'For Education. For Temperance.' They were advocating a version of abolition that didn't disturb Boston's own social order. It was freedom as export. Righteousness at a distance. The ask was modest — $20 per settler, roughly $700 today. Enough to transport and equip a family to settle Kansas on behalf of abolition. Donations flooded in. The Rev. Horace James from Worcester sent $23.37, boasting of his congregation, 'Never did fingers and thumbs move more nimbly in the performance of any good work.' To him that meant that 'verily there is hope for Kansas.' Others weren't so flush with cash. The Rev. W.C. Jackson from Lincoln, Mass., whose flock scraped together $15, reported, 'Your circular for the Emigrant Aid Society came rather inopportunely for us farmers.' Some ministers like Jonathan Lee from Salisbury, Conn., apologized for the frugality of their flock: 'From my scanty purse a single dollar must be accepted in testimony of my interest in the cause of truth and freedom,' because, Lee wrote, 'I am without pastoral charge or salary.' Others enclosed neat bundles of cash with effusive letters, grateful for a moral cause that could be joined without leaving home. Lawrence threw himself into the effort. He wrote President Pierce — his cousin by marriage — to chide him for failing to protect free-staters. He tracked weapons shipments. He personally funded churches, schools, and armories. He, along with many others, made Kansas a proxy battlefield, a place to perform conviction while sidestepping a harder reckoning with what could be done to stop slavery entirely. Advertisement And Kansas, as it turned out, bled. Missourians — armed and incensed — flooded across the border. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Pro-slavery militias burned pressrooms. In 1856, just as the violence crested, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a searing speech comparing Kansas to a raped virgin and accusing Southern politicians of barbarism. In a more familiar scene, days later, a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, stormed into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane. This was the war New England had hoped to fund rather than fight. But the borders were dissolving. Eventually, the South seceded. And when Kansas did enter the Union as a free state in 1861, its fate had been sealed not by New England idealism but by the absence of Southern senators in Congress. Advertisement When the Civil War gave way to a fractured Reconstruction, Kansas endured not as a solution crafted by New England elites but as a promise seized by Black Americans themselves. As Reconstruction's guarantees faltered, many formerly enslaved people fled the South for the Plains, becoming known as Exodusters. Others, like Edward McCabe, envisioned Kansas not just as a sanctuary but as a staging ground — a terrain on which to build something autonomous and Black. For McCabe, Kansas — and later, Oklahoma — offered a second chance. Edward P. McCabe, circa 1883-1887. Kansas State Historical Society via National Park Service And the names live on. The college town of Lawrence, Kan., bears Amos A. Lawrence's name, a monument to abolitionism at arm's length. In Langston, Okla., the Black town McCabe helped found, street names like 'Massachusetts' signaled to Black settlers that they were heirs to a longer freedom struggle — one rooted in, but no longer dependent on, New England's conscience. The limits of New England's good intentions The West that New England built was funded by abolitionists who had converted not to revolution but to strategy. They filtered their moral convictions through propriety. It's worth asking what their legacy means now. We live in a moment when the very institutions Amos Lawrence once stood for — elite philanthropy, intellectual inquiry, and cautious reform — have come under fire. Harvard, a beacon of New England liberalism, finds itself besieged by accusations from both right and left. Elsewhere, DEI offices are shuttered. History curricula are rewritten. Librarians contend with what books to put on their shelves. Even here, in the bluest of blue states, there's talk of 'indoctrination,' 'wokeness,' and 'elites out of touch.' And here too, migrants are detained often without the norms and sorts of protections we assumed would be durable. Advertisement In the 1850s, Lawrence and his cohort were shaken into action by a single courtroom scene on Court Street. But their response came with a caveat: They would confront injustice without addressing it at home. Today, Court Street is quieter, humming more predictably with foot and car traffic — but the moral decisions we must make haven't gotten easier. Who we detain, whose histories we erase, which freedoms we underfund — all still happen in that old Boston bubble. The difference now is that there's no Kansas to send our convictions to.
