This Kentucky Asylum Released a Death Row Killer — Then Its Graves Vanished for Good

🔔 Subscribe for new videos every week:    / @stateofruin1   In October of nineteen eighty, a Kentucky courtroom sentenced sixteen-year-old Todd Ice to death, the youngest person under a death sentence anywhere in America. But that sentence did not hold. Four years later, the state's own Supreme Court threw the conviction out, and by the early nineties, Ice walked free from the very hospital meant to treat him. That hospital was Central State Hospital, outside Anchorage, Kentucky, built for sixteen hundred patients and holding more than twenty-four hundred by nineteen forty. Decades later, its own graveyard would disappear just as completely. Eighteen sixty-nine. Chapter One. A Farm for Wayward Children. In eighteen sixty-nine, the Kentucky state legislature purchased two hundred acres of land from the descendants of the frontiersman Isaac Hite, on the outskirts of a settlement that would later become the town of Anchorage, ten miles east of Louisville. The state's plan was modest on paper: a House of Reform for Juvenile Delinquents, a place to hold white boys and girls between the ages of seven and sixteen who had run afoul of the law or simply had nowhere else to go. Construction finished around eighteen sixty-eight and eighteen sixty-nine, and for a few years the campus functioned exactly as intended, a rural reform school far from the city.