16 Siders Kids: How Every Mind In This Case Failed Them

**Tony Brueski** (0:02)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Green.

**Tony Brueski** (0:10)
Yeah, The Siders, 16 Kids, the horror story that is. We're going to do a psychological breakdown of this today. We've been wondering, how does this happen? How does one's mind function to allow this to actually play out the way that it appears to have been playing out? That's what we're doing today. Four adults kept 16 children in a 12 by 12 room for years, while paying property taxes, some holding jobs, shopping at the Dollar General. It wasn't all chaos. It was somewhat maintained. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott is with us to help break down the psychology of a household that functioned somewhat in public and allegedly ran something of an unspeakable horror house in private, including the question at the center of this case, Elizabeth Siders was married at 15, while seven months pregnant at 18 years old, her husband. She's a defendant. What happened in her mind in between might explain a lot. We have a lot to get into today. Your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we work our way through it. We're going to start with the mind, the mind that builds this room. And Gary Jr., he delivered DoorDash orders all day. He's, from what we understand, the father of some of the kids, all of the kids, we don't know.
And then he went home to 16 children in a room covered in feces.
Two completely separate realities. He's dropping off your Taco Bell, and then he's back in the horror house with the 16 children and feces every way. Oh, I don't think that that was bean burritos from Taco Bell. Wait a second.

**Robin Green** (2:01)
Makes you second guess Murdaugh.

**Tony Brueski** (2:03)
Maybe it explains the crypto-spluridium outbreak that's going on right now as well. What does it take, psychologically, Shavaun, to live in two worlds like this? Because he presents himself one way at the Dollar General, at the dropping off your Taco Bell, and then going home to this.
It seems one would think, well, you couldn't possibly have two such stark realities going on at the same time, but apparently you can, Shavaun.

**Shavaun Scott** (2:36)
Apparently, it doesn't take a lot to function delivering DoorDash, right? Because I can't imagine this guy was terribly sophisticated in his presentation anywhere. But the first three things that popped into my head when I just took a glance at this horrible story and it didn't take long. Number one, cognitive impairment. There's something wrong intellectually with these folks.
Is it dementia? Is it just low IQ?
There's something off. Then throw in some mental illness into the blender, and we don't know enough to know, is there some schizophrenia? Is there another major disorder of some kind? Then throw in abuse and blend it all up. This is the kind of family you get. Unfortunately, I think they may not have 16 or 18 kids living in their homes, but I think there are a lot of families out there who are living in similar conditions. Yeah.

**Tony Brueski** (3:33)
That was the first thing that came to my mind when I started absorbing this story.
It's getting the headlines because it's 16 kids. It's like, wow, that's the big wow draw. But my initial reaction was, just go drive around any city in the United States, even small towns, especially in very impoverished areas. And you may not have 16 kids. You may have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, whatever, in very similar conditions, directly in front of us every damn day. And if anybody's pretending that this isn't going on everywhere, you're not awake. You're not paying attention. My reaction was, this is not rare. This is just one that's being exposed because it has a big number in front of it.

**Shavaun Scott** (4:20)
Exactly. 100% right there with you. I worked with a case many years ago in California that had some similarities, but it was only two kids.
And you're right, it did not hit the news in any kind of a big way. But, and I can't remember who turned the family in, but somehow CPS had gone out there and found these horrendous, filthy living conditions with dirty diapers just piled up, soiled animal feces throughout this home. And the children were toddlers, and so fortunately, they were rescued out of that. They didn't live in it for years and years. But one of my roles was to try to determine, are these people capable of parenting again? And I did not believe that they were. But that was what was going on in that case. You had some mental illness. You had people who were not terribly bright in the first place. There was some abuse going on. The wife was being abused by the husband. But the really scary thing, what kind of work did they both do? Fast food. They both worked, which I remember the chain. I've never eaten there since.