In 1953, when thousands of U.S. servicemembers returned home from the United States’s failed effort to stop encroaching communism during the Korean War, they left behind tens of thousands of mixed-race children and their scorned mothers. The plight of these women and children became a well-publicized crisis in the mid 1950s, a calamity that prompted Christian child welfare organizations such as World Vision to enter the war-ravaged country.
Bertha and Harry Holt, a wealthy Pentecostal Christian couple in Oregon, were among the many who felt spurred to action when they learned about the discrimination facing these mothers and children. The Holts were already parents of six biological kids when, in 1955, they attended a World Vision lecture in which speakers described unhoused and rejected babies and toddlers that needed love, care, and homes. “Saving” these children from the racist bias and poverty they’d likely experience in Korea became a mission writ large for the Holts, and they quickly decided to bring eight “Amerasian” children into their home. Bertha later wrote that the adopted children were “innocent victims of the heartlessness of war.”
But the Holts’s efforts to save Korean American children didn’t end with these adoptions. The couple and their biological children were so determined to do more to help that, within two years of bringing their new family members to the United States, they’d shuttered their lumber business and founded an international adoption program, and eventually, an orphanage to house the biracial Korean kids who were awaiting placement.
The history of that agency is at the center of Paige Towers’s powerful new book What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption, which uses a gruesome multiple murder by an adoptive father connected to the Holts’ organization to explore the exploitation at the heart of their agency model, and assess the flaws undergirding international adoption more generally.
University of Iowa Press
University of Iowa Press, 350 pages. Publication date: May 26, 2026.
The Holts, Towers writes, created Holt International Children’s Services in 1956 with the explicit aim of bringing mixed-race South Korean babies and toddlers into white, Christian homes in the United States. Towers situates its efforts, and the efforts of other religiously-based intercountry adoption agencies, at the intersection of “capitalism, colonialism, Christianity, misogyny, racism, and white saviorism,” and presents a convincing, if horrifying, template for this collision.
Towers paints an especially grim picture of Holt International Children’s Services, and the supposed altruism of the agency’s actions unravels under her scrutiny. Despite the Holts’s success in finding homes for thousands of children, she presents the orphanage as a place where abuse, neglect, hunger, and disease were rampant. What’s more, the growing ranks of the intercountry adoption movement led to a perverse demand for more children; Towers describes children in South Korean cities and countryside being kidnapped from their families by Holt and other agencies so that they could to be placed with the U.S. families willing to pay for them after the supply of mixed-race children was exhausted.
Though they insisted on finding Christian homes for each child, Towers writes, the Holts were otherwise lax in determining the suitability of prospective adopters: To qualify, heterosexual married couples needed only to be “born again” Christians, able to fork over a hefty adoption fee to the organization.
Towers’s sordid revelations about Holt Adoption Program point to large systemic abuses, including the agency’s reliance on untrained and overwhelmed workers who had no idea how to care for, let alone nurture, the children in their custody. Sadly, many of the children who were eventually adopted ended up being abused or neglected by inadequately vetted adoptive parents, and in some cases, were later abandoned. The book’s account of these children’s suffering is both gut-churning and enraging—as is the fact that the Holts built their empire with help from several members of Congress who streamlined immigration approval for the children and sanctioned “proxy adoption,” a process that permitted the agency to bring children to their new families without having met them. Equally galling, the Holts helped make intercountry adoption a lucrative business for themselves and others who followed a similar programmatic model.
The Holts’s lackadaisical vetting process and home study is evident in a particularly horrific story that Towers weaves into What They Stole. That story features Steve and Sheryl Sueppel, a married Iowa couple who adopted four Korean children from Holt between 1999 and 2005. The pair presented themselves to the agency as the epitome of success: Steve was a well-paid bank executive, and Sheryl a former teacher eager to become a stay-at-home mom. Both were well liked, active in civic life, attended church every Sunday, and lived the life of an upper-class suburban household.
And then the veneer cracked: In 2007, Steve was caught with his hand in the till at his job, and was charged with embezzling nearly half a million dollars from his employer. Sheryl was stunned, and although she thought about taking the kids and leaving her spouse, she instead chose to stay. It was a bad decision: In 2008, right before the embezzlement trial was set to begin in, Steve killed Sheryl, the children, and himself—a horrific familicide that rocked their small, tight-knit community.
While Towers makes clear that Holt bears no responsibility for Steve Sueppel’s murder of his children, she notes that the agency did only a cursory review of the Sueppels before finalizing their fourth child’s adoption—a blatant violation of due diligence. Had the review been more rigorous the agency might have questioned whether a person under indictment should be granted permanent custody of a young child.
This reality was always apparent to journalists, advocates, and others who took a sober look at the efficacy of international adoption. In fact, Matthew Rothschild, former editor of The Progressive, wrote in 1988 about the dark underpinnings of international adoption and the ways both Christian and secular adoption agencies have, for decades, been allowed to operate with impunity. Moreover, Christian rhetoric about “saving” children in dire need of support – programs that turn adoptive parents into saints – and that ignore potential red flags, have long been noted by those paying attention.
Decades after the deaths of Harry and Bertha Holt, Holt International Children’s Services continues to operate an extensive worldwide adoption service. Its website boasts that it “provides care and support to many of the world’s most vulnerable children” in seventeen countries across Asia, Africa, and South America, as well as in Bulgaria and the United States.
But the organization cannot erase its ugly history, and Towers has written a revelatory book that exposes the ways that good intentions can be derailed and unwittingly cause harm. What They Stole is important, insightful, and upsetting—a must-read for anyone interested in child welfare, social history, and family dynamics.