‘What They Stole’ details ‘neglect, recklessness, and violence’ that underpins international adoption
In a Q&A with Prism, author Paige Towers discusses a 2008 case of familicide in Iowa that involved the murders of four adopted children from Korea
Paige Towers’ new book, “What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption,” traces the Evangelical origin story of the Holt Adoption Program that facilitated the adoption of hundreds of thousands of Korean children, including Ethan, Seth, Eleanor, and Mira, by Steven Sueppel and his wife Sheryl. In 2008, Sueppel murdered his wife and children in Iowa before dying by suicide.
I came to the Sueppel’s story with more than curiosity over a true-crime story.
I’m a Korean American adoptee who organizes at the intersection of reproductive justice and adoption. And my adoptive father—like Sueppel—abused me in our idyllic suburban house while he was seen as a successful, upstanding husband and father. In both cases, no one thought to intervene.
In mainstream adoption narratives, children are first made into objects of pity and charity to warrant our initial family separation, and then we are expected to prove the inherent goodness of the system that displaced us. In the case of Ethan, Seth, Eleanor, and Mira, even in death they are folded back into a story told by someone else that centers the perspective of the adult who abused them: Sueppel’s unraveling, his financial crimes, his religious delusions, and ultimately, his violence. But Sueppel is not an exception.
The “win-win” adoption narrative is one of the most politically durable, bipartisan-supported issues in this country. In this seamless version of events, adoptive parents give homes and better futures to “unwanted” children whose parents (namely mothers) are deemed unfit to care for them. When the Steve Sueppels of the world get media coverage, we default to compartmentalizing them as stressed, mentally ill, monstrous exceptions driven to violence, rather than ask what larger systems enabled them to reach these extremes in the first place. Familicide of adoptive children adds another layer, though adoptees are often still treated as the murdering parent’s proof of goodness.
This is where “What They Stole” is most powerful, and where I wanted more. At its strongest, the book asks readers to confront intercountry adoption as a system created to meet the mutually reinforcing needs of America and postwar South Korea. Towers reveals the machinery behind the sentimental origin story: the rise of the Holt Adoption Program—the first major international adoption agency—and the “baby hunts” and coercion behind the business.
Towers also makes clear how often Christian certainty and capitalist demand moved in lockstep to fuel international adoption.
And still, I wanted more.
“What They Stole” courageously enters the ethically rocky terrain of adoption and reaches toward hard questions that adoption rarely answers. The book troubles adoption, but not enough to let the reader remain troubled.
Too often, adoptees and adoption stories are required to reassure the broader public that adoption was flawed then and better now. When adoption stories must always end in neat reassurance or reunion, we never have to confront the tensions in modern day adoption. Like the Holts’ methods of procuring children in postwar South Korea—a country marked by American military presence, poverty, stigma against mixed-race children and the children of unwed mothers, and weak state support for family preservation —adoption today is still shaped by demand, constraint, and unequal power.
Ultimately, adoptive parents are people implicated in a system that they have the power and privilege to change. Adoptive parents can demand transparency, for example, or fund family preservation, challenge manipulative adoption marketing, resist expediency, and help redefine what’s in the best interest of the child.
The Sueppels’ story does not really end with what ultimately happened to Ethan, Seth, Eleanor, Mira, and Sheryl. There remains harder questions to grapple with, namely what violence the adoption machinery continues to allow when child removal is normalized, and everyone else decides what’s best for adoptees.
Works such as “What They Stole” can help spark these larger, necessary conversations about adoption. Towers spoke to Prism about her new book, which was released in May, the pushback against those who criticize intercountry adoption, and why adoptees’ voices are regularly minimized and omitted from stories about adoption.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tiffany HyeonBrooks: Beyond your place-based connection to Iowa, what led you to tell the story of the Sueppel familicide?
Paige Towers: In March 2008, Steven Sueppel murdered his wife, Sheryl, and their four adopted children from Korea—Ethan, Seth, Mira, and Eleanor—in my hometown of Iowa City. I was a 21-year-old kid attending the University of Iowa at the time. Like everyone in the community, I was shocked and horrified.
Still, I didn’t initially question why those four children were in Iowa to begin with. That happened the following year, when I moved to Seoul to teach English. I was confused as to why this modern, wealthy nation was still sending children to the U.S., roughly a decade after the Sueppels adopted their first child.
It wasn’t until years later that I first understood that the Sueppel murders weren’t an isolated incident; the history of Korean intercountry adoption is fraught with neglect, recklessness, and violence. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. And so, I quickly realized there was a story there—one I wanted to at least attempt to tell.
HyeonBrooks: You describe “baby hunts” and the controversial methods of “coercion, force, or bribery” the Holts prescribed to procure Korean babies for international adoption. It’s easy and advantageous for people to say these harmful practices ended or are one-off crimes perpetrated by a few bad actors. Yet these same practices are not relics. They operate widely in modern adoption, including with the offer of housing and healthcare in exchange for relinquishment. What will it take to make the public understand that the Sueppels’ story—and international adoption more broadly—are the result of failed systems and not a “win-win” model for family creation?
Towers: What made researching the Holt story so unsettling was realizing that the mass harm the Holts caused in the 1950s and early ’60s was not publicly investigated, condemned, or reconciled. Instead, the agency was “professionalized,” a term that makes me feel incredibly uneasy.
For instance, instead of working alongside Korean authorities to take babies from women living in camptowns, pregnant women were funneled into adoption agency-run maternity homes. There—as you note—housing and healthcare were transactional. One had to sign away their parental rights to receive any sort of social support.
Apparently, we feel better about this setup: the so-called homes for mothers, the trained staff, the crisp and (sometimes) legal paperwork, the formality, the quiet behind-closed-doors exchange. So, I think public understanding changes when we stop asking only whether adoptive parents are “good people” and start asking harder structural questions: What support systems existed for the biological family? Who benefited economically or politically from separation? What alternatives were never funded or pursued, and why?
Now, even as we’re experiencing this increase in investigative reporting, there’s been a pushback against the perceived criticism of intercountry adoption. Like, why can’t something so heartwarming just be good? I see adoptees, researchers, and activists repeatedly having to remind people that adoption can be a positive, loving, stabilizing, and meaningful act. Instead, the problem is the system. The problem is the power imbalance. The problem is the coercion, fraud, bribery, and kidnappings. The problem is the money. The problem is how much pain and damage were caused through the commodification of children.
Even in the 1950s, the Holts’ methods for adoption were viewed by the child welfare community as shocking and highly unorthodox. People recognized that children were facing grave danger. Humanitarian groups—as well as social and medical workers—were literally panicking, but Holt still became the largest adoption agency in the world.
I don’t know what it will take for people to slow down, listen, and not react in defensiveness. But I do feel that if one cares about adoption [and] about adopted people’s rights or just a particular adopted person in their life, then they must reexamine how this system was built and why. What would it be like if everyone could just acknowledge that the issue is far more complex than what was sold to us by the media, the government, the agencies, and by broader culture for years?
Book cover courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
HyeonBrooks: Given what you’ve learned writing “What They Stole,” to what degree do you think adoptive parents act with knowledge of the systems that delivered their children?
Towers: I came away from researching and writing “What They Stole” believing that most adoptive parents are operating with partial knowledge, not full knowledge. Many genuinely believe they are participating in an uncomplicated act of love or rescue because that is how adoption has been presented to them.
One thing that struck me in the Holt archives was how carefully the adoption narrative itself was constructed. The public was shown grateful children, selfless adoptive parents, and dramatic rescue stories. Meanwhile, the underlying conditions—poverty, family coercion, social stigma, geopolitical interests, lack of social services—were often obscured or reframed as inevitabilities.
Shadows of that narrative still exist today.
Overall, we need to be willing to ask difficult questions about how children became available for adoption, whose voices are missing from the story, and whether family preservation was treated as the priority. But I did not write this book to encourage shame or judgment.
HyeonBrooks: A voicemail and note left by Steve Sueppel framed the killing of his wife and children as an act of salvation. As an adoptive parent, he believed he was “saving” the children. To you, does this say something larger about the logic of rescue in adoption?
Towers: This is a difficult question. Even as the author of this book, it’s still hard for me to read through that section. What disturbed me about the voicemail and suicide note was the way they echoed a broader logic that appears throughout the history of intercountry adoption: the belief that vulnerable children are better off removed and saved by adults who claim moral authority over their lives. Steve imagined himself as both protector and destroyer, convinced that he alone knew what was best for his family.
Something else that struck me while researching the Holts was how often this language of salvation blurred into possession or control. Children were “rescued” into better lives, but the people making those decisions often assumed extraordinary authority over the futures, identities, relationships, and religious education of these children. And as we see here, this paternalistic mindset can become dangerous, especially when combined with narcissism and rigid beliefs.
HyeonBrooks: Now that you’ve completed a book-length project on international adoption, do you feel you were able to fully report everything you set out to tell? In particular, “What They Stole” relies primarily on accounts of the surviving adults, while Ethan, Seth, Mira, and Eleanor’s perspectives are absent. How did you navigate this gap, and what does it say when adoptees’ perspectives are typically missing from adoption narratives, even when they are alive and well?
Towers: To be honest, I feel like I could have worked on this book for another five years, and I still wouldn’t have reported on everything I’d hoped to.
In the Sueppel case, the children are gone, so I had to reconstruct their lives through media archives, documents, photographs, and interviews. Of course, all the research in the world can never substitute for a person speaking for themselves. One of the central tensions of the book is that adopted people are most profoundly shaped by these systems, yet their voices are often the least preserved in the record. Adoption narratives have often centered adoptive parents, agencies, missionaries, and governments.
At the same time, writing this book would never have been possible without the profound research and work completed by academics, activists, and writers on intercountry adoption—many of whom are adopted themselves.
And yet, many adopted people continually must explain or publicly narrate their histories. When I was interviewing and gathering information, some adoptees chose privacy. Others could not be reached. And some people were understandably exhausted by or aggravated at feeling the pressure to educate. To reexpose themselves to trauma. To retell their story of adoption, as if this is what defines them. Throughout the process, I remained mindful of this emotional labor involved in revisiting the past yet again.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor