Disclaimer: Some names in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter. These changes align with those provided with permission from Chantal Woodyard in the Gimme Shelter TV series. Beyond these alterations, all events and accounts have been thoroughly investigated and are presented as truthful and accurate to the best of our knowledge.

Just days before the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday, Chantal Woodyard found herself standing in the shadows of a now abandoned building situated on the Wyoming State Hospital campus in Evanston. It had been almost 40 years since she had set foot on these grounds. The air was crisp with a bitter bite, and the dead grass speckled with snow. She wasn’t supposed to be there—not officially anyway—but a friend had arranged to get her in.

The building loomed in front of her, its reddish stone and brick exterior as imposing as she remembered. Its rounded arches, meant to project dignity and care, had always felt like cruel irony—one that masked the rot of age, and the rot of terror encapsulated inside. It was a visit that would open new wounds and uncover old ones, long festered and waiting to burst.

Chantal scrolled through the photos on her phone, her fingers swiping through each image. The pictures were like a scene from a horror movie. A dark-paneled office—her stepfather’s. A weathered table in the canteen, where she sat hunched over schoolwork. A recreation room, where she befriended other children—children institutionalized for the societal crime of being disabled, a common practice in America until the mid-20th century. The familiar tunnel—its walls peeling with time, light casting long, skeletal shadows. A place she learned, far too young, was home to suffering.

And the steel surgery table.

The moment she understood her story—and the stories of so many others—needed to be told.

Photos provided by Chantal Woodyard and Save the old WSH Facebook page, illustration compiled by Pueblo Star Journal

Blinking against the sudden flood of memories, tears spilled onto the houndstooth fabric of her dress, blotting the bright pink blazer she wore—a contrast to the tough, assertive professionalism she projected. A nametag on her lapel read: Chantal Woodyard, Disability Rights Advocate.

It was her advocacy that had brought us together for the interview. That, and “Gimme Shelter,” a television pilot based on her life, which is now being shopped to film festivals and major streaming networks.

It was a tidy angle: a Pueblo Star Journal board member whose Pueblo roots gave way to a career in activism, fighting for those society prefers voiceless and forgotten. A March profile for Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month—clean, digestible.
In part, that story is being told here. But having never met Chantal, I set out to tell one story and uncovered something more.

Chantal’s path wasn’t tidy. It was curated by forces beyond her—a life shaped in such a way that advocacy was not just what she did but what she had been molded into. And it couldn’t be told without returning to this place. A place that had forged her.

When Everything Changed

“He would abuse me in these rooms,” Chantal recalled, referring to her stepfather, Cecil, who worked as a director of activity therapy at the hospital.

Scarlett, her mother, had originally moved Chantal and her older sister to Wyoming to live with another stepfather, Bruce—a man with whom Chantal had a loving parental relationship.

But stability was never something Scarlett embraced. She was chaotic at best, abusive at worst, and her children were both fodder and kindling in the bridges she burned. She cheated on Bruce, and Chantal suspected that one of her affairs had been with their landlord—a man who was later adjudicated to be guilty of and sentenced to death for murder.

“I remember that landlord busting in the door, yelling, ‘Where’s your mom and dad?’” she said. “We had this old English sheepdog who cornered him on the porch and bit him.”

Soon after their move, Scarlett had another baby and eventually took a job as a recreational aide at Wyoming State Hospital, where she met Cecil. From that moment, everything changed.

Gimme Shelter

Driving along Pueblo’s West Street, you might pass a white stucco home with a wide front porch, its age etched into the cracks and crevices of its foundation. It has settled into itself over the years, but like the comfort it has always provided, it remains steadfast.

Chantal calls it her gimme shelter home—the center of her world. It was her paternal grandparents’ house, a place of refuge from her mother when she was young and, later, a gift from her father, Wayne, after her grandmother’s passing in 2013.

It was also where she first encountered disability.

Her grandparents had long been friends with their neighbors, the Stanifers—a well-known Pueblo family that still owns and operates Campbell’s Flowers. Their son, Jack Stanifer, had a spinal injury and used an electric wheelchair. To little Chantal, he wasn’t different—he was just cool. “I thought he was the bionic man,” she laughed.

Jack lived independently at home, had a career, and carried himself with an easy confidence that made disability seem like just another part of life. His advocacy left a profound imprint on her, shaping the way she thinks about her work today. In Jack’s house, in this neighborhood, disability wasn’t something hidden—it just was.

But the Gimme Shelter house held something else—a gateway to everything she had spent years trying to lock away. A path to telling her story the way it actually happened, to merge her past with the life she had built as an advocate.

It was here, among boxes and the remnants of her grandparents’ lives, that Chantal found it: the journal. The one where she had written it all down. The abuse. The friendships she had clung to as a young girl wandering that hospital. The horrors she had witnessed. The moment she turned Cecil in. How her mother remained complicit.

There it was, in her hands—the evidence of everything she had tried to bury. Proof that the past wasn’t just memory. It was written. It was real. It was undeniable.

Nowhere Safe

In Wyoming, Scarlett would take six-year-old Chantal and her siblings with her to work and to see Cecil, her married boss. While Chantal’s older sister, Michelle, was left to watch the younger kids, Chantal was often free to wander the recreational building.

That was where she met Sid—or at least, that’s the name she remembers. A young boy who was a resident at the hospital. They formed an immediate friendship. Sid didn’t treat her like a little kid, and she didn’t see him as anything other than her friend.

But inside that hospital, the rules were different. Friendship wasn’t simple. Sid wasn’t just another kid—he was a patient, confined behind the unspoken barriers of institutional life. Chantal didn’t fully understand those barriers then, but she felt their weight in the way his agency was controlled.

It was the first time she saw how institutions don’t just contain people—they determine the terms of their existence. Power wasn’t just about authority; it was about shaping the limits of someone’s world.

And it wasn’t confined to those walls.

Cecil wielded his own kind of power. After an affair with Scarlett, they both divorced their spouses and married. At home, his control was absolute. Chantal remembers the abuse—physical and sexual—as relentless. Sometimes, it happened in that very building, the same place where she formed memories with Sid. There was no escape, only the steady erosion of safety, until nothing was untouched by Cecil’s reach.

A few years later, Scarlett and Cecil packed up the children and left for Maine. Officially, it was a fresh start. Unofficially, they were running. Before they left, Chantal says Cecil had been accused of abusing a child in their in-home daycare. He was never convicted, and the accusation was buried, never spoken of again.

Maine was where everything finally broke.

At school, Chantal was pulled aside by a guidance counselor after missing the bus. Concerned by what seemed like a pattern, the counselor pressed her with questions, and Chantal disclosed the abuse. Cecil was arrested, but Scarlett continued to meet with him despite the allegations.

Then came the accident. Chantal’s younger sister broke her leg in a snowmobile crash at a friend’s house, setting off another welfare check. This time, the state was preparing to intervene. But before officials could arrive, Scarlett—tipped off by a friend in law enforcement—packed up the family’s station wagon and vanished. They were on the run again.

Michelle, having just turned eighteen, stayed behind in Maine with her boyfriend’s family. She was later subpoenaed to testify against Cecil in court. Their mother was not there when her daughter took the stand.

Chantal eventually went to live with her father, Wayne, who only had custody of her and Michelle during the summers—never knowing what was happening the rest of the year. When Scarlett took the kids, Wayne and Chantal’s uncle searched for her, eventually finding her in Michigan. Enrolled under a different last name, Chantal was in class when a social worker entered, spoke her real name, and in that instant, she knew it was over.

With her father, Chantal found the stability she had longed for. His wife, Nancy, became the kind of mother she had never known—one who showed her what it meant to truly be loved.

Scarlett, however, never took responsibility. Finding her way back to Pueblo, she would later tell her version of the events in Maine to a local Pueblo newspaper, recasting herself as a victim. Months on the run, the choices she made—they were reframed, her role carefully omitted.

The Work

In 1989, at a Mötley Crüe concert in Denver, Chantal realized she had found home—and never left. She settled into the city, taking a job working with individuals with disabilities. It was there, in the quiet moments between care tasks, that she began to recognize her own story reflected in the lives of those she worked with.

Working with one woman, in particular, she realized that her past and present had converged in a way she never expected. The woman had spent years institutionalized and would scream in terror at the prospect of taking a shower. The reaction was visceral and insistent. Chantal recognized that fear. She understood what it meant for something as routine as water to become a source of trauma.

“They [other support staff] couldn’t figure it out, but I knew why she hated the shower. I understood,” she said.

It would be a defining moment in a life dedicated to helping others and doing the work.

Today, Chantal has become an expert in ADA compliance and disability rights, fighting for systemic change in a world that still makes access a privilege rather than a guarantee. Among her many projects, she is working on a program designed to break the cycle of poverty that is built into the system, one that allows people with disabilities to build careers instead of being trapped by benefits that penalize them for earning too much.

It is work that is never-ending, especially in the current political climate. With protections for people with disabilities eroding before her eyes, some days feel impossible. “Last week I was on the floor curled up and crying,” she said. “But then I realized, my people need me, they need my voice right now. There is no time to be tired.”

In 2022, Chantal lost Michelle unexpectedly. It was a kind of loneliness she hadn’t prepared for. While her five younger siblings and two step-siblings were still alive, her sister was the only person who truly understood the extent of what it had been like. Without her, the past sometimes feels like a heavier load to carry.

And yet, Chantal has learned to give grace, even to those who never earned it. Making amends with Scarlett before her passing last year, she no longer feels the need to seek revenge or retribution against her mother. Scarlett made her choices. Chantal has made hers.

Her best friend, Barbie, has seen it all: the fight, the exhaustion, the relentless care she pours into others.

“I’m just proud of her,” Barbie said. “She’s that loyal and she’s that kind.”

Anthea, a former supervisor—also an advocate and friend—agrees. “She is fearless,” she said. “She has been an advocate from day one.”

At the heart of it, Chantal only hopes that she’s made a difference. That telling her story, and the stories of others, matters. Even if it upsets the people who would rather see it buried.

All of it—every moment of trauma, every piece of her past—aligned to get her exactly where she is now. Serendipitously melding in ways that seem predestined and planned by something beyond our realm. Allowing her to fight in ways she didn’t know how to when she was young.

And some nights, when the weight of it all feels unbearable, she puts on the Rolling Stones hit “Gimme Shelter”. The opening chords wash over her, and for a moment, she lets herself remember the girl she used to be—the one who cared, who fought, who survived.

Then, she gets back to work.

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