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For those familiar with the case already or don’t care to know it, the juice has been collected for you at the very end just above the references.

February 4 1987, Tallahassee Florida — Police received a call from a member of the public concerned about six dishevelled children in a park seemingly under the supervision of two well-dressed men. The men were members of a 60s style commune/cult called The Finders and the children had been those of women belonging to this group. The children were dirty, malnourished, and after being taken into police custody, one had shown signs of sexual abuse. The children demonstrated an unfamiliarity with the ‘outside world’ and stated the men had been their teachers taking them to a school in Mexico for brilliant children. When asked who their parents were they replied they’d been weaned from their mothers and were under the control of the “game caller”.

The Tallahassee PD report stated, "[name redacted - one of the children] said they would go to peoples houses and babysit. She stated that this was fun because they got to eat what was there, and do what those people wanted them to. She would not elaborate".¹ The two Finders men had been transporting the children in a white van registered to a warehouse in Washington D.C. and, "During this process [name redacted - one of the children] saw the van registration on this investigator’s pad. She stated that the address which the van was registered to was ‘the warehouse’. She stated that they would go there sometimes".²

This information was relayed to U.S Customs officials and Metropolitan Police in Washington D.C who discovered they had preexisting information from an informant on file stating, “That a group of people calling themselves, the ‘Finders’, were conducting brainwashing techniques at [redacted]”, and that, “The source reported children were used in rituals by the groups”.³

Search warrants were secured for the warehouse and a nearby duplex house owned by Finders leader Marion Pettie, which were raided the following day on February 5^th. Inside the warehouse was discovered: hot tub and sauna facilities, various film sets, a video screening room, a library containing books on mindcontrol, and a room full of networked computer equipment with a satellite link on the roof.⁴

According to a U.S Customs agent who conducted the raids named Ramon J. Martinez, a Finders named Stuart Miles Silverstone had been found inside a computer room at the duplex home, which had also been hooked up with a satellite link. And files on the computers Silverston had been operating detailed various methods for acquiring children, “SILVERSTONE was located in a room equipped with several computers, printers, and numerous documents. Cursory examination of the documents revealed detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes. The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community known as Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping”.⁵

According to this agent, other files seized during the raids contained printouts of messages sent and received through an electronic mail system called telex to other networked computer terminals across the United States and abroad. One such telex message had been a purchase order for two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through an official at the Chinese Embassy. Others detailed activities such as “bank secrecy” and “interests in high tech transfers” in London, Europe, and Africa. Most curiously, one recently received message, found in the possession of Silverstone, provided a detailed summary of the arrests of the two Finders members in Florida the day prior, and included a set of instructions, “to move ‘the children’ and keep them moving through different jurisdictions, and instructions on how to avoid police attention”.⁶

MPD suspected members of The Finders had, “cleaned the area, since they had notice captioned subjects had been arrested”.⁷ No children had been found in either the warehouse or duplex, though large amounts of children’s clothing had been, along with photographs of children, including one described as, “a child ‘on display’ and appearing to accent the child’s genitals”.⁸

Among documents seized from warehouse had been, “a looseleaf binder with the names of presidential candidates on the dividers” which contained “newspaper articles relating to the candidates”,⁹ and, “intelligence files on private families not related to the Finders. The process undertaken appears to be have been a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters, tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, etc., of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown. There was also a large amount of data collected on various child care organizations”.¹⁰

A summary of the findings provided by Special Agent Martinez in U.S Customs investigation report reached the following conclusion:

On February 6th, the day after these raids had been conducted, the FBI took over the investigation and then subsequently possession of all computer equipment and floppy disks seized from both the warehouse and nearby home, as well as from the van found transporting the children in Florida. Soon after the FBI classified all MPD reports related to The Finders investigation “Secret”. According to one of these reports dated February 19^th 1987, which has since been released through FOIA, an MPD Detective reported speaking with a CIA official who told them The Finders investigation had been, “treading on their toes” and that the CIA “apparently have a vested interest in [redacted] and/or group”.¹¹

In a heavily redacted section of this report it states a “Disk” had been sent to Europe by someone who, “Did not know that the person he turned the information over to in Europe was a source of this office and is not aware that the Source brought the Disc back to this office. [redacted] actually transferred the disc in London. Det [redacted] then turned the Disc over to WFO/FBI, Counter Intelligence office for analyzation. We have not been apprised of the results of that alaysis[sic], nor do we expect to be. Regardless of what type operation they may be engaged in, there will be no justification for the way the children have been treated, and the matter will be addressed in Family Division, Superior Court”.¹²

A photo album found during the warehouse raid had contained pictures of men and children from The Finders group dressed in robes slaughtering goats. When news of The Finders investigation was picked up in the press by The Washington Post on February 7^th, they went with the headline ‘Officials Describe Cult Rituals in Child Abuse Case’ and reported, “D.C. police, who searched a Northeast Washington warehouse linked to the group, removed large plastic bags filled with color slides, photographs and photographic contact sheets. Some photos visible through a bag carried from the warehouse at 1307 Fourth St. NE were wallet-sized pictures of children, similar to school photos, and some were of naked children. D.C. police sources said some of the items seized yesterday showed pictures of children engaged in what appeared to be "cult rituals." Officials of the U.S. Customs Service, called in to aid in the investigation, said that the material seized yesterday includes photos showing children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and one photograph of a child in chains. Customs officials said they were looking into whether a child pornography operation was being conducted”.¹³

The satanic cult aspect of the investigation was left to circulate in the national press for about a week before the FBI declared their investigation uncovered no evidence of a federal crime, “spokesman for the FBI’s Washington field office, said the FBI investigation was ‘pretty well winding down. . . At this point we have not uncovered any evidence of federal violations.’ He said this included no evidence of kidnapping or using children for pornographic purposes”.¹⁴

The newspapers of record swiftly realigned themselves and became the voice of reason, debunking their own coverage of the case as a hoax reminiscent of the satanic panic. An Op-ed in The Washington Post informed its readers, “When the satanic dust settled, all the Florida police had on the two men they'd arrested were six children who appeared to be unkempt, hungry and bug-bitten, a condition the Tallahassee gendarmes had apparently never before encountered. They were shocked beyond belief, and thus began the 1987 Salem witch hunt, aided and abetted by newspapers and TV”.¹⁵

The six children in Florida were returned to female members of The Finders identified as their mothers, some sooner than others, and the two men who'd been transporting them had the charges against them dropped and were eventually released. So far as the official narrative went, The Finders had been an alternative lifestyle community with some pretty bizarre but legal practises which law enforcement authorities had misconstrued as satanic, and this had led to hysteria in the press. The CIA aspect had never become public and the incident soon slipped away into the transience of the news cycle, forgotten about for a number of years.

In October 1991 MPD officers reported observing suspicious activity of well dressed men accompanied by children at late hours of the night coming and going from a building they thought had been raided during The Finders investigation back in ’87.¹⁶

Then in 1993 the Department of Justice received a copy of the aforementioned memo compiled by U.S Customs agent Ramon J. Martinez on the raids of The Finders properties, and launched an internal inquiry into CIA involvement with The Finders group and a potential cover up of the groups operations by the FBI in 1987. Details on this were leaked to The Washington Times which published an article in December 1993 citing both the U.S Customs memo and the MPD report on CIA involvement. The article reported, “A Metropolitan Police document dated Feb. 19, 1987, quotes a CIA agent as confirming that his agency was sending its personnel to 'a Finders Corp., Future Enterprises, for training in computer operations'”.¹⁷

The leader of The Finders, whom the children called “the game-caller”, had been a former Air Force Master Sergeant named Marion Pettie. It turned out his late wife had been a CIA employee named Isabelle Pettie and one of his sons had worked for Air America, a CIA cutout used to traffic herion in the golden triangle region during the Vietnam war. It was also learnt Future Enterprises had provided software training for CIA employees and that an employee of the company named Robert Garder Terrell had been a member of The Finders let go in February 1987.¹⁸

Paranoid minds were left to stew on this for thirty years, prodding and poking with various FOIA requests for a peek behind the curtain. Then in 2019 the FBI started abruptly dumping their trove of heavily redacted case files on their 1987 investigation, including the follow up inquiry into a suspected coverup in 1993. Buried among these, which were sprinkled with red herrings like Ted Gunderson’s diagrams of the McMartin pre-school tunnels near the beginning of the first batch, were three documents of instantaneous interest to anyone who knew what they were looking at.

It turned out a list of names and addresses had been found on the two Finders men transporting the children through Florida. On February 9^th 1987 the FBI reported in a memorandum, “Deputy Sheriff [redacted] Leon County Jail, Tallahassee, Florida, provided a two-page list of names and addresses of individuals both within the United States and various foreign countries, which was seized from the property of [redacted] and [redacted] Several of the last names are identical with members of the ‘Finders’ organisation, and are believed to be possibly relatives to those members. A copy of this list is attached”.¹⁹

The FBI field office that received the list then put through the following request on February 13^th, “Enclosed for the Bureau and WFO is a two page list of names and addresses. The enclosed list was recovered from subject [redacted] and [redacted] by jail authorities at the time they were booked into the Leon County Jail, Tallahassee, Florida, by the Tallahassee Police Department. Bureau is requested to search and index all names appearing on this list and to advise Jacksonville and WFO of results of indices search”.²⁰

The response to this request took almost a month, but on March 10^th it finally came through with information matched to three names on the list. One name on the list had been reflected in a Buffalo case file entitled, “[redacted] ALLEGED MEMBERS OF NORTH AMERICAN MAN/BOY LOVE ASSOCIATION (NAMBLA); ITOM - SEOC - POSSIBLE MURDER”. A second had been reflected in a Dallas case file entitled, “[redacted] ODYSSEY FOUNDATION DALLAS, TEXAS; ITOM - CHILD PROSTITUTION”. And a third, “appears as a member of the ODYSSEY FOUNDATION, in Dallas file”.²¹

The two members of The Finders had been found transporting 6 children in a van through Florida “to Mexico”, with a list of addresses for one individual named in case of NAMBLA members suspected of murder, and two named in a boy trafficking network looked at in connection to the Houston mass murders of Dean Corll in 1973.

References

1. Tallahassee PD Offense report 87-3990, 02/08/87, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 1of4 - as of August 2023), p.132 https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-04/view

2. Tallahassee PD Offense report 87-3990, 02/08/87, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 1of4 - as of August 2023), p.134 https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-04/view

3. Case note of FBI Case (7-1685), Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 1of4 - as of August 2023), p. 55 & p.56 https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-04/view

4. Tallahassee PD Offense Report 87-3990, 02/08/87, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 1of4 - as of August 2023), p.136 https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-04/view

5. Memo Dated 02/07/87 by U.S Customs Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez

6. Ibid

7. FBI case note, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 4of4 - as of August 2023) p.176

8. Memo Dated 02/07/87 by U.S Customs Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez

9. FBI case note, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 4of4 - as of August 2023) p.176

10. Memo Dated 02/07/87 by U.S Customs Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez

11. Metropolitan Police Department Investigation Report, Case No. 87-225, 2/19/87, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 1of4 - as of August 2023) p.67 & p.68 https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-04/view

12. Ibid

13. ‘Officials Describe Cult Rituals in Child Abuse Case’, Saundra Saperstein & Victoria Churchville, The Washington Post, February 7 1987

14. ‘FBI dropping investigation of Washington commune’, Chicago Tribune, February 13 1987

15. ‘The Devil You Say’, Joseph Laitin, Washington Post, February 15 1987

16. Metropolitan Police Department Investigation Report, 10/22/91, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 2of4 - as of August 2023), p.147 & p.148, https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-02-of-04/view

17. ‘CIA tied to cult accused of abuse’, Washington Times, Paul M. Rodriguez, December 17 1993.

18. 'The Finders Coverup charge aimed at cult with local ties', Tallahassee Democrat, December 22 1993

19. FBI Memorandum, field file 7-1248, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 4of4 - as of August 2023), p.168, https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-04-of-04/view

20. FBI Memorandum, field file 7-1248, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 4of4 - as of August 2023), p.101, https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-04-of-04/view

21. FBI Memorandum, field file 7-1248, Released in FIO/PA# 1412188-000 (TheFinders FBI Vault release 4of4 - as of August 2023), p.133, https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-04-of-04/view