July 1976 — In the quant little city of Port Huron, Michigan just North East of Detroit, a high school gym teacher named Gerald Richards, with a concerning combination of other vocations such as masseuse, magician, hypnotist, whilst also campaigning as a republican candidate for local government; was arrested after the mother of a student told police Richards had molested her son on a camping trip.
On the 12th of July Richards had taken four of his students to a private airstrip, to meet with another man who had flown them in his plane to his private island, called North Fox Island, located 17 miles off the coast of Michigan’s Leelanue peninsula. There, they spent two nights lodged in bungalow facilities of the Brother St Paul’s Summer Camp for Boys.
North Fox Island
Upon their return one of the boys told his mother Richards and this other man had performed sex acts on him and taken photographs of him naked. The mother reported this to Michigan police on the 15th of July, which begun a week long investigation into these allegations1.
After the boys claim had been corroborated through interviews with the other three, police arrested Richards in his car on the 23rd of July. When searching his vehicle two envelopes were discovered. One contained naked pictures of boys taken on North Fox Island, in the other a letter addressed to a "Frank Shelden", warning him to "watch his files & mail & to check his files & get all stuff to North Fox Island”2.
In exchange for partial immunity, Richards gave investigators the names of two other men he said were principal figures in a child porn ring he claimed to be merely at the periphery of. These were Francis Duffield Shelden and Dyer Grossman3.
Gerald Richards
Francis Shelden
Dyer Grossman
The first of these names might have come as quite a shock, as Francis Duffield Shelden belonged to a well established old money family in the State of Michigan. His great-grandfather on his father’s side had been Michigan governor and senator Russel A. Alger, who had also been United States Secretary of War from 1897-99. While on his mother's side were the Duffields, an industrialist family from Detroit made of money so old it wasn't entirely clear from whence it came4a 4b.
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As such, Shelden had been endowed with a trust allowing him to pursue a leisurely life of ‘philanthropy’, particularly that which involved youth charity. So far as appearances went, he had many feathers in his cap. Aside from a number of commercial property interests, Shelden had worked part-time as a Professor of geology at Wayne State University. He served on the board of the Cranbrook institute, a private arts academy and boarding school with a thematic affinity for, oddly enough, the mythology of Orpheus5, the centerpiece of the academy’s campus showcasing a fountain sculpture called Orpheus fountainpic. In greek myth Orpheus was commonly associated with the arts, but also pederasty, known by Ovid as “Orpheus, the first pederast”. Shelden had also been on the board of Boys Republic6a, another boarding school for delinquent boys funded by the General Motors charity, United Foundation 6b. And in keeping with this theme, he also volunteered his time to a local Big Brother program7.
According to Richards, he’d met Shelden through an advertisement placed for his ‘magic show’ in an underground pedophile newsletter called ‘Better Life Monthly’, abbreviated to BLM—or Boy Lover Monthly8, who Shelden had been a “prolific writer” for under the pen name Frank Torey. This ‘magic show’ was really a coded message Richards used to exchange his 12 year old ‘magic assistant’, a neighbour of his named Michael Farquhar, for boys groomed by other pedophiles in the Michigan area. He would later testify before a congressional inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children, held in 1977, that he’d been familiar with John Norman's Odyssey network9, and at one point referred to Michael Farquhar as his ’fellow’10, which had been the term used for boys exchanged between members of the Odyssey network11. So it’s possible Richards and Shelden met through John Norman's network.
After corresponding by mail the two started meeting up in person at hotel rooms and Shelden’s Ann Arbour mansion to use boys they’d groomed for sex and pornography12. As their relationship progressed through these activities Shelden had mentioned North Fox Island to Richards, and his plan to start a summer camp there for boys he wanted Richards head. To this end he put Richards in touch with an organisation called the The Church of New Revelation located in New Jersey, and a "reverend" there by the name Dyer Grossman.
The Church of New Revelation wasn’t a real a church and Dyer Grossman wasn’t a real reverend. Like Shelden, Grossman belonged to a wealthy family from Long Island, and worked as a teacher at an exclusive boarding school for boys in New York13. He travelled to Michigan and met with Richards to draft up an incorporating charter for Brother St Paul’s Mission Camp for Boys, to be located on North Fox Island. The charter allowed the camp to derive a religious charity non-profit status by virtue of being a subsidiary of Grossman's Church in New Jersey, which of course had only existed on paper. While the exact timeline for this operation is unclear, a news article from 1970 would indicate Richards had been using an organisation called Brother Paul's organisation as a child porn front for at least six years, long before it had been incorporated into a North Fox Island summer camp in 1974.14.
Despite his, albeit less than entirely truthful cooperation with the investigation so far, Richards, who had since been granted bail with his trial set for August, had his bail bond abruptly cancelled by a judge in early September after he allegedly sent an anonymous letter to a local reverend claiming that his attorney and a psychiatrist named Dr. Katz had conspired against him. Richards denied writing this letter, and it isn’t entirely clear what his bizarrely did bit of incomplete information contained in the police report notes below was all about.
The immunity deal Richards had been granted for information on Shelden and Grossman had been made by a district attorney named Peter Deegan. Despite having made the deal, Deegan delayed the authorisation of arrest warrants for both Grossman and Shelden for over four months. Shelden and Deegan likely shared a mutual acquaintance by way of another Michigan district attorney in Charlevoix named Don Berlage. Berlage, who had visited North Fox Island with his two teenage sons on at least one occasion15, had been a former FBI agent16 and was a director of a Big Brother program 17, an organisation Shelden had also been involved with.
On September 13th Richards was brought to trial and abruptly sentenced to a 2-20 year variable length prison term 18. From inside prison, possibly alarmed by the potential length of his term, Richards sketched mapped out for investigators a network diagram detailing what amounted to a child pornography operation which spanned from state to state, coast to coast, right across the United States, and even the Atlantic Ocean onto Europe19a 19b.
Copy of Gerald Richards network diagram
Notice in the upper right corner Richards notes "Dorian Philosophy". This he explained as the philosophical outlook behind the network in his testimony during the congressional inquiry.20.
''But more exclusively with them, they believed in a sort of reliving of an old Dorian Greek philosophy, a belief that man and boy relationship, mind, body and spirit. It is a metaphysical thing.''
Remember “Orpheus, the first pederast”? Well, the Dorians were progenitors to the totalitarian Greek city states, the most powerful and well known of which was Sparta. These city states were ruled by oligarchies in perpetual civil war against the greek democracies, such as Athens. The Dorians had been conquerers of the Island of Crete, and whatever mysterious traditions of Minoan civilisation carried over into Classical civilisation, most likely did so by way of the Dorian cultural diffusion into Greek culture. It is this supposed esoteric knowledge as to the 'true' roots of Western civilisation, contained in such mythologies as the Orphic mysteries, which has captured the fascination of aristocratic culture in the West ever since they rediscovered it during the renaissance. For more on this see: The Politics of Organised Vice: Part 1 - Mythological Origins and Child Abuse and High Society, a Christmas Tradition. Put simply, the Dorian outlook became the Spartan outlook, which became the basis for the Greek totalitarian outlook, whose most well known propagandist was Plato, the nephew of an Oligarch ruler. The tenets of this oligarchic totalitarian outlook are espoused in Plato’s “Republic”.
Then in August Richards produced further evidence of the networks existence by way of a letter Dyer Grossman had written him, postmarked from the 19th July 1976. In this letter Grossman outlined plans to set up a series of foster homes in Michigan, citing the profitability in receiving monthly payments from the government for taking in “runaways” and “problem kids”. Grossman also mentioned he had procured a 12 year old boy through the Big Brother program, whom he described as ‘innocent’ but that “some camping trips may change that”21.
The letter had a return address for an organisation in New Jersey called The Ocean Living Institute. This was a Seasteading foundation( not unlike TerraMar, the organisation ran by Ghislaine Maxwell and registered to an apartment sold to Jeffrey Epstein by Lynn Forester De Rothschild. For information on this and much more see Who did Jeffrey Epstein Work For? ), incorporated by a man with the curious name, Adam Starchild. Who had also been the incorporating agent for Brother Paul’s Mission Camp For Boys22.
Adam Starchild
Adam Starchild was actually Malcolm Willis McConahy, or at least had been; an offshore tax attorney who appeared to have faked his own death in 197523. Starchild, as we shall call him for clarity’s sake, had been a former been a former scout master in Minneapolis in 1965 but was kicked out of the organisation after expressing desires to engage in sex with some of the boys. Not long after he was apprehended in Wisconsin driving to New York with four boys in his car and was charged for possession of child pornography24.
Starchild would later act as Francis Shelden’s attorney in transferring assets, such as stocks and bonds, into an offshore trust he could access from Europe. As this is where Shelden fled while district attorney Peter Deegan 'handling' the case, made persistent delays to the authorisation of a warrant for his arrest, which provided him with ample time to get his affairs in order.
First, on the 28th of July, just five days after Gerald Richards initial arrest, detectives contacted Deegan's office regarding a search warrant for Shelden's Ann Abor estate. Deegan attempted to delay this request until after Richards first court appearance, however they went around him and obtained it through another deputy-prosecutor and it was executed upon the following day25. Nothing had been found though except emptied filing cabinets. It turned out Shelden had learnt of Richards arrest beforehand and cleared the place out26.
Then, a few days later on the 2nd of August, Deegan deferred the first request for an arrest warrant for Francis Shelden.27.
In early September Deegan also delayed arrest warrant requests for both Shelden and Dyer Grossman28.
Another one for Dyer Grossman was deferred on the 27th, Deegan's office citing workload issues.29.
Then the closest thing to a smoking gun came on the 8th of October, when investigators learnt Deegan's office had in fact closed the case complaints made against Shelden and Grossman 'in error’30.
Arrest warrants for both men were finally issued on the 7th of December31, more than four months after the investigation had started, and only days before a story broke about North Fox Island in the press. In the days following the public scandalisation of the case, a teenage boy Francis Shelden had known since age nine died in what was reported as a suicide.32.
The first in a series of articles divulging the details of the North Fox Island operation appeared in the Traverse City Record Eagle on December 11th. An investigative journalist named Marilyn Wright who had been following the case for months through her police contacts, had learnt Brother St Paul's Mission Camp had been incorporated as a non-profit charity to provide temporary lodging and mentorship to juvenile delinquents33. It had been linked to two other organisations through The Church of New Revelation. These were The Ocean Living Society in New Jersey and The Educational Foundation for Youth in Chicago. These organisations used mailing lists to elicit donations from charity sponsors, who would in return be mailed child pornography featuring boys housed in those programs. In some instances sponsors could arrange visits with the boys featured in the materials. These mailing lists had been advertised in two underground child porn newsletters, Better Life Monthly and Hermes, of which Francis Shelden had also been involved with as both a writer and financier.
Investigators also learnt Gerald Richards had been processing child porn sent to him from a third organisation linked to the The Church of New Revelation. Photo negatives and 8mm films had been mailed to him from a place in Monteagle, Tennessee called Father Bud’s Boy’s Farm34. He made copies of these and mailed them onto a forwarding service located in North Carolina called MAIL-O-MATIC 35. Interestingly, Richards also mentioned a distribution company in California as part of this pipeline, called F&S Distributions36, he said belonged to Guy Strait37a 37b, the child pornographer partnered with William Byars Jr in the DOMLyric ring, linked to John Norman in Dallas, as well as the child pornographer Roy Ames and his associate "serial killer" Dean Corll in Houston. A connection detailed in part two of this series: Dean Corll and the Odyssey Network. Richards also noted that F&S Distributions was the Californian publisher for Hermes38, which Guy Strait had himself been admittedly involved with39.
Father Bud’s Boys Farm in Tennessee was a foster home located on a secluded farm being run by an ordained episcopal priest named Rev. Cladius Vermilye. It housed juvenile delinquents sent there by the youth corrections and welfare agencies of Tennessee and Louisiana40a 40b. These boys would be supplied with drugs and alcohol to make them pliant and perform in orgies, which were filmed and photographed. This child porn would be sent out to a mailing list of 'sponsors', who could pay to arrange visits to the farm, which also operated as a brothel. This foster home was raided on the 10th of November 1976, and a list of over 270 sponsors was seized. On this was Francis Shelden's name41, while authorities in Tennessee linked the farms operation to Adam Starchild, Dyer Grossman, and The Church of New Revelation42.
What had in part led to this raid, in conjunction with the information Gerald Richards provided, had been the discovery of yet another child porn ring, this time in New Orleans, two months prior in September 1976.
Which brings us to the next part of this network, and series, Boy Scout Troop 137. However, this was not the end of the North Fox Island connections. In fact, what has been accounted for thus far isn't even half the story. As North Fox Island would later become linked to the investigation into a series of child murders in Oakland County Michigan during the same period. Attributred to a serial killer dubbed the Oakland County Child Killer, or OCCK. Which will be explored in a forthcoming part of the series.
It just keeps on growing. . .
