Camp Ozanam, Lake Huron, 1974 and 1975
If you were a camper or a camp counselor at Camp Ozanam, the 100-year-old, free overnight camp for children located on the shores of Lake Huron, in 1974 or 1975, I would like to link you up with someone who lost a brother there in the summer of 1975. He died under suspicious circumstances that were packaged as a sad accident.
I posted about this camp in November of 2020.
Did you attend summer camp at Camp Ozanam on Lake Huron in the 1970s or 1980s?
My November 17, 2020 post about Camp Ozanam was in response to a discovered news article dated September 20, 1977. The links to page 3A and page 10 of the Detroit Free Press article are contained in the above post.
The article was shocking in a number of ways. The Free Press reported that fucking bad penny pedophile “Fr.” Gary Berthiaume was not only being accused of a second rape of a 14-year-old boy (this incident AT CAMP OZANAM), then Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson announced to the world that this Catholic priest had been cleared in the OCCK case by–wait for it–a polygraph.
September 20, 1977 was also the evening John McKinney was murdered at his Birmingham gallery. His murder case remains conveniently unsolved. He was, in addition to being a gallery owner, some fake-ass minister of some bullshit ministry. A real Renaissance Man.
Police go on to describe the [alleged] assault at the children’s camp as “an isolated incident.” But shockingly, in the paragraphs above that “isolated incident” remark, the reporter tells readers that OCCK victim Mark Stebbins “attended that camp a few years before his death.” As did his older brother Michael, who said he knew of no incidents at the camp involving Mark or other campers. These brain surgeons at the OCCK task force have been telling the public for at least six months that the abductor could be posing as or an actual priest yet the magical, gold-plated, law enforcement polygraph machines in Michigan silence this possible lead once and for all. The bad penny resurfaces when Berthiaume is arrested in 2020 and later sentenced to one year in prison in 2022 for sex crimes against kids in the 1970s.
With pedophiles there is never an “isolated incident.” Someone recently posited that perhaps Berthiaume was subbed-in for Gerald Richards after Richards took one for the entire Michigan pedophile and CSAM team and went to prison (briefly) after his arrest in the summer of 1976 in Port Huron. But sure, let’s announce that Berthiaume passed a polygraph in the OCCK case in September 1977. Let’s ignore that this priest was alleged to have raped a boy at a children’s overnight summer camp run by the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Detroit. That’s another county’s problem.
The OCCK murders and Berthiaume’s sex crimes caused the major Catholic Church musical chairs sequence in metro-Detroit we now recognize, thanks to the Boston Globe’s Spotlight revelations in 2002. The now well-documented machinations the church has always engaged in to protect its predatory priests and its bank accounts. This does not mean a priest was in fact involved in the OCCK crimes, but it does reflect real concern by that institution of possible exposure of sex crimes by its priests and abuse taking place at the Sacred Heart Seminary right there at the foot of Woodward Avenue in Detroit.
Back to Camp Ozanam.
It appears that things might have gotten very fucked up at Camp O right around 1975. If you were there in 1974 or 1975, especially if you have information about possible child sexual assaults that might have resulted in silencing witnesses or victims, please consider responding to this post. An “isolated incident” can still be a very serious crime and it can lead to more serious and more escalated crimes. Silence always protects the predator. If you are not comfortable posting here, email me at OCCKTruth@protonmail.com.
Suspects John Hastings and Paul Johnson
A reader asked a very interesting question and makes a compelling point:
With John Hastings and Paul Johnson there’s something uncanny about the pattern they share in going from clean-cut Bloomfield boys of privilege to psychiatrically unstable weirdos in no time. Like they both got under the influence of something that didn’t just turn them evil and violent like Busch and Green, but clinically insane.
Hastings was a graduate of Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield, Michigan. Johnson attended Brother Rice in 1970 and 1971, but transferred to Seaholm High School in Birmingham in 1972 (apparently did not graduate).
