This comment from a reader was posted today to an older post on the North Fox Island Pedophile Ring. https://catherinebroad.blog/2019/12/12/north-fox-island-pedophile-ring/. It contains important insights, so I am elevating it to a post:
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I was born 1968 in Lubbock but soon moved to Houston, Texas, where my childhood was steeped in fear and dread, thanks I now believe to Corll and everything else that was being reported at the time – in the Tribune and elsewhere.
I moved to Omaha in the early eighties and as a teenager went to a prep school for boys there run by jesuits. One of these jesuits was infamous among students for his ceaseless attempts to meet privately with them (I did meet privately with him and was pressured for months after that to travel an hour away for a personal retreat with him in a remote cabin owned by the school: he often carried a puppet around the school and talked to students through this strange intermediary). His MO in these private meetings was to discuss your sex life and to make sure you had no insecurities about your equipment – all very conversational, as, I took it, I was to suppose some drop-pants exchanges just must go down among jesuits. This required exposure and an exam. I didn’t fall for it and was told no one else had, but these days I wonder.
We lived out past Boystown and I passed it every day. I left Omaha but returned in the early nineties, ahead of Franklin. I was warned about Alan Baer during that time by peers. He was infamous, too. I couldn’t believe that everyone knew this; nor that their parents did not seem to. I once dropped off an acquaintance at the house of Peter Citron, who lived nearby. I was amazed to be told by the guy I dropped off that he and many other boys were living with Citron. He was a rough kid and I thought, how does an arrangement like this happen?
Years ago, around the late mid-nineties, an older gay man in Tennessee, where I’ve lived now for 20-something years, gave me a suitcase of his papers, hoping I would find a way to archive them. These were bar flyers and announcements and that kind of thing; memorabilia, mostly – but among them were strange photos, several letters and a brochure from a place called Boy’s Farm. I don’t know whether this man was a patron but as I learned more I assumed he must be.
I spent hours at the library learning whatever I could. I was shocked to discover only recently about Fox Island, and its ties to Boy’s Farm, as well as Mr. Norman. Perhaps because of these formative experiences I have proceeded through all subsequently absorbed information with a firm understanding of the reality that these networks insinuate themselves into positions of authority (church, police, universities, boy scouts, government). They are organized in a way I understand to be thorough. Grooming involves surveillance and insinuation into various settings. That is a process; never a mere abrupt act. These things continue to appall me, but I’m never too surprised by the high connections. They seem like careful leg-work to me; setting a stage of protection – and. crucially, confusion (an example would be Norman naming his mail-order network Odyssey)
Gacy was a recruiter for the Jaycees. He ran for County Commissioner. One must consider, given all we know, that part of Gacy’s possible purpose in showing porn to Jaycee recruits involved incrimination, just as it seems wise to consider Gerald’s hypnosis less as simply a tool for seduction and more part of a larger, learned philosophy of behavioral control and interrogation. It does seem that a hypnotist lurks somewhere in the margins of every sexual blackmail operation since the cold war. And duress – applying pressure, confusion, and agitation to subjects – has been a big part of research into behavioral control and modification. I think of Ted Koczynski – the experiments he was subjected to as a college student. I think of all the mental institutions and behavioral program so many of these molesters were sent to – and released into society from prematurely. And I think of Henley, who talked about the training he received from Corll, how he described this system of applied duress.
Richards was a hypnotist and a magician (which I expect went some way toward providing context for the hypnosis). Father Ritter ran Covenant House and socialized with the GOP. Boystown isn’t an anomaly; its involvement in the Omaha goings-on (i.e. Franklin) is far less difficult for the lay person to comprehend at this point. There are many reports of Gacy trying to hire one kid to kill another. He was surrounded by his own versions of Henley and Brooks – and earlier stories posit that before them, Corll himself had other, earlier helpers. I think these are complex systems, these groups; involving many people who have or are made to have as much to lose as each other.
I suspect it’s possible that the victims in OC were brought to a group setting. It takes more than a few people to film anything, even poorly – especially back then, before SLR and light-sensitive sensors, and nothing the men associated with this ring in any part of the country did was ever exactly solitary. Norman’s index cards illustrate the system of mutual incrimination that served as bedrock foundation for these networks: you can see that same system today after online busts of forums whose members were required to submit photos from their own “stashes” for eligibility.
The shifts Busch and Greene were alleged to have taken would seem to me a window into how this system works – as opposed to how these two members of a larger system did. However Vermilye operated was how Shelden and others did. There was literature to set the standards and practices of setting up a group home. It’s conceivable to me that Busch would have learned various things during his time associating with Shelden and Fox Island, and could have felt emboldened by this setting to branch out on his own.
Similarly, I don’t know why there wouldn’t have been different drivers and teams for the abductions – and I don’t know why, given the enormity and organization of these networks, it would be inconceivable that individual players broke off into their own cells to apply these learned skills independently, or were working for multiple people. Take Warzecha, who had a record of abductions: who gave this particular Henley his proverbial $200 for pick-ups? If you acknowledge that abductions were conducted by others on the behalf of a sponsor, it would seem to follow that there were quite a few sponsors in region.
It’s clear these perps studied the family habits of their victims. Babysitters, family contacts, who knows what else. Recruitment requires observation and various mental strategies, judging by Corll and Gacy alone. Both were focused on mental dominance and coercive confusion. Foresight and preparation mean power over others. You don’t go donate a heap of money to local police, as Epstein did, because you have a passion for philanthropy. These are ducks put in rows.
These operations were vast, with many layers carefully applied. Apologies for the info dump.***