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In between lies and twisted statements, Gerald Richards explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter investigating child pornography that around 1968 he left the porno shop he was working at and started his own mail order child pornography business. This surely supplemented the income from the first “nonprofit” this monster created in 1970 to gain access to children.

By 1970, Richards, his wife, and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Mugridge had formed a nonprofit to bring safety instruction and religious studies to area schools using the “media of magic.” In an article that reads like a prescient roadmap for much darker schemes, Richards explains he came up with the idea for school outreach after he “was contacted by several area businessmen to provide such a service.” I just bet you were, Jerry.

In 1976, Richards and his friend Frank Shelden were indicted for raping a young boy from Port Huron. Richards, who did not have a private plane, was arrested in July 1976 and pleaded guilty. Shelden, who did own a private plane, fled the country, evaded justice and I’m sure continued to offend until his dying breath.

We don’t know that anyone has been able to definitively link Brother Paul’s Boys Nature Camp on North Fox Island with Oakland County. If they have, they are keeping that information for their own purposes. However, it is indisputable that N. Fox was never thoroughly investigated. Francis Duffield Shelden’s blue blood lineage (Shelden/Alger families) certainly meant strings could be pulled and legal problems disappear.

M.F. Cribari describes Shelden’s lineage and the obviousness of a “staunch wall of cemented protective power” for this black sheep of blue bloods in her book, Portraits in the Snow, The Oakland County Child Killings . . . Scandals and Small Conspiracies (Outskirts Press Inc., 2011, p. 178-200). This cement wall would extend to any of Shelden’s patrons of the upper-crust/heavy-hitter variety or anyone who overlapped with Oakland County, and would be cause for treading lightly and making sure that the client/patron list went MIA.

But a mid-level freak like Gerald Richards was totally expendable. He was described in the Chicago Tribune as “one of the Midwest’s leading child pornographers and the worst kind of pimp”–a “flesh peddler who fed off the young,” who filmed, processed and sold child pornography and sold his models to pedophiles. Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1977, p. 20.

He served the low end of his 2-10 year sentence at Jackson Prison and unbelievably enough, was back in The Times Herald with his now father-son magic act. No mention of his prior “employment” or his stint at Jackson.

By 1988, Richards was arrested again, this time for selling child porn through the mail. I guess he really couldn’t conjure up sufficient income through magic. He told investigators that he had merely been setting up a sting to entrap purchasers. Although the Wikipedia page on N. Fox Island states Richards killed himself in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Islands_(Lake_Michigan) –see Criminal History section), a reader consulted Richards’ death certificate which states he died of “upper gastrointestinal bleeding” due to “portal hypertension” after a lengthy hospital stay.

I thought the researcher’s (see yesterday’s post) description of Gerald Richards was spot on:

I am on to Gerald Richards.  He was a little man with big aspirations and a voracious need for attention, so he left a long trail in the local media (as his father had before him).  He complicated everything because he needed a structure to operate in and, as is evident in his Senate testimony, he intellectualized and rationalized to the point of delusion.  He must have loved cavorting with the “big rich predators” but he was way in over his head and they used him and threw him away.  It’s a tale worthy of Shakespeare!

From a reader

That he was a manipulative, delusional liar was evident from his comments to the Chicago Tribune in 1977, as well as his later testimony in Washington, D.C. Manipulative liar was the least of his heinous traits. The Tragic and Most Heinous Tale of the Double Life of The Great and Evil Richeli.