Furthermore, Christopher Busch was identified in these articles by name, suggesting he was more than just a name on the subscriber list for Francis Shelden’s special brand of child porn—he may even have helped produce it. In the weeks after Busch and Greene were arrested in Flint, a headline of a story in the Detroit News dated February 22, 1977, read: “Oakland County link probed in sexual exploiting of boys.” The article identified three Flint men: Christopher Busch, Gregory Greene and Douglas Bennett, who were at the time being arraigned and bound over for trial on multiple charges of criminal sexual conduct with minors. An unnamed fourth suspect was still being sought. (Decades later, Det. Williams would locate both Bennett and the “fourth man,” who was identified as Hiram Becker. Neither had any connection to the case.)
“…They are charged with using gifts, threats and physical force to persuade the boys to engage in sodomy, oral sex and lewd photography sessions. … The men met the boys by picking them up as hitchhikers, and by working as counselors in community service groups. One of the defendants had worked for a time as a coach of a youth baseball team.
“Assistant Prosecutor Lenore Ferber said as many as 75 more boys may be questioned as the investigation continues,” the article read.
“Genesee County Prosecutor Robert F. Leonard said yesterday the defendants (Busch and Greene) may have passed boys from one to another and the scheme may have had ‘nationwide’ ties. He said his office in investigating the possibility the defendants may have been linked to Grosse Pointe millionaire Francis D. Shelden, missing since allegations that his youth camp on Lake Michigan island near Traverse City was a ‘homosexual haven’ became public last fall.”2
It is important to note that in the same article, Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson diminished the impact of the child porn ring on his jurisdiction, stating he did not believe there was any connection between Busch and Greene and the OCCK case. Specifically, Patterson said that while “information developed in the Flint investigation suggests that some of the victimized boys had been procured in Oakland County,” he was “unaware of any increase in the ‘usual number of scattered instances’ of homosexual complaints in Oakland County.”3 (The equating of homosexuality with pedophilia was an official misconception of the times.)
The article further reads: “Patterson emphasized that the cases are seemingly unrelated to the murder of Mark Stebbins, a 12-year-old Ferndale boy, sexually molested and then killed early last year.”4
Busch was again connected to North Fox Island in a Traverse City Record-Eagle article on a freshman Michigan state legislator set to sponsor legislation outlawing child pornography. Condemning child pornography as “one of the most depraved forms of child abuse,” which can “can scar a child for life,” Rep. Larry Burkhalter announced he would introduce a bill that would make it a felony to finance, produce or wholesale pornography involving children under age seventeen.5 The article further read:
Sgt. Mike Moyes of the Michigan State Police Community and Youth Services Unit said the so-called “chicken films” [victims of pedophiles are called chickens] and magazines are available in Michigan but it is not clear whether any of them are actually produced here.
But he said two recent incidents in which adults allegedly involved youths in sexually explicit activities have raised serious questions about [child porn] and police officials are now putting their heads together “to try to find out how far this really goes.”
State police seized 18 rolls of film from a Marine City man [Gerald Richards] who was named in the corporation papers of Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission, an alleged homosexual pornography ring involving young boys in Port Huron and on North Fox Island off Grand Traverse Bay. Photographs allegedly taken on the island have been reproduced in hard core pornographic magazines, police said earlier.
Two principals of Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission, Francis D. Shelden and Dyer Grossman, are still sought by state and federal authorities on criminal sexual conduct charges.
Flint police also confiscated eight rolls of film from Christopher Busch, 25, of Birmingham, one of three men arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct involving 10 to 14-year-old boys. Police there said say as many as 50 youths could be involved.6
Taking a lead in the Flint investigation, Genesee County Prosecuting Attorney Robert F. Leonard invited several law enforcement agencies spanning four Michigan counties to a conference which would address this “tragic problem.”7 The invitation read:
“Several police agencies and prosecutors’ offices in Michigan are conducting an ongoing investigation into the sexual abuse and commercial exploitation of children which is acute and widespread, reaching across city, county and state lines.
“Our targets appear to be organized and interconnected. Effective investigation requires the highest degree of cooperation and information sharing among enforcement agencies.
“The meeting is open to all interested prosecutors and police agencies. I would encourage you to extend invitations to any appropriate participants keeping in mind the sensitive and confidential nature of the matters to be discussed.”
The meeting was scheduled for April 11, 1977. Attached to the invitation was a “Tentative Confidential Agenda for Representatives of Law Enforcement Agencies.” Among the items for discussion were “Exchange of Photographs,” “National Conspiracy and Its Effect on Michigan,” and “Civic Organizations Vulnerable to ‘Infiltration.’”8
No record of the meeting ever taking place could be found.
Two years later, in 1979, Leonard was convicted of embezzling $34,000 in public funds. He spent 44 months in a Federal Penitentiary. After he was released, he sought to have his law license reinstated, but was repeatedly denied.9
In 2012, I spoke with Leonard over the phone, then in his early eighties and living in Flint. I asked him specifically about his prescient concerns about the sexual exploitation of children decades earlier. He could not remember any such problem, so I sent him a copy of the letter he wrote in an effort to jog his memory. In a follow-up call, he said he couldn’t recall any of it.
“My brother, Mark, and I were talking about this Fox Island nightmare recently,” began a blog post by Cathy King Broad in March 2013. “He noted how shocking it is that the Fox Island story died once back in the day, and once again when it was revealed in the news over the last 5 years. As he said, ‘I can’t even think of how many boys were violated and how many powerful people were involved. There have got to be some records with the FBI or other LE. Just think if the story hit the press today, the outrage and outcry that would happen?’ But there was no outcry back then and the lid is now tighter on this file than it is on the OCCK file. I can only surmise this is because the many perpetrators were the kind of people who had money—and a lot of it—as well as power and prestige. And their victims were powerless. … These animals make Jerry Sandusky look like a rank amateur.”10
In 2006, Detroit FBI Agent John Ouellet checked FBI files and databases looking for links to Francis Shelden and the OCCK case. Ouellet also steered a request through the FBI in Washington, D.C., and onto the Dutch Police in Amsterdam, to pursue a possible connection between Francis Shelden and a large distributor of child pornography named Kim Tam Ang.
Williams had first learned of Kim Tam Ang—a British national from Selangor, Malacca, in Indonesia, living in Amsterdam—from a 2005 interview with Richard Lawson. In keeping with Lawson’s usual practice of weaving a largely fictitious narrative around some basis in fact, he told Williams he had traveled to Amsterdam in 1979 as a Detroit Police informant and had a conversation with “Kim.” Lawson claimed that “Kim” named Francis Shelden as being involved in the abduction and murder of Timothy King. He also said Shelden was financing the production of the child porn photos and films in the Detroit area and shipping them to Amsterdam for international distribution by an organization called the “Eye of the Chicken-Hawk.”
11
Along with the request to investigate Shelden and Kim Ang, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office sent, through FBI’s legal attaché in Amsterdam, several photographs of Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich and Timothy King to the Dutch police.
Dutch police in Brussels reported back that both Kim Ang and Shelden were mentioned in an investigation by the Danish police in 1993 concerning child pornography and sexual offenses against minors. (Shelden died in 1996.) They also scoured through photos and films confiscated during a large child porn sting in Amsterdam in 1993. On behalf of the Oakland County Child Killings investigation, they raided a warehouse containing illicit material and compared the four children’s photos with every image in the vast archive.
But after several months, they reported they had found nothing.
While Williams does not rule out the possibility that the four children were involved in the child pornography ring, all he knows for sure is: “Our victims’ pictures have never been found.”
As tempting as connecting these dots may be, without facts it is mere conjecture. “I know Busch’s name was on a ledger filled with Francis Shelden’s child porn customers and I have no doubt that Busch and Shelden knew each other,” Williams said. “There was no computer back then. The pedophiles had to contact each other at parties and exchange photos of kids. Shelden taught at Wayne State for a time and Busch took classes there. They were both part of Big Brothers. Other than that, I have no other evidence at this time.”
North Fox Island was purchased in August 1959 by Francis Duffield Shelden, a Grosse Pointe real estate developer, for approximately $2,000.12 (Shelden originally bought the island with his older brother, Alger Shelden, Jr., but Francis later bought him out.) A pilot and plane owner, Shelden immediately contracted to have a 3,000-foot aircraft runway built. He also built a loading dock, a small house and guest cottage, and several cabins. Shelden planned to make the island a resort destination for fellow aviation enthusiasts, but those plans never materialized. Sixteen years later, Shelden would vanish.
Born in 1928, the second son of Alger Shelden and Frances Pitts Duffield, Shelden became the newest addition to one of America’s most prestigious and wealthiest families. His great grandfather was Russell Alexander Alger, a former governor of Michigan, a U.S. senator and a U.S. secretary of war under the McKinley administration.
Alger was a founding member of the exclusive Yondotega Club, whose members included presidents Truman and Hoover, Teddy Roosevelt and the Prince of Wales. He had two children: Russell A. Alger, Jr., and Caroline Annette Alger.
Russell A. Alger, Jr. (Francis Shelden’s grandfather) was one of the founders of the Packard Motor Company. During the early 1900s, Alger built an Italian Renaissance villa on the banks of Lake St. Clair, one of the finest country estates to grace Grosse Pointe’s Lake Shore Drive. The estate was used as a branch museum until 1949, when it was deeded to a group of Grosse Pointers formulating plans for a library to serve as a memorial to the Grosse Pointe veterans of World War II. The War Memorial Center’s “purpose is to serve not only as a memorial to Grosse Pointers who served their country, but to persevere as a center for the educational and charitable purposes which enrich the community and promote the well-being of the public.”13
Caroline Annette Alger married Henry Dusenbury Shelden in 1887; the third of their four children, Alger Shelden, was Francis Shelden’s father.
Alger Shelden became a land developer. As president of the Shelden Land Co., he developed Rosedale Park and Grosse Pointe Farms, two of Detroit’s most prestigious subdivisions. In July 1964, Alger and his wife Frances gifted the Grosse Pointe War Memorial a 3,000-pound marble foundation in the center of a circular reflecting pool, complete with underwater lights, installed in front of the main entrance. The couple selected the fountain in New York that spring, prior to departing to Europe for six weeks. An avid sailor and yacht enthusiast, Alger Shelden’s family were regulars at both the Bayview and Grosse Pointe Yacht Clubs.
The young Francis Shelden attended Cranbrook School, an elite private boarding school in Chris Busch’s neighborhood of Bloomfield Hills, where he would later serve on the board. He earned a Bachelor of Art degree from Yale University and a Master of Science in Geology degree from Wayne State University. He completed his course work for a Ph.D. in Geology at the University of Michigan but stopped short of completing his doctoral thesis.
In 1976, Shelden owned approximately two million dollars in marketable securities, which he had inherited, a ski lodge in Aspen Colorado, a condominium in Ann Arbor on the Huron River, several cars, a Piper Seneca II airplane, N. Fox Island—at the time assessed at $312,000—all the stock in the FDS Land Company, and Windigo Ranch, Inc.14
Shelden led the consummate double life. In a December 1975 Detroit Free Press Sunday magazine article, Shelden was portrayed as a “rich, 47-year-old bachelor who flies his own plane, invests in the market, dabbles in oil, studies geology,” and is the owner of “one of the most private and exclusive hideaways imaginable.”15
When the reporter asked why he had never married, Shelden said: “I don’t have any reason why. I was close to being married once. I’m not what you’d call a woman hater. It’s lonely sometimes, but I think a lot of married people have lonely periods, too. And a man has a pretty good shake being single, more so than a woman.”
Shelden recounted running into an old girlfriend at a social gathering. He told her about his island, about the beauty and “isolation.”
“She looked at me as if I was absolutely mad, as if to say, ‘Thank God I didn’t marry Shelden.’”
Shortly after purchase, Shelden populated the island with seven deer hoping that the herd would multiply to allow for hunting for his friends. By 1974, his friends took 150 does and bucks. While he enjoyed venison stew, Shelden said he did not hunt himself. “I just personally don’t enjoy it,” he said. “I guess I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite. I plan their destruction.”16
As one online observer of the OCCK case put it: “When you look into what Frank Shelden’s family background actually was—their power, connections and social standing—the Fox Island revelations should have been a major, major scandal. Instead it was barely reported. Plenty of time to plan, cover tracks and to abscond prior to charges being brought. Neither is it a surprise that, once he did, he was effectively left alone.”
On July 23, 1976, six months after Mark Stebbins was abducted and murdered, Gerald S. Richards, a 29-year-old physical education instructor at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Port Huron (about 50 miles northeast of Detroit), was arrested for raping a 10-year-old boy.
Richards had raised suspicion when a student’s mother became concerned about his questionable behavior with boys in gym class—like measuring them for jock straps with a ruler while holding their penises. The son of a police officer who learned to use a camera by taking mugshots at his father’s precinct, Richards began working in an adult bookstore in Port Huron while attending college in 1968. He was also a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and made his services as a self-described master magician, escapist and illusionist available free of charge to area churches and schools.
By the time Gerald Richards landed in prison for his role in Brother Paul Children’s Mission on North Fox Island, he was trying to redeem himself. In March 1977, he granted an interview to journalist Ken Wooden for his CBS 60 minutes story on “Kiddie Porn.” Richards expressed his “sorrow and loss” for getting involved in “the child-sex business” (courtesy Ken Wooden).
By the time he was arrested, Richards was married with a small child, and making more money producing and selling child pornography than he did as an elementary school gym teacher. In testimony he gave in 1977 to a U.S. congressional committee investigating the sexual exploitation of children, he gave a bizarre explanation for why he turned to pornography years earlier: “My wife developed serious gynecological p
roblems and a boy became a sex substitute in a homosexual relationship.”17
Soon, Richards found “this was an area where maybe I could profit by selling more, producing more, and this particular person would obtain another model for me and that’s basically how I got into it, on a local level.” Richards produced both still photographs and movies. Over a two-year period, he estimated his customers numbered “maybe six hundred.”
The younger the child, he said, the more in demand. “I was teetering between wrong and right,” he testified. “The money was too good. I just couldn’t stop. … I’d see all that mail coming in and thought of the money.”18
Richards met Francis Shelden through a carefully coded classified ad designed to match like-minded sexual perversions in Better Life Monthly, a publication, representing “an international organization seeking liberation for boys and boy lovers. …. with articles, photos, poems, etc. relating to the subject of boy love with ads that put you in touch with others of like interest.”19
Shelden and Richards corresponded and then met. The two travelled together, often to Chicago, where contacts with boys were made with porno shop proprietors or sleazy motel owners. North Fox Island was an ideal setting to film pornography.
In December 1975, Francis Shelden gave a reporter and photographer a tour of North Fox Island, which was described as “one of the most private and exclusive hideaways imaginable … which Shelden shares only with his deer herd, the birds and a few close friends” (photograph by Al Kamuda, Detroit Free Press via Newspapers.com).
The Snow Killings Page 24
