I Know My First Name Is Steven

by Echols, Mike

  "We have got to get over the old adage that we have to keep the family intact. There is no qualification to become a parent. You couldn't teach school without some kind of degree; you couldn't practice law; you couldn't repair a Mercedes without some type of schooling. I believe in parents' rights to a certain extent, but when you are given the greatest gift of all—the birth of a child—you can turn that child into a Henry Lee Lucas [the partner of his son's murderer, Ottis Toole] mobile murderer, or into a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

  "Let's get over that assumption that everybody is a good parent. . . that old assumption by the court system and social services. We have tens of thousands of children in graves that were returned to their parents by social services, or not removed from their homes, because their parents weren't good parents. Who is responsible for those kids? Society! We are all responsible for all the children, whether they are our own naturally or not. Children are God's special little people. They need special protection. They certainly can't physically take care of themselves. . . . "

  Concerning the criminal justice system's handling of those who murder children, Walsh observed: "If life imprisonment was life imprisonment in the United States, then we wouldn't have so many murderers that get out of prison and continue to murder children. The penalties for the murder of children or crimes against children should be stiffened. The death penalty is only applicable in the most heinous of situations. [But] when an individual is sentenced to death, he has gone through the finest criminal justice system in the known history of the world. He has had the benefit of that, and he should be held responsible for his crime."

  Also in attendance at the Colorado State University conference was Jay Howell, the first Executive Director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and one of his greatest concerns is the use of the word "stranger" when cautioning children.

  " 'Stranger,' " he said, "is a word we do not advise using with children. Children will tell you that if they see somebody on the way to school everyday—even people who introduce themselves to the child by name—then they are not strangers. They don't understand 'stranger' because it suggests somebody who is weird-looking. The other half of the problem with using that word is that sixty to ninety percent of the people who commit crimes against children are known in some way to the child. You have told the kid to look out for the wrong person! Children just aren't getting the right messages. We would like for them to get better messages that they can understand . . . messages like, No one should be picking you up, Nobody should be making secrets, Nobody should be taking pictures in the bathing suit areas . . . those kinds of things." And Howell stressed the inherent danger of parents allowing children to wear T-shirts with their names emblazoned on them.

  Many people are surprised to learn that, according to Derek Hudson's biography of Lewis Carroll (Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography, Derek Hudson, Clark-son N. Potter, Inc., New York, 1977), the author of the beloved children's classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was a pedophile who was sexually attracted to little girls. According to Hudson, portions of Carroll's diaries clearly show him wrestling with his conscience over his hidden sexual feelings for young girls, although no evidence remains that he ever actually had sex with any of them.

  When he wrote his most famous book in 1862, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—Lewis Carroll was a nom de plume—was a respected mathematics don at Oxford's Christ College, an Anglican Church deacon at Oxford's Christ Church Cathedral, and a pioneer photographer of children, taking many nudes and seminudes of little girls, for in Victorian England nude photographs of children were considered asexual and thus acceptable. Indeed, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, collected many such photographs.

  Dodgson was a heterosexual pedophile fixated on prepubescent girls. In a letter to an individual who had offered him a lucrative position at a public school for boys, Dodgson said, "I am fond of children (except boys) . . . boys are not in my line: I think they are a mistake." And in a letter to Harry Furniss—the illustrator for Dodgson's book Sylvie and Bruno—Dodgson wrote, "Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely. . . . I confess I do not admire naked boys. They always seem to need clothes—whereas one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up."

  There are hundreds of thousands of Dodgsons in America today, such as David Tichnor of Chicago, a notorious heterosexual pedophile who is well known to Chicago Police, the F.B.I., and U.S. Customs agents. Tichnor founded and operates the Lewis Carroll Guild, which—recalling Dodgson's dark secret—publishes the periodical Wonderland. Unfortunately, though, the Guild is but one of several public organizations in the United States which openly advocate and promote their raison d'être:sexual liaisons between adults and children.

  Another such organization is the Rene Guyon Society of Beverly Hills, California, whose spokesperson, Tim O'Hara, occasionally pops up on television and radio talk shows. One of the Society's missives—a single, sloppily printed sheet—bears the group's motto: "Sex by year eight or else its [sic] too late!" The paper also states, "Because of our efforts, the day will come, and come soon, when children will have sex [sic] freedom (provided contraceptives are used) of a bisexual nature with other children an [sic] with adults. They will be allowed to happily participate in kid porn activity. The soonest of all this [is] to come about depends on your sending funds and offering to provide your special talents."

  However, the real winner in this nefarious category has got to be NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which is headquartered in New York City, "with chapters in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto." As stated in a brochure they distribute, "Our membership reflects a cross-section of the population. It includes members of both sexes, teachers, artists, clerks, writers, students, social workers, cooks, professors, taxi drivers, editors, priests and ministers, prisoners, and so on."

  In late 1984 I began writing to NAMBLA's New York address, falsely representing myself as a wealthy homosexual pedophile so as to gain access to NAMBLA members and material. Finally, on April 12, 1985, my efforts were rewarded when, while I was in New York on business, NAMBLA's National Membership Secretary, Robert Rhodes, phoned me at my hotel from his office with the Social Security Administration in Newark, New Jersey, and invited me to be his guest at that evening's meeting of the NAMBLA Collective, the executive editorial committee for the NAMBLA Bulletin, "Voice of the North American Man/Boy Love Association." (Indeed, Rhodes had swallowed whole my story that I wanted to help NAMBLA financially.)

  I met Rhodes at NAMBLA's postal box at the midtown post office on West 38th Street and the two of us then traveled by subway to the apartment of Editor Renato Corazza, located on the fifth floor of 222 East 10th Street. On arriving, I was introduced to and warmly greeted as a fellow homosexual pedophile by Corazza; Peter Melzer, NAMBLA's Treasurer; David Thorstad, NAMBLA's Founder and President; and Peter Reed, who was introduced to me as "a teacher with the New York City schools."

  Over the next five hours I was privy to this groups intimate conversations as I helped them stuff their current NAMBLA Bulletin into preaddressed nine-by-twelve-inch plain brown envelopes marked "First Class," with a return address reading simply, "P.O. Box 174, Midtown Station, New York, NY 10018." Finishing this, I was asked to singlehandedly sort the four hundred and twenty issues by the addresses on the labels. I was only too happy to oblige: almost seventy-five percent of the labels bore the recipient's name, and some of those even had a title and/or organizational name which identifies the recipient as one who comes into contact with children (i.e., ministers, rabbis, social workers, teachers, youth choir directors, etc.). Also, I saw that virtually every state in the union has members of this organization receiving this monthly communique advocating sexual liaisons between men and boys.

  I sorted the individual copies while Melzer packed one hundred to ship to Rock Thatcher (P.O. Box 10675, Phoenix, Arizona 85064), Director of NAMBLA's Prison Ministry (indeed, it is called
this), which each month attempts to surreptitiously mail the Bulletin to incarcerated homosexual pedophiles in prisons all over the United States. And as he worked, Melzer paused to proudly show me NAMBLA's financial records, files which clearly indicated that NAMBLA receives regular, large contributions from a variety of celebrity member supporters, including internationally prominent novelists and poets.

  As an unknown "newcomer," my being given the task of stuffing and sorting the NAMBLA Bulletin was contrary to Rhodes's own lofty pronouncement in a previous issue in response to "M.R., Hawaii," who wrote expressing his concern: "A NAMBLA member incarcerated for four years has warned me to discontinue my membership in NAMBLA and other boy-lover organizations. He warned that just sending for and receiving NAMBLA publications is very dangerous and that agents consider NAMBLA a threat to the U.S. government. Please advise!"

  To "M.R.," Rhodes pompously responded: "Be assured that these rumors are unequivocally false. No one has ever been arrested simply because of membership in NAMBLA. NAMBLA's mail is handled only by a small group of longtime members. Our records are kept in highly secure locations. We need not panic, but we should be prudent."

  Early in that truly unforgettable evening, when I referred to one of those present as a "pedophile," Rhodes quickly corrected me: "Pedophile is an unfortunate choice of a word; we would prefer boy lover." Later, when the subject of a letter from a heterosexual pedophile David Tichnor came up—he had written to Melzer suggesting a closer alliance between his Lewis Carroll Guild and NAMBLA—Rhodes haughtily remarked, "Personally, I can't understand a man being into little girls."

  Before I left the meeting those present tried to induce me to become a member of NAMBLA so that I could purchase back issues of the Bulletin and receive future issues. It was an offer I could not refuse. In those issues of this abhorrent publication I found many insights into NAMBLA and its members.

  The May 1984 issue featured a poem on the back cover entitled Adam—"Dedicated to Adam Walsh, dead at six"—by boy lover Russell T. Kinkade. Also, inside that issue appeared a short piece by Nat M. Black, who recounted his experiences as a soccer coach for a team of ten-year-old boys and his finagling a couple of unsuspecting mothers into allowing him to have two of the lads stay with him overnight, a night during which he took sexual liberties with both.

  The December 1984 Bulletin had a feature article "by a busy boy lover" entitled Boys at Sport. The article gave detailed advice to those pedophiles who wanted to follow in Mr. Black's footsteps and become soccer league coaches. Said the pedophile/writer: "As long as the league is running decently, it will self-perpetuate with new young boys coming in every year. . . . Occasionally, exposure to adult males is a consideration in a mother's signing her son up for a sport. While the majority have caring fathers, you shouldn't assume that because a boy is in one or more seasonal sports, he's too busy to have time for a caring adult friend."

  In the May 1985 issue, Rhodes used his monthly "Quid Nunc" column to discuss his chastisement for his column's content: "Several members (including our kindly Editor) felt there was too much bad news. The point was that readers are depressed by reading only a list (and graphic details) of arrests and convictions [of fellow pedophiles], and thereby are inhibited from acting for their own liberation. . . . One Collective member raised the point . . . that I am using the language of our oppressors. This involves using the language of violence (i.e., molestation, assault, rape) about acts often notably consensual, non-violent [sic], and pleasurable." In fact, this vapid periodical is always filled with such prevarication.

  A case in point is Richard Boyer's NAMBLA Bulletin column "Boys in the Media," featuring television program notes and motion picture reviews pointing out those which contain scenes with boys wearing underwear (or, Boyer hoped, nothing at all) and ripped-off, sometimes-revealing photographs of boy actors (on one occasion a photograph of a young, half-naked Ricky Schroeder). But the March 1985 issue had sad news indeed: "Former Steering Committee member and Bulletin Collective Member Richard Boyer has been arrested and charged with having sex with two underaged boys, eleven and fourteen, in the Bronx."

  On the whole, though, the really frightening thing about NAMBLA's members—especially the likes of David Thorstad and Robert Rhodes—are their articulate, astute efforts to spread their skewed gospel of legalizing sex between men and boys. Whereas they are reasonably careful that the material they publish is protected by the First Amendment, they are not so careful in their private lives, thus the unfortunate Mr. Boyer and his arrest.

  However, NAMBLA and their ilk are only part of the problem. The most devastating stories of sexual assaults of children include those of the victims of gruesome murders committed by serial killer-homosexual pedophile Arthur Gary Bishop on five boys in and around Salt Lake City, Utah, from late 1979 until mid 1983. Bishop—with a long yet neglected history of sexually abusing boys dating back to his days as a teen-aged Mormon Boy Scout leader—had the same sexual desires as do NAMBLA's members, but he killed his prepubescent and pubescent victims to prevent them from telling about his photographs of and assaults on their naked young bodies and even occasionally practiced necrophilia on their dead bodies.

  Bishop's first victim was four-year-old Alonzo Daniels, who disappeared on October 16, 1979. On November 9, 1980, eleven-year-old Kim Petersen went to meet a man who wanted to buy his roller-skate wheels at a street corner. He never returned home. On October 20, 1981, four-year-old Danny Davis went to the grocery store with his grandfather. He vanished without a trace while playing in the toy aisle. June 22, 1983, was Troy Ward's sixth birthday; he went for a birthday ride on a motorcycle with an unknown man and never returned home for his ice cream and cake. And on July 14, 1983, the oldest, thirteen-year-old Graeme Cunningham, disappeared.

  On that November Sunday in 1980, Kim Petersen walked to a street corner near his home to sell his skate wheels to a man he had met at a skating rink the night before. When Kim arrived at the corner, Bishop talked the boy into accompanying him, drove the lad into the desert southwest of Salt Lake City, and at gunpoint forced the eleven-year-old to strip naked and pose for a series of pornographic pictures. But as Kim started to get dressed, Bishop shot the youngster. Kim begged for his life, but another shot rang out and ended the blond eleven-year-old's life. Bishop dumped the limp body into a shallow grave.

  About life without her son, Kim's mother said: "The real hard thing is—you know, we have two little girls now—it is such a feeling of loss, not to have Kim here with us as part of our family . . . and for the girls not to ever be able to meet him or be with him. We told our first girl, Edwina—she's four now—about Kim, and that she does have a brother, and she knows she had a brother Kim, and she talks about him quite often, in fact. Her friends come over to play with her and the first thing she says is, 'My Kim lives with Jesus.'

  "And she will go shopping with me and she will see a boy that looks like Kim's picture, and she'll point him out to me and ask, 'Is that my Kimmie?' '

  Thirteen-year-old Graeme Cunningham was small for his age, a boy with a mischievous smile and an affectionate nature, the youngest son of Scottish immigrants John and Shona Cunningham. Graeme was deeply loved and doted on by his eighteen-year-old sister Jacklene, and his older brother Ian, sixteen. For over a year before Graeme disappeared his best friend had been Jeff, a thirteen-year-old boy living with Art Bishop.

  Although their contacts with Bishop had been casual, John and Shona felt that they had come to know the man—Jeffs father, they assumed—over the year prior to July 1983. So when Bishop asked permission for Graeme to accompany him and Jeff on a camping trip to the red rock canyons around Moab, Utah, they approved. It would be two weeks and their son would be dead before the Cunninghams would learn that Jeff was not Bishop's son and that the man had been sexually abusing his young live-in charge for two years.

  After their return from Moab, on the night of July 14, 1983, Bishop telephoned Graeme and told him that he could earn some money fo
r their planned trip to Disneyland if he would come to his apartment and help him to deliver something. Art also told Graeme not to tell anyone that he had called, nor where he was going.

  Graeme went to Bishop's apartment, where the man convinced the boy that he was being blackmailed and that he needed to get some nude photographs of Graeme for the blackmailer. Very reluctantly, Graeme undressed and posed naked for a dozen fron tally nude Polaroids before he started to get dressed and tell Bishop never to tell his mother. At this, Bishop picked up a hammer and struck Graeme in the back of his head, gravely injuring the boy.

  Assuring Graeme that he would be all right and that they would still go to Disneyland, Bishop carried his groggy victim to the bathroom, filled the tub with water, and drowned Graeme before undressing and fondling the lad's naked body. Later that night he drove up remote Cottonwood Creek, dumped Graeme's body, and then picked up Jeff at a local amusement park.

  Even with the search for Graeme under way, Art and Jeff went to Disneyland on July 16 while the Cunningham's, their friends, and the Salt Lake City Police searched frantically for Graeme.

  When Art and Jeff returned to Salt Lake City, they immediately drove to the Cunninghams' home, where Bishop told Shona, " 'Well, the trip would have been more fun if Graeme had been there, because I was looking forward to showing him all these new things he had never seen before. I'd have waited a week to make the trip if I had thought it could help find Graeme.' "

  About Bishop's visit, Shona remarked, "It wasn't a real abnormal conversation, other than the fact that I was having it with the man who had come into our lives and murdered our son."

  And Shona recounted a conversation Jeff told her he had had with Bishop on their way back, when Jeff had said to Bishop: "You lived in the same apartment house as Alonzo Daniels; you lived close by Danny Davis; you were supposed to meet Kim Petersen; you don't live too far away from where Troy Ward lived; and you were friends with Graeme? And Jeff was going through this turmoil of, 'My God! . . .' "