Disturbing History - DH Ep:51 The Odyssey Project: Kids For Sale

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

In August of 1973, Houston police were still pulling bodies from the dirt floor of Dean Corll’s boat shed when a frightened young man in Dallas picked up the phone and called the FBI. What he had witnessed inside a Cole Avenue apartment convinced him that the horrors unfolding 240 miles south were not isolated—and that the man he was living with might be part of something far larger.Days later, Dallas police raided the apartment. What they uncovered would expose one of the most extensive child trafficking operations ever documented in the United States: a mail-order network that sold access to children, servicing clients in at least thirty-five states and multiple foreign countries. The volume of evidence was staggering. It filled the bed of a pickup truck.Tens of thousands of index cards—estimates range from thirty thousand to over one hundred thousand—each meticulously cataloging the names, preferences, and payment histories of paying customers.Lieutenant Harold Hancock of the Dallas Police Department would later state publicly that the cards contained the names of prominent public figures and federal employees. Those cards were forwarded to the State Department. And then, without explanation, they were destroyed.Tonight on Disturbing History, we pull back the curtain on a story that links two of the most infamous serial killers in American history—Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy—to a nationwide child exploitation network that operated openly, repeatedly resurfaced after arrests, and appeared to enjoy a level of protection rarely afforded to criminals of any kind. At the center of this story is John David Norman, a man arrested dozens of times over five decades, who continued running trafficking operations from behind bars, rebuilt his networks every time they were dismantled, and whose client lists somehow vanished before investigators could ever examine the names that mattered most.We follow Norman’s trail from the Odyssey Foundation in Dallas to the Delta Project in Chicago, where his closest associate, Phillip Paske, would later surface on the payroll of John Wayne Gacy. Prosecutors were aware of that connection. It was never introduced at trial.We examine congressional hearings that briefly exposed these networks, only for investigations to stall, evidence to disappear, and accountability to evaporate.We explore the connected operation on North Fox Island in Michigan and its potential links to the still-unsolved Oakland County Child Killer case. Across states and decades, the same patterns emerge: shared mailing lists, overlapping personnel, recycled victims, and systemic failure at every level meant to stop it.And finally, we ask the question that lingers beneath all of it—whose names were written on those index cards, and why were they destroyed by the very institutions tasked with uncovering the truth?A content warning before we begin: This episode contains detailed discussion of child sexual abuse, child trafficking, and serial murder. The material is deeply disturbing. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide

through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victim. Sometimes, it's rewritten by The Disturbed. There's a particular kind of evil that walks among us in plain sight. It wears a suit and tie.

It sits on charity boards and writes checks to children's organizations. It shakes hands with politicians and poses for photographs at fundraisers. And when this evil is finally explained, When the mask slips and the truth threatens to spill out into the light of day, something curious happens. Evidence disappears. Witnesses go silent. Files are misfiled, misplaced, or declared irrelevant to the investigation.

And the names on those damning lists, the prominent public figures and federal employees who paid good money to abuse children, those names vanish into the ether of government bureaucracy, never to be seen again. Tonight on disturbing history, we're going to pull back the curtain on one of the most suppressed stories in American criminal history. This isn't a story about a single predator operating in isolation. This is a story about a network, a system, an infrastructure of abuse that stretched across the entire United States, reached into Canada and Europe, and operated for decades under the noses of law enforcement. This is a story that connects two of the most prolific serial killers this country has ever known.

Dean Coral, the Candy Man of Houston, and John Wayne Gasey, the Killer Clown of Chicago. For nearly 40 years, the verifiable connections between these killers and a nationwide child trafficking network were suppressed from the public record. Tonight, we're going to examine what was known, who knew it, and why the full story was never told. This is the story of the Odyssey Foundation, based in Dallas, Texas. The Delta Project, Creative Corps, and MC publications, all operating out of Chicago. And a publication called Handy Andy, produced in rural Pennsylvania. Different names, different cities, different decades. But all of these operations share a common thread.

A single man who operated for over 40 years was arrested dozens of times and somehow kept walking out of prison to victimize more children. His name was John David Norman. And the question that should keep you up at night isn't just what he did. It's who else knew about it, who paid for those subscriptions, whose names were on those index cards, those 30,000 to 100,000 index cards that were seized by Dallas Police, sent to the United States State Department, and then, inexplicably, destroyed.

Lieutenant Harold Hancock of the Dallas Police Department told the Chicago Tribune in May of 1977 that those index cards contain the names of prominent public figures and federal employees. Think about that. A police lieutenant on the record stating that the client list of a child trafficking operation included people in positions of power and trust. And then the evidence was destroyed by the very government agency that should have investigated it. This is disturbing history. This story deserves to be told in full.

We're going to trace the history of these operations from their origins in the early 1970s through their final collapse in the late 1980s. We're going to examine the documented connections to two serial killers. We're going to look at the congressional hearings that expose these networks and the inexplicable failures that allowed them to continue operating. And throughout this episode, I'm going to be very clear about what is documented fact and what remains allegation or speculation. This is important, because this story has been muddied over the years by people who don't

distinguish between the two. There's enough horror in the documented facts. We don't need to embellish. So, settle in. This one's going to be a wild and disturbing ride. To understand the context of this story, we need to start with what was happening in Texas in the summer of 1973, because it was the discovery of one horror that would inadvertently expose another. August 8, 1973, Pasadena, Texas, a suburb of Houston. A teenage boy named Elmer Wayne Henley put three bullets into the chest of a 33-year-old man named Dean Arnold Coral. Henley then calls the police and tells them something that will horrify the nation. Dean Coral had been killing boys. Lots of them.

Henley had been helping him do it. So had another teenager named David Owen Brooks. What followed was the most extensive excavation of human remains in American history up to that point. Investigators found 17 bodies buried in a boat storage shed in Houston. Six more at a beach on high island. Four, by Lake Sam Rayburn. At least 27 young men and boys, some as young as 13, had been kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, and murdered. The victims had been lured with promises of parties, alcohol, and drugs. They'd been bound to a plywood torture board.

They'd been subjected to unspeakable acts. And then they'd been killed, wrapped in plastic, and buried. Dean Coral had worked at candy factories run by his mother, earning him the nickname The Candyman. He'd been using that access to befriend and groom children for years. The full scope of his crimes may never be known. Recent forensic analysis suggests there may have been as many as 30 to 35 victims, with somebody still undiscovered. But here's what makes this relevant to our story tonight.

In the aftermath of Coral's death, his accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley gave a statement. statement to police. In that statement, Henley said that Coral had claimed to be involved with a Dallas-based organization that, and I'm quoting directly here, bought and sold boys, ran whores and dope and stuff like that. A Dallas-based organization that bought and sold boys, that claim would take on new significance within days. August 9, 1973, the day after Coral's death. While Houston police were still beginning to comprehend the scope of what they'd uncovered, a 21-year-old man named Charles Brissendine was in Dallas, terrified for his life. Brissendine had been trafficked to Dallas by an organization called the Odyssey Foundation.

He'd answered an ad and been invited to the city as a fellow by a sponsor. What he'd found when he arrived was not what he'd expected. While staying in the apartment of the organization's leader, Brisandine had stumbled across photographs. Photographs of young boys. Some of them had the word kill written on them. Brissendine had been watching the news. He'd seen the coverage of the Houston murders.

He knew what those photographs might mean. According to reports, Brissendine became agitated whenever the Houston murders were mentioned over the phone. He was scared. He suspected that the man who was housing him might be connected to the horrors that were being uncovered just 240 miles to the south. Brisbane contacted Rob Schivers,

the Dallas correspondent for a gay magazine called The Advocate. shivers told him to call the FBI immediately. Brissendine did, and that phone call set in motion a chain of events that should have brought down one of the largest child exploitation networks in American history. On August 13, 1973, the Dallas Police Department received a memo from the FBI detailing what Brissendine had told them. He believed there was a connection to the Houston murders. The next day, August 14th, Dallas Police raided an apartment at 3,000.

3716 Coal Avenue. What detectives found in that apartment was staggering in its scope. According to news reports from the time, they seized enough material to fill a pickup truck. There were booklets containing photographs and contact information of teenage boys and young men. There were pamphlets advertising the services of the Odyssey Foundation. There was pornographic material depicting minors. There was camera equipment and photo engraving equipment used to produce the publications. There was marijuana, and then there were the index cards, 30,000 of them. Some reports would later suggest the number was closer to 50,000, possibly even 100,000. Each card was meticulously organized. Each one contained the name and contact information of a

client, their sexual preferences, the types of boys they were interested in. These cards represented a customer base spanning 35 states and multiple foreign countries. Think about the organizational infrastructure that represents. This wasn't some amateur operation. This was a business, a nationwide mail order business in the exploitation of children. And the man running it had built a database of his customers that would be the envy of any legitimate corporation. The man at the center of this operation was John David Norman, also known as John Paul Norman, born October 13, 1927, in Ada, Oklahoma. At the time of his arrest, he was 45 years old. Here's where the story takes its first disturbing turn.

Because John David Norman's 1973 arrest in Dallas was not his first encounter with law enforcement, not by a long shot. Norman's early life reads like that of a promising young American. A July 1944 article from his hometown newspaper, The Ida Weekly News, described the 16-year-old Norman as a remarkable young man. He was working as a radio and engineer for Station K-T-R-H in Houston, where his family had moved the previous year. He was planning to attend Northwestern University. He had won scholarships. He wrote commercial jingles. A 1939 newspaper profile in the Ata Evening News had described the 11-year-old Norman

as a top-performing student, a skilled pianist, and a Cub Scout who enjoyed the outdoors. By all appearances, this was a boy destined for success. Norman did attend Northwestern University on a scholarship from radio station Wend in Chicago. From 1946 through the 1950s, he wrote commercial jingles for hundreds of products. He attended Lamar High School in Houston, where he was part of the Student Council and the National Honor Society. But something was deeply terribly wrong with John David Norman. The first documented evidence appears in 1954, when he was arrested for sexual assault in Houston. He was 26 years old.

He was arrested again in 1956. The disposition of those cases is unclear, lost to time and poor record keeping. By 1960, Norman had his first conviction for sex crimes against children on his record. By 1963, he'd been convicted of sexual assault in California. By 1971, he'd been convicted in federal court for sending obscene material through the mail and sentenced to 16 months. So here was a man with a document. history of child predation, spanning nearly two decades, a man who had been convicted multiple

times, a man who had been to prison for mailing obscene material. And yet, by 1973, this man was running a nationwide child trafficking operation out of a Dallas apartment. How? How does a convicted child predator build an empire of abuse with seemingly no interference from law enforcement? That question will haunt every chapter of this story. The Odyssey Foundation wasn't some fly-by-night operation. It was organized with the precision of a legitimate business. Let me walk you through how it worked, because understanding the infrastructure is key to understanding how it operated for so long.

The Foundation presented itself as a support group for gay men. Now, in 1973, this carried far less scrutiny than it would today. The gay rights movement was in its infancy. Homosexuality was still classified, as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Gay men faced tremendous discrimination and often operated in the shadows. Norman exploited this. He used the legitimate need for community and support as camouflage for his predatory operations.

Norman and his associates would approach young men at bus stations, targeting runaways and vulnerable teenagers. These were kids who had often fled abusive homes, kids who were hungry and scared, kids who were looking for someone to help them. The predators presented themselves as that help. The boys who were recruited, typically between the ages of 13 and 19, were referred to in the organization's materials as fellows. They were photographed for the organization's booklets and catalogs. Their physical descriptions were recorded. Their quote, availability was documented. Men who subscribed to the Odyssey Foundation's materials were called sponsors. For a membership fee of $15, they would receive catalogues featuring photographs and descriptions of available boys.

This was a mail order catalog for children, sent through the United States Postal Service to addresses in 35 states and multiple foreign countries. If a sponsor wanted to arrange a meeting with a particular fellow, they would contact Norman. Norman would then arrange for the boy to be trafficked to the sponsor's location. The boy would stay with the sponsor for one to three days on average before being moved to the next client. Let me say that again so it sinks in. Children were being shipped across the country like packages, passed from predator to predator.

Their abuse scheduled and coordinated by a central clearinghouse, and the entire operation was financed through mail order subscriptions. The operation was international in scope. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. One document was a new one document, case involved a 16-year-old boy from Independence, Missouri, who was trafficked to a client named Charles Railing in Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Redling then took the boy on a trip to

Europe. This wasn't just interstate trafficking. This was a global enterprise. Now, I need to be very careful here about distinguishing between documented facts and allegations that remain unproven. This is important because this story has been distorted over the years by people who conflate the two. Let me lay out what we actually know. Elmer Wayne Henley told police that Dean Coral claimed to be involved with a Dallas-based organization that bought and sold boys. That statement is on the record. Charles Brisandine, the informant who led police to the Odyssey Foundation, suspected a connection to the Houston murders. He became agitated when the murders were mentioned. He feared he was in danger. In 1975, the Houston Police Department reported finding photographs

depicting 11 of Coral's victims during a raid on a child prostitution ring. This was reported in contemporary news coverage. Norman had previously lived in Houston, as evidenced by his 1954 and 1956 arrests there. He had ties to the city. However, and this is crucial, Benny M. Newman, the commander of the police youth division in Houston, stated at the time that there was no known connection between Norman's operations and Coral's murders. Police stated they did not think Coral's other accomplice, David Owen Brooks, was involved with the Odyssey Foundation. They said they had no evidence establishing a connection, though they

notably did not rule out Coral and Henley as being involved. So what do we make of this? The honest answer is, we don't know with certainty. There are documented connections that raise serious questions. There are also official law enforcement statements that found no definitive link. What we can say is that both operations existed simultaneously. Both targeted the same demographic of vulnerable teenage boys, and at minimum, they operated in overlapping territories during overlapping time periods. What we can also say is that the investigation into any connection was effectively shut down. Houston Police, under Chief Herman Short, faced heavy criticism for their handling of missing persons reports prior to the discovery of the

murders. Many of the victims had been reported missing, and their families had been told the boys were runaways. There was, according to later investigators, something of a public relations campaign to end these investigations as quickly as possible. Houston wanted to be Space City, not Murder City. The investigation into any broader network was not pursued with vigor. And now we come to the part of this story that should make your blood boil, because what happened to the evidence seized in Dallas is one of the most egregious examples of investigative failure, or perhaps something worse, in American law enforcement history. Remember those index cards. The 30,000 to 100,000 cards containing the names, addresses, and sexual preferences of clients

in 35 states. Lieutenant Harold Hancock of the Dallas Police told the Chicago Tribune in May of 1977 that those cards contained the names of prominent public figures. and federal employees. He said that his department had separated out all the index cards containing the names of Texas public and state employees for special investigation. The cards were sent to the United States State Department, and then they were destroyed.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is not speculation. This was confirmed on the record by State Department counselor Matthew Nymetz. When pressed by reporters from the Chicago Tribune about what had happened to this evidence, Nimitz stated that the State Department destroyed the index cards after determining them to be, and I'm quoting, not relevant to any fraud case concerning a passport. Passport fraud.

That was their explanation. A database containing the names of tens of thousands of men who had paid for access to trafficked children. A database that a Dallas police lieutenant said included prominent public figures and federal employees in Washington, D.C., and the State Department's explanation for destroying it, was that it was that it wasn't relevant to passport fraud. When reporters pointed out what Lieutenant Hancock had said about the cards containing names of prominent people, the State Department had no explanation for why they had not forwarded this evidence to the FBI or postal inspectors.

They offered no further comment. Meanwhile, John David Norman was released on bail. He was charged with possessing marijuana, conspiracy to commit sodomy, and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. And then he jumped bail. and fled to Chicago. The client list was gone. The evidence was gone.

And Norman was free to rebuild his empire. By late August or early September of 1973, just weeks after his Dallas operation was raided, John David Norman had relocated to Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was using a new alias, Steve Gerwell, and he'd moved in with Charles Railing, one of his former clients from the Odyssey Foundation.

Rayling was the man who had taken a 16-year-old boy from Missouri on a trip to Europe. He was exactly the kind of trusted client who would provide Norman with safe harbor while he regrouped. Norman didn't waste any time. Within weeks of arriving in Homewood, he was back to his old patterns. He began sexually abusing teenage boys in the area, enticing them with beer, showing them pornography, and committing acts of molestation. He groomed them the same way he had groomed boys and dad. Alice, using alcohol and pornography to lower their inhibitions and normalize abuse.

On October 31st, 1973, Halloween night, Homewood Police received an anonymous tip. Someone called to report that a man calling himself Steve Gerwell was sexually abusing boys in the area. Norman was out of town when police came looking, but his roommate, Charles Railing, cooperated with investigators. When Norman returned to Homewood on November 14th, He was arrested and charged with eight counts of indecent liberties with a child and eight counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Police identified him from Dallas Police Department photographs and confirmed that Steve Gerwell was actually John David Norman,

the man behind the Odyssey Foundation. Norman was held in Cook County Jail to await trial, and it was there, behind bars, that he would do something remarkable in its audacity. He would continue running his operation. This is one of the most astonishing details in this entire story. John David Norman, sitting in Cook County Jail awaiting trial on child molestation charges, used the jail's printing press to continue his operations. From behind bars, Norman began publishing a newsletter for a new organization he called the Delta Project.

He sent out at least three issues of what he called John Norman's newsletter. The newsletters were mailed to subscribers across the country, advertising his new operation and soliciting clients. In these newsletters, Norman laid out an ambitious vision. The Delta Project, he claimed, aimed to provide educational, travel, and self-development opportunities for qualified young men of character and integrity. It was couched in the language of mentorship and personal growth, but police knew exactly what it was.

Norman described a system of what he called Delta dorms. These would be houses across the United States, where two to four teenage boys, referred to as cadets, would be housed under the supervision of an adult don. The dons would apply through Norman's organization, and cadets would be assigned to them. Police alleged, and the structure makes it obvious, that these cadets were underage prostitutes

being placed in the homes of paying clients. Norman was describing a franchise model for child sexual abuse, a network of satellite locations across the country, each housing multiple victims, each overseen by a paying customer. It was in Cook County Jail that Norman met the man who had become his closest associate for the next several years. His name was Philip Ronald Pask. Pask was born June 11, 1953 in Chicago. His father worked for the city's 33rd ward, giving the family political connections.

By all accounts, Pask had a violent temper. He was openly bisexual and frequently cross-dressed. He had a lengthy criminal record that began at age 17 in 1971, with convictions for drug dealing, theft, and battery. And he was also involved in a murder. On November 7, 1973, just a week before Norman was arrested in Homewood, Pask and two accomplices named Alfred Bone and Richard Angel, planned to rob a 65-year-old coin collector named Louis McCurley.

The robbery took place at 7 in the evening in McCurley's second-floor apartment on West Irving Park Road in Chicago. McCurley was home watching television with his wife. Bone was armed with a knife. Angel had a handgun. The robbery went horribly wrong. McCurley was killed. Through a plea deal,

Pask and Angel's murder charges were dropped in exchange for guilty pleas to attempted armed robbery. Both served prison time and were then placed on probation. Bone received a sentence of 14 to 20 years. So here was Philip Pask. young, violent, connected through his father to Chicago's political machine, a convicted accessory to murder now on probation. And Norman saw in him the perfect right-hand man. In fact, Norman even began referring to Pask in his newsletters as his, right-hand man. He made pleas for bail

for both himself and Pask. When Pask was released on probation in 1976, he immediately went to work running the Delta project from the outside while Norman remained incarcerated. Pask registered both his name and Normans to a Chicago post office box. The two shared an apartment on Wrightwood Avenue. On Pask's probation records from May and December of 1976, it's documented that he was working for Norman and making $3 an hour. His probation officer knew. It was in the file.

And apparently, no one thought to ask what kind of work a convicted accessory to murder was doing for a convicted child molester. Here's where this story becomes almost darkly comedic in its absurdity, if the subject matter weren't so horrifying. While running a child prostitution ring on behalf of his imprisoned mentor, Philip Pask got a day job. He became a children's supervisor at a fire department swimming pool in Chicago. Pask was hired through the Comprehensive Employment Training Act, known as CETA. This was a federal jobs program, meaning that that while Pask was trafficking children for Norman's Delta Project operation, he was being paid with your tax dollars to supervise other children at a public swimming pool. A convicted

accessory to murder with documented employment by a convicted child molester, working as a children's supervisor at a public facility. The hiring process either didn't include a background check, or someone didn't care what that background check revealed. Pask would hold this job until August of 1977, when the Chicago Tribune Exposé finally made his activities too public to ignore. In the spring of 1976, while still awaiting trial on charges related to the Homewood offenses, John David Norman was bailed out of Cook County Jail. The bail amount was $36,000, $36,000 in 1976. Adjusted for inflation, that's over $200,000 today.

Someone paid that money to get Norman out of jail. Who? An unknown person from California. That's all we know. Their identity has never been publicly disclosed. Some wealthy individual in California paid a small fortune to free a known child predator from jail. We don't know who they were. We don't know if they were a client, a fellow predator, or something else entirely. We just know that someone with significant resources wanted Norman back on the streets. Once out on bail, Norman moved into a basement apartment and began publishing a new newsletter called Hermes. The name was significant. Hermes was also the name of an existing underground publication in the boy lover community. By using this name, Norman was signaling

to a pre-existing network of predators that his operation was back online. In a May 1977 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Norman claimed to have sent the newsletter to over 7,000 people. Police estimated the operation had 5,000 subscribers and was grossing over $300,000 per year. In $97, that's well over a million dollars annually in today's money. Norman, Ever the Showman, denied that the Delta Project was sexual in nature. He claimed it was purely an educational and mentorship organization. This was, of course, absurd, but Norman was skilled at constructing cover stories and exploiting legal gray areas.

In December 1976, Norman was finally sentenced for the Homewood offenses. He received four years in prison and was sent to Pontiac Correctional Center. One month later, on January 19, 1977, a 17-year-old named Kenneth Hellstrom was walking home from work in Homewood. He never made it. Someone attacked him on the street and stabbed him six times. Helstrom managed to make it to a nearby location before collapsing. He died several hours later in the hospital. hospital. Kenneth Hellstrom was the boy whose testimony had put John David Norman in prison.

He had implicated Norman in the child molestation charges back in 1973. His testimony had been crucial to the case. Norman had an alibi. He was in Pontiac Correctional Center at the time of the murder, but Philip Pask was on the outside, and Pask was initially wanted for questioning in Helstrom's murder. The timing was, to put it mildly, suspicious. The key witness, against Norman, the young man whose testimony had finally put him behind bars, was dead just one month after Norman's conviction. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The murder happened while Norman was locked up, but his violent right-hand man was free. I should note here in the interest of accuracy that in June 2012, a man named Fred Rogers was

convicted of Kenneth Hellstrom's murder and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Rogers, who was 16 at the time of the killing, had reportedly gotten into an argument with Helstrom earlier in the day. So officially, the case is solved. But for 35 years, this killing hung over the Norman investigation. It raised questions about witness intimidation, and whether Pask or others associated with Norman might have silenced someone who could testify against the network. The timing remained suspicious even if the eventual resolution pointed elsewhere. In May 1977, the Chicago Tribune published a devastating series on child pornography and child prostitution in Chicago. Reporters George Bliss and Chuck Newbauer

conducted an extensive investigation that exposed the Delta Project and identified both Norman and Pask by name as the ringleaders of a nationwide operation. The Tribune series was comprehensive. It detailed how the operation worked. It traced Norman's history of offenses. It exposed how he had continued running his operation from prison. It identified Pask as his man on the outside and revealed his employment at the city swimming pool. The reporters claimed to have obtained a list of 5,000 names of Delta Project clients. The series prompted national attention.

More importantly, it prompted congressional action. On May 27, 1977, United States Senate subcommittee hearings on the protection of children against sexual exploitation began in Chicago. The hearings were extensive and produced detailed testimony about Norman, Pask, and the Delta Project. Cook County State's attorney Bernard Carey testified. His investigator, Jack Lehman, provided detailed explanations of how the network operated. The Tribune reporters presented their findings. The scope of what was described was staggering. During the hearing, Senator Culver asked investigator Lehman to describe the Delta project. The exchange is worth quoting at length

because it shows just how organized this operation was. Lehman explained that Norman sends out material and receives material from other agencies similar to his. He described the Don program where men would agree to have what Norman called a cadet, a young boy between 13 and 19. Come live with them. The Don would take one to three cadets to live in his house. The dons would provide housing and supervision. This was, as investigators understood it, a system for placing child prostitutes in the homes of paying customers under the guise of mentorship. The congressional hearings documented that Norman's operation had connections in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and potentially other cities. They documented that children were being moved across state lines.

They documented that the operation was generating significant revenue. In August 1977, Following the Tribune exposé and in the wake of the congressional hearings, Philip Pask was finally fired from his job as children's supervisor at the city swimming pool. The Tribune published an article about his dismissal, complete with his mugshot. But the congressional hearings, for all they exposed, did not result in the dismantling of the network. Norman was released on parole in the fall of 1977. Within months, he was back at it. To understand the next chapter of this story,

We need to talk about another name you probably know. John Wayne Gacy. Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne Gacy murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men in the Chicago area. He buried most of them in the crawl space beneath his house at 8213, West Somerdale Avenue and Norwood Park Township. It was, at the time, the worst serial murder case in American history. Gacy was a respectable citizen on the surface. He ran a construction company called PDM contractors, which stood for painting, decorating, and maintenance. He was active in local democratic politics.

He organized Polish Constitution Day parades. He dressed as Pogo the Clown to entertain children at parties and hospital visits. The nickname Killer Clown would come later. Gacy employed young men to work for his construction company. Many of his victims were either employees or people he'd met through his business. He used the job as a way to access vulnerable young men. In December 1978, Gacy was arrested after investigators connected him to the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Pist.

The excavation of his property revealed the remains of 29 victims. Four more were recovered from the De Plains River. The case shocked the nation, but there were aspects of it that never received the public attention they deserved. After Philip Pask was fired from his job at the city swimming pool in August 1977, he needed new employment. At some point in 1978, he went to work for John Wayne Gasey's construction company. The earliest documented record of Pask working for PDM contractors is from 1978 when he assisted in demolition work at a drugstore in Rochelle. Attorney Steve

Becker, who has spent over a decade investigating the Gacey case, has obtained pay stubs showing that Gacy paid PASC with PDM company checks at least three times in 1978. According to Gacy, he was introduced to Pask through another PDM employee named David Cram. Cram would later claim that he had warned Gacy about hiring Pask, citing his criminal record and his history of being in a mental institution. Gacy hired him anyway. Now, I want to be extremely careful here. John Wayne Gacey was a pathological liar.

He told contradictory stories over the years. He manipulated everyone he encountered. Nothing he said should be taken at face value without independent corroboration. That said, some of his claims about Pask have been verified. The employment records are real. The pay stubs exist. Pask did work for Gacy. That connection is documented fact, not speculation.

In a series of interviews conducted in 1992 while he was on death row, Gacy made extensive claims about Pask and the Delta Project. Again, these are Gacy's claims, and he was a liar. But let me present what he said so you can evaluate it. Gacy described Pask as dangerous. He said Pask used hard drugs, shared an apartment with a prostitute, and quote, pimped girls, boys, for sex or movies.

He claimed that Pask, along with employees David Cram and Michael Rossi, all had keys to his house at 8213 West Somerdale Avenue. Most controversially, Gacy insisted that other people had murdered victims in his house while he was out of town. He named Pask as one of his accomplices. He also claimed that John David Norman produced snuff films involving young boys. No snuff films connected to Norman have ever been found. That claim remains unverified. But Gacy's description of Pask as a pimp of boys aligns with what investigators already

knew from the Delta Project investigation. Here's what makes this more than just the ravings of a desperate killer. Some of Gacy's alibis have been independently verified. Documentation exists showing that Gacy was out of town, sometimes out of state, at times when some of his attributed victims disappeared. Travel records, financial statements, business logs. If Gacy wasn't in Chicago for some of these disappearances, someone else had to have access to his house. Here's what's most remarkable about the Gacy Pass connection. It was known to prosecutors at the time. Philip Pask was listed on the state of Illinois' witness list for Gacy's 1979 trial. He was also listed on the defense's second supplemental witness list. Both the prosecution and

the defense considered Pask a relevant witness in a mass murder case. Think about what that means. Both sides knew there was something there worth exploring, and yet Pask never testified. The Delta Project Connection was never introduced at trial. Why? Based on the research of attorney Steve Becker and journalists who have investigated the case, several factors appear to have been at play. First, the prosecution wanted a clean case. They wanted to prove that Gacy, and Gacy alone, had committed these murders.

The evidence against Gacy was overwhelming. They had bodies in his crawl space. They had witnesses who had escaped. They had confessions. Introducing the possibility of accomplices or a larger trafficking network would have complicated the prosecution and potentially raised reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors. Second, Gacy's defense was based on insanity. His attorneys wanted to prove he was mentally ill and not in control of his actions.

If the defense introduced evidence that Gacy was knowingly participating in an organized trafficking operation with other people, that would undermine the insanity argument, a person working deliberately with accomplices in a criminal enterprise doesn't fit the profile of someone who didn't understand what they were doing. So both the prosecution and the defense had reasons to keep the Delta Project connection out of the trial. And that's exactly what happened. The connection between John Wayne Gacy and a nationwide child trafficking ring was never presented to the jury. It was never examined in court. It was never made part of the official record. For nearly 40 years, was effectively suppressed from public knowledge.

While Pask was working for Gacy, John David Norman was back in business in Chicago. Norman had been paroled from Pontiac Correctional Center in the fall of 1977. By June 1978, he had moved into a basement apartment at 685 and a half West Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago. This was just a 20-minute drive from Gacy's house on West Somerdale Avenue.

Norman set up the apartment as a child pornography. studio. He began working with boys from a local foster home. These were wards of the state, children in the care of the Department of Children and Family Services. The very children the state was supposed to be protecting. Two teenage boys reported to police that Norman had photographed them naked and had sex with them. One of the boys told investigators something that captures the horror of this entire operation. Norman, he said, was in the process of selling him to a client. He was just waiting for his plane ticket, a child in state care, being sold to a client, waiting for his plane ticket to be trafficked across the country. That's what was happening in Chicago in

1978. When Chicago police raided Norman's apartment in June 1978, they found Philip Pasque there. They also found, once again, thousands of index cards containing customer information. Reports vary on the exact number, with estimates ranging from 20,000 to 100,000. thousand cards. Norman had rebranded the Delta Project. It was now operating under the name's Creative Corps and MC Publications. The newsletter was called Mail Call. The operation was sophisticated enough that Norman was allegedly sending photographs of boys to a dawn in Canada. Chicago police detectives investigating this arrest called the State Department. They wanted to compare the 1978 index cards with the one seized in Dallas

back in 1973. They wanted to see if there were overlapping names. They wanted to track the network. The State Department told them the Dallas cards no longer existed. They had been destroyed. John David Norman was convicted again and spent several more years in prison. He was released in 1982. By February of that year, he was already in trouble.

He was arrested in Denver for soliciting a child for sex. And then, following his usual pattern, he fled. Norman ended up in Adams County, Pennsylvania, near the small town of Asper's. This was rural America, far from the urban centers where he'd previously operated. He was using a new alias, Clarence McKay. Between October 1983 and May 1984, Norman set up two locations. One was a two-and-a-half-story red brick house on Farm Company Road near Asper's. The other was an efficiency apartment at a motel in Cumberland Township,

and he started a new publication. He called it Handy Andy. According to Pennsylvania State Police at Gettysburg who investigated the operation, Handy Andy was a mail-order child pornography publication. It featured photographs of local boys engaged in sexual acts. Norman exploited at least 20 teenage boys from the Adams County area, enticing them with drugs and alcohol to participate in the production of the material. The operation ran for approximately two years,

before one of the victims finally reported it to authorities. On May 31, 1984, Pennsylvania State Police raided Norman's rented home on Farm Company Road. But Norman had fled. Evidence at the scene indicated he had been tipped off. The thin, white-haired man who had been living there under the name Clarence McKay was gone. A nationwide manhunt began. A 1986 news report stated that Norman was wanted in five different states for child sex crimes. He was one of the most wanted child predators in the country.

Norman was captured in Bollingbrook, Illinois in October, he was extradited back to Pennsylvania. But in March 1985, demonstrating the legal skills he'd developed over decades of evading justice, Norman got himself released on bail using a writ of habeas corpus. He promptly fled Pennsylvania for the second time. Norman turned up in DuPage County, Illinois, under yet another alias. Patrick Nelson. In Bollingbrook, two boys told police that a man had propositioned them for sex.

When detectives arrived at Norman's apartment to arrest him, the 59-year-old man jumped from a third-floor window to escape. He broke his ankle in the fall. Police found him at a local hospital. Norman was sent back to Pennsylvania. While locked in a Pennsylvania jail, he managed to get himself released yet again through legal maneuvering. The man had an encyclopedic knowledge of

criminal procedure from his decades of experience with the system. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. He was finally captured for the last time in August 1987 in Urbana, Illinois. He was given a six-year sentence for crimes in Illinois and later extradited to Pennsylvania, where he was sentenced to 18 to 36 months for charges related to Handy Andy. A plea agreement was reached in the Pennsylvania, California case, reportedly because prosecutors anticipated difficulty finding witnesses willing to testify after such a lengthy period of time. Norman pled guilty to one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. The original 18 charges were reduced. Norman's criminal career

continued even into old age. He was convicted of child molestation in Colorado in 1988. He was convicted of distributing child pornography in California in 1995. He was convicted again in 1998. When Norman was released from prison in California in 1999, the state took an unusual step. They declared him a sexually violent predator and committed him indefinitely to Atascadero State Hospital. His psychiatrist at Atascadero, Dr. James Revis, assessed Norman extensively. His conclusion was Stark. John is an unrepentant adult male sex offender, who in my opinion will go to his grave without any remorse for what he has done. Norman was held at Atascadero until October 2008, when he was given a supervised release to the rural town of Boulevard, California. The conditions

were strict. He was prohibited from contact with males under 18. He couldn't use the internet. He couldn't possess pornography. He couldn't leave his designated residence area. He was 81 years old. He had been a predator for over 50 years. You might think that time and age would have diminished his compulsions. You would be wrong. On February 2nd, 2009, less than five months after his release, Norman violated his conditions.

He gave a suggestive note containing his contact information to a 19-year-old grocery bagger in El Centro. He had also placed an ad online looking for a roommate. The urges that had driven him for half a century were still, there. Unchanged. Undiminished. Exactly as his psychiatrist had predicted. Unrepentant. In March 2009, Norman was ordered back into state custody at Coalinga State Hospital. He died there on May 22, 2011, at the age of 83. Philip Pasque had died years earlier on November 9, 1998 in Chicago. The cause was AIDS-related complications. He was 45 years old.

His final arrest had been in 1996 for possession of a controlled substance. Norman's operations didn't exist in isolation. Throughout the 1970s, a disturbing web of interconnected child exploitation rings operated across the United States. Many of them shared mailing lists, subscribers, and methods. And they often shared the same publications. One of the most significant interconnected operations centered on a private island in Lake Michigan called North Fox Island. Francis Duffield Sheldon came from one of Michigan's wealthiest

families. His great-grandfather on his father's side was Michigan Governor Russell A. Alger, who also served as United States Secretary of War. The family had old money, political connections, and social standing. Sheldon earned his bachelor's degree from Yale. He served in the Michigan Air National Guard during the Korean War. He worked part-time as a professor of geology at Wayne State University. He sat on the boards of prestigious institutions including the Cranbrook Institute, a private arts academy, and Boys Republic Inc., a residential center for troubled adolescents. He volunteered with the Big Brother program, and he owned North Fox Island, a private island near Traverse City, Michigan, approximately two miles wide by one mile long.

On this island, Sheldon operated what he called Brother Paul's Children's Mission, supposedly a boys nature camp. Parents or guardians paid $85, equivalent to over $470 today, for a child's six-day stay at what they believed was a legitimate summer program. In reality, according to investigators and court records, Sheldon was flying boys to the island in his private Piper Seneca two aircraft to be filmed in child pornography. Wealthy subscribers to underground publications were invited to the island to sexually abuse children. The operation was was documented, organized, and connected to other networks across the country. Sheldon was connected to a publication called Hermes,

the same name Norman used for his Delta Project newsletter. This was not a coincidence. The boy lover community in the 1970s operated through a network of interconnected publications and mailing lists. Men involved in these networks shared subscribers, shared content, and sometimes shared victims. According to investigators, Sheldon had been involved with Hermes as both a writer and a financier. Gerald Richards, a schoolteacher who helped operate the North Fox Island scheme, was identified in congressional testimony as one of four major producers of child pornography in the 1970s. Richards kept detailed records.

When he was arrested, police found lists of customers, lists of contacts, and lists of other figures in the child pornography business. These lists showed connections between North Fox Island and other operations, including evidence suggesting links to Norman's networks. Sheldon's name appeared on customer lists connected to Norman's operations. The mailing lists overlapped. When investigators finally moved against the North Fox Island operation in 1976, they found that Sheldon's cabinets and drawers had already been emptied.

Someone had warned him. He fled to the Netherlands, which at the time had no extradition treaty with the United States for these types of crimes. Sheldon lived in the Netherlands until his death in 1996 at age 68. The Michigan warrant for his arrest was canceled after his death. He was never brought to justice. The North Fox Island case took on additional tragic significance because of its timing and location. Between February, 1976 and March 1977, four children were abducted and murdered in Oakland County, Michigan. The victims were Mark Stebbins, age 12, Jill Robinson, age 12, Christine Mihelich, age 10, and Timothy King, age 11. Their bodies were found dumped in the

snow at the side of roads, leading some to call it the snow killings. The case became known as the Oakland County Child Killer case, and it remains officially unsolved to this day. Investigators looked at possible connections between the Fox Island pedophile ring and the Oakland County murders. Some of the same names appeared in both investigations. The timeline of Sheldon's activities in Michigan overlapped with the killings. Several of the men involved in the Fox Island operation lived in or had connections to Oakland County, but prosecutors failed to coordinate effectively across jurisdictions. Sheldon fled before he could be questioned. Client lists were seized and then somehow disappeared or were not shared between agencies.

The investigation stalled. The family of Timothy King, the final victim, has spent decades pushing for answers. They've documented the failures of law enforcement. They've noted how evidence was lost or destroyed. They've questioned why prosecutors in different counties seemed incapable of coordinating with each other. I should note clearly, it has never been proven that the Fox Island Ring was responsible for the Oakland County murders. There are documented connections that raise serious questions. There are also other suspects who have been investigated over the years.

The case remains open. What we can say is that there was a network of interconnected predators operating in Michigan at the same time these children were killed, and that network was never fully investigated. As we look back at this history, a disturbing pattern emerges. Again and again, when investigators got close to exposing the full scope of these networks and the identities of their clients, something would happen to derail the investigation.

Evidence was destroyed. The State Department shredded tens of thousands of index cards from the Dallas raid. File cabinets were emptied before raids on Fox Island. Client lists vanished or were never shared between agencies. Suspects fled before arrest warrants were issued. Sheldon escaped to the Netherlands. Norman repeatedly jumped bail and fled to new states. Warning systems seemed to exist that allowed the most well-connected predators to stay one step ahead of law enforcement.

Connections weren't pursued. Houston police declined to fully investigate links between the coral murders and the Dallas trafficking ring. The Delta Project connection was kept out of the Gacy trial. Different jurisdictions failed to coordinate even when they were investigating the same networks. Sentences were light. Norman was convicted repeatedly over five decades, yet spent remarkably little time incarcerated relative to the scope of his crimes. Each time he was released, he immediately resumed his activities. The system seemed incapable of keeping him contained. Now, I want to be careful here. I am not claiming there was a single organized conspiracy to

protect these networks. What I am observing is that the pattern of failures is too consistent to be explained entirely by incompetence. Lieutenant Hancock of Dallas police said the index cards contained prominent public figures and federal employees. The State Department destroyed them. Congressional hearings in 1977 documented the scope of Norman's operations in detail, yet he was able to continue operating for another decade. Prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions seemed unable or unwilling to pursue the clients whose names appeared on these lists.

The simplest explanation, which is also the most disturbing, is that some of the people who could have stopped these operations had reasons not to. Whether they were clients themselves, whether they were protecting colleagues, whether they were simply avoiding scandal, we may never know for certain. What we do know is that children

paid the price for their silence. John David Norman operated for over 40 years. He was arrested dozens of times in multiple states. His operations were raided multiple times. Congressional hearings were held. Newspaper exposés were written. A massive buyout. of evidence documented his crimes and his networks. And yet, decade after decade, he walked out

of prison and started again. The total number of his victims is unknown and probably unknowable. The index cards from Dallas alone suggested tens of thousands of clients. Each client potentially victimized multiple children. The boys who passed through the Odyssey Foundation, the Delta Project, Creative Corps, and Handy Andy were traumatized in ways that rippled through generations. And here's what should keep you up at night. The client lists were never fully investigated. Those 30,000 to 100,000 names were destroyed or lost or conveniently misplaced. Men who paid to abuse children lived out their lives in anonymity. Many of them were, in Lieutenant Hancock's words, prominent public figures and federal employees. What positions

did they hold? What decisions did they make? What other children crossed their paths in their professional lives? We'll never know, because the evidence was destroyed by the very agencies that should have prosecuted them. The lessons of these cases were not learned in time. It took until 1978 for the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act to be passed. It took until 1984 for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to be established. It took until 2006 for the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act to create a national sex offender registry. Each of these reforms came too late for Norman's victims.

Too late for the boys trafficked through the Odyssey Foundation. Too late for the children exploited by the Delta Project. Too late for the teenagers photographed for Handy Andy. Too late for the boys flown to North Fox Island. And the question we must ask ourselves is, Are there operations like this running today? The technology has changed. The Internet has replaced mail order catalogs.

Encrypted messaging has replaced index cards. But the predators remain. And so do the powerful people who have every reason to ensure their names never see the light of day. In recent years, cases like Jeffrey Epstein have shown us that wealthy predators still operate networks with apparent impunity. Client lists are still seized and then conveniently not. released. Investigations are still shut down before they reach the most powerful names.

The pattern continues. History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. The faces change. The technology evolves. But the fundamental dynamics remain the same. Predators with resources build networks. Those networks serve powerful people. And when the networks are exposed, somewhat, somewhere, make sure the most damaging information disappears. Remember, the worst atrocities in history weren't committed by people who thought they were doing evil. They were committed by people who thought they'd never get caught, protected by people who made sure they didn't. You're hot, I'm seeking, watch out, I'm seeking, watch out, I'm coming for you. Ooh, you better run now.

Ooh, the moon is out now. Oh, you're gonna hear my how. Oh, ho, ho, ho. Blood skies, red eyes can't give enough for me. My dream is your nightmare. You'll see me come. for you

I'm coming for you ooh you better run now ooh the moon is out now you're gonna hear my heart oh Ooh, ho, ho, ho, ho. Ooh, you better run down.

Ooh, o'oo, the morning's out now. Ooh, you're gonna hear my hell. Thank you.