The Kill Jar Read online

  There was no way for the children to escape the island. When he insisted, they slept in Frank Shelden’s bed. For a while, nobody knew about it.

  Like other molestation camps around the country operating similar, highly successful pornography rings that have since been well chronicled in dozens of news articles, North Fox Island even received government subsidies. Organized as a charity under the name Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission and billed as a child care facility, Frank Shelden’s organization was eligible for $150 per month per boy from its county coffers; $400 per month per boy from the state; and $700 per month per boy from the federal government.

  Brother Paul’s of Fox Island, then, could rake in $1,250 per month per boy to commit among the most heinous of crimes, and all of this money was exempt from income tax by the IRS.

  This was just fluff money. Pornography linked to the molestations generated even bigger business.

  FRANK SHELDEN, MILLIONAIRE

  A regular, secret contributor to Better Life Monthly, a newspaper whose own masthead dedicated it to “boy love,” Frank Shelden otherwise had a clean public image and was on a variety of charitable boards, including that of the Cranbrook Institute of Science, which was associated with the very prestigious, private Cranbrook schools in the suburbs. A savvy businessman skilled in the covert ops of pedophilia, Shelden organized “sponsorship” opportunities surrounding the Fox Island retreat. In exchange for their tax-deductible contributions, nearly three hundred sponsors of the island regularly received illicit child pornography in mailers disguised to look like propaganda from the camp.

  During the winter off-seasons, Frank Shelden arranged for young boys to be flown onto the island via his private plane under the promise of lavish getaways with the trusted philanthropist. There on the snow-covered island, without the company of other children, boys as young as eight years old were forced to endure the horror of Shelden’s bait-and-switch techniques. They were alone. They were on an island with a middle-aged man curled around them. Insert whatever emptiness you feel, and then hold on to that for the rest of your life. You still won’t even be close to feeling what those boys must have felt.

  AS FAR AS locals were concerned, Frank Shelden was a prize. In addition to his work with the camp on North Fox Island, he treated favored kids to hunting trips; took them to Aspen, Colorado, for skiing ventures; held beach parties for them at a family estate in Antigua; and set up college trust funds for their educations.

  Eventually, the Michigan State Police zeroed in on Fox Island after continued reference to it from multiple Detroit-area pedophiles during other, unrelated investigations. An investigation into Fox was eventually begun, quietly.

  Just a few days before an arrest warrant was issued for Frank Shelden, however, he fled the country, having been tipped off. He sent one of the boys he’d molested—now eighteen years old—a postcard promising to pay for his college education. The boy, suicidal after years beneath the slithering hand of Shelden, sucked on a rifle and squeezed the trigger.

  During the OCCK investigation, Fox Island would continue to be referenced. Suspects would allude to it, and one of them would name Christopher Busch in association.

  The list of Fox Island sponsors was confiscated by the Michigan State Police, rerouted through the FBI, and finally reported by the feds as accidentally destroyed in a flood—an unimaginable fate for key documents being held by one of the most organized, powerful law enforcement agencies in the world.

  DRY MARTINI

  Erica McAvoy, Kristine Mihelich’s younger half sister, sits across from me in a booth at the Stillwater Grill at two o’clock in the afternoon. She’s thirty-five years old. We’re just off the interstate in Okemos, Michigan, about an hour’s drive from the suburbs of Detroit.

  The Stillwater is a mid-scale lunch place, like a TGI Fridays. Erica’s a real estate agent. She picked this place and probably brings her clients here. She’s dressed tidily, possibly to make a sale later in the day. Her haircut seems salon-styled. She orders a dry martini, and when it comes, I watch the midday sun cut across her glass from a large window to my side. I’ve ordered an iced tea, although I probably won’t drink it. I’ve already had two coffees today.

  A year ago I would have ordered a drink, maybe a martini like Erica’s. Five years ago I would have ordered three of those martinis, sucking on olives while we talked. Fifteen years ago I would have made it a five-bourbon lunch, driven back to my hotel, and contemplated the various ways I could harm myself in a single evening. But now I have my kids to consider, and these other kids to dig up.

  My iced tea comes, and Erica says, gesturing out the window, “There’s my dad.”

  I look out the window and see her father stepping down from a large black pickup truck.

  Erica hadn’t told me her father was coming. She’d held back, maybe on purpose.

  “I hope you don’t mind me inviting him along,” she says.

  It’s understandable that she’d want her father here. I wish I’d thought of that, getting his story alongside of hers. I’m staring at Erica’s drink, knowing that I’ll have to eat something but feeling the awkward impropriety of food in a situation like this. Her older sister had been held in captivity for nineteen days and eventually murdered, and I’m about to order a steak salad. I’ve been running on empty, but the whole performance just feels rude, looking over a menu, making small talk. Even me being here feels blasphemous.

  I get out of the booth when Tom Ascroft comes in. I shake his hand. He stands about five foot seven, weighs about 160, and has a hardscrabble grip like my father used to have. In his sixties now, Tom is balding, and there’s a scar ringing his crown from a surgery that I don’t ask him about. I contemplate that scar over the very occasional lulls in our four-hour conversation.

  Tom was Kristine’s stepfather at the time of the killings. She had a biological dad somewhere around Detroit, but my understanding is that he’d been more or less absent. Tom raised Kristine and had Erica and another daughter with Kristine’s mom after he joined the family.

  When Tom orders an old-fashioned, he does so without even a blink, like he’d been tasting the bite of its whiskey, and the cherry-sweet chaser, before he even got here. I can smell the sweetness of his drink when it comes and I want one, too, the little rapid-fire spasms in blood chemistry egging me on.

  Tom and Erica drink fast. They each order another cocktail while they talk to me about Christopher Busch. They tell me about the detectives supposedly losing evidence; they make little rabbit ears with their fingers when they say “losing.” And they talk about North Fox Island and other possibly related porn syndicates.

  We become quiet at the mention of Fox Island, the darkness of that place we’d each studied to the point of overkill, the influx of boys being dropped off by single-engine plane during wintertime or ferried through the crush of spring ice once the weather had warmed: None of us mentions the imagery of young skin, the flashing of camera bulbs, the ticking of 8mm film.

  Later, Tom and Erica talk about being stonewalled by the Michigan State Police, the attorney general, and the various detectives and prosecutors over the years. Tom says he’s felt shoved out from the beginning. He tells me about wanting to identify Kristine’s body back in ’77 but not being allowed to. He says he immediately went down to the morgue but was initially stonewalled because he wasn’t blood related.

  He was on fire, he tells me.

  “I showed up,” he says. He shakes his head in sadness and can’t seem to say anything more.

  Then, after a while, he says, “There was a detective down there, and I grabbed his gun. I took it out of his fucking holster.” He tells me he waved it around and that he would have shot somebody. I nod my head, believing him. I might have shot somebody, too.

  The cops let him see Kristine after they realized his sincerity with the weapon. One of the officers had stayed in Tom’s home while the PD searched for Kristine during those nineteen days of captivity—a common preca
ution in case the killer rang them or showed up in person—and had intimately understood, and possibly shared, Tom’s despair. There was no tussle, no arrest. Tom gave the detective his gun back and stepped into a room to view his stepdaughter. It was the 1970s, and you could do shit like that and still get away with it, still cross your fingers for personal involvement. Nowadays, Tom would be serving a decade for pulling a cop’s piece.

  Tom identified Kristine, still frozen in a seated position as if she were driving a go-cart on the autopsy table, but she was clothed. Whoever killed Kristine saw more of her than Tom did.

  Halfway through our lunch, Tom says to me, a slight buzz in his eyes from the alcohol but also from anger, “Who knows what her clothes were covering up.”

  Neither of us says anything for a long few minutes. My digital recorder blinks atop the table. Erica’s martini glass is dry, I notice. Her forefinger rests inside of it like a shovel inside a shed.

  When we walk out of the restaurant after lunch, Tom and Erica are both a bit sauced. We shake hands in the parking lot. On the way to my rental, I glance back and see Tom stepping firmly into his truck, a bulge from the ankle of his jeans revealing the imprint of a pistol, I think.

  MAGIC MAN

  In the summer of 1976, in the midst of the OCCK murders, Gerald Richards, a thirty-something gym teacher at St. Joseph Catholic Elementary School in Dexter, in the suburbs, decided to run for county commissioner and enlisted the help of an eight-year-old student to pass out election pamphlets for him.

  In exchange for the work, Richards promised the boy’s parents that he would take the boy on a trip. Some days later, Richards picked up the boy in his car and then also picked up three other boys, all students at St. Joseph’s, and headed out of town. All four boys were driven to a small airport in St. Clair County, about an hour east of Detroit, where Frank Shelden was waiting in his Cessna.

  The boys were flown to North Fox Island. They landed, got into a jeep, and drove to one of Frank Shelden’s cottages.

  During their three-day stay, the boys took hikes, goofed around near the water, and were subjected to the usual molestations by both Shelden and Richards that occurred in Shelden’s evening lair.

  GERALD RICHARDS, IN addition to working in the gym at St. Joseph Catholic Elementary School, owned a massage parlor in the Detroit area, performed magic shows for local charities and birthday parties, and drove an orange Pinto with the words “Jerry the Magician” printed on the side.

  As clichéd pedophiles go, he fit the bill, but there were many other awkward indicators along the way and so many blatant abuses that went unreported for a long time: Richards allegedly stared at boys in the school showers, patted their naked butts “in a guy way” (as he stated in later testimony) as they walked by, sometimes massaged their groins to “prevent injury,” and occasionally “measured” boys for athletic supporters by holding on to their penises and placing a ruler beside them.

  On several occasions Richards invited boys to his home on the weekends; there, a leather massage table awaited them in his basement, the windows of which had been blacked out with paint so that nobody outside could peek in.

  At some point during the summer of ’76, Gerald Richards took a boy to Port Huron, just minutes from the small airport where Frank Shelden normally kept his plane. An acquaintance had rented a small room at the Holiday Inn, where the boy was taken into a hotel room with both men and molested over multiple days.

  Months before this, in January of 1976, only weeks before the first OCCK abduction, Richards took two other boys to Frank Shelden’s home in Ann Arbor, where they, too, were routinely abused throughout the night, their stories collected and preserved in police documentation, in gruesome detail.

  WHILE BOTH SHELDEN and Richards were listed as directors on official brochures for the Fox Island camp, a fifteen-year-old boy, Michael F., was highlighted alongside them as a camp counselor. Being fifteen, the boy would invoke trust in the parents of other children being considered for placement. Like Vincent Gunnels, the teenaged victim and, later, possible accomplice of Christopher Busch, Michael F. appears to have been used as a snare. Shelden and Richards, engaging in a common ruse among pedophiles, dangled the looks and youth of Michael F. in order to lure those children who might otherwise not approach.

  Michael F. gave testimony about having been “friends” with Richards for approximately three years, beginning with a molestation in Richards’s blacked-out basement at the age of twelve and then continuing while Michael F. worked for Richards as an assistant to his magic shows.

  Over the three years of ongoing abuse, Michael F. and Richards had about a dozen sexual encounters with each other, often with a third, also underaged party brought in to participate. Richards would make the two children take photographs and moving pictures of one another, most of this happening on North Fox Island and in Port Huron.

  All photographs and film of their hundreds of victims were routinely shared between Richards and Shelden, but also among a private client list even more secreted than the island’s sponsor list. This was pre-Internet, of course, and instead of monthly credit card fees for a porn site, private “philanthropic donations” were received via U.S. mail, then packages containing sample footage would be bundled by hand and shipped out discreetly.

  RICHARDS IDOLIZED FRANK Shelden for his wealth and access. They first met when Richards advertised his magic show in Better Life Monthly, the pedophilia rag, Shelden contacting him afterward by letter. They corresponded using innuendos that revealed their shared tendencies. Shelden later financed Richards on a trip to an out-of-state convention of magicians, impressing Richards with the fluidity of his expendable income.

  They eventually organized the camp together. Richards had gone from a blue-collar gym teacher driving a Pinto to hobnobbing with the elite: a private plane, a private island, and endless private parties behind dungeon doors.

  By the time Richards was in police custody, he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown caused by both the disintegration of his enterprise and the certainty of prison time. Frank Shelden, following in the tradition of all great elitists, had taken his money and his private plane, abandoned the sycophant Richards, and absconded to foreign lands. Shelden at first resided at the family-owned mansion on Antigua but eventually settled in the Netherlands, a pornography hotbed, where he lived for two more decades on his family’s extensive wealth.

  Prior to Shelden’s death in the mid-nineties, years of attempted extraditions failed. For whatever reason, the Michigan State Police, the FBI, and multiple political figures were unable to extract Frank Shelden from his power and influence, and consequently were unable to extract any justice for the hundreds of boys he molested in the United States.

  GET RID OF IT

  Gerald Richards gave testimony to the surface of his and Shelden’s crimes together in exchange for leniency from the courts. Some of this testimony revolves around an occasion in March of 1976 when Frank Shelden, flying an underaged boy to Fox Island, put the plane on autopilot and molested the young man over the Saginaw Bay. Around this same time Mark Stebbins had been missing. While the Stebbins captivity dates reportedly preceded this incident, what’s worth noting is both Shelden’s activity at the time and the very real possibility of the March date being an intentional misdirect by Richards.

  In addition to testimony related to their production of the still- and motion-picture pornography capturing their routine raping of victims, Richards also gave testimony to the incorporation of Fox Island by the state, the details of its charter, and its connection to two previously unheard-of shell organizations known as the Church of the New Revelation and the Oceanographic Living Institute.

  The shell trusts were organized in cahoots with two mystery characters, Dyer Grossman of both New Jersey and New York, and Adam Starchild, of reportedly unknown origin. Both names would attract media attention.

  When hunted down, Dyer Grossman, wearing rectangular and thick, black-framed glasses and w
ith a mouth like an open strawberry, would be found to have been first living in Walnut Creek, California, collecting funds as a foster parent for a boy he’d been molesting, and then later living in the Netherlands alongside Shelden. Starchild had, reportedly, remained a ghost; he had eluded police and the name couldn’t be tracked.

  A plethora of correspondence was provided, outlining the Fox Island financial schema that allowed it to operate tax-free with its per-child government subsidies. Other franchise-style camps were discovered to be in the planning stages by Shelden and Richards, with locations on both coasts.

  Richards testified to modeling their organization on the success of like-minded operations such as Boys Farm, Inc., located in Winchester, Tennessee, and run by Reverend Claudius “Bud” Vermilye, whose credentialed (read rich) clients could be personally furnished with a young boy for an extended “vacation-type” visit.

  A search warrant was eventually issued for Frank Shelden’s home in an upscale Ann Arbor neighborhood, fitting for the heir to the developer of Detroit’s famously extravagant Grosse Point mansions. Officers arrived, found the home vacated, and broke out a lower window to gain entry.

  Richards had given officers a detailed floor plan of the home, advising that copies of film footage and photographs could be found in a series of file cabinets in an office on the lower level. In a darkened room, three file cabinets were indeed found. Reportedly, one cabinet had only papers in it, and the other two had been emptied.