vault backup: 2026-09-22 22:51:38

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Gerald Richards.md

@@ -2,15 +2,36 @@
 category: "Crime & Abuse Networks"
 tags:
   - Person
-summary: "Gerald Richards, full name Gerald Stewart Richards, was a high school gym teacher in Port Huron, Michigan, who also worked as a masseuse, magician, hypnotist, and Republican candidate for local government."
+  - ChildAbuse
+  - Michigan
+summary: "Port Huron teacher and organizer of Brother Paul's Children's Mission on North Fox Island, arrested in 1976 and sentenced to two to ten years, who testified to the Senate in 1977."
+relations:
+  - type: employed_by
+    with: "[[St. Joseph's Catholic School]]"
+    role: "physical education teacher"
+    fn: 2
+  - type: founded
+    with: "[[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]]"
+    role: "organizer and president"
+    fn: 3
+created: 2026-04-28
+updated: 2026-09-22
 ---
-Gerald Richards, full name Gerald Stewart Richards, was a high school gym teacher in Port Huron, Michigan, who also worked as a masseuse, magician, hypnotist, and Republican candidate for local government. He operated a naturopathy clinic in a commercial basement where he molested boys during massage therapy sessions, including a 12-year-old neighbor he used as an assistant in his magic shows. Richards drove an orange Pinto marked "Jerry the Magician" and had previously set up Brother Paul’s Educational Entertainment Missions in 1970 as a non-profit for safety instruction and religious education through magic and arts. In 1975, he placed an advertisement for his magic show in the pedophile newsletter Better Life Monthly, leading to his contact with [[Francis Shelden]]. Richards described himself as peripheral to a nationwide child pornography operation but confessed to extensive involvement after his arrest.[^1]
+Gerald S. Richards, of Port Huron, Michigan, taught physical education at St. Joseph's Catholic School in Port Huron, was a businessman in the town and had been a candidate for local political office. He was president of [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] and director of its nature camp, and told police he was its organizer.[^2][^3] He was arrested in July 1976, pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the first degree, and by 1977 was serving a two-to-ten-year term at the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson.[^2][^4]
 
-### Criminal Activities
-On July 12, 1976, Richards took four students aged 8 to 14 to a private airstrip where [[Francis Shelden]] flew them to [[North Fox Island]] for two nights at [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]], where Shelden performed sex acts on at least one boy and photographed him naked. Upon return, the boy reported the abuse, leading to Richards's arrest on July 23, 1976, after police found naked photos of boys and a letter to Shelden in his glove compartment warning him to move files to [[North Fox Island]]. Richards confessed to molesting boys in exchange for partial immunity and provided details on producing and distributing child pornography, including processing films from [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Monteagle, Tennessee, and mailing them via Mail-O-Matic in [[North Carolina]] to F&S Distributors in California. In August 1976, he handed over a letter from [[Dyer Grossman]] dated July 19, 1976, outlining plans for foster homes in Michigan to house runaways for government payments and mentioning a 12-year-old boy procured through a Big Brother program for camping trips. Richards was sentenced on September 13, 1976, to 2 to 20 years in Southern Michigan Prison in Jackson after pleading guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the first degree, and from prison he sketched a network diagram in September 1976 detailing a coast-to-coast child pornography operation.[^1]
+### Testimony to the Senate
 
-### Connections
-Richards met [[Francis Shelden]] in 1975 through Better Life Monthly, corresponded by mail, met at hotels and Shelden's Ann Arbor estate to abuse boys together, and Shelden recruited him to direct a summer camp on [[North Fox Island]] for child pornography production. Shelden connected Richards to [[Dyer Grossman]] of The [[The Church of New Revelation]] in [[New Jersey]], a fake church used to incorporate [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] as a non-profit subsidiary for tax-exempt status, allowing the camp to receive court-ordered juvenile delinquents for abuse and filming. Grossman, a science teacher from a wealthy Long Island family working at an exclusive New York boys’ boarding school, traveled to Michigan to draft the charter and planned foster homes for runaways, with a letter mentioning a 12-year-old boy for sexual use. [[Adam Starchild]] ([[Malcolm Willis McConahy]]) incorporated [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] and The [[Ocean Living Institute]], fronts for Shelden's operations; Starchild faked his death in 1975. Richards identified [[Claudius Vermilye]], an Episcopal priest running [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee, as sending child pornography films for processing, where juveniles were drugged, filmed in orgies, and offered to sponsors for visits, with the farm raided in November 1976 and linked to The [[The Church of New Revelation]]. He named [[Richard Halvorsen]], a New Orleans scoutmaster arrested in September 1976 for a boy prostitution ring using [[Troop 137]], whose files connected to Vermilye's farm and [[John David Norman]]'s [[Delta Project]] via index cards on boys’ sexual preferences. Richards linked the operation to [[John David Norman]]’s [[Odyssey Network]], referring to boy exchanges as a "Cadet racket" and "fellows" supplied to sponsors, with Norman’s [[Delta Project]] using newsletters like [[Hermes]] for prostitution and pornography distribution.[^1]
+On May 27, 1977, Richards testified under oath in Chicago before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. He said his first contact with pornography came while he was in college, working nights in an adult bookstore from September 1969 to March 1972. In January 1973 he met a neighbor boy of 13 or 14, whom he filmed for two years without selling the material, and in January 1975 he began producing and selling child pornography, until about February 1976. Through an organization he met other men who swapped pictures and boys; he said he had access to about 30 boys, only two or three of them from Port Huron and the rest obtained from Pontiac and the Detroit area. He said he had pleaded guilty "to protect my models and exposure of my affair" with the boy, then 15, who was his partner in the operation. He described Better Life, "a philosophical group" run through the mail, as "the main organization in the [[United States]]" for the trade, and said that [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee "sold raw film to other men. They would bring it to me to process." He named among the customers he ended up with "Sheldon, Grossman, Keller," and said of [[Francis Shelden]]: "He was a friend of mine. He paid for my office."[^4]
+
+In 1975 Richards answered an advertisement in the pedophile newsletter *Better Life Monthly,* of which Shelden was named by Richards as a staff writer, and [[Dyer Grossman]] came to Port Huron from [[New Jersey]] to help set up Brother Paul's. At his arrest police found a letter from Grossman proposing sites for "child care" organizations in Michigan, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia, noting that counties would pay up to 150 dollars a month per boy, state agencies up to 400 and federal agencies up to 700. Richards told police that the [[The Church of New Revelation|Church of the New Revelation]], the Ocean Living Institute, the Educational Foundation for Youth and Brother Paul's were all fronts.[^3]
+
+### The North Fox Island Trip
+
+Richards was also described as a masseuse, magician and hypnotist, a Republican candidate, the operator of a naturopathy clinic in a commercial basement, and the driver of an orange Pinto marked "Jerry the Magician," and as having set up Brother Paul's Educational Entertainment Missions in 1970. On July 12, 1976, he was said to have taken four students aged 8 to 14 to a private airstrip from which Shelden flew them to [[North Fox Island]] for two nights; after one boy reported abuse, Richards was arrested on July 23, 1976, with photographs of naked boys and a letter warning Shelden to move files to the island. He was said to have been sentenced on September 13, 1976, to have handed over the Grossman letter, dated July 19, 1976, in August 1976, and to have drawn a diagram of a coast-to-coast network from prison. He was said to have identified [[Claudius Vermilye]] as sending films for processing, and the scoutmaster [[Richard Halvorsen]] of [[Troop 137]], whose files were linked to Vermilye's farm and to [[John David Norman]]'s [[Delta Project]] by index cards on boys' sexual preferences, and to have described the exchange of boys as a "Cadet racket." [[Adam Starchild]], who incorporated Brother Paul's and the [[Ocean Living Institute]], was identified as [[Malcolm Willis McConahy]].[^1]
 
 ### Footnotes
-[^1]: Dovey, S. (2023). Eye of the Chickenhawk. United States: Thehotstar.
+
+[^1]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It gives his sentence as two to twenty years, contradicted by contemporaneous reports of a two-to-ten-year term, and describes him as a high school gym teacher; its account of immunity is contradicted by his own testimony that he pleaded guilty.
+[^2]: Wright, Marilyn. *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1976-1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
+[^3]: Wright, Marilyn, *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* and *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, both reprinted in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977, and in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 1977.
+[^4]: Testimony of Gerald S. Richards, Chicago, May 27, 1977, in *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, 1977, pp. 34-41. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit