The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/John David Norman.md

category	aliases	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
Criminals & Offenders	John Paul Norman Evan Goodwin Allen Hitchcock John Shanks Steven Gurwell	KeyFigure Person OrganizedCrime ChildTrafficking	Dallas and Chicago procurer who ran boy-prostitution services under the Odyssey Foundation and Delta Project names; the State Department destroyed a client file of more than 30,000 cards seized in 1973.	1927-10-13	2011-05-22	Dallas, Texas Chicago, Illinois	type with fn founded Odyssey Foundation 1 type with start fn founded Delta Project 1976 1 type with role fn partner_of Phillip Paske closest associate; ran the Delta Project while Norman was in prison 1 type with reverse start end fn investigated Homewood Police Department true 1973 1973 5 type with reverse start fn investigated Federal Bureau of Investigation true 1976 6	2026-04-28	2026-10-14

John David Norman ran a succession of organizations that, according to police in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas, Texas, supplied boy prostitutes to paying clients across the country: the Norman Foundation, Epic International, the Odyssey Foundation and the Delta Project. He also used the names Evan Goodwin, Allen Hitchcock, John Shanks and Steven Gurwell, and the Hasting Foundation. By 1977 he had thirteen arrests for sex offenses going back to 1954.¹²

Dallas and the Index Cards

The Dallas police announced on August 15, 1973, that a raid the previous evening on an apartment in the city had uncovered a procurement ring operating as the Odyssey Foundation, with a San Diego, California, post office box. They gave the name of its alleged leader as John Paul Norman, 45, who was freed on $7,000 bond on state narcotics charges after marijuana was found in the apartment. The police said he had been arrested in Houston in 1954 and 1956 on sexual assault charges, had been convicted in California in 1963 and in 1971 (the latter a federal conviction for sending obscene literature through the mail), and had been committed to a state hospital by the California Department of Mental Hygiene as a sex offender. The material seized included catalogue files the police put at 50,000 to 100,000 names and stationery bearing the name Epic International.³ The writer Robin Lloyd wrote in 1976 that sponsors were selected from a master list of 50,000 prospects and sent a booklet called "Fellows 1973."⁴

The Chicago Tribune gave the date of the arrest as March 1973. Lieutenant Harold Hancock of the Dallas police arrested Norman on charges of contributing to juvenile violations of state drug laws and seized more than 30,000 index cards listing clients, "some of them prominent people and some federal employees in Washington." "I felt that some federal agency should get the cards and I contacted the State Department through the FBI, I think it was," Hancock told the Chicago Tribune. "All the cards were sent to Washington to the State Department, and that's the last I heard of." Matthew Nimetz, a counselor of the State Department, told the paper that officials had found "the cards were not relevant to any fraud case concerning a passport" and destroyed them; he "was unable to explain" why the department had looked at them only for passport irregularities or why it had not passed them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the postal inspectors.¹ Tribune reporters told a Senate subcommittee in May 1977 that the department said it had shredded the cards in 1974 "because they couldn't find any use for them," and that "some passports were issued for taking a boy across the seas and into another country."²

Dallas police told the Chicago police that they had information associating Norman with the ring that supplied boys to Dean Corll, whose murders of 27 boys in Houston came to light in 1973 after Elmer Wayne Henley shot him; a Tribune reporter testified that Dallas had investigated Norman "as a possible solicitor for these boys."¹²

Chicago and the Delta Project

Norman moved to Homewood, Illinois, in mid-1973 and lived with an Epic International client, who told police that Norman had supplied him that summer with a sixteen-year-old Missouri boy for a three-week, 4,500-dollar tour of Europe. Using the name Steven Gurwell, Norman was arrested in October 1973 after a tip that he had plied ten teenagers with beer to have sex with him; police seized pornography and a list of 5,000 names and addresses of clients.¹

A Homewood police supplementary report dated November 5, 1973, states that the department was then seeking a warrant for Gurwell's arrest and that the subject had left Illinois on October 25, 1973.⁵

Held in Cook County Jail in 1976 on charges of indecent liberties with ten boys, Norman used the jail's printing facilities to send three newsletters to clients announcing the Delta Project, which would place boy "cadets" with "dons" in "Delta-Dorms" around the country: "The nature of the relationship between cadet and sponsor is left entirely to the two of them." He said he corresponded with more than 7,000 people from the jail. Someone in California whom police could not identify paid his 36,000-dollar bail in cash. In December 1976 he pleaded guilty to eight counts of indecent liberties with a child and was sentenced to four years; his associate Phillip Paske, "a convicted murderer and thief" on probation, kept the project going from post office box 5094 in Chicago. Norman told the Tribune: "This has nothing to do with sex. I didn't want to get young kids involved in sex." The police said both the Delta Project and the Chicago newsletter Hermes "were controlled by separate groups of men working together in an interlocking web of vice."¹

On October 19, 1976, the FBI Chicago office recorded in a memorandum (file 166-2548) an investigator's information that Norman, John Shanks and Phillip Paske ran "The Delta Project" as a business transporting young males interstate to paying customers, and that some customers may be federal employees. The memorandum recommended opening a new case.⁶

On March 21, 1979, the Illinois Supreme Court denied an original petition for habeas corpus filed by Norman. The order states that he claimed he had been misadvised, when he pleaded guilty, that there would be no mandatory parole term after his sentence. The court held that habeas corpus did not lie for that claim and denied the petition without prejudice to a post-conviction petition in the trial court.⁷⁸

Paske later worked for the contracting business of John Wayne Gacy, who after his conviction named Paske and Norman in connection with his crimes. Norman was arrested again in Pennsylvania in 1983, jumped bail, was recaptured in Illinois in July 1987, and died in 2011.⁹

Colorado Records

A Colorado Bureau of Investigation identification record for Norman, issued April 1, 2020, lists Denver arrests on February 26, 1982, on a commercial sex solicitation charge and a felony charge of commercial sexual exploitation of a child. A Denver police entry dated June 10, 1988, lists second-degree sexual assault and sexual assault on a child. The record shows Norman received at the Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City on April 30, 1990, on two counts of sexual assault on a child.¹⁰

The Finders

Two names in the address book seized from the The Finders members Douglas Ammerman and James Michael Holwell at their arrest in Tallahassee on February 4, 1987, appear, according to the writer S. Dovey, in an FBI Dallas file on child prostitution that concerned Norman's Odyssey Foundation, and a third in a Buffalo file on members of NAMBLA suspected of murder. No direct tie between Norman and the Finders' leadership has been documented.⁹¹¹

Footnotes

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1. Moseley, Ray, with Michael Sneed and George Bliss. "Chicago Is Center of National Child Porno Ring." Chicago Tribune, May 16, 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, pp. 433-435. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041 ↩︎

2. Testimony of George Bliss and Michael Sneed, U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation, hearings, Chicago, May 27, 1977, 95th Congress, 1st session. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit ↩︎

3. "Alleged Homosexual Ring Found in a Raid on Apartment in Dallas," New York Times, August 16, 1973, p. 16. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/08/16/archives/alleged-homosexual-ring-found-in-a-raid-on-apartment-in-dallass.html ↩︎

4. Robin Lloyd, For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America (1976), p. 80. https://archive.org/details/formoneyorlovebo0000lloy ↩︎

5. Homewood, Illinois, Police Department, Supplementary Investigation Report, Case No. 20228, dated November 5, 1973, second page. https://archive.org/details/JohnNorman_HomewoodPD ↩︎

6. Federal Bureau of Investigation, memorandum, SAC Chicago (166-NEW), dated October 19, 1976, file 166-2548, FOIPA release 1352511-001 (Philip Paske file). https://vault.fbi.gov/philip-paske/philip-paske-part-01 ↩︎

7. Norman v. Elrod, 76 Ill. 2d 426, 394 N.E.2d 1043 (Ill. 1979). ↩︎

8. Norman v. Elrod, 76 Ill. 2d 426 (1979), No. 51521, order entered March 21, 1979 (per curiam). https://static.case.law/ill-2d/76/cases/0426-01.json ↩︎

9. Dovey, S. Eye of the Chickenhawk. Thehotstar, 2023. ↩︎

10. Colorado Bureau of Investigation, identification record for "Norman, John David," issued April 1, 2020. https://archive.org/details/JohnNorman_CBI ↩︎

11. Federal Bureau of Investigation, "The Finders," FBI Records: The Vault, released November 2019, https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders. ↩︎