—Epilogue—
What is the Reality?
So what can be concluded from this sordid sequence of incidents, interviews, indictments, convictions, confessions, denouncements, and deaths? On one hand, a Douglas County grand jury found that Larry King never molested a child and certainly wasn’t an interstate pedophilic pimp, but that grand jury is trumped by countless contradicting documents and the statements of Eulice Washington, Shawneta Moore, Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Paul Bonacci, Rusty Nelson, Tony Harris, Fred Carter, Nikolai Cayman, Rue Fox, Paul Rodriguez, Henry Vinson, and a highly decorated NYPD detective. I concede that some of these sources are tenuous; but if just one of them is truthful, then the grand jury report was largely a fiction.
The grand jury also declared that Boys Town students weren’t illicitly involved with Larry King and the “non-existent” pedophile network. It’s surely hard to cast off the traditional saintly image of Boys Town. However, the statements of Eulice Washington, Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Paul Bonacci, Rusty Nelson, Tony Harris, Fred Carter, Nikolai Cayman, Rue Fox, and Henry Vinson counter-balance the government’s official account—I’ve included Vinson because he told me that both Larry King and Craig Spence disclosed to him that Boys Town kids were involved in their network. Again, if just one of them is truthful, then the Douglas County grand jury was a travesty.
When I refer to sources as tenuous, I touch on Franklin’s built-in mechanism that has greatly facilitated its concealment. The victims were molested and turned on to drugs as children, and, after they outgrew their youthful marketability, they were discarded and quickly became drug addicts and/or felons, thereby compromising themselves and demolishing their credibility. Boner characterized their state as “ruined,” and readily confessed, “we were turned into sex perverts and drug addicts by these people.” In the case of Alisha Owen, a former victim who wouldn’t recant, the feds and state garishly and unabashedly used her prior behavior to deconstruct her credibility. Moreover, Nebraska’s media and the national media have depicted her as a pathological liar.
In addition to the names I’ve listed, two individuals who claimed to be victims of the Franklin pedophile network have approached me. I didn’t have a paper trail on either one to King or to Boys Town, so I opted not to include their names, even though I have a tendency to strongly believe one of them. Senator Ernie Chambers has also told me that further victims approached him as Franklin unfolded—he didn’t want to see them destroyed by the wrath of law enforcement and advised them to button up and hunker down. Sandi Caradori, too, has received a number of phone calls over the years from purported victims who have conveyed to her that they appreciated the crusade of her late husband. Finally, Gary Caradori’s documentation lists several victims I never managed to contact. I probably could have used his documentation to locate additional victims, but I ultimately concluded that I had a critical mass of victim corroboration without seeking out other victims. Perhaps some will come forward as a result of this book.
The powerful sating their appetites for forbidden fruit via pedophilia and pedophilic sadism are evils that date back millennia: The Roman emperor Tiberius reportedly indulged in pedophilia and then murdered his victims. Moreover, since I started work on this story, pedophile rings linked to the powerful have been exposed in Portugal, Belgium, Chile, and Mexico. The Portuguese ring procured victims from Portugal’s version of Boys Town, and the Belgian pedophile ring reportedly utilized blackmail and had satanic practitioners. The Belgian ring also mirrored Franklin in the respect that many Belgians, including law enforcement officers, concluded it entailed a massive cover-up. The situation prompted thousands of Belgians to take to the streets in protest. So powerbroker pedophile networks like Franklin aren’t unprecedented around the globe.
Indeed, extraordinary and breathtaking power was deployed to orchestrate the cover-up and vaporization of the Franklin story, which generated deeply disturbing aberrations in the US legal system. When I made my first face-to-face pitch of Franklin to a news organization, I told the individual meeting with me that it is likely state and federal grand juries in Nebraska had been co-opted, and I felt a federal grand jury in DC was probably co-opted too: The sort of puppeteering I alluded to implied that the puppeteers were sitting at the apex of power. The individual I met with couldn’t make the paradigm shift required to entertain the prospect that two, and possibly three, grand juries had been hijacked to protect child molesters, and he looked at me with unbridled skepticism, which became an all too familiar pattern. He is a former recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism.
In my Franklin investigation, the names of lofty politicians and powerbrokers who have pedophilic appetites have repeatedly surfaced. The names have been absolutely mind-boggling. Senator Schmit was anonymously implored not to pursue the Franklin Committee investigation because it would lead to the “highest levels of the Republican party.” And shortly after Gary Caradori realized that he was in the feds’ crosshairs and “being ‘set up’ for an arrest,” he wrote a letter to a renowned lawyer noting that the pedophile network he uncovered extended “to the highest levels of the United States.” Given the names that have surfaced in my investigation, I believe that without an immaculate cover-up of Franklin the administration of George H.W. Bush may have been jeopardized.
But to name names would serve no useful purpose, thanks to Franklin’s built-in concealment mechanism: the victims’ previous transgressions and the politicians’ eminence. Eulice Washington continues to insist that she saw a nationally prominent politician at a pedophilic party she attended in Chicago. Washington has amazingly turned her life around, and has been gainfully employed as a youth worker, but she fell in with the wrong crowd after her liberation from the Webb household and has had four children out of wedlock; she lost control of one of her sons, who became enmeshed in gang activity and was later placed in Boys Town, of all places. Though Washington is an extraordinary example of someone overcoming a hellish childhood, her word against that of an eminent politician would be a first-round TKO.
Ultimately, an extremely uncomfortable question needs to be considered: Were the feds saving a specific administration or an extremely corrupt, institutionalized political system where blackmail is commonplace—or, perhaps, both? In other words, is it possible that the feds were the prime movers in Franklin’s underlying events? Is it conceivable that Franklin may have been the blackest of black ops?
Rumors that Franklin Credit Union funds ended up in the Reagan administration’s illegal Contra war chest even made it into the Lincoln Journal, and Larry King fondly name-dropped his friendship with CIA Director William Casey, but rumors and name dropping do not a CIA operation make. However, Paul Rodriguez and his colleagues had sources state that Craig Spence was a CIA asset; Spence himself claimed he was a CIA asset and confessed that his home was bugged by “friendly” intelligence agents. Henry Vinson also told me that Spence confessed to him he was a CIA asset and that his blackmail enterprise was CIA-affiliated.
Vinson claims to have informed federal prosecutors that the pedophilic blackmail enterprise of King and Spence had connections to the CIA. The CIA has denied its affiliation to Spence, and Vinson is a convicted felon, but thousands of documents were sealed in Vinson’s case. The documentation salvaged by the Washington Times is at odds with the statements issued by the US Attorney concerning Vinson’s clientele, but it corresponds to Vinson’s allegations.
Should we believe Vinson, the convicted felon, whose statements concerning his VIP clientele are corroborated, or the government that covered up the names of Vinson’s clientele and refuses to unseal the documents in his case? The unsealing of Vinson’s case files may elucidate the alleged connections of King and Spence’s pedophilic pandering to the CIA. If Vinson’s documentation is unsealed, and shows that he revealed to the feds that King and Spence were pedophilic pimps connected to the CIA, then it would be incumbent on the Department of Justice to tell America whether those allegations were investigated or simply ignored and covered up. If the Department of Justice has a sincere interest in the welfare of children, it should unseal those documents and provide the American public with answers.
Documentation from the CIA’s mind-control program demonstrates that the agency carried out extremely ominous experimentation on children that included electroshock, drugs, hypnosis and “psychological tricks,” and the documents discussed the experimenters’ inducing disassociation and multiple personality disorder. The CIA apparently came to the rescue of the Finders, who were seemingly engaged in sinister activities with children, and a CIA official offered only “Hogwash” as a rebuttal when US News & World Report questioned him about the CIA’s possible connections to the Finders.
Moreover, the CIA’s Operation Midnight Climax in the 1950s and 1960s consisted of CIA-run safe houses in San Francisco and New York—prostitutes on the CIA payroll lured clients back to the safe houses, where they were surreptitiously slipped mickeys of various drugs, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way mirrors; sexual blackmail was reportedly used to secure the confidences of the unsuspecting victims who were surreptitiously drugged. The CIA has a track record of child abuse and blackmail; so is it possible that American politicians have been targeted by the CIA’s spycraft?
The inordinate lust for power is often accompanied by the inordinate power of lust, which has the potential to cause the smartest of individuals to make foolish decisions: Bill Clinton is a stunning example of someone who craved power from a young age, but nearly forfeited his coveted seat at the pinnacle of power because of compulsive sexual behavior. In addition to lust making smart people foolish, arrogance and greed also make fools of very smart people, and many of our politicians have the trifecta of full-tilt libido, arrogance, and greed.
In recent years, America has witnessed the sexual downfall of New Jersey Governor James McGeevey, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, US Senator Larry Craig, and US Congressman Mark Foley. Both Craig and Foley sat at the zenith of power in the US Congress: Craig attempted to solicit sex in an airport restroom and Foley sent instant messages with explicit sexual content to an underage Congressional page.
After Craig and Foley were outed, long-standing accounts of their brazen homosexuality began to surface—both were extremely susceptible to sexual blackmail: One sexually compromising picture leaked to the media or the public certainly would have marked the end of their political careers as well as public disgrace. If such pictures existed, whoever possessed them would have held these politicians in thrall. But homosexuality and pedophilia are by no means the only fodder for the blackmail of a politician—revelations of extramarital affairs and bribes have sunk many.
In 2008, the Congressional approval rating plummeted to an almost unfathomable low of 12%. If 88% of Americans feel that the Congress is not serving their will, whose will is it conceivably serving? One might say “special interests,” but the story I have told suggests that Congress may be serving the will of covert masters. Perhaps there is a checks and balances system that is obscured from the American public—a checks and balances system of blackmail. Is it possible that our politicians’ various improprieties are catalogued and then wielded over their heads, like some sword of Damocles? I consider the federal overkill involved in covering up Franklin, and, again, I ask were the feds protecting an administration, a corruption-laden political system, or both? The upward mobility of certain officers of the court who played a role in covering up the facts of Franklin, even after the administration of George H.W. Bush left office, may be an indication that “the system” is corrupt and compromised.
The government’s abetting child abuse is extremely disturbing, but the media, or the fourth estate, played a role as well. The feds were aided and abetted by the press through either commission or omission: The “conservative” Omaha World-Herald and the “liberal” Washington Post loudly echoed the feds’ official line. The World-Herald proactively dismantled the Franklin Committee’s investigation and promoted the version of Franklin cooked up by the FBI and the Douglas County grand jury, just as the Washington Post proactively dismantled the Washington Times’ investigation and promoted the malfeasance of the DC US Attorney’s Office and the Secret Service. The New York Times, CBS’ 48 Hours, and GQ also participated by trumpeting what seems to be government propaganda.
The Omaha World-Herald published a retrospective 1998 article on Franklin echoing a familiar refrain: “The passage of time, Van Pelt said, has vindicated what the Douglas County Franklin grand jury did. Nothing has emerged in the intervening years that disproves the grand jury’s conclusions, he said.” In addition to owning a newspaper that is an arbiter of truth, the World-Herald Company co-owns Election Software & Systems, which has counted approximately fifty percent of the ballots in the last four major US elections.
I’ve written mostly about the Omaha-World Herald and its twisting and turning of facts, but the Washington Post steamrolled over the Washington Times reportage on Craig Spence, his purported CIA affiliation, and his blackmail enterprise. The Washington Post branded the Washington Times reporting as “yellow journalism” and having “not much substance.” The Post also offered a disingenuous explanation for discounting the Washington Times stories on Spence—”a key law enforcement official” had “lunch at the Post” and “assured the staff that the investigation was primarily on credit card fraud.” Again, it’s rather interesting that the Post didn’t listen to key law enforcement officials during Watergate, but it was all ears concerning the government’s account of Spence.
Interestingly, Henry Vinson named a high-flyer at the Washington Post, who professes to be a married heterosexual, as one of his more gung-ho clients. I don’t consider Vinson’s word infallible, but his account does offer a plausible explanation for the newspaper’s siding with the government concerning Spence et al.
The New York Times coverage of Franklin was quite interesting—America’s newspaper of record jumped on the story almost immediately, reporting on the Unicameral’s Executive Board meeting in December of 1988, when the first allegations of child abuse publicly surfaced. A week later, the Times had a follow-up article that further explored the child-abuse allegations, and it even included an interview with Julie Walters, who said that she felt Eulice Washington’s contentions were credible. The newspaper then completely backed away from any coverage of Franklin for a year and a half—its next article on Franklin reported on the findings of the Douglas County grand jury. The final New York Times article on Franklin reported on the findings of the federal grand jury—both articles discussed Alisha Owen’s perjury indictments.
The timing of CBS’ 48 Hours was uncanny: The episode even commented on the fact that Owen “is now on trial for perjury.” The producers of that segment must have kept tabs on Owen’s trial, and the 48 Hours aired on the same day that Owen’s jurors started deliberating her fate. Though the 48 Hours episode had a profound impact on Owen’s jury, I realize that to directly attribute malfeasance to the show would be mere speculation. But the feds spared no expense to cover up Franklin; is it possible that some very powerful people in government called in markers with a major network to facilitate the cover-up?
I think it would be difficult to interpret the GQ article, “Other People’s Money,” as anything other than a hatchet job on the Franklin Committee, Gary Caradori, Owen, etc. In addition to a derisive slant, the article had numerous inaccuracies—even in its pronouncement of the government’s cover story on Franklin. For example, the article described Eulice Washington as a “9-year-old boy.” Major magazines require articles to be scrutinized by “fact checkers,” but GQ’s fact checkers were obviously asleep at the wheel that month.
I’ve heard of other media personalities who are possibly compromised, but it’s also conceivable that many in the media found the story of Franklin too implausible, and opted to take their cue from the government instead of putting much legwork into excavating the truth. If, in fact, Franklin reportage was so skewed because the media has been heavily compromised and corrupted, it does not bode well for our society.
A third powerful entity in our society that has been implicated in Franklin is Boys Town, and, by extension, the Church. I have considerable corroboration that King plundered Boys Town for underage victims. Boys Town’s administration initially seemed to be interested in investigating the allegations—Father Val Peter gave Julie Walters the thumbs-up to look into Eulice Washington’s early allegations. But, later on, Caradori noted that Father Peter was “uncooperative” with his investigation. A paper trail, albeit scant, also links Larry King and his credit union to Boys Town.
Boys Town has had a positive impact on numerous children, but it is an organization with a shadow. This was illustrated once again by its character assassination of former students who stepped forward and attempted to litigate molestation lawsuits against the orphanage. A “report” commissioned by Boys Town to “investigate” the abuse allegations employed retired G-man John Pankonin as its chief investigator, and it was essentially déjà vu all over again: The report included the psychological and psychiatric records of the alleged victims, trashed their credibility, refuted their allegations, and exonerated the alleged abusers. The attorney representing the litigants as well as social services agencies were dumbfounded by Boys Town’s “malicious” response to the lawsuits.
All the litigants had succumbed to drug addiction and/or antisocial behavior that made their credibility tenuous and easy to deconstruct except for one: Todd Rivers. So the Boys Town report published an absolute falsehood concerning him. The report said that Rivers had claimed recovered memories of his molestations by Boy Town’s Father James Kelly in March of 2002, and he gave an interview to the World-Herald about his molestations before February 23, 2002; therefore he wasn’t being truthful. But Todd Rivers actually commented on his abuse in a World-Herald article from February 23, 2003—almost a year after he recovered memories of being molested. The fact that Boys Town published an outright falsehood to deconstruct Rivers’ credibility is very disturbing. It’s also disturbing that the Boys Town report cleared Father James Kelly of molesting Boys Town youth, because I’ve talked to four former students who claim Kelly was their abuser, and his history suggests that of a serial predator.
In Todd Rivers’ case, Boys Town conscripted a psychiatrist who sat on the Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) to debunk Rivers’ repressed memories. FMSF had a macabre genesis, and some of its Advisory Board members have prior affiliation with CIA mind-control experimentation. I find it rather interesting that the FMSF denounces dissociation, even though CIA documentation clearly discusses it as a producible state.
After David Hill, Rue Fox, and Nikolai Cayman were allegedly molested at Boys Town, all three told me they were put in psychiatric facilities. Molestation will invariably have adverse effects on children, compelling them to act out, and to attribute sinister motives to Boys Town for depositing them in psychiatric facilities as a premeditated means to destroy their credibility, like the former Soviet Union discredited dissenters, would be problematic. But according to Cayman, after he told Boys Town staff about his alleged flights with Larry King, he was flown to Georgia and deposited in a psychiatric institution. His account of being summarily flown from Nebraska to Georgia and hospitalized is corroborated by affiliates of federal law enforcement. If Boys Town was actually concerned about Cayman’s mental health, and he was in the midst of a severe mental health crisis requiring hospitalization, I would think that Boys Town would have hospitalized him in an Omaha facility.
Ironically, it was an exploration of Satanism which propelled me into the parallel universe of Franklin, and it’s one of the facets of the story where I’ve accrued the least amount of corroboration: I have Shawneta Moore’s accounts as reported by Richard Young Hospital, OPD officer Irl Carmean, and Jerry Lowe, and I also have the statements of Paul Bonacci, Nikolai Cayman, and Rusty Nelson.
The US Customs report on the Finders seemingly implicates that group in occult activities, but over the years I’ve heard several conflicting accounts about the cult’s actual beliefs and its affiliation to the CIA. Nonetheless, the CIA shutting down an investigation into the Finders reminds me of the OPD and FBI’s earliest efforts to slam the door on the early allegations against Larry King. The CIA apparently had no problem lowering an iron curtain on any investigation into the Finders—even when US Representatives pushed for an inquiry. If the US Representatives had possessed the same fortitude as members of the Franklin Committee, and not backed down, their hearing might have yielded some rather remarkable revelations that the CIA obviously didn’t want publicized.
Though I only have four corroborations on the Franklin narrative’s satanic component, the theme of Larry King confessing to or playing a role in the murder or sale of children has come from Troy Boner, Alisha Owen, Paul Bonacci, Rusty Nelson, and Henry Vinson. Though the selling or killing of children isn’t necessarily satanic, it is unconditionally evil.
Satanism has numerous different sects with varying beliefs, but many of its adherents hold values that are an inversion of idealized Christian values, which put a premium on the preservation of a child’s innocence—Satanists of this ilk look upon the defilement of innocence as one of their highest sacraments. They would be the perfect individuals to conscript in the creation of a pedophile network, or to carry out inhumane activities or “psychological tricks” on children in the perpetuation of sadistic mind-control experiments.
I recall the “satanic panic” that emerged in the 1980s, but I didn’t give it too much credence because it was so off-the-wall. The FBI, though, responded to the escalating brouhaha with a 1992 report authored by a supervisory special agent at Quantico, Virginia’s venerated Behavioral Science Unit. The report essentially debunked all that wacky innuendo about ritual abuse and reassured the American public that is was virtually non-existent and they could sleep soundly at night. Though the FBI report yielded scant evidence concerning ritual abuse, several studies and articles on the subject have been published in academic, peer-reviewed journals. The strength of their findings lies in the fact that the victims who claim to have been ritually abused are from disparate geographic locations and socioeconomic strata; yet they describe the same improbable, horrific events.
A 1995 study published in The Journal of Psychohistory surveyed five organizations throughout the United States offering a hotline for children, including Childhelp USA, a bellwether in the advocacy and assistance for abused children: The study found that in 1992 roughly 23,000 calls reporting the ritual abuse of children had been logged by the five hotlines.
Moreover, a 1991 study conducted by the National Center for the Treatment of Dissociative Disorders in Denver, Colorado, published in The Journal of Child Abuse & Neglect, surveyed thirty-seven adults who had reported ritual abuse as children and were diagnosed with either multiple personality disorder or dissociative disorder. All the subjects said they had been sexually abused, physically abused and/or tortured, had witnessed animal mutilations, been forced to take drugs, and received death threats—83% said they had witnessed at least one adult or child sacrifice.
The studies of ritual abuse survivors have contained relatively limited numbers of subjects, but in 2007 a team of researchers from the United States and Germany conducted the Adult Survivors of Extreme Abuse Survey (EAS), the largest study of ritual-abuse survivors to date. The team provided an online website for survivor advocates and survivors. The website featured a survey of 238 questions, ranging from demographics to categories of abuse. Of the 1,471 participants responding to the questionnaire, 987 completed the “Categories of Abuse” component: 191 participants claimed to have experienced only ritual abuse, 69 said that they had undergone only mind control, and 513 reported that they experienced both ritual abuse and mind control.
Of the 704 EAS respondents reporting ritual abuse, 543 respondents specifically reported satanic ritual abuse. When the EAS investigators crunched the numbers concerning the participants who claimed satanic ritual abuse, they were amazed at how closely the types of satanic ritual abuse reported by the EAS respondents matched the types of ritual abuse found in the 1991 study conducted by the National Center for the Treatment of Dissociative Disorders. The latter study found that 100% of the subjects had been sexually abused, physically abused and/or tortured, had witnessed animal mutilations, and received death threats: The respective percentages of the EAS respondents reporting abuse in those categories were 95%, 96%, 86%, and 93%. The National Center for the Treatment of Dissociative Disorders found that 83% of the subjects in its study had witnessed a human sacrifice, and 82% of EAS respondents had witnessed murder carried out by their abusers.
When I started to explore ritual abuse, I thought it was merely the stuff of nightmares, and, I have to confess, I was initially dubious of the therapists I contacted who worked with ritual abuse survivors and mind-control victims. But over the years, as I’ve cultivated rapport with these therapists, I’ve concluded that they haven’t lost their minds, nor are they religious zealots. In fact, a 1995 study published in the Journal of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice looked at the question of whether or not therapists who work with ritual abuse victims had a tendency to be religious. The study looked at 497 Christian therapists and 100 members of the American Psychological Association and their respective diagnoses of dissociative disorder, sexual abuse and ritual abuse. The study concluded that Christian therapists and APA members diagnosed dissociative disorder and sexual abuse with the same frequency, and Christian therapists’ diagnosis of ritual abuse was only slightly higher than that of the APA members questioned. A second study, published in The Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, concluded that religious beliefs had no relationship to a therapist’s identification of ritual abuse.
To the average American, the Franklin story, even in its abbreviated version—a pedophile network that pandered children to the power elite, its cover-up by the federal government, and its possible affiliation with the CIA and blackmail—is wholly divorced from conventional reality, and to superimpose Satanism onto it makes it over-the-top incomprehensible, even approaching the absurd. It easily surpasses the darkest surrealism of a David Lynch movie. But there’s a facet of Franklin that even eclipses Satanism in terms of the fantastic: mind control. Paul Bonacci, in fact, claims to be a victim of a government mind-control program.
Though Van Pelt and company concluded that Bonacci was a liar, Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Danny King, and Rusty Nelson corroborate his participation in the pedophilic parties at the Twin Towers. Bonacci, like Owen, refused to recant his allegations about King’s pedophile network. The Douglas County judiciary didn’t have the courage to try Bonacci, after just barely convicting Owen, and dropped his perjury charges.
After some false starts, I’ve spent numerous hours with Bonacci, his wife, and their children. Today, Bonacci doesn’t smoke, drink, or take drugs, and he’s quite pious—he’s also struggled through the acute throes of his multiple personality disorder. Before Bonacci became “integrated,” sorting out his multiple personalities into a unified self, he related some fantastic tales. Unfortunately, as he was in the midst of unifying his various personalities, he was exploited by various parties on the fringe and perhaps also by major television networks, including ABC and FOX.
Bonacci has been relatively consistent, but he now admits that some of the statements he’s made, especially in the earlier stages of his integration, were incorrect. So, that being said, I’ll discuss Paul Bonacci and the accounts he’s conveyed to me, and also the corroboration I’ve collected in his case.
When Gary Caradori initially videotaped Bonacci, Bonacci claimed that Larry King was engaged in the sexual compromise of politicians in Washington, DC. Karen Ormiston said that she remembers a later interview where Bonacci brought up Craig Spence’s name as King’s partner in pedophilic pandering and blackmail. Bonacci discussed King’s DC townhouse with both Caradori and Yorkshire Television. As previously noted, he said that the basement had a room that only locked from the outside, and reporter Paul Rodriguez found that statement truthful. It would be next to impossible for Bonacci to relate such a detail unless he had actually been in King’s DC townhouse.
Bonacci also told Yorkshire Television that he took midnight tours of the White House as an underage prostitute, and the tours were arranged by Craig Spence. Bonacci’s claims sound extremely implausible, but Washington Times reporters were aware of at least four tours arranged by Spence, and one of the tours included an underage male. Though the Washington Times doesn’t outright corroborate Bonacci on the midnight tours he’s alleged to have taken, its reportage indicates Bonacci’s seemingly far-fetched story was within the realm of possibility.
Bonacci maintains that his MPD was the result of a government mind-control program. According to Dr. Mead, Bonacci wasn’t cognizant of his MPD until Mead diagnosed him in 1990. Bonacci told me he wasn’t aware of the mind-control origin of his MPD until even later, when he started to integrate his alternate personalities. I’ve talked to accredited, licensed therapists who say they’ve counseled mind-control victims, and they’ve said that the majority of these patients initially aren’t mindful of their MPD or its government origins.
The CIA documentation that I’ve collected discusses inducing MPD in children and the experimenters’ use of electric shock, drugs, hypnosis, and “psychological tricks.” Bonacci related to me that his mind was deconstructed through electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sexual abuse, and satanic ritual abuse. He also told me that he was initially molested in kindergarten by a serviceman at Offutt Air Force Base, where the mind-control program was conducted.
MPD is the result of dissociation, and dissociation is caused by traumatic events that compel the mind to distance itself from those events because an individual is unable or unwilling to process them at the time. It’s impossible to infer the exact nature of the “psychological tricks” mentioned in the CIA documents I’ve acquired, and to specifically ascribe satanic ritual abuse and sexual abuse to the mind-control experiments is problematic; but the scant CIA mind-control documentation that has been recovered demonstrates that the agency was willing to use a variety of sadistic methodologies to further its research, including torture, concussions, large doses of psychotropic drugs, and frequent high-powered electroshock.
When I embarked on this investigation, I knew next to nothing about the CIA’s mind-control programs, so I initially talked to therapists who counsel mind-control victims. The therapists included psychiatrists and psychologists, and I was eventually directed to individuals the therapists had diagnosed as mind-control victims and who themselves contended they were mind-control victims. Every self-proclaimed mind-control victim I’ve interviewed has said that satanic ritual abuse and sexual abuse were integral facets of the experimenters’ methodologies.
I freely concede that these individuals strike me as psychologically damaged. If I hadn’t been directed to them by therapists whom I found to be credible, I never would have believed their accounts, because they were so divorced from mundane reality. In fact, even today, I have difficulties discerning whether some of them were psychologically damaged simply by their dysfunctional childhoods or by the CIA’s mind-control experimentation.
The CIA allegedly discontinued mind-control programs in the 1960s, but Paul Bonacci and the other alleged mind-control victims I’ve interviewed discuss being manipulated by mind control throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. So we are faced with a dilemma quite familiar to our tale: Are we to believe the government? Or shall we believe these psychologically damaged individuals who insist that they underwent CIA mind-control efforts well after the CIA’s declared termination date for these programs?
The CIA destroyed the overwhelming majority of its mind-control documentation in 1973, which could have been its way of hiding the efficacy of the programs and/or their sheer, sadistic brutality. The particular CIA document I’ve acquired concerning the creation of MPD wasn’t released during the US Senate hearing on mind control in 1977—it was acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request years later. The majority of the documentation floating around the Internet regarding the CIA and mind control came out of the 1977 Senate hearing, and I’m not aware of the document I possess even being on the Net, though it very well may be.
Bonacci also told me about a high-ranking military officer who was in cahoots with King and Spence’s pedophilic blackmail enterprise—he said that the military officer in question was a Satanist and a pedophile. The military officer Bonacci alluded to is an admitted Satanist, and he was implicated in the molestation of several children. I have the search warrant that police executed on his home during a molestation investigation—a child who was purportedly molested gave an apt description of the officer’s house, which was detailed in the search warrant. After local police executed the search warrant, they found corroboration of the child’s account, but the feds usurped the case and dropped the charges against the officer—a familiar theme.
Bonacci claims to have been in the officer’s home, and he gave me an accurate description of the home; so either Bonacci came by the search warrant, a description of the home by someone else, or he was actually in the home—the officer’s home is on the West Coast.
Shortly after Caradori found Bonacci, Bonacci confessed to participating in the kidnapping of twelve-year-old Johnny Gosch, who was abducted on the morning of September 6, 1982 while delivering papers in West Des Moines, Iowa. This is one of the more infamous abductions in American history—Johnny Gosch’s photo and that of a second kidnapped child were the first to appear on milk cartons. Word of Bonacci’s confession eventually drifted to Noreen Gosch, Johnny’s mother, and, searching for answers, she met with Bonacci at the Lincoln Correctional Center in 1991. Bonacci provided Noreen Gosch with details about her son’s abduction, and with details regarding certain physical characteristics that had never been released to the press. Noreen Gosch believed Bonacci, and her husband believed him as well.
The FOX network’s America’s Most Wanted picked up on the story, airing five segments on Johnny Gosch’s abduction. America’s Most Wanted interviewed and even polygraphed Bonacci, and his interview was integral to the show’s coverage. America’s Most Wanted showed a tape of Bonacci’s first meeting with Noreen Gosch at the Lincoln Correctional Center—he broke down crying and apologized profusely.
Bonacci told America’s Most Wanted that the man who coordinated the Johnny Gosch abduction was named “Emilio,” and he provided a very detailed description of him—he also provided a detailed description of Emilio’s henchman, whose name was “Tony.” Bonacci told me that Emilio shoved a gun in his mouth and threatened to kill him if he didn’t accompany Emilio to abduct Johnny Gosch.
Bonacci imparted a highly improbable tale to America’s Most Wanted about a sinister network of pedophiles, and he disclosed to the show’s producers that Johnny had been held on a ranch in rural Colorado that was near an elephant-shaped rock. Bonacci said that Johnny attempted to run away from the ranch and, as a punishment, he was branded like livestock, which the producers thought was extremely far-fetched. After Bonacci’s interview aired on America’s Most Wanted, a runaway named Jimmy contacted Noreen Gosch, and America’s Most Wanted eventually interviewed him.
Jimmy claimed to have been on the Colorado ranch after Bonacci had left, and he gave a description of the ranch and the elephant-shaped rock that coincided with Bonacci’s description. He then dumbfounded the producers of America’s Most Wanted: Jimmy showed them a brand on his leg—the precise type of brand that Bonacci had described! Bonacci and Jimmy also told the producers about a cavity beneath the Colorado house where the children were stashed. America’s Most Wanted, Bonacci, and Jimmy took a field trip to rural Colorado, and they indeed found the elephant-shaped rock and the ranch. Bonacci walked up to the vacant house and burst out in tears. Bonacci and Jimmy then led the producers to the cavity under the house.
America’s Most Wanted also interviewed a friend of the Gosch family, who said he had been to a Colorado restaurant where he saw “Johnny Gosch was here” written on the men’s room wall. This is a remarkable coincidence, and Jimmy’s account certainly corroborated Bonacci’s earlier account, but none of this is irrefutable proof that Johnny Gosch was in Colorado.
However, when Bonacci was incarcerated at the Lincoln Correction Center after the fall of Franklin, he received various letters from around the country. The letters were from Kansas City, Missouri; Sacramento, California; and Brockton, Massachusetts, and were written by kids who, Bonacci said, were enmeshed in the vast underground pedophile network that abducted Johnny Gosch. I’ve acquired some of the letters, and they discuss Emilio, and also “Johnny” and “JG.” For example, “The Col is gone to Mexico and took JG with him. JG is back to blond and had face surgery.” So either Bonacci had these letters sent to him from around the country to provide bogus validation for his participation in Johnny Gosch’s abduction, or these kids were actually enmeshed in the network, have “broken away,” and are aware of Emilio and Johnny or JG.
Bonacci offered details of Johnny Gosch’s abduction that had never been released to the press; Jimmy corroborated Bonacci; a family friend of the Gosch’s provided possible corroboration that Johnny Gosch may have been in Colorado; and Bonacci’s letters supplied the names of kids who claimed to have been acquainted with Johnny Gosch after his abduction. But Iowa law enforcement never followed up on Bonacci’s leads.
America’s Most Wanted interviewed a law-enforcement official in Iowa who said that Iowa law enforcement hadn’t interviewed Bonacci regarding Johnny Gosch because the Omaha FBI declared he was not credible. The FBI even pressured America’s Most Wanted not to air its segments on Johnny Gosch, but its host, John Walsh, refused to knuckle under to the FBI’s pressure. I’ve documented example after example of the Omaha FBI’s cover-up of Franklin; so it’s not surprising that it swayed Iowa law enforcement from even interviewing Bonacci.
I’ve provided a mere thumbnail account of the Johnny Gosch abduction and its related complexities, which would be a book unto itself. Early on, I simultaneously pursued both the Franklin and the Johnny Gosch stories, but I came to a fork in the road where time and money would permit my pursuit of only one—I ultimately opted for Franklin, because I concluded that its immense paper trial and potential for corroboration made it much more likely to yield real results.
The Johnny Gosch story is also overflowing on the Internet, and it occasionally pierces the mainstream media. In addition to America’s Most Wanted, ABC spent a great deal of time and resources on the story, but its inquiry was eventually shelved. In 2006, Noreen Gosch received a color photo of three boys bound and gagged on a bed, and also a black-and-white photo of a single boy bound and gagged—she maintains that the black-and-white photo was definitely her son.
She posted the photos on JohnnyGosch.com, and the pictures quickly ricocheted around the world, creating a surge of interest—they were even broadcast on the ABC and FOX networks. Shortly after the pictures started to circulate, a former Florida investigator denied that the pictures were of Johnny Gosch—he said the pictures were from a 1978 or 1979 investigation, where law enforcement found no “coercion or touching.” The retired investigator asserted that the pictures from the investigation were filed away, but he was never able to produce them.
Paul Bonacci’s allegations have been out-and-out rejected by state and federal law enforcement as the ravings of someone who is mentally ill, but he has received a modicum of vindication from the civil suit he litigated against Larry King in a US District Court. As discussed, John DeCamp, acting as Bonacci’s attorney, filed sixteen civil lawsuits in federal court on behalf of Bonacci. The lawsuits were directed at people Bonacci accused of molesting him or of covering up his abuse, and the lawsuits contended that these individuals had deprived Bonacci of his civil rights.
US District Court Judge Warren Urbom dismissed fifteen of the lawsuits. Larry King was incarcerated when Bonacci’s lawsuits were filed, and he opted not to contest the allegations. “A lot of people conduct lawsuits from prison,” said Judge Urbom. “There is no indication he wanted to dispute this…. The defendant King’s default has made those allegations true against him.” Urbom entered a “default judgment” against King in 1998, and DeCamp moved for a separate trial on the issue of compensation.
During the 1999 trial, DeCamp called Noreen Gosch, Rusty Nelson, Paul Bonacci, and Denise Bonacci, Paul’s wife, to testify. Noreen Gosch made a stunning disclosure when she testified: She stated that her son, Johnny, had visited her a few years earlier and had corroborated Bonacci’s account of his abduction—she said that she hadn’t publicly divulged her late-night rendezvous with Johnny, and she was disclosing it only because she was under oath. She testified that her son feared for his life, and he had said that the pedophile network that abducted him was connected to the rich and powerful as well as the government.
Urbom’s one-million-dollar judgment against King discusses Bonacci’s “repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonments, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals,” etc. The judgment also addressed Bonacci’s suffering because of King: “He has suffered burns, broken fingers, beating of the head and face and other indignities by the wrongful actions of the defendant King. In addition to the misery of going through the experiences just related over a period of eight years, the plaintiff has suffered the lingering results to the present time.”
I wrote that Bonacci received a “modicum of vindication” from the judgment, and DeCamp felt Judge Urbom finally believed Bonacci. But the real vindication ultimately came in the form of King’s appealing the judgment, and then withdrawing his appeal after DeCamp began making “motions for depositions.” King was released from federal prison in April 2001, after serving nearly ten years for his financial crimes, and he relocated to the Washington, DC area. Not a single dollar from the judgment has as yet been collected.
I’ve spent years corroborating the reality of these events, and I acknowledge that there are facets of Bonacci’s story that sound implausible and are impossible to substantiate—he’s also confessed to making untrue statements as he’s struggled through the acute throes of his MPD. On the other hand, Bonacci has never wavered about his participation in Johnny Gosch’s abduction, and he’s provided numerous specifics concerning the abduction that were, in part, confirmed by America’s Most Wanted. If the Omaha FBI hadn’t been engaged in a proactive cover-up of the Franklin story and the discrediting of Bonacci, which was further evinced by the FBI’s pressuring America’s Most Wanted not to run the Johnny Gosch story, Bonacci might have provided law enforcement with valuable leads that could have solved the riddle of that boy’s disappearance.
I’ve worked assiduously to prove that “Franklin” is a reality, but it’s also important for me to debunk various Franklin derivatives that have floated around the Internet and been the subject of wild speculation and conjecture. The story of Johnny Gosch has become an integral facet of Franklin lore because of Paul Bonacci’s purported participation in the abduction. In 2005, the Internet was abuzz with innuendo that Jeff Gannon, gay escort by night and White House reporter by day, was none other than Johnny Gosch. The Internet innuendo about Johnny Gosch emerging as Jeff Gannon became so fertile that it even pierced the mainstream media—MSNBC’s short-lived show, Dietl and Daniels, aired segments tackling the Web speculation. I looked into the innuendo and quickly concluded that Jeff Gannon definitely wasn’t Johnny Gosch.
A second Franklin-related fallacy that is all over the Internet involves Hunter Thompson’s alleged participation in snuff films. When Gary Caradori initially interviewed Bonacci, the latter related that Larry King chartered a plane to Sacramento, where a boy named “Jeremy,” who had been kidnapped, was filmed being shot in the head. Bonacci later said that the film’s “producer” introduced himself as “Hunter Thompson.” Bonacci didn’t say that the producer was, in fact, the gonzo writer Hunter Thompson, but merely that he introduced himself by that name. To this day, Bonacci doesn’t even know what the late Hunter Thompson looked like. And surely common sense would dictate that someone making a snuff film wouldn’t provide his true name, especially if he was famous.
Though Bonacci never said that the actual Hunter Thompson participated in the production of a snuff film, Rusty Nelson gave an interview where he fingered Hunter Thompson as a snuff-film aficionado. I’ve previously discussed Nelson’s living a very marginalized life after his incarceration, and then falling in love with a woman in rural Nebraska who footed the bill for him to start a photography studio. And shortly after the studio was opened, it was raided by law enforcement—Nelson was incarcerated for not registering as a sex offender, and his camera equipment was impounded. Those events ultimately led to the dissolution of Nelson’s photography studio and his relationship.
Prior to the raid, Nelson had been consistent with me and generally snubbed Internet irregulars who requested interviews. After the raid, however, Nelson gushed interviews to all comers, and he gushed information that was contradictory to the accounts he related to me—he also made statements that I concluded were outright lies. In some of those interviews he implicated Hunter Thompson in the making of snuff films. I had spent hours with Nelson before his photography studio was raided, and he had never discussed Hunter Thompson’s affiliation with King or snuff films. After those interviews, I confronted Nelson and showed him five pictures—one of the pictures was of Thompson and Nelson couldn’t identify him.
Though Rusty Nelson has a propensity to tell tall tales, OPD documentation, Alisha Owen, and Paul Bonacci connect Nelson to King—I’ve also collected off-the-record corroboration linking Nelson to King. Moreover, he’s provided me with many nuances that have panned out regarding Franklin; so I believe that Nelson was part-and-parcel of Franklin’s dark machinations. Though Nelson’s moral barometer may be deeply flawed and he has told tall tales, I have a tendency to believe that he was able to smuggle some pictures out from under King’s watchful eyes, and that he gave those pictures to Gary Caradori in Chicago. I also feel that he no longer has pictures. He maintains that he has as a life insurance policy.
In addition to spending numerous hours with Rusty Nelson, I’ve spent countless hours with Eulice Washington, Alisha Owen, Paul Bonacci, and members of their respective families. I initially cultivated relationships with them in order to determine their veracity, but, over time, I’ve developed friendships with each of them. Unlike Nelson, they’ve been consistent right down the line—their respective family members also believe and/or back up their accounts.
I’ve never snagged Eulice Washington in a lie, and I’ve corroborated various statements she’s made to me via Kirstin Hallberg, Patricia Flocken, her sisters, and through the many social service documents I’ve collected—I also have multiple corroborations about her allegation that Larry King flew Boys Town students around the country to be used as underage prostitutes.
I’ve also never caught Alisha Owen lying to me, and I’ve corroborated numerous aspects of her story through Paul Bonacci, Rusty Nelson, Danny King, Troy Boner’s affidavit, Karen Ormiston, Henry Rosenthal, her family members, a York guard, and through the other documentation I’ve collected. I’ve contacted various witnesses who testified against Owen at her trial, and Danny King is the only one who has confessed to perjuring himself. However, Troy Boner’s “lie or die” affidavit states that he also perjured himself at her trial because of FBI coercion.
Paul Bonacci’s story is extremely bizarre, but he’s also been consistent with me, and I’ve been able to corroborate bits and pieces of his story—I must admit though, I’ve encountered one contradictory statement: Bonacci told me that he related his sexual abuse to a high school counselor. I eventually found the former counselor, and he said that he remembered Bonacci’s prolific truancy, but he couldn’t recall him conveying accounts of sexual abuse.
I readily admit that there are aspects of Bonacci’s story that are next to impossible to corroborate, but Alisha Owen, Danny King, Rusty Nelson, Troy Boner’s affidavit, Paul Rodriguez, and a former producer of America’s Most Wanted have confirmed nuances of Bonacci’s very strange stories. Moreover, both of Johnny Gosch’s parents have stated that they believe Bonacci took part in the abduction of their son, because of the detailed information he provided them.
I was initially perplexed by Bonacci’s ability to cut loose from his family for protracted periods at such a young age: He told me that his family life was completely dysfunctional, and his mother and his subsequent stepfathers never kept tabs on him—his account of non-existent parenting has been corroborated by a family member. Moreover, from the interviews I’ve conducted with Alisha Owen and Danny King, it’s obvious to me that they clearly know Bonacci, even though Van Pelt and company denied that fact. It’s also evident to me that Rusty Nelson and Paul Bonacci know each other.
Given the unbelievable amount of abuse that Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci have endured from perpetrators and also law enforcement, I find it truly astounding that they’ve been able to forge lives for themselves. Both Owen and Bonacci have been happily married for years, and both are gainfully self-employed.
I feel that time has vindicated Owen and Bonacci and granted them a well deserved poetic justice: They refused to recant their abuse, and they’ve managed, against all odds, to put together productive lives for themselves. Troy Boner and Danny King recanted their allegations of abuse—Boner died a drug addict, and Danny King is well on his way to that destination. Moreover, the other victims I’ve talked to who never came forward publicly are mired in drug addiction and are living on the periphery of society or are incarcerated. The fact that Owen and Bonacci have been able to persevere and even flourish in various aspects of their lives is the only silver lining to Franklin’s very dark cloud.
Contrary to the legions of government and media personnel who have labeled Franklin as a mere “conspiracy theory,” overwhelming corroboration and documentation confirm both the existence of an interstate pedophile network and a government cover-up thereof. This is not a conspiracy theory—it is an account of a conspiracy. Unlike other government conspiracies that have been acknowledged—Watergate, Iran-Contra, Cointelpro, etc.—Franklin hasn’t been exposed in the “authoritative” media as a bona fide conspiracy. In fact, mainstream media seems to have colluded in the cover-up, and thus it has been relegated to the dustbin of “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, if I hadn’t come across the US Customs report on the Finders, I never would have pursued this story, because of its absolute implausibility. But “implausible” does not mean “contrary to fact.”
The Franklin story is a cautionary warning for America—not only does it provide a glimpse at a stratum of government corruption that is opaque and unfathomable to the majority of Americans, it also demonstrates that the government, together with the media, have the potential to spin fictions into facts and facts into fictions. Since the collapse of the Franklin Credit Union, the Patriot Act has eased restrictions on law enforcement, and the media has undergone considerable consolidation due to government deregulation. The titanic media conglomerates of today are beholden to the federal government because its policies allow for their existence. So early 21st century America may be even more susceptible to the cover-up of a scandal as horrific as Franklin than it was two decades ago.
Nick Bryant
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