The Finders and The Odyssey Network

The Tallahassee Discovery

On February 4, 1987, police in Tallahassee, Florida received a call about six dishevelled children in a park under the supervision of two well-dressed men. The men were members of a commune called The Finders, and the children belonged to women within the group. The children appeared dirty, malnourished, and demonstrated an unfamiliarity with the outside world. One child showed signs of sexual abuse. When questioned, the children stated the men were their teachers taking them to a special school in Mexico for brilliant children, and that they had been weaned from their mothers and were under the control of the "game caller." The van transporting them was registered to a warehouse in Washington, D.C.

The Washington Raids

This information was relayed to U.S. Customs officers and Metropolitan Police in Washington, D.C., who discovered they already had an informant file stating that The Finders were conducting brainwashing techniques and that children were used in rituals by the group. Search warrants were secured for the warehouse and a nearby duplex owned by Finders leader Marion Pettie. Inside the warehouse, authorities discovered hot tub and sauna facilities, film sets, a video screening room, a library of books on mind control, and a room full of networked computer equipment with a satellite link. According to U.S. Customs Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez, files on computers operated by a Finders member named Stuart Miles Silverstone contained detailed instructions for obtaining children through impregnation of female members, purchasing, trading, and kidnapping. Other files included telex messages to terminals across the United States and abroad, including a purchase order for two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through an official at the Chinese Embassy, and instructions to move children through different jurisdictions to avoid police attention.

The CIA Connection and FBI Cover-Up

On February 6, 1987, the FBI took over the investigation and classified all MPD reports related to The Finders as "Secret." According to a released MPD report dated February 19, 1987, a detective spoke with a CIA official who stated the investigation had been "treading on their toes" and that the CIA "apparently have a vested interest" in the group. It was later revealed that Marion Pettie's late wife had been a CIA employee, one of his sons had worked for Air America, and that the CIA had sent personnel to a Finders-related company called Future Enterprises for computer training. In 1993, the Department of Justice launched an internal inquiry into CIA involvement and a potential FBI cover-up after a Customs memo was leaked to the press.

The Odyssey Network Link

Among the most significant discoveries were documents found on the two Finders men arrested in Florida. An FBI memo dated March 10, 1987 revealed that names on a seized address list matched individuals in FBI files related to the Odyssey Network in Dallas, Texas, the interstate boy prostitution operation run by John David Norman. One name was reflected in a Buffalo file regarding alleged members of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and a possible murder investigation. The two Finders men had been transporting six children in a van "to Mexico" with a list containing addresses for individuals linked to John David Norman's trafficking network and suspected NAMBLA members. By 1987, Norman had been a fugitive for years, continuing to operate boy prostitution and pornography rings across multiple states. The convergence of intelligence community involvement, the systematic acquisition and movement of children, and documented links to the same prostitution network connected to the Dean Corll murders in Houston raises questions that were never satisfactorily answered by the official narrative, which dismissed the entire affair as a satanic panic hysteria before quietly burying the evidence.