Adam Starchild

Adam Starchild, a name New Jersey authorities described as an alias, was listed in the Kearny, New Jersey, telephone book. Incorporation papers in three states showed him as president of the Church of the New Revelation and of the Ocean Living Institute, both incorporated in Delaware in 1974 with principal places of business in New Jersey, as primary incorporator of Brother Paul's Children's Mission and as a trustee of the Educational Foundation for Youth of Illinois. The Internal Revenue Service granted the church and the institute tax exemption without investigating their claims to be charitable organizations. Gerald Richards told police that all four organizations were fronts for the production of child pornography. Starchild told the Traverse City Record-Eagle they had not been set up as fronts but might have been "used" for that purpose by Dyer Grossman, who held offices in all three.²

The Shelden Trust

On September 18, 1976, Francis Shelden, who by 1978 was being sought by the FBI under a fugitive warrant, established a revocable trust with the Trust Company of the Virgin Islands, Ltd., organized in the British Virgin Islands, as trustee, and delivered to Starchild, "founder and original owner" of the trust company, securities he valued at about two million dollars, including all the stock of FDS Land Company of Michigan and Windigo Ranch, Inc., of Colorado. When Starchild failed for months to provide an accounting of the 1977 dividends, Shelden, on the advice of a Dutch tax lawyer, Antoon Kasdorp, removed the trust company by a document notarized in Amsterdam on April 13, 1978, and named as successor trustee Edward Brongersma, a member of the Dutch Senate, who accepted the same day. The litigation over who controlled the trust ran through the federal courts into the mid-1980s; in 1985 Starchild, of Tarpon Springs, Florida, appeared as counsel for the defendants.³⁴ Federal cases of 1988 to 1990 were captioned United States v. Starchild (Adam Aristotle), a/k/a McConahy (Malcolm).⁵

The McConahy Identity

The writer S. Dovey wrote that Starchild was Malcolm Willis McConahy, an offshore tax attorney who faked his death in 1975, that he had been expelled as a scoutmaster in Minneapolis in 1965, and that he had been charged with possession of child pornography in Wisconsin before his association with Shelden. Dovey also wrote that he structured the transfer of Shelden's assets to the Virgin Islands trust to protect them from investigation, and described the church as the vehicle through which Brother Paul's could receive court-ordered juvenile delinquents on North Fox Island. He was linked through these networks to John David Norman.¹