Dyer Grossman

Dyer Grossman, of Carmel, New York, was the product of a wealthy Long Island family and a graduate of Cornell University. He taught for ten years at an exclusive boarding school for boys in New Jersey and for two years at a private academy for boys in the fourth through ninth grades, and, in the words of the district attorneys' statement, "is alleged to have been director of a boys' camp in Vermont." He applied to serve as a Big Brother in a California county while scouting sites for a boys' camp there, and sought money from wealthy contributors, including a Michigan philanthropist, to start his camp.³ He was vice president of Brother Paul's Children's Mission, executive director of the Ocean Living Institute and youth director of the Church of the New Revelation, of which Adam Starchild was president.²

After Gerald Richards answered an advertisement in Better Life Monthly, in which the church offered to help readers set up child care organizations and camps, Grossman came to Port Huron from New Jersey to help set up Brother Paul's. On that trip, according to the Michigan State Police, he committed sexual acts with two Port Huron boys aged 10 and 14; the police had photographs of the 10-year-old in the motel room. He and Richards had applied to join Big Brothers and been rejected. A letter from Grossman found on Richards at his arrest in July 1976 proposed "child care" sites in nine states and the District of Columbia and described the monthly payments per boy from counties (up to 150 dollars), states (up to 400) and federal agencies (up to 700). By 1977 he was a fugitive under federal flight warrants on two counts of criminal sexual conduct and was believed by the police to be in Washington State.²⁴

On March 4, 1977, Robert F. Leonard, president-elect of the National District Attorneys Association, wrote to Benjamin Civiletti, Assistant Attorney General-designate for the Criminal Division, that there might be "a national conspiracy made up of an inter-relating network of foster homes, churches, nature camps and other similar programs," and that "someone that needs investigation is a person by the name of Dyer Grossman, who it appears, goes from state to state setting up these organizations, and in some cases, affiliating with a New Jersey church under circumstances which avoid any scrutiny by the IRS." Some of the costs, he wrote, were "unknowingly being provided by public funding," and many of the men who traveled between states to abuse children at these camps were "very wealthy individuals and some are respectable community leaders in their home towns."³

The Big Brother Letter

The writer S. Dovey wrote that Grossman co-drafted the charter of Brother Paul's, was closely associated with Francis Shelden, and in a letter to Richards described a twelve-year-old boy he had obtained through a Big Brother program, and that he created the church on paper and linked it to Father Bud's Boys Farm of Claudius Vermilye.¹ In 1977 Adam Starchild, president of the church, told the Record-Eagle that its organizations had not been set up as fronts but might have been "used" for that purpose by Grossman.²