Francis Shelden

Francis Duffield Shelden, the bachelor heir of a prominent Detroit-area family, was a part-time university professor, a former director of the Cranbrook Institute of Science, and a board member of Boys Republic, a residential center for troubled boys in Farmington Hills; a 1975 newspaper interview described him as devoting much of his time to Big Brothers, which later denied he had been connected with it. He was the sole owner of North Fox Island, 835 acres in Leelanau County off Grand Traverse Bay, assessed at 312,000 dollars.¹ His great-grandfather was Russell A. Alger, governor of Michigan and Secretary of War.²

Brother Paul's Children's Mission

Brother Paul's Children's Mission, incorporated in 1975 to prevent juvenile delinquency "through the philosophy of naturopathy and naturalism," ran a nature camp on North Fox Island under the auspices of the Church of the New Revelation of Kearny, New Jersey. Its president and camp director was Gerald Richards, a Port Huron physical education teacher; its vice president was Dyer Grossman, a New York science teacher; Shelden was a director. The church and the Ocean Living Institute, both incorporated in Delaware in 1974, and the Educational Foundation for Youth of Illinois had been granted tax exemptions by the Internal Revenue Service without investigation; incorporation papers named Adam Starchild, an alias according to New Jersey authorities, as president of the church and the institute, trustee of the foundation and principal incorporator of Brother Paul's. The camp never applied for a state license.¹

After Richards's arrest in July 1976, in possession of pornographic films, he told police that the church, the institute and the foundation were fronts for producing child pornography, and that Shelden was a staff writer for Better Life Monthly, advertised as "a monthly paper serving the interest of pedophiles." Police found a letter attributed to Grossman proposing "child care" sites in eight states and the District of Columbia and noting that counties would pay up to 150 dollars a month per boy, states 400 dollars and federal agencies 700 dollars. State troopers raided Shelden's Ann Arbor home on July 29 and found nothing new; the Traverse City post could not get a warrant for the island. Richards was sentenced to two to ten years in Jackson Prison. Shelden was charged with criminal sexual conduct with a fourteen-year-old boy at Port Huron and with an eight-year-old Port Huron boy on North Fox Island, and Grossman with acts with two Port Huron boys; both became the subjects of federal flight warrants.¹

The Wider Network

Richards's films led Tennessee authorities to raid Boys Farm Inc. near Alto, the Father Bud's Boys Farm of the Episcopal priest Claudius I. "Bud" Vermilye Jr., who was indicted on sixteen counts; its list of more than 270 "active sponsors" included Shelden. Vermilye's eldest son had disappeared on July 5, 1974. In New Orleans, the leader of Boy Scout Troop 137, Richard Halverson, and twelve other men, including the Massachusetts industrialist Richard C. Jacobs of Jet Spray Corporation and the realtor Hugh Scott Mellor, were charged with conspiracy; Halverson, a volunteer probation officer, had drawn up applications for state and federal money for homes for boys, and the Louisiana and Tennessee welfare departments had paid for children placed with the groups. "It seems to be like spider webs strung out all over the nation," said the New Orleans juvenile detective Mason Spong. Correspondence and films seized in the raids came "from Australia and Canada and virtually every state in the Union."¹

Amsterdam

Shelden settled in Amsterdam, became a Dutch citizen, and was not extradited. There, under the name Frank Torey, he published PAN from 1979, and he named the Dutch senator Edward Brongersma trustee of his assets in 1978. Richard Lawson, an informant in the investigation of the Oakland County child killings, later alleged that Shelden financed films of abused boys, among them the murdered Timothy King; the allegation has not been corroborated. Shelden died in Amsterdam on July 9, 1996.²