Gerald Richards

Gerald S. Richards, of Port Huron, Michigan, taught physical education at St. Joseph's Catholic School in Port Huron, was a businessman in the town and had been a candidate for local political office. He was president of Brother Paul's Children's Mission and director of its nature camp, and told police he was its organizer.²³ He was arrested in July 1976, pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the first degree, and by 1977 was serving a two-to-ten-year term at the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson.²⁴

Testimony to the Senate

On May 27, 1977, Richards testified under oath in Chicago before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. He said his first contact with pornography came while he was in college, working nights in an adult bookstore from September 1969 to March 1972. In January 1973 he met a neighbor boy of 13 or 14, whom he filmed for two years without selling the material, and in January 1975 he began producing and selling child pornography, until about February 1976. Through an organization he met other men who swapped pictures and boys; he said he had access to about 30 boys, only two or three of them from Port Huron and the rest obtained from Pontiac and the Detroit area. He said he had pleaded guilty "to protect my models and exposure of my affair" with the boy, then 15, who was his partner in the operation. He described Better Life, "a philosophical group" run through the mail, as "the main organization in the United States" for the trade, and said that Father Bud's Boys Farm in Tennessee "sold raw film to other men. They would bring it to me to process." He named among the customers he ended up with "Sheldon, Grossman, Keller," and said of Francis Shelden: "He was a friend of mine. He paid for my office."⁴

In 1975 Richards answered an advertisement in the pedophile newsletter Better Life Monthly, of which Shelden was named by Richards as a staff writer, and Dyer Grossman came to Port Huron from New Jersey to help set up Brother Paul's. At his arrest police found a letter from Grossman proposing sites for "child care" organizations in Michigan, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia, noting that counties would pay up to 150 dollars a month per boy, state agencies up to 400 and federal agencies up to 700. Richards told police that the Church of the New Revelation, the Ocean Living Institute, the Educational Foundation for Youth and Brother Paul's were all fronts.³

The North Fox Island Trip

Richards was also described as a masseuse, magician and hypnotist, a Republican candidate, the operator of a naturopathy clinic in a commercial basement, and the driver of an orange Pinto marked "Jerry the Magician," and as having set up Brother Paul's Educational Entertainment Missions in 1970. The writer S. Dovey wrote that on July 12, 1976, he took four students aged 8 to 14 to a private airstrip from which Shelden flew them to North Fox Island for two nights; after one boy reported abuse, Richards was arrested on July 23, 1976, with photographs of naked boys and a letter warning Shelden to move files to the island. Dovey also wrote that he was sentenced on September 13, 1976, that he handed over the Grossman letter, dated July 19, 1976, in August 1976, and that he drew a diagram of a coast-to-coast network from prison. According to Dovey, he identified Claudius Vermilye as sending films for processing, and the scoutmaster Richard Halvorsen of Troop 137, whose files were linked to Vermilye's farm and to John David Norman's Delta Project by index cards on boys' sexual preferences, and described the exchange of boys as a "Cadet racket." Adam Starchild, who incorporated Brother Paul's and the Ocean Living Institute, was identified as Malcolm Willis McConahy.¹