John David Norman

John David Norman ran a succession of organizations that, according to police in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas, supplied boy prostitutes to paying clients across the country: the Norman Foundation, Epic International, the Odyssey Foundation and the Delta Project. He also used the names Evan Goodwin, Allen Hitchcock, John Shanks and Steven Gurwell, and the Hasting Foundation. By 1977 he had thirteen arrests for sex offenses going back to 1954.¹²

Dallas and the Index Cards

Lieutenant Harold Hancock of the Dallas police arrested Norman in March 1973 on charges of contributing to juvenile violations of state drug laws and seized more than 30,000 index cards listing clients, "some of them prominent people and some federal employees in Washington." "I felt that some federal agency should get the cards and I contacted the State Department through the FBI, I think it was," Hancock told the Chicago Tribune. "All the cards were sent to Washington to the State Department, and that's the last I heard of." Matthew Nimetz, a counselor of the State Department, told the paper that officials had found "the cards were not relevant to any fraud case concerning a passport" and destroyed them; he "was unable to explain" why the department had looked at them only for passport irregularities or why it had not passed them to the FBI or the postal inspectors.¹ Tribune reporters told a Senate subcommittee in May 1977 that the department said it had shredded the cards in 1974 "because they couldn't find any use for them," and that "some passports were issued for taking a boy across the seas and into another country."²

Dallas police told the Chicago police that they had information associating Norman with the ring that supplied boys to Dean Corll, whose murders of 27 boys in Houston came to light in 1973 after Elmer Wayne Henley shot him; a Tribune reporter testified that Dallas had investigated Norman "as a possible solicitor for these boys."¹²

Chicago and the Delta Project

Norman moved to Homewood, Illinois, in mid-1973 and lived with an Epic International client, who told police that Norman had supplied him that summer with a sixteen-year-old Missouri boy for a three-week, 4,500-dollar tour of Europe. Using the name Steven Gurwell, Norman was arrested in October 1973 after a tip that he had plied ten teenagers with beer to have sex with him; police seized pornography and a list of 5,000 names and addresses of clients.¹

Held in Cook County Jail in 1976 on charges of indecent liberties with ten boys, Norman used the jail's printing facilities to send three newsletters to clients announcing the Delta Project, which would place boy "cadets" with "dons" in "Delta-Dorms" around the country: "The nature of the relationship between cadet and sponsor is left entirely to the two of them." He said he corresponded with more than 7,000 people from the jail. Someone in California whom police could not identify paid his 36,000-dollar bail in cash. In December 1976 he pleaded guilty to eight counts of indecent liberties with a child and was sentenced to four years; his associate Phillip Paske, "a convicted murderer and thief" on probation, kept the project going from post office box 5094 in Chicago. Norman told the Tribune: "This has nothing to do with sex. I didn't want to get young kids involved in sex." The police said both the Delta Project and the Chicago newsletter Hermes "were controlled by separate groups of men working together in an interlocking web of vice."¹ His 1979 petition against the Cook County sheriff reached the Illinois Supreme Court.³

Paske later worked for the contracting business of John Wayne Gacy, who after his conviction named Paske and Norman in connection with his crimes. Norman was arrested again in Pennsylvania in 1983, jumped bail, was recaptured in Illinois in July 1987, and died in 2011.⁴

The Finders

Two names in the address book seized from the Finders members Douglas Ammerman and James Michael Holwell at their arrest in Tallahassee on February 4, 1987, appear, according to the writer S. Dovey, in an FBI Dallas file on child prostitution that concerned Norman's Odyssey Foundation, and a third in a Buffalo file on members of NAMBLA suspected of murder. No direct tie between Norman and the Finders' leadership has been documented.⁴⁵