Richard Halvorsen

Richard S. Halvorsen, also reported as Halverson, had worked with Raymond Woodall as a maintenance man at the Adelphi Academies in Coral Gables, Florida, identified by Florida police as a former male prostitution front, before the two moved to New Orleans. There in 1974 they organized Boy Scout Troop 137 with about 40 boys, selecting about ten for Scout trips during which sexual acts took place. Halvorsen was a volunteer probation officer, drew up applications for state and federal money to establish homes for boys, and with Richard A. Pass recruited boys through volunteer agencies for runaways, using guitars and a motorcycle as inducements. According to the Coral Gables police, he recruited six New Orleans boys for the Adelphi Academies by promising their mothers free scholarships.²

New Orleans police arrested Halvorsen, then 51, and Woodall in September 1976; he and twelve other men were charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated rape and aggravated crimes against nature, and nineteen men were eventually charged. A search of his home produced card files with the names and addresses of boys in other states and pornographic photographs, and his files contained the name of Claudius Vermilye of Father Bud's Boys Farm in Tennessee. The case was prosecuted by the office of District Attorney Harry Connick. By May 1977 Halvorsen and Woodall had been convicted and were awaiting sentence; his later habeas petitions against successive wardens of the Louisiana State Penitentiary were decided in 1980 and 1982.²³

The Dallas Film and the Connick Allegation

The writer S. Dovey wrote that the case broke when film found in a malfunctioning commercial processing machine in Dallas was traced to the assistant scoutmaster Harry O. Cramer, and Halvorsen to have been arrested with Woodall and Robert Lang. Dovey also wrote that Connick was implicated by the testimony of one of his own witnesses.¹