North Fox Island

North Fox Island is a small island, about three miles long and a mile wide, in Lake Michigan roughly seventeen miles off the Leelanau Peninsula and fifty miles north of Traverse City, in Leelanau County.¹ Francis Shelden, a graduate of Yale and Wayne State and a descendant of Governor and Secretary of War Russell A. Alger, bought it in 1960 for 20,000 dollars and built a landing strip, cabins and trails.¹ By 1977 it was assessed at 312,000 dollars.²

Brother Paul's Children's Mission

Brother Paul's Children's Mission, incorporated in 1975 with Adam Starchild as its primary incorporator and operating under the auspices of the Church of the New Revelation, ran a nature camp for boys on the island. Gerald Richards, a physical education teacher at St. Joseph's Catholic School in Port Huron, was its president and the director of the camp, and Dyer Grossman its vice president. The camp never applied for a state license. After Richards's arrest in July 1976, Shelden was charged with criminal sexual conduct with a 14-year-old boy at Port Huron and an eight-year-old boy on the island, and he and Grossman became federal fugitives. Shelden, who described himself in a 1975 interview as devoted to Big Brothers, was a board member of Boys Republic, a residential center for troubled boys in Farmington Hills; the Big Brother organizations of Detroit, Flint and Port Huron denied he had ever been connected with them, and Richards and Grossman had been rejected when they applied.² One national report said the group had flown "upwards of 200 boys out to the island for the pleasure of well-heeled homosexuals."³ Richards testified to a Senate subcommittee in Chicago on May 27, 1977, that Shelden "was a friend of mine. He paid for my office."⁴

On September 18, 1976, Shelden placed his fortune, securities he valued at about two million dollars, in a trust with the Trust Company of the Virgin Islands, founded by Starchild, and on April 13, 1978, by a document notarized in Amsterdam, replaced it as trustee with the Dutch senator Edward Brongersma.⁵ Shelden remained in the Netherlands, which had no extradition treaty for child sexual offenses, and died there in 1996.¹

Oakland County Child Killer Connection

Investigators of the Oakland County Child Killer case examined connections between the North Fox Island network and suspects in those murders. Richard Lawson made statements in 1988 and 2005 linking Shelden's network to film production associated with the killing of Timothy King. In February 2026 the FBI began a new excavation on the island.⁶