Part 1: The Franklin Scandal...A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal

The Franklin Scandal...A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal
By Nick Bryant

—Prologue— 

The Finders of Lost Children 

I was in rural Nebraska charging up Highway 81 in a rented GMC Envoy—our destination was Madison, Nebraska, ten miles due north. An early evening August sun cascaded shafts of sunlight onto seemingly infinite tracts of cornfields, and a faint breeze tugged gently on the tall shafts of corn. The temperature was an ideal 75º Fahrenheit and no clouds blemished the azure sky. The speed limit was 65 MPH —my speedometer read 70. A sensible person in my shoes would have second thoughts about even slightly breaking the speed limit, but I felt a sense of urgency. 

Gazing into my rearview mirror, I noticed the flashing red and amber lights of a Nebraska state trooper. My fight-or-flight response flared—I felt a burst of adrenaline and I was also smacked by a swell of anxiety. I abruptly swerved onto the shoulder, ripped my New York driver’s license from my wallet, and dredged the rental paperwork from the Envoy’s glove compartment. The trooper wore opaque sunglasses, and a smirk creased his well-tanned, square face. I handed him my license and rental agreement before he said a word. 

After he gave my documentation a cursory glance, he inexplicably escorted me to his “cruiser.” He called in for priors—I came up clean. I was also clean-shaven, and my hair was neatly trimmed above my ears. I wore an immaculate Joe Boxer T-shirt, beige khaki shorts, and new Nike running shoes—Air Max. I looked like the Platonic ideal of an upstanding citizen. 

He was unimpressed with my pristine record and appearance; so I tossed out a few polysyllabic words—smirk intact, he remained unimpressed. When he pulled out a pencil and a pocket-size notebook and started asking questions, I had a bad feeling —a really bad feeling. He wanted to know my whereabouts for the past week. I told him I’d been “mountaineering” in Colorado. The trooper seemed to have little concern for my Constitutional rights, but I felt the predicament dictated that I refrain from ACLU buzzwords and comply. He jotted down my answers and left the car. 

The trooper talked to my passenger for ten minutes or so before returning. He scribbled my passenger’s name—Rusty Nelson—in his notebook. As he furnished Nelson’s name to the dispatcher, I sensed that the situation was on the verge of becoming ugly—seriously ugly. The dispatcher reported that Nelson was a “registered sex offender,” and then she barked out a flurry of numbers. Though I had no idea what the numbers meant, I felt confident they weren’t nice numbers. A second state patrolman pulled up behind us in a gray SUV. 

The trooper twisted to his right and gesticulated like a football referee indicating a bobbled reception: He said Nelson’s story and mine didn’t “match up.” He then exited the car and spoke to the other trooper for a few minutes. Returning to the car, he opened the passenger’s door, poked his head into the vehicle, and again remarked that our stories didn’t “match up”—once more making the gesture of a football referee. He slammed the door shut and trotted over to my vehicle. 

His backup ran over to the Envoy with a shaggy brown mongrel of a dog, and they took two or three laps around the vehicle. The dog sniffed at the tires and every little crevice. After the dog started to appear bored, the first trooper escorted Nelson from the Envoy. Nelson’s facial expression was taut with fear—his eyes repeatedly darted back and forth. The trooper deposited him between the cruiser and State Patrol SUV to keep us separated. 

The trooper then made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: He said they could arrest us, impound the vehicle, and search it or they could simply search it on the spot. I gestured to the Envoy, grimaced, and said, “Knock yourselves out.” The troopers then meticulously searched every inch of the vehicle and ripped apart all of our possessions—I think it probably took them about thirty minutes to completely scour the Envoy, but it seemed interminable as I watched and waited. 

Sitting in the cruiser, flooded with fear, I had difficulty imagining how our stories didn’t “match up,” even though Nelson has a habit of speaking in ambiguities and asides. We weren’t exactly “mountaineering” in Colorado; nevertheless, I was absolutely certain that Nelson hadn’t told the trooper the motives behind our trek— he’s definitely not stupid. I’ve heard a number of unbecoming adjectives applied to Nelson but “stupid” wasn’t one of them. 

Nelson was the admitted former “photographer” of a nationwide pedophile network I’d been investigating for over three years at that time. The ring pandered children to the rich and powerful and had access to the highest levels of our government. Before we made our trip to Colorado, I thought I could prove the network’s existence, its cover-up by federal and state authorities, and make a case for CIA involvement and blackmail. However, I felt it would be next to impossible to name names without pictures, because of the pedophiles’ lofty social status. I was confident that society would never take the word of damaged victims, who had themselves become predators and felons, over the word of seemingly well-adjusted politicians and affluent businessmen. Nelson told me he had blackmail pictures stashed in the mountains of Colorado. I was incredulous, but had to give it a shot. 

As I watched the troopers rip apart the Envoy, I glanced at Nelson—he looked quite nervous too. I even felt a begrudging kinship with him, which was rooted in a mutation of the Stockholm Syndrome—we were both under siege. I then recalled the various tribulations I’d endured since I started investigating this story: My life had been threatened, I’d been followed, I’d received ominous, anonymous phone calls, menacing emails, and Nebraska law enforcement had taken a keen interest in me. 

Nelson was my second “on record” interview when I was first cutting my teeth on the story. During our initial meeting, he alluded to having “pictures in the mountains,” and over the course of our subsequent conversations he occasionally mentioned the pictures. I had no illusions about Nelson’s being a paragon of morality: He confessed that his former vocation consisted of taking pictures of adults in sexually compromising positions with children; therefore I viewed his revelations with skepticism until they were confirmed. But he provided me with considerable information that I ultimately corroborated. I caught him lying to me too. 

Over the course of three years I cultivated Nelson’s trust, and he eventually agreed to accompany me to southwestern Colorado, where he said the pictures were stashed. Nelson warned me that the mountain terrain was treacherous and required a 4-wheel drive, so I rented an Envoy. I drove the brawny SUV from Minneapolis to Nebraska, and met up with Nelson at his girlfriend’s house on the outskirts of Madison, Nebraska. The next morning we loaded up the Envoy with enough gear and provisions to explore Antarctica for a month, and after a visit to Omaha we set out for Colorado. We grabbed some shut-eye in a motel near Denver and arrived in the mountainous Uncompahgre River Valley the following day. 

After two days of tortuous driving and strenuous hiking yielded only three “dry wells,” and Nelson’s elaborate excuses, I had no interest in looking for a supposed fourth stash spot. Nelson has a tenuous relationship with truth, and had made no guarantees of recovering the blackmail pictures; I had made the sojourn to Colorado knowing full well that it might be a wild goose chase. Moreover, given Nelson’s nature, I decided at the onset of the trip that I wouldn’t take a “goose egg” personally. After all, I was grateful for the vast amounts of information he provided me that I ultimately corroborated. 

I have to admit, though, I have a tendency to be optimistic, and there was a vestige of it in me that hoped to retrieve pictures. During our odyssey, I had held onto a slight shred of hope that Nelson might possibly be sizing me up simply to see if I was on the level—he suffered from extreme paranoia and rightfully so: The pedophiles were men of extravagant wealth and power, and a number of individuals associated with the network and its cover-up had died under mysterious circumstances. For every person who went “on record” with me, I found seven, eight, or nine people who refused to even talk about talking. 

Nelson and I had a chilly and silent drive to Denver, and the next morning we had an equally chilly and silent drive to Nebraska, which brings us to Highway 81. When the troopers’ search came up empty, they were kind enough to cut us loose. As Nelson and I drove away, he turned to me and said, “Do you know how lucky you are?” In a nutshell, Nelson was implying that the troopers’ harassment had been a set-up, and they were looking for blackmail pictures. If we, in fact, possessed pictures, the troopers’ search would have been catastrophic. 

I’ve never subscribed to sprawling conspiracy theories: I’ve always thought that the Warren Commission’s “magic bullet” conclusion was a bit suspect, but never devoted a great deal of time to the various scenarios debunking it. 

The improbable prime mover in my nexus with the state troopers on Highway 81 was a conversation I had in July 2002 with a magazine editor, who said he was looking for “very dark” stories. Never having shied away from dancing in the dark, I pitched him a flurry of stories whose themes included Satanism and Nazism. He resonated with the Satanism angle. I had a simple plan: ferret out Satanists, attend a black mass, and write an article. Over the next month or so, I talked to a gamut of Satanists—not surprisingly, I found them a rather unsavory lot. I quickly discovered that they were either very, very smart or cognitively challenged. Punk rockers are the only other group I’ve encountered with such a marked gray-matter polarization, which I discovered while working as a bouncer at a club in the early eighties. 

I eventually drifted toward a “sect” of intelligent Satanists—I’ve always preferred intelligent and unsavory to slow and unsavory. Anthony was the first of the cerebral Satanists I met. He was fond of black: black blazer, black shirt, black pants, and even black socks and tennis shoes. He, like the other Satanists I came across, was a Republican. It struck me as ironic that Satanists and fundamentalist Christians— groups embracing antithetical religious doctrines—generally share political affiliations.

I evidently impressed Anthony with my knowledge of metaphysics, having studied philosophy in college, lived on the ashram of a genuine Indian guru, and attended groups dedicated to Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Zen, and Sufism. Our philosophical and metaphysical conversations ranged from Nietzsche to Eastern mysticism. 

After Anthony and I talked four or five times, he consented to take me to his sect’s version of a black mass, which is patterned after the mass of Roman Catholicism. He only had one condition, and it was nonnegotiable: he insisted I partake of the “host.” The host, in Anthony’s sect, is a floury wafer that contains the high priest’s semen and the high priestess’ menstruation. Anthony and I parted ways. 

While I was courting Anthony in the hopes of attending a black mass, I continued to troll the Internet for stories pertaining to Satanism. The Net was replete with stories of Satanists abducting children, and also of clandestine bonds between Satanists and the CIA. Given my inherent skepticism of conspiracies, I initially dismissed the tales. Eventually, I came across a number of stories about a cult called the “Finders” that weren’t rooted in fringe paranoia, but, according to the sources, in a US Customs report. 

The existence of tangible evidence intrigued me, and I phoned a “conspiracy theorist” who claimed to have the authentic US Customs report on the Finders. We spoke for maybe twenty minutes, and he discussed the Finders, the “Illuminati,” and a cavalcade of far-reaching speculation, convincing me that he wasn’t of sound mind. A week or so after our conversation, however, I did in fact receive a package from him that contained the US Customs report on the Finders and also a US News & World Report article on the Finders that quoted the report. 

The Customs report, written by Special Agent Ramon Martinez, recounted a sordid, horrific cluster of events. On February 4, 1987, a concerned citizen notified the Tallahassee Police Department—he had observed six white children, “poorly dressed, bruised, dirty, and behaving like wild animals,” in a Tallahassee park. The children were accompanied by two well-dressed white males driving a white 1979 Dodge van with Virginia plates. 

The Tallahassee police responded to the call and took the children and adults into custody. The adults refused to cooperate, and one produced a business card that stated he planned to exercise his Constitutional right to remain silent. Police officers noted that the children, whose ages ranged from three to six, could not adequately identify themselves or their custodians and were “unaware of the function and purpose of telephones, televisions, and toilets.” The children also said that they were not allowed to live indoors and were given food only as a reward. The Tallahassee police charged the two adults with felony child abuse, and they were held on a $100,000 bond. The children were placed in protective custody. 

Police officers found documents in the van that enabled them to tentatively identify the two adults and partially identify the children. They also found documents containing two Washington, DC addresses. 

The Tallahassee police suspected child pornography; they contacted the US Customs Service (USCS), which has a Child Pornography and Protection Unit. Shortly thereafter, Detective James Bradley of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) contacted Special Agent Ramon Martinez of the USCS. Detective Bradley indicated that the Tallahassee arrests were probably linked to a case that he was investigating in the DC area, involving a “cult” called the Finders. An informant had told Bradley that the Finders operated various businesses out of a warehouse in DC and housed children at a second warehouse. 

“The information was specific in describing ‘blood rituals’ and sexual orgies involving children, and an as yet unsolved murder in which the Finders may be involved,” wrote Martinez in his report. 

Bradley told Martinez that the Tallahassee arrests of the two adults for child abuse were the critical mass he needed for warrants to search the two warehouses. And on February 6, the MPD, accompanied by the USCS, executed search warrants on the warehouses. Rummaging through the first warehouse, they found jars of feces and urine and also a room equipped with several computers and printers and a cache of documents. 

“Cursory examination of the documents revealed detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes,” wrote Martinez. “The instructions included the impregnation of female members of … the Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping. There were telex messages using MCI account numbers between a computer terminal believed to be located in the same room, and others located across the country and in foreign locations. One such telex specifically ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through a contact in the Chinese Embassy.” 

The investigators also discovered documents that discussed “bank secrecy,” “hightech transfers,” “terrorism,” and “explosives.” To their astonishment, they even found a detailed summary of the events surrounding the arrests in Tallahassee the previous night and instructions that were broadcast via a computer network. The instructions advised the “participants” to move the “children” through different police jurisdictions, and “how to avoid police attention.” 

Martinez and the MPD officers also found a large collection of photographs. A number of the photos were of nude children, and one appeared to be a child “on display” in a way that accented the “child’s genitals.” An MPD officer then presented Martinez with a photo album. The album contained photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets slaughtering two goats. The photos portrayed the slaughter, disembowelment, skinning, and dismemberment of the goats by the children. The photos showed the removal of the male goat’s testes and the removal of “baby goats” from the female goat’s “womb,” and the presentation of a goat’s head to one of the children. 

“Not observed by me but related by an MPD officer were intelligence files on private families not related to the Finders,” Martinez continued in his report. “The process undertaken appears to be have been a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for baby-sitters, tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, etc., of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown. There was also a large amount of data collected on various child care organizations.” 

Approximately a month after the MPD executed the warrant, Agent Martinez set up an appointment with Detective Bradley to review the documents that had been seized at the two warehouses. His report stated that he was to meet with Bradley in early April. On April 2, 1987, Agent Martinez arrived at MPD headquarters at approximately 9:00 A.M., and he was in for a shock. Detective Bradley was unavailable, but he spoke to a “third party” who was willing to discuss the Finders only on a “strictly off the record basis.” 

“The individual further advised me of circumstances which indicated that the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter,” Agent Martinez concluded in his report. “The MPD report has been classified secret and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.” 

Wow! After I finished reading the USCS report, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” came to mind: “There’s something happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” The USCS report certainly triggered a paradigm shift within me—I suddenly became willing to entertain ideas that I previously would have discarded with dismissive skepticism. 

Though I was intrigued by the USCS report, I attempted not to jump to conclusions —I’ve met many people over the years whose only aerobic regimen is jumping to conclusions. But I felt that the Finders definitely merited a LexisNexis search of all newspaper articles relating to the cult. I went online and collected over twenty articles on the Finders from a hodgepodge of daily newspapers, ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Orange County Register. 

Almost all of the articles pertained to the investigations launched by the Tallahassee police, MPD, and USCS. The earliest articles discussed the Finders’ probable involvement in “Satanism,” and a spokesman for the Tallahassee police said that one of the children “showed signs of sexual abuse.” Moreover, an FBI spokesman announced that the Finders were being investigated for “the transportation of children across state lines for immoral purposes or kidnapping.” 

A February 10, 1987 article in the Washington Post reported on a news conference kicked off by MPD Chief Maurice Turner, Jr. This news conference occurred after the CIA intervention, and at it Chief Turner backpedaled with ferocity, rejecting allegations that the Finders were involved in satanic rituals or child abuse. The chief also elevated the Finders from a cult to a “communal group.” He neglected to mention that the Finders were a communal group that reportedly had an interest in “purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping,” and also an interest in “terrorism” and “explosives.” He omitted discussing the jars of feces and urine as well. 

Two days after Chief Turner’s press conference, an FBI spokesman said that their investigation of the Finders was “winding down,” because the Bureau hadn’t “uncovered any evidence of federal violations.” The two adult Finders taken into custody by Tallahassee police had their felony child-abuse charges reduced to misdemeanors. Six weeks later the abuse charges were dropped altogether, and the children were eventually returned to the Finders. 

That was seemingly the end of the Finders saga. But almost seven years later, the grisly USCS report was leaked to the media, because a cadre of Customs agents were aghast that law enforcement hadn’t followed up on the Finders. A December 27, 1993 US News & World Report article, “Through a Glass, Very Darkly: Cops, Spies and a Very Odd Investigation,” discussed the efforts of Democratic Representative Charlie Rose of North Carolina and Florida Representative Tom Lewis, a Republican, to expose the government’s ties to the Finders.

“Could our own government have had something to do with this Finders organization and turned their backs on these children?” asked Representative Lewis in the article. “That’s what all the evidence points to. And there is a lot of evidence. I can tell you this: We’ve got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn’t be happening if there was nothing here.” 

The MPD declined to comment on the Finders to US News & World Report, but an anonymous investigator for the Tallahassee Police Department criticized the MPD’s handling of the matter: “They dropped this case like a hot rock.” The article also quoted “ranking officials” from the CIA who described accusations linking the CIA to the Finders as “hogwash.” The efforts of Representatives Rose and Lewis to hold a hearing on the Finders/CIA connection ultimately came to naught. 

My LexisNexis postmortem on the Finders and the subsequent US News article left me perplexed and whetted my curiosity. The LexisNexis articles provided me with the names of a dozen or so people enmeshed in the Finders saga, and I decided to start making phone calls. 

The first Washington Post article on the Finders interviewed a psychologist “who works with cult members.” In the article, the psychologist said that he had “tracked” the Finders for five years. I really wanted the skinny on the Finders, and the psychologist’s remarks had the academic perspective of a zoologist commenting on a rare species for a National Geographic documentary. I thought he could offer me deep, anthropological insights into the Finders’ mating habits, rituals, and mores—so I called him first. 

Our conversation lasted all of five or six seconds. I said, “My name is Nick Bryant, and I’m a freelance writer researching the Finders,” and he stammered: “I don’t know what you’re talking about! N-n-n-o comment! N-n-n-o comment!” Click. The word “Finders” elicited such a negative response that I immediately thought of Pavlovian conditioning, à la A Clockwork Orange, or, perhaps, a threat to life or limb. 

I phoned the mother of a Finder: “No comment!” 

I phoned a former Finder: “No comment!” 

I phoned law enforcement: “No comment!” 

Freelance writing has largely immunized me to rejection: Being barraged by “No comment!” didn’t dent my resolve. But I found it nearly impossible to garner information about the Finders and why the CIA might quash an investigation into the group’s seemingly sinister activities. 

As I attempted to crack the enigma of the Finders and the CIA, I found the Internet to be rife with accounts of another “conspiracy” involving Satanist and CIA collusion. The tale was rooted in a book, The Franklin Cover-Up, written and self published by John DeCamp (a former Republican Nebraska state senator), and also in a documentary, Conspiracy of Silence, produced by Britain’s Yorkshire Television for airing in 1994. On the Internet, the bizarre, implausible confluence of events I would spend the next seven years investigating is simply called “Franklin,” because of its association with Omaha’s Franklin Credit Union. 

I ordered a copy of The Franklin Cover-Up from Amazon and a VHS of Conspiracy of Silence from the conspiracy theorist who had sent me the Customs report. As I talked to the conspiracy theorist a second time, I conceded a Finders/CIA connection that appeared ominous, even though I was reluctant to draw definitive conclusions about their relationship. The conspiracy theorist adamantly maintained that the Finders were a Satanic/CIA “factory” for sex slavery and mind control, but he offered absolutely no proof for his assertions. I still felt he wasn’t of sound mind. 

Conspiracy of Silence arrived before The Franklin Cover-Up, and I popped it into my VCR. The fifty-minute film told the tale of an interstate pedophile ring that plundered Boys Town for under-age prostitutes, and pandered children to a cabal of powerful pedophiles in Washington, DC. The film also included footage of alleged victims recounting chilling experiences of sadism. Conspiracy of Silence also described the fruitless efforts of Nebraska legislators to expose the ring amidst the juggernaut of a massive cover-up that included murder, media manipulation, and a full-court press by federal law enforcement. 

I found Conspiracy of Silence extremely disturbing. As I watched it a second time, I was even more disturbed. Wanting to assure myself that I wasn’t free-falling into an abyss of conjecture, I invited friends to my apartment and gave screenings of the documentary. They, too, found it chilling. 

Conspiracy of Silence had a fairly coherent narrative, but it was an unfinished rough-cut devoid of titles and credits. The documentary proper was preceded by a scrolling preamble, stating that Conspiracy of Silence was to be shown on the Discovery Channel, but “influential members of Congress” had prevented the program from airing and “ordered all copies destroyed.” The preamble ended on an Orwellian note: “This is the program they didn’t want you to see!” 

I phoned Yorkshire Television and eventually managed to contact Tim Tate, who had directed Conspiracy of Silence. After we discussed Franklin, I asked him about the veracity of the preamble. He said that Yorkshire Television wasn’t responsible for it, and his account of the documentary’s cancellation lacked the preamble’s drama. Tate maintained that the Discovery Channel commissioned the documentary and then pulled the plug on the production, offering the same nebulous rejection journalists have eaten for years: It’s just not right for us. 

Tate’s clarification regarding the preamble was an important first lesson as I entered the Franklin wormhole. In my quest for truth, I would have to be extremely cautious. An edifice of lies could easily obscure a foundation of truth—an edifice built by overzealous conspiracy buffs going a bridge too far or, perhaps, a deliberate attempt at misinformation. I would find that even individuals who were directly enmeshed in Franklin had embraced Web-based accounts and anecdotes that I concluded were apocryphal. 

DeCamp’s The Franklin Cover-Up arrived shortly after Conspiracy of Silence. The book had inspired Conspiracy of Silence, and interviews with DeCamp played a central role in the documentary. The Franklin Cover-Up was primarily an amalgam of documents that were collected and subpoenaed by the Franklin Committee, a subcommittee of the Nebraska legislature, which was formed to investigate crimes related to Omaha’s failed Franklin Credit Union. DeCamp acted as legal counsel to the Franklin Committee’s chairman, and the Committee’s documents made a strong case for the pedophile ring’s existence, even though state and federal grand juries had ruled that rumors of its existence were a “hoax.” 

The Franklin Cover-Up made two major assertions that were absent from Conspiracy of Silence: The book cited victim debriefings stating that the ring was enmeshed in Satanism, and it also implied that the ring was connected to the CIA. DeCamp, a seasoned lawyer, presented tidbits of compelling evidence here and there, and I was intrigued. 

Both Conspiracy of Silence and The Franklin Cover-Up implicated one Lawrence E. (Larry) King, Jr., of Omaha, as the primary pimp of the nationwide pedophile ring. 

Throughout the 1980s, the middle-aged King, tall and corpulent, had been described as a “GOP high-roller” and “the fastest rising African-American star” in the Republican Party. He was Vice Chairman for Finance of the National Black Republican Council, a sanctioned affiliate of the Republican National Committee. King also ardently campaigned for the 1988 presidential bid of his “personal friend” George H.W. Bush. In a 1988 flurry of name-dropping, King told a reporter for Omaha’s weekly Metropolitan of his lofty connections atop the political food chain: “I know some of the people I admire aren’t very popular. Ed Meese. The late Bill Casey of the CIA. And I love former Chief Justice Burger. Those are the people I really like to talk to. Bill Casey … I thought so very highly of him.” 

Though King emerged from humble Nebraska origins, his highfalutin persona had the colossal dimensions of a signature balloon floating above the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. He had a special affinity for flowers, and his life was a bouquet of finely tailored suits, limos, chartered jets, and glistening jewelry. He had an array of diverse business ventures, but his primary day job was manager of an Omaha credit union, created to provide loans for Omaha’s underserved black community. The full name of the firm was the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union. 

On November 4, 1988, federal agents descended on the Franklin Credit Union, and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) would ultimately conclude that $39.4 million had been stolen. King would be indicted on 40 counts that included conspiracy, fraud, and embezzlement. Federal law required annual audits of federally regulated credit unions, but King had possessed the political juice to stave off audits for years. 

After reading about the exploits of Larry King in The Franklin Cover-Up, I phoned John DeCamp at his law office in Lincoln, Nebraska. I left two or three messages before catching him. DeCamp’s life, I would learn, was a non-stop montage of multitasking: He politely cut the call short, but gave me his home phone number and suggested that I call him over the weekend. 

When I phoned him on Saturday afternoon, he said that a University of Nebraska football game had just started, and he asked me to call later. DeCamp remarked that life in Nebraska had scant recreational diversions, and Cornhusker football was the unofficial state religion. Investigation of child sexual abuse, with all its sinister foreboding, and the archetypical Americana of “Husker” football initially struck me as strange bedfellows. 

I called DeCamp in the early evening, and we talked for half an hour or so. I had a list of questions that were kindled by Conspiracy of Silence and The Franklin Cover-Up. DeCamp couldn’t provide answers to the majority of my questions, and he wasn’t willing to voice crazed conjectures, which impressed me. He lived in a small town forty miles south of Lincoln, and he invited me to spend the night. The holidays were near; I decided to visit my grandmother in Minneapolis, rent a car, and then drive to Nebraska. 

I sent an email to the magazine editor who had conscripted me to write an article on Satanism, noting my new direction. He wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about backing a fact-finding junket to Nebraska, so I decided to make the trek without his blessing. I then phoned an old friend who lives in Omaha, explained my mission, and requested the use of his couch. He welcomed my visit. 

The five-hour drive from my grandmother’s to Omaha gave me time to ponder the story. Though The Franklin Cover-Up offered compelling evidence for the existence of King’s pedophile ring and its cover-up by law enforcement, it lacked substantive proof for the ring’s connection to Washington, DC, blackmail and the CIA, and also the pandering of Boys Town kids. The latter I found especially jarring in the context of the saintly mythology of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town. 

Crossing over the Missouri River on Interstate 80, I entered “The Good Life State” and quickly made my way to Omaha. My friend, Dirk, greeted me at the door of his apartment. I hadn’t seen him in eight years. His look was still indelibly counterculture: bib overalls, shoulder-length black hair, and a graying beard; an earring—a silver half-moon—dangled from his left earlobe. He was a potter and also worked at a natural foods emporium. 

I had first met Dirk on the ashram of an Indian guru, His Holiness Sri Swami Rama, over two decades earlier: I was nineteen and he was twenty-four. I lived on the ashram, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, for five months before Rama tapped me to work at his New York City bookstore. While in New York, I discovered things that made me believe that Rama, a professed celibate, had an insatiable appetite for young women, and I edified my bookstore coworkers about our beloved guru’s lower chakra predilections. Word of my insubordination quickly reached Rama, and he gave me “24 hours to leave the city or else.” I interpreted his “or else” as a death threat—I had no idea that I was flirting with a second death threat during my visit to Nebraska. 

Dirk split with Rama shortly after my departure and moved back to Omaha. Over the years, we kept in touch and periodically visited each other. After Dirk and I reminisced a bit, we grabbed a bite at a restaurant near his apartment. As we ate, I asked him if he remembered the scandal surrounding King and Franklin twelve years earlier. All he recalled was the Nebraska media reporting that three or four kids alleged they had been molested. They recanted, and a grand jury ultimately declared their allegations had been fabricated. 

As Dirk and I later sat in his living room, digesting our dinners and talking, I showed him the USCS report on the Finders and also Conspiracy of Silence. His initial reaction was similar to mine: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” 

The next night, Friday, at 7:00 P.M., I was slated to meet John DeCamp at the Coyote Den in Claytonia, Nebraska—population 296. The Coyote Den was wedged in among the dozen or so buildings that formed Claytonia’s main drag. The bar had a musty scent, and a cloud of blue smoke hovered near the ceiling. The bar’s wood paneled walls were decked out with the festive posters and signs provided by beer distributors, and fifteen or twenty men, most of them farmers, sat around wooden tables, drinking and swapping yarns. The wooden counter, to the left of the entrance, stretched for approximately twenty feet, and featured a big glass crock of pickled pigs’ feet. Though I’ve lived an adventurous life, I had somehow never come face-to-face with pickled pigs’ feet before, and they looked indescribably repulsive and daunting. 

John DeCamp was one of three men huddled around a corner table. His face poked upwards when we made eye contact—he had brown hair parted to the side, a round face, and tinted glasses. He wore a black turtleneck and slacks, and sipped from a brown bottle of Budweiser. Though he appeared perfectly innocuous in the humble confines of the Coyote Den, his self-published The Franklin Cover-Up had evolved into a fountainhead of fertile and ubiquitous Internet gossip. A highly decorated Vietnam vet and former sixteen-year Nebraska state senator, DeCamp had projected an imposing persona in Conspiracy of Silence. In person, his stature was more akin to Edward G. Robinson than John Wayne. 

I walked over to his table, shook his hand, and introduced myself—he seemed less than enthusiastic to meet me. Since DeCamp first published his book in 1992, he’s been a living, breathing mecca for conspiracy theorists—he cautiously scrutinized my soundness of mind and motives. After nonchalantly strafing me with a fifteen minute Q & A, he must have concluded I was sufficiently benign. We then hopped into his car, picked up his teenage son, and drove to a nearby Chinese buffet. 

I felt reluctant to discuss this material in front of DeCamp’s son. According to Conspiracy of Silence, DeCamp’s family had been terrorized for his efforts to expose the pedophile ring. After dinner, we drove back to DeCamp’s sprawling Claytonia home, which had an indoor pool and plenty of space for his wife and four children. 

DeCamp and I talked for about half an hour before we crashed. I gave him a list of people I wanted to interview and asked if he would help facilitate the interviews. He said he would give it a shot, but his resolve seemed lukewarm. DeCamp’s revelations in The Franklin Cover-Up had never managed to pierce the mainstream national media, and he was legitimately skeptical of it ever happening. 

The following morning, after a night of insomnia, I followed DeCamp to his Lincoln law office in pursuit of documentation. He directed me to an upstairs room, pointed to a mountain of white cardboard boxes, and departed. I spent hours digging through the boxes, but retrieved only one or two documents that I thought would be useful. 

By mid-afternoon, DeCamp had already left the office, and I emerged from the upstairs room tired and despondent: I’d sifted through hundreds of documents and hadn’t found any of the tantalizing tidbits DeCamp cited in his book. Jan, the office manager, and I converged at the coffeemaker—I explained to her that my five-hour search for documents had essentially resulted in zilch. She then told me that the documents excerpted and alluded to in The Franklin Cover-Up were in the basement. We walked down two flights of stairs, and she pointed to the Franklin mother lode—a wall of large, brown boxes. 

The boxes yielded Omaha Police Department (OPD) reports and internal memos, Nebraska State Patrol (NSP) reports, Nebraska Department of Social Services (DSS) reports, internal Boys Town reports, victim debriefings, hundreds of the ring’s flight receipts, etc. The cache of documents was a research junkie’s nirvana, and I filtered through three or four boxes before Jan concluded the workday. 

I made copies of the documents that I thought were relevant, stapled them back together, and fastidiously returned them to their respective boxes. I sensed that Jan was fond of order, and that my being a conscientious citizen scored major points with her. Over the next two weeks, she often griped that media personnel— including Yorkshire Television and ABC—had haphazardly rummaged through the boxes and left a wake of disarray. 

I spent Saturday night and Sunday at Dirk’s and returned to DeCamp’s office on Monday morning. A brief conversation with DeCamp, who was in the midst of frenetic multitasking, he provided me with a few phone numbers and a caution to be careful. Though DeCamp dispensed the warning with uncharacteristic gravitas, I’m generally not prone to paranoia and didn’t take it too seriously. 

One of the numbers was for Monsignor Hupp, the Director of Boys Town from 1973 to 1984. The eighty-eight-year-old Hupp had just moved from Omaha to Necedah, Wisconsin. In Conspiracy of Silence, Hupp was evasive and vague, but when I interviewed him, he made a number of truly scandalous allegations about Boys Town. I asked Hupp about Larry King’s association with Boys Town: He said that after he had left Boys Town, he heard a staff member was allegedly taking Boys Town kids off campus to a restaurant owned by King. 

But he confessed that he wasn’t able to fully explore the rumors because, according to Hupp, his successor, Father Valentine Peter, ordered that the Boys Town Police Department arrest Hupp if he was ever seen on campus, which prompted him to discuss the matter with Omaha’s archbishop. Hupp said that the archbishop ordered him to walk away from Boys Town and not look back. He also told me that he didn’t trust Father Peter or the archbishop. Hupp’s accusations were the first crack in my preconceived notion of Boys Town as a utopia for troubled youth. 

The next person on the list I contacted was Rusty Nelson. In The Franklin CoverUp, DeCamp discussed Nelson’s involvement in “child pornography,” referencing an Omaha Police Department report and a victim debriefing that painted a rather sordid picture of Nelson as King’s “photographer,” and their association perplexed me. DeCamp told me that he had offered Nelson legal assistance after the latter was pinched for child pornography. Nelson ultimately did time for the charges, but maintains that he had been set up to undermine his credibility. 

After Nelson and I played phone tag for a couple of days, he voiced his reluctance to be interviewed, but he ultimately relented. He lived with his girlfriend and her two teenage children in a rural Columbus, Nebraska trailer park. Shortly after I pulled into the driveway—before I had a chance to ring the doorbell—Nelson opened the front door. I was struck by his dark brown eyes, which were glazed and a little spooky. 

I talked to Nelson for ten or fifteen minutes, easing his reluctance before I plucked a tape recorder from my backpack. Over the course of the next two hours, he related an improbable tale of Larry King’s nationwide network. He alleged the ring pandered or outright sold children to the rich and powerful, employed blackmail, and had ties to US “intelligence.” He maintained that King had attended satanic rituals, and had routinely plundered Boys Town for underage prostitutes. Nelson also named eminent politicians as pedophiles. 

“King hired me to take pictures of adults and children in compromising positions,” Nelson told me. “The pictures showed who the adults were and who the kids were. I gathered that the purpose was blackmail, and it was political. The content of the pictures, and the events surrounding them, would be an instant end to a politician’s career.” 

Nelson claimed that King attempted to pressure him into making “snuff films,” causing their relationship to fissure. After Nelson severed his ties to King, he alleged, he was harassed by the FBI. Nelson claimed that the crux of the FBI’s threats wasn’t designed to force disclosures about King’s pedophile ring, but rather to silence him. 

Nelson’s allegations were jarring, but his shifty personality severely detracted from his credibility. After the interview, I returned to my friend Dirk’s apartment and let him listen to the tape. “If even half of this interview is true,” I told Dirk, “this story is one of America’s worst nightmares.” 

The next day I drove to DeCamp’s office and continued to sift through the basement boxes. I also contacted, or attempted to contact, individuals who had granted interviews to Yorkshire Television and appeared in Conspiracy of Silence. A number of people ignored my repeated phone calls, but I met with a woman who works within Nebraska’s foster care system and also with a former state legislator. 

Neither would grant an “on record” interview, citing the welfare of their families. Though they wouldn’t talk “on record,” they both alluded to the Franklin activities as a malignancy that was vast and seemingly omnipotent. Their fear was palpable— DeCamp’s book mentioned the mysterious deaths or suicides of numerous people affiliated with the investigation into King’s alleged child-pandering network. 

Both my contacts had thought Conspiracy of Silence would break Franklin wide open. But when the documentary was shelved, they lost all hope of the story’s ever being exposed, and both voiced the same concern: An unheralded journalist like myself wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to land the story: Why jeopardize the welfare of their families for a fruitless effort? After all, major newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, had reported on a federal grand jury that refuted the existence of an interstate pedophile network. 

I also contacted numerous people who weren’t interviewed by Yorkshire Television, but whose names surfaced in The Franklin Cover-Up, and they recoiled from meeting with me. After a week or so of constant rebuffs, I remarked to DeCamp, “It’s like these people are living in Stalinist Russia.” Nodding his head, he added, “And they don’t even know it.” 

A couple of days after I spoke to the woman working in Nebraska’s foster care system, an investigator for the Nebraska State Patrol started to phone me every day, leaving voice mails that pertained to my conversation with her. I had mentioned to her that Monsignor Hupp had uttered a number of damning statements about Boys Town. The NSP investigator wanted to know the exact nature of Hupp’s statements. I attempted to reach the woman to discuss her statements to the investigator, but she wouldn’t return my calls. Three years after my initial visit to Nebraska, she finally took one of my calls—she told me that she’d never talked to the NSP investigator. 

My friend Dirk was quite intrigued by Conspiracy of Silence, and then by my interviews with Monsignor Hupp and Rusty Nelson: He started phoning friends and acquaintances in an attempt to nurture my budding inquiry. He spoke to the friend of a friend whose name appeared in The Franklin Cover-Up, but the man wouldn’t meet with me. 

Dirk also had a rather unorthodox phone conversation with an acquaintance, who had an acquaintance who claimed to have been a drug courier for the ring. The courier wouldn’t speak directly to Dirk and used his buddy as a conduit. He apparently recounted a few incidents of murder and mayhem, breaking down in tears, and said I was in great danger: The conversation seemed to blind-side Dirk like an unanticipated left hook—I was a little freaked out too. 

The sum total of Rusty Nelson’s disclosures (even if only partly true), people’s intense apprehension to talk, daily calls from the NSP investigator, and the courier’s warning were whittling away at my cavalier attitude. I also had the feeling that I was being followed, but I was unsure if I should chalk it up to a bona fide intuition or an evolving uneasiness—either way, I kept one eye on the rearview mirror. 

Though I had the willies, I phoned two purported victims who appeared in Conspiracy of Silence. The first victim wouldn’t return my calls, but I eventually talked to Paul Bonacci. Yorkshire Television had filmed him in Washington, DC, discussing his life as a child prostitute molested by the power elite. The thirty-three year-old Bonacci, married and the father of two little girls, had an extremely troublesome history. He’d been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and at the age of twenty-two served time for the sexual assault of a minor. 

Bonacci, too, was averse to being interviewed. So I invited him and his family to lunch, mentioning that we would merely chat, and he accepted my offer. On a brutally cold Wednesday, Bonacci, his wife, and their two preschool daughters trudged into the restaurant like they’d just finished the Iditarod—his daughters were bundled up in hooded snowmobile suits, snowmobile boots, thick scarves and mittens. 

Bonacci’s smile was brimming with white teeth. He appeared relatively conventional at first sight, but the indelible black grooves under his troubled brown eyes conveyed a nightmarish past. He and his wife spent ten minutes peeling off the multiple layers of their children’s winter garb, wiping the girls’ runny noses, and situating them around the table. 

As we ate lunch, I noticed two men in their late fifties, burly and casually dressed, periodically peering at our table—they had the menacing look of KGB apparatchiks. I struggled not to comment on their undue attention, because it was possibly a figment of my increasing wariness, and Bonacci’s wife was already visibly agitated. After a lunch of spaghetti, smiles, and small talk, Bonacci consented to an interview the following afternoon at 2:00 and gave me directions to his house. 

The next morning Bonacci didn’t answer my phone calls, but I decided to pay him a visit nonetheless. He and his family lived in Valley, Nebraska, twenty miles west of Omaha. Once I made it to Valley, I navigated a series of twists and turns before taking a left onto a dirt road, which I followed for a block or two before coming to a triple fork. 

Swerving sharply to the right, I instantly realized that I should have veered left. I abruptly stopped and, preparing to back up, glanced in my rearview mirror: A nondescript brown sedan had just turned onto the dirt road and also stopped. I drove on, stopping just before the main dirt road was out of sight. The brown sedan started and then stopped again. I felt a flight-or-fight adrenal boost and made a squealing U-turn, waiting for the car to catch up and pass. The car never passed me, and I concluded it must have turned around on the dirt road.

After collecting myself, I proceeded to the far left fork. The Bonaccis lived in a rural area that was an odd smattering of trailers, shotgun shacks, and middle-class houses. The dwellings were spread out on a grid of dirt roads that had the contours of a maze. I eventually found the Bonaccis’ modest, single story, brown home—no one was there. I pulled into his driveway and hung out for an hour or so, constantly craning to the left and right, but there were no signs of the Bonacci family or the brown sedan. 

Driving back to Omaha, I thought that I probably hadn’t been followed after all; the driver of the brown sedan had most likely turned onto the dirt road by mistake and realized his mistake precisely when I looked into my rearview mirror. Just as I convinced myself that I’d been beguiled by paranoia, a brown sedan with civilian license plates began tailgating me—a tinted windshield obscured the driver’s face. I sped up, the brown sedan sped up; I slowed down, the brown sedan slowed down. I hit my brakes and then sped up. The brown sedan backed off briefly, and then began tailgating me again. 

I abruptly swerved onto an exit ramp and slammed to a halt at a stop sign. The brown sedan followed, pulling up behind me. I looked into my rearview mirror, but the tinted windshield continued to obscure the driver. When I took a quick right, the brown sedan streaked past me. I pulled into a gas station, caught my breath, and bought an ice cream sandwich—ice cream sandwiches have a way of alleviating my stress. I ate the ice cream sandwich and mulled over my options. I then made a beeline back to the Bonaccis’. 

I felt a sufficient amount of fear upon returning to the Bonaccis’ to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy, because, after all, crazy people are generally devoid of fear. I think many might argue that the mere act of returning to Bonacci’s was crazy, but one of my goals was to interview a purported victim, and I’m big on goals. 

Prowling down the dirt road to the Bonaccis’, repeatedly glancing in the rearview mirror, I noticed Paul Bonacci’s white van in his driveway. I parked on the dirt road, walked over to the house and knocked on the door. Bonacci and his wife answered the door. I invited myself into their house and appealed to Bonacci for a half-hour interview; he begrudgingly consented, against his wife’s objections. I sat on a couch in their cluttered living room, attempting to allay Mrs. Bonacci’s marked agitation as she bundled up their children. She then hustled them off to her parents’ house a few blocks away. Twilight was yielding to night as they departed. 

Bonacci had a history of psychiatric illness, and I hoped to calm him down before I started the interview. According to The Franklin Cover-Up, Bonacci had been a victim of extreme sadism and had even witnessed murder. I lobbed a few softballs at him before broaching the horrors he’d reportedly endured. Just as I started hurling fastballs, Bonacci’s wife opened the front door. She reacted to my last question by demanding that I stop the interview—she feared that their children would be endangered if Bonacci talked. 

The day had been fraught with too many difficulties for me to abandon the interview, and I backed away from the darker questions. Though I attempted to placate Bonacci’s wife, her agitation was having an adverse effect on her husband’s psychological state. I found myself constantly comforting both of them, though I repeatedly thought of men in black—driving nondescript brown sedans—kicking down the house’s front door and raking us all with machine-gun fire. 

After several stops and starts, Bonacci related a tale that was eerily similar to Nelson’s. In fact, he named the same “intelligence” officer as had Nelson. He also said that Larry King had been the ringleader of a nationwide pandering network, had attended satanic rituals, and had pillaged Boys Town for victims. 

Though child-abuse charges were never brought against King, Paul Bonacci and John DeCamp pursued federal civil lawsuits against King and other alleged pedophiles Bonacci named as his assailants. US District Court Judge Warren Urbom declared Bonacci’s accusations of Satanism and sadism to be unsubstantiated and “bizarre,” and he dismissed all but one of the lawsuits filed by DeCamp—Larry King was incarcerated for looting the Franklin Credit Union when Bonacci’s lawsuits were initiated, and he didn’t bother to respond to the court’s summons. 

Judge Urbom therefore granted Bonacci a default judgment against King. DeCamp then requested a hearing on the single issue of damages, and called Bonacci to the stand along with other witnesses who corroborated his “bizarre” accusations. After Judge Urbom listened to the testimony, he awarded Paul Bonacci a one million dollar judgment. The ruling was based upon some of the horrific events that Bonacci related to me. 

Judge Urbom wrote in his decision, “Between December 1980 and 1988, the complaint alleges, the defendant King continually subjected the plaintiff to repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonments, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals, forced the plaintiff to ‘scavenge’ for children to be a part of the defendant King’s sexual abuse and pornography ring, forced the plaintiff to engage in numerous sexual contacts with the defendant King and others and participate in deviate sexual games and masochistic orgies with other minor children. The defendant King’s default has made those allegations true as to him. 

The issue now is the relief to be granted monetarily. 

“The now uncontradicted evidence is that the plaintiff has suffered much. He has suffered burns, broken fingers, beatings of the head and face and other indignities by the wrongful actions of the defendant King. In addition to the misery of going through the experiences just related over a period of eight years, the plaintiff has suffered the lingering results to the present time. He is a victim of multiple personality disorder, involving as many as fourteen distinct personalities aside from his primary personality. He has given up a desired military career and received threats on his life. He suffers from sleeplessness, has bad dreams, has difficulty in holding a job, is fearful that others are following him, fears getting killed, has depressing flashbacks, and is verbally violent on occasion, all in connection with the multiple personality disorder and caused by the wrongful activities of the defendant King.” 

“I don’t think the judge would have given Paul a million dollar award if he didn’t think he was telling the truth,” DeCamp said of the ruling. King appealed the judgment but then withdrew his appeal. DeCamp told me King retracted his appeal following “actions for depositions.” The award for damages, however, remains uncollected. 

I left the Bonaccis’ stressed and exhausted. As I entered Dirk’s apartment, he gave me a concerned look. I told him about the nondescript brown sedan and the Bonacci interview, and red-alert registered in his eyes. I eventually rolled into bed, tossing and turning for an hour or two before falling asleep. The following morning, Friday, I drove to DeCamp’s office and finished sifting through his documentation, thanking Jan for all her help. 

I made it back to Dirk’s by early evening, and he wasn’t home. I’d been sitting on the couch, channel-surfing for about five minutes, when I heard a knock on the front door. I cautiously crossed the living room and peered through the peephole, focusing on the convex image of a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had a mane of unkempt, long red hair, a full, freckled face, and wore thick-lensed glasses. I asked if I could help her, and she held up a book and said she wanted to give it to me. Her speech and mannerisms had the somnolence of someone in a hypnotic trance. 

After the brown sedan incident, there was no way in hell I was opening the door: I wasn’t sure if she was alone, and I didn’t want her potentially incriminating fingerprints in Dirk’s apartment or my prints on her book. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to grab my tape recorder, but I was too tired and freaked out to think straight. 

Though I repeatedly asked her to leave, she wouldn’t, insisting that I take the book. I eventually walked back to the couch, resumed channel-surfing, and she finally left. Within minutes of her departure, Dirk came home, carrying a sack of groceries. I mentioned that we’d had a visitor bearing a gift. Dirk said that he’d passed her on his way into the building. Taken aback by her freaky appearance, he couldn’t help himself from turning to watch her walk into the night. He remarked that he’d never seen her before. 

As Dirk toiled away in the kitchen, making dinner, and I settled on the History Channel, I again heard a knock on the front door—she was back, bearing the same gift. I motioned Dirk over to the door, and he gazed into the peephole. The events of the preceding twenty-four hours had depleted my adrenal reserves, but her reappearance gave Dirk a major adrenaline jolt. His facial expressions cycled through dread, foreboding, and bewilderment as she relentlessly knocked on the door. 

Dirk and I huddled five feet from the door, discussing possible responses while she continued to knock. We agreed that under no circumstances should she enter the apartment, because there were just too many unknown factors. Stunned and perplexed, Dirk walked back into the kitchen as I implored her to leave. Before she left, she said, “You’re in danger—they’re going to kill you.” 

Though our dinner was delicious, neither Dirk nor I slept well that night.

—Chapter One— 

Webs of Corruption 

I left Nebraska utterly devastated. I was beginning to believe that Franklin had been a killing field for the souls of innumerable children. The documentation I garnered revealed scores of victims and the harassment I encountered reinforced my burgeoning beliefs. Over the years, I’ve wavered on several investigative stories in the face of doubt—I wasn’t convinced the stories were noble enough to stalk with reckless abandon. But the evil represented by Franklin unshackled me from any fetters of doubt. 

I wouldn’t be able to return to Nebraska for eight months, but in the meantime I started digging into the background of one Larry King. King’s father, Lawrence King, Sr., grew up in Omaha and was tagged with the nickname of “Poncho” as a youngster. The nickname followed him into adulthood, and, as Poncho King came of age in the 1920s and 1930s, Omaha, the county seat of Douglas County, was on its way to becoming the world’s leading livestock market—it overtook Chicago in 1955. 

In Poncho King’s later teens, he found employment in the meatpacking plants of the Omaha stockyards—like thousands of young men hailing from Omaha. Poncho King went to work in Omaha’s Swift meatpacking plant; the Swift Company would employ him for over forty years. He started at Swift on the bottom rung, skinning hogs, but gradually worked his way into a supervisory position. 

The founder of the Swift Company, Gustavus Swift, had revolutionized the meatpacking industry in the 1880s by using refrigerated rail cars to transport dressed livestock east. Swift’s little trick was to harvest ice from the Great Lakes each winter and then build ice stations along the route. The sprawling Union Pacific Railroad was also headquartered in Omaha, and it was integral to providing the infrastructure for Omaha’s booming meat industry. 

Poncho King married his teenage sweetheart, Vineta Swancey, in 1942, and they ultimately settled into a clapboard house that was flanked by the roar of the Union Pacific Railroad and the wafting tang of the stockyards on the periphery of Omaha’s economically depressed North Side. Poncho and Vineta King had six children; Lawrence Jr. was their second child and oldest son—he was born September 7, 1944. The Kings were devout Presbyterians, and they attended North Omaha’s Calvin Presbyterian Church every Sunday. Larry Jr. was a tall, husky kid who was an excellent student and talented singer. King’s parents encouraged him to take singing lessons as a youth, and he was a notable fixture in the church’s choir. 

As a student at Omaha’s Central High School, King worked as a waiter at the ritzy Blackstone Hotel. The downtown hotel was a “symbol of elegance” and kept a small fleet of limousines for visiting dignitaries. The Blackstone Hotel offered the teenage, working-class King his first portal into the dazzling world of the rich. King went on to graduate from Central High School in 1962 and then enrolled at Omaha University, where he eventually took up pre-med studies. Becoming disillusioned with premed, he signed up for a four-year hitch in the Air Force in 1965, rising to the rank of sergeant. During his stint in the Air Force, King married Alice Ploche, whom he met in Chicago. 

A 1973 article in the Omaha Sun was the first media mention I found of Larry King. According to the article, the Air Force sent King to Thailand to be an “information specialist” as the Vietnam War was raging, and he handled “top secret” military communications. King also told the reporter that after his honorable discharge from the Air Force, he took classes at the American Banking Institute in Omaha. King’s résumé states that he was a 1972 graduate of the University of Nebraska with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration, but the 1973 article made no mention of his degree. 

At the age of twenty-five, King entered the “management training program” of First National Bank in downtown Omaha. The Omaha Sun reported that King, working in the bank’s “computer section,” and a janitor were the bank’s only African-American employees. “I was dissatisfied with my advancement there,” King said in the article. So in August of 1970, King left his job at First National Bank with no employment prospects in sight. 

Later that year, a key organizer of the faltering, two-year-old Franklin Community Federal Credit Union asked Poncho King if he wanted to take it over—Poncho King had successfully headed the employees’ credit union at the Swift Company. Poncho declined, but suggested that the Franklin Credit Union hire his son as its manager. Larry King was interviewed and given the job. 

One of King’s first moves as Franklin manager was conscripting the fair-haired Tom Harvey to manage the books. Harvey was a former high school teacher, and it was rumored among Franklin employees that he had been fired from his teaching job for fondling a male student. King had reportedly met Harvey at the University of Omaha, and both were ostensibly Presbyterians. Harvey’s mother, Mary Jane, a Presbyterian Church bigwig, also came aboard at Franklin. She would eventually lend a hand to her son and King in the plundering of Franklin, and would likewise be convicted on related charges. 

The 1973 Omaha Sun article lauded King for his diligence and industriousness as he worked “eighteen-hour” days to single-handedly save the sinking credit union. Interestingly, Warren Buffet owned the now-defunct Omaha Sun, and his wife, Suzie, was a benefactor of the Franklin Credit Union. 

The Omaha Sun article was clearly written to puff up King’s image, but the article contained a pair of peculiarities as it described up-and-comer Larry King. The peculiarities revolved around the Kings’ relocation from North Omaha to a large, rambling home in the affluent Omaha suburb of Ponca Hills. The paper reported that “King renewed FBI acquaintances recently” when a heroin trafficker who lived in King’s neighborhood was busted—FBI agents suggested to King that he move out of North Omaha. If the FBI “renewed” its “acquaintances” with King, that would imply that they already had a relationship. As this story unfolds, it will become all too apparent that the FBI had a vested interest in protecting Larry King … and his dirty deeds. 

The second peculiarity involved the Kings’ relocating to a lavish house in an opulent suburb inhabited by millionaires. At the time of the article, the Franklin Credit Union’s total assets hovered around $100,000, and Larry King reportedly never received more than $17,000 a year from the credit union. 

Four years after taking the helm of Franklin, King created the Consumer Service Organization (CSO) as an affiliate of the credit union. The CSO became a mass receiver of welfare, disability, and social security checks for many residents of North Omaha. CSO officers set up Franklin accounts for the entitlement recipients and offered financial counseling. King vociferously extolled the virtues of the CSO for providing “a hand up and not a hand-out,” and Franklin’s coffers soon swelled with not only the entitlement monies but with grant monies too. The grants were given to Franklin for its good works in the community. 

King and his Franklin underlings also started to peddle certificates of deposit around the country, offering interest rates 2% to 3% above the market rate—a Franklin executive raked in a cool $1 million in just one day by vending Franklin’s high interest CDs. The Franklin CD con was a Ponzi scheme—Franklin perpetually pushed CDs so it could cover maturing ones. 

Corporate powerhouses like Mutual of Omaha, Union Pacific, and the Kiewit Corporation (a Fortune 500 Omaha-based contractor) and several religious organizations, including Boys Town and the American Baptist Church, lined up to give Franklin grants or purchase its CDs. King also cultivated a relationship with President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Samuel Pierce, whose political favoritism would later be exposed and give rise to scandal. Under Pierce, HUD would chip in many thousands of dollars to the Franklin Credit Union—Franklin solicited $1 million in HUD grants in 1981. The US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare also gave Franklin thousands. So King was ultimately glomming onto millions via his massive Ponzi scam and also via grants for all his good works. 

Omaha World-Herald publisher, Harold Andersen, seemed to be a stalwart ally of King and the Franklin Credit Union. In addition to the World-Herald depositing thousands in the credit union, Andersen was Chairman of Franklin’s Advisory Board. The tall, fair-haired Andersen attended Franklin’s annual meetings, dispensing smiles and handshakes. In fact, Andersen headed a 1984 Franklin fund drive that raised $672,170, enabling King to build a bedroom in the credit union’s basement. 

The bedroom would be furnished with a brass bed, fluffy white comforter, a stereo, and a television. King told a Franklin employee that the bedroom served two functions—it allowed him to “unwind” and it also housed a live-in security guard. I talked to one of the “security guards” who briefly inhabited Franklin’s basement bedroom—he alleged one of his first official duties as a Franklin security guard was performing oral sex on Larry King in the basement bedroom. 

King referred to the credit union as “my baby,” and his baby quickly became his personal, bottomless ATM. King flaunted his newfound wealth with all the pomp and garishness appropriate to a nouveau-riche vulgarian. He moved into a second Ponca Hill home, a mansion that overlooked the Missouri River. He eschewed his Corvette in favor of a sleek Mercedes, and sported several diamond rings and a bejeweled $65,000 watch. King’s lifestyle was soon a succession of Lear Jets, limos, and five-star restaurants. He also had his hand in a diverse array of business ventures, including restaurants and bars. He bought Omaha’s Showcase Lounge, which I’m told was a favored destination of pimps and prostitutes. 

King’s conspicuous consumption was certainly eyebrow-raising for those taking notice: In a thirteen-month period prior to Franklin’s closing, money gushed from Franklin’s coffers into King’s hands. He racked up $1,131,229 on six different credit cards—$1,033,975 on American Express alone. He spent $186,395 on limos, $45,806 on chartered planes, $45,166 on jewelry, and various florists billed him a total of $145,057. 

Though the National Credit Union Administration required federally insured credit unions to be audited every year, Franklin hadn’t been audited during its last four years of operation. According to a former Franklin executive, when auditors would show up every now and then, King would holler, “Phone Washington!” After King talked to “Washington,” the auditors begrudgingly made a hasty retreat. In December of 1988, a Des Moines Register article quoted an NCUA investigator discussing King and the Franklin Credit Union: “We’d sit around while having a beer in Omaha 10 years ago and wonder where he was getting all the money to pay for his lifestyle.” So NCUA officials were apparently cognizant of the fact that King had been looting Franklin for years. But King got by with a little help from his friends—his friends in DC. 

Early in 1984, a Franklin employee wrote a memo that documented King’s embezzlement of funds. After the employee wrote the memo, he was summarily fired. The former Franklin employee then met with the Director of Nebraska’s Department of Banking and Financing and even talked to a representative of the NCUA, but his tale fell on deaf ears. 

In the 1980s, King started translating his ill-gotten wealth into political power. In his twenties, King had been a Democrat and die-hard supporter of Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern, who was walloped by Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential race. But as King’s personal fortunes took a vertical trajectory, he switched his political alliances to the Republicans in 1981. 

King was the founder and Chairman of the Nebraska Frederick Douglas Republican Council, which threw a 1983 reception honoring none other than Larry King for his “service to the Republican Party both locally and nationally.” The reception, held at Omaha’s upscale Regency Hotel, had presenters form ranks to praise and venerate King and impart plaques of recognition. The function had so many individuals extolling the virtues of Larry King that presentations were limited to a mere ninety seconds.

Hobnobbing with Nebraska’s Republican elite was just an appetizer for King—he also started to become a force in Republican politics at the national level. His entrée into big-time Republican politics was through the National Black Republican Council. King reportedly wore several hats for the Council—he was Vice Chairman for Finance and also participated with its Nominating Committee and Development Committee. Moreover, King reportedly served as an adviser to its Youth Committee. King seemed to be particularly interested in children—his résumé acknowledged that he was on Head Start’s Board of Directors, Regional President of the Girls Club, and on the Executive Committee of the Camp Fire Girls. King’s résumé also mentioned that he was “Secretary/Treasurer” of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. 

As King became a fixture of Republican politics at the national level, he rented a swanky Washington, DC townhouse on California Street NW, near Embassy Row, and started to throw fabulous parties. A 1987 guest list from one of his DC parties boasted such luminaries as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, then Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Commission; United States Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick; New York Congressman Jack Kemp; and Nebraska Congressman Hal Daub. Congressman Daub, like Omaha World-Herald publisher Harold Andersen, had a stint on Franklin’s Advisory Board. 

King also started to make hefty contributions to Republicans and their causes and sponsored Republican fundraisers. He shelled out $23,500 to Citizens for America, a conservative group run by the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff that assisted Oliver North in garnering support for the Nicaraguan Contras. King held a fundraiser for Congressman Hal Daub that was attended by HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce. King also gave a generous donation to Republican Kay Orr in her successful 1986 bid to become Nebraska’s governor—he even sang the national anthem at her inaugural ceremony. 

King’s early musical training gave him a niche among Republicans when it came to belting out the “Star Spangled Banner.” His national anthem debut for a Republican audience came in 1982 at a National Black Republican Council dinner. President Reagan and his wife were in attendance, and they were quite impressed with King’s booming baritone. King then opened the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas with a spectacular rendition of the national anthem. 

King had a busy time at that convention in Dallas. In addition to singing, he threw his biggest bash ever. He rented the Southfork Ranch—the fictitious lair of Dallas patriarch J.R. Ewing. Southfork’s sprawling white mansion and grazing horses gave the six hundred people who attended King’s party a hearty Texas welcome. Teenage cowgirls—wearing navy satin tights, vests, and cowboys hats—handed out yellow roses. A resplendent King, attired in white, sporting a thick gold chain, served the partygoers ribs, baked beans, coleslaw, and pecan pie. 

HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce attended the shindig as did Reagan’s daughter, Maureen, who was photographed with King in a very admiring embrace. Two months after Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential race, the Washington Post published an op-ed by King, “Why Blacks Should be Republican,” wherein King touted the “substantial gains” made by African Americans under Republican policies. 

As the Reagan administration was in its waning days, King apparently had high hopes for the presidential aspirations of New York Congressman Jack Kemp: the New York Post reported that King made his party rounds in New York City and DC proudly displaying a “Jack Kemp for President” button. King kicked in cash to Kemp’s 1988 presidential bid and to a Kemp political action committee. King planned to host a Kemp fundraiser at his home—his florist said no expenses were spared for the Kemp fundraiser. Floral arrangements were scattered throughout the house and outside—King even had the florist float flower arrangements in the pool. Kemp, however, canceled the fundraiser at the last minute. 

Kemp’s abrupt cancellation of the fundraiser didn’t seem to put a damper on their association. King and Kemp would team up at the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans. Two months before the Convention, King formed the Council of Minority Americans, which sponsored a $100,000 gala in New Orleans—Jack Kemp, Alexander Haig and former President Gerald Ford were on the Council’s “host committee.” A ten-minute video, featuring King and Kemp, urged African Americans to vote for George H.W. Bush in the upcoming election. The Washington Post reported that a “child singer,” whose “hair was pulled back in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ hairdo,” belted out “Dixie” at the gala. At the time, King was reportedly lobbying for an ambassadorship to Jamaica, where his wife’s family was said to be from. 

When the Franklin Credit Union was raided later that year, Republican VIPs started distancing themselves from King like rats fleeing a sinking ship. A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee initially denied that King was involved in Republican politics at the national level, but a few days later she acknowledged that King had a role with the National Black Republican Council, whose chairman exclaimed, “Of course they knew!” A spokesman for Jack Kemp said of King and Kemp, “They met at a fundraiser, but King was not a personal friend.” 

Kemp was a former National Football League quarterback, and a golden boy of the Republican Party. President George H.W. Bush appointed Kemp the Secretary of HUD, and Kemp would be Bob Dole’s running mate when the latter made his 1996 presidential bid. But rumors of homosexuality plagued Kemp for decades. In fact, Kemp was asked about his purported homosexuality during a 1986 interview on NBC’s Today Show. He “categorically” denied the rumors. 

Kemp, who died in 2009, insisted that the genesis of the rumors dated back to the 1960s when he was a part-time aide to then-California Governor Ronald Reagan and also a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. At the time, Kemp co-owned a Lake Tahoe ski lodge with a second Reagan aide, who threw “homosexual parties” at the lodge. The latter Reagan aide resigned amidst contentions of his homosexuality, but Kemp said he purchased the lodge as an investment and never visited it. Kemp maintained that his co-ownership of the lodge was the sole wellspring of the homosexuality rumors that stalked him for decades. 

Surprisingly, Clarence Thomas was one Republican big shot who didn’t disavow knowing King; instead, he called King’s legal travails “unfortunate.” Though Thomas’ name appears on the invitation list of a 1987 DC party hosted by King, Thomas said he first met King in 1988 at the New Orleans Convention. Like King, Thomas’ wife had grown up in Omaha. She was a protégé of Nebraska’s Congressman Hal Daub and accompanied Daub to DC as an aide, the very same Hal Daub who sat on Franklin’s Advisory Board and was also the beneficiary of a King fundraiser and campaign contributions. 

Thomas’ 1991 appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which decided his fate as a Supreme Court Justice, held millions of Americans spellbound before their televisions. Law professor Anita Hill had been a subordinate of Thomas when he headed the Equal Opportunity Commission, and Hill testified that Thomas was lewd, talked of bestiality, and kept abreast of porno stars. Thomas called the proceedings a “high-tech lynching” and absolutely denied Hill’s allegations. 

The hearing was ultimately a “he said, she said” affair, and Thomas became a Supreme Court Justice, but very few Americans were aware of the fact that a second female subordinate of Thomas’ had been subpoenaed to appear before the hearing who could have corroborated Anita Hill: Angela Wright had been employed by the Equal Opportunity Commission during Thomas’ reign as Chairman, and she too alleged lewd conduct and sexual harassment by Thomas. 

Though Wright had flown from North Carolina to Washington to testify at the hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee never called her. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Biden said Wright’s subpoena had been lifted because of the wishes of Wright and her attorney. But Wright’s attorney adamantly denied Biden’s claim and stressed that Wright never asked for the subpoena to be lifted. 

Because Biden and the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t call Wright to testify, the hearing came down to Thomas’ word against Hill’s, and Thomas subsequently eked out a razor-thin majority in the US Senate—52 to 48—to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. However, if Biden had called Wright to testify, it’s certainly possible that the Senate wouldn’t have confirmed Thomas. A book about Thomas, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, supported Hill’s allegations that he had a penchant for pornography, and several women have since come forward to corroborate Hill’s other allegations. 

America is a society that predominantly believes that an individual’s sexual predispositions or preferences shouldn’t be illegal insofar as they involve consenting adults, and I’m of that opinion too. But the import of Franklin is the age-old story of sexual blackmail. If, in fact, Jack Kemp had homosexual liaisons or Clarence Thomas had an interest in bestiality or lascivious pornography, their preferences would make them susceptible to being compromised and controlled. Given Kemp’s former positions as a US Congressman and Secretary of HUD, and Thomas’ status as a US Supreme Court Justice, they have made decisions that affect every American. Their potential to be blackmailed thus makes them vastly different from John Q. Citizen. 

Before the fall of Franklin, Larry King seemed to be exempt from bad press, even though just below the surface of his lavish lifestyle lurked very dark shadows. In addition to allegations of King being a pimp, rumor and innuendo would connect his name to several suspicious suicides or outright murders. As the story of Franklin unfolds, it will become evident that the media and law enforcement were hands-off concerning King, and I’ve found it nearly impossible to link him to the various suicides and murders that Franklin lore attributes to him. I’ve also located people who might have had information to offer on the deaths, but they’ve obstinately refused to talk to me. 

An FBI debriefing of an alleged victim of King’s pandering network discussed a relationship between Larry King and a drug dealer named Bill Baker, who also reportedly dealt in child pornography—he was found murdered near downtown Omaha: An unknown party had put a bullet in the back of his head. The alleged victim told the FBI that Baker had molested her at King’s behest. She also related to FBI agents that she was in Baker’s apartment when Baker and King were screening child pornography to determine its marketability. She informed the FBI that Baker’s murder had been a “contract killing,” but I couldn’t find any evidence that the FBI conducted a follow-up investigation. 

The “suicide” of twenty-nine-year-old Charlie Rogers is highly suspicious, and I found substantial corroboration connecting Rogers and King. Rogers’ fully clothed body was found on November 10, 1986 in his west Omaha apartment with a fatal shotgun wound to the head: The stock of his twelve-gauge shotgun rested between his legs, and the barrel of the gun was pointed at his head. His television was on, and there was no suicide note—his apartment’s front door was locked, but the door to his third-floor deck was unlocked. Though Rogers’ death was ruled a suicide, his relatives and friends were dubious of the official pronouncement. He was very close to his mother and younger sister, and both told law enforcement that he surely would have left a suicide note. 

Rogers, a body-builder, was six feet tall and tipped the scales at around 180 pounds. He had a thick head of brown hair, brown eyes, and ruggedly handsome features. He owned a lawn service and also worked as a bouncer at The Max, Omaha’s popular gay bar, frequented by Larry King. But the interactions between Rogers and King weren’t limited to The Max. In addition to finding Rogers’ body on November 10, law enforcement found a gold deerskin coat in his apartment—a receipt in the coat’s pocket showed that Larry King had purchased the coat for $2,810. King also sent Rogers “dozens of flowers” and bought him a “closet full of clothes.” A lover of Rogers had an 18-karat gold bracelet King purchased for Rogers: “Charlie” was engraved on the bracelet’s topside and “From the Boss” was engraved on the underside. In Rogers’ pocketbook of telephone numbers, the name “King” was accompanied by five different numbers. 

Approximately three weeks before Rogers’ death, he stopped by his mother’s house for a roast beef dinner, a routine ritual in his life. He told her that he had a plane ticket to Washington, DC, but he decided not to use it and asked her if she wanted to fly to DC. His mother declined her son’s offer and abruptly cut short their conversation about the ticket. In retrospect, she felt Rogers was attempting to explain the ticket to her; therefore she deeply regretted interrupting him. 

After Rogers’ death, his mother found the plane ticket while sorting through his possessions—the Franklin Credit Union had purchased the ticket for Rogers. He was slated to fly out of Omaha at 11:25 A.M., make a stopover in Minneapolis, and arrive in Washington, DC at 4:35 P.M. On the same day, he would leave DC at 8:00 P.M, and after a stopover in Minneapolis, return to Omaha at 10:57 P.M. She felt it was very strange that someone at the Franklin Credit Union, presumably King, wanted her son to be in DC for just three-and-a-half hours. 

A week or so after Rogers’ conversation with his mother about the DC ticket, he visited his twenty-six-year-old younger sister and her husband—he had about two weeks to live. Rogers showed up at their place around 10:00 P.M. on a Sunday night. Rogers and his kid sister were very close, and she immediately noticed that Rogers, who was usually effervescent and a prankster, appeared extremely tense and paranoid. Rogers had a lot on his mind, and he would spend the next four or five hours talking to his sister and brother-in-law. Rogers had nicknamed his little sister Crunch, and he piped, “Crunch, I think I’m in trouble.” 

Rogers then alluded to the fact that he was living a double life but, he said, for the physical welfare of his sister and her husband he wouldn’t divulge many of its specifics—he told them that he was attempting to extricate himself from an endeavor that was seemingly ominous. Though he wouldn’t specifically state the particulars of the endeavor, he said it was connected to a very powerful individual whose name was “Larry King.” His sister had never heard of Larry King before, and she didn’t have the foggiest clue about King or the Franklin Credit Union. 

Rogers disclosed to his sister that he had been enmeshed with King for a couple of months, and he took several trips with him, primarily to Washington, DC—he said he’d received approximately $50,000 from King. Rogers revealed that King was connected to people who harnessed unbelievable power—he mentioned four or five times that he was merely a bug on the floor, and these powerbrokers had the ability to squash him at will. Rogers then conveyed to his sister and brother-in-law a rather mind-boggling account of that power—the power brokers had the “juice” to completely erase people’s backgrounds and insert them into high-ranking political positions. 

Rogers told his sister that he wanted out of King’s sphere, because he had renewed a relationship with a former boyfriend who disapproved of King’s activities. Before Rogers left his sister’s house at approximately 3:00 A.M. the following morning, he gave his sister a pair of letters King had written to him. Rogers also gave his sister a small stationery card that had “Larry King” inscribed on the front. 

Rogers departed his sister’s house in the wee hours, and she would never see him alive again. Though the three had talked for hours, Rogers’ fear for his life hadn’t abated in the least. Shortly before his departure, he told his sister and brother-in-law that if something happened to him or he went missing, they should contact Douglas County Deputy Attorney Bob Sigler—he said Sigler would be fully cognizant of his situation. 

Rogers’ mother phoned her son two days before his death, and he was in good spirits—her call found him catching up on his lawn service’s bookkeeping. The night of Rogers’ death, he was bouncing at The Max, and he seemed to be quite agitated—he and his boyfriend had a physical altercation on the sidewalk outside the bar. He punched his lover, who fell onto the sidewalk and hit his head. The fall resulted in a minor laceration that required him to be taken to the emergency room for stitches. After work, Rogers stopped by the hospital to see his boyfriend. And then Rogers supposedly went home and blew his brains out. 

The day Rogers’ body was found, his mother received a call from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. The officer phoning Rogers’ mother insisted he stop by her place of employment, but he wouldn’t tell her why. Officers from the Sheriff’s Office then showed up at her work around 1:00 P.M. and informed her that her son was dead. She has said that she felt as if every drum in the world was being pounded, every bell in the world was being rung, and the building was crashing down upon her. 

The son-in-law who had been privy to Rogers’ startling revelations two weeks earlier picked up Rogers’ mother and they drove to her daughter’s home—it was a cold, sleeting day. When they arrived, Rogers’ sister and her husband told Rogers’ mother of his confessions and that he feared for his life. They also told her that he’d said if anything happened to him, they should contact Douglas County Deputy Attorney Bob Sigler. Later in the day, Rogers’ father phoned Sigler. 

Sigler maintained that he had no idea why Rogers insisted that he be contacted if Rogers turned up dead or went missing—Sigler would say that their only connection was that Sigler had handled a few misdemeanor cases for Rogers when he was in private practice. 

Rogers’ mother, sister, and brother-in-law were perplexed by Sigler’s reaction and quickly swept away by dread—they developed a rapid-onset fear of Larry King. Shortly after Rogers’ death, his mother received a letter from King requesting that she return a pager King had given to her son: “Please accept my sincere sympathy on Charlie’s death. After having Charlie as an employee, I was very sad to read about your loss. Unfortunately, I must ask a favor of you at this time. Charlie had a paging beeper provided by us that he used when he worked… ” 

Omaha World-Herald reporter James Allen Flanery talked to Rogers’ kin, and started delving into Rogers’ mysterious death. (Flanery would also tell the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office that the “suicide” of a former Boys Town student might also be connected to King.) Flanery made a visit to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, requesting Rogers’ autopsy report. The Sheriff’s Office generally dispensed autopsy reports without much ado, but the Sheriff’s Office phoned Douglas County Deputy Attorney Bob Sigler, and he refused permission to cough up Rogers’ autopsy report. 

A puzzled Flanery then wandered over to Sigler’s office—he had a few questions for Sigler: Flanery wanted to know why Sigler wouldn’t give him Rogers’ autopsy report, and he also wondered why Rogers had told his sister and brother-in-law that they needed to contact Sigler if Rogers suffered an unexpected death. Flanery walked into Sigler’s office and plied him with questions. 

Sigler wasn’t receptive to Flanery’s queries and exploded: “There’s no interview here!” barked Sigler. “I don’t affirm, I don’t deny. I don’t have any comment.” Sigler then made a comment that struck Flanery as especially strange: He asked Flanery if Omaha World-Herald publisher Harold Andersen knew that Flanery was poking around into Rogers’ death. 

Flanery would eventually publish an article on Rogers’ death in the World-Herald linking Rogers to King, but the newspaper only published the article after the fall of Franklin, and over two years after Rogers’ death. The article also neglected to mention that Flanery had come by Rogers’ little black book during the course of his investigation into Rogers’ death. Flanery had phoned one of the numbers in the little black book and left his name and number on a man’s answering machine. Shortly thereafter, Flanery received a call from the man’s sister—she and Flanery were acquainted. The sister told Flanery that he had stumbled onto a national prostitution ring. 

Upon my return to Nebraska, I started looking for Larry King’s alleged victims, now young adults. I was particularly interested in interviewing Eulice Washington, because she had been the first of the purported victims to come forward. I eventually found Washington’s grandmother, Opal Washington, whom I talked to for twenty or thirty minutes. I told Opal of my intentions, and she seemed genuinely pleased that a journalist had taken an interest in the “horrible things” her granddaughters had endured. 

She said that she would contact Eulice on my behalf, and I gave her my cell phone number—Eulice Washington phoned me later in the afternoon. She was suspicious of my motives but, after we conversed for half an hour or so, I quelled her concerns and she invited me to her home. Washington’s white, split-level house was located in a western suburb of Omaha. Shortly after I knocked on the front door, she greeted me and invited me into her home. She wore a denim shirt and blue jeans— her complexion was unblemished and she had lucid, bronze eyes. 

Washington was gracious, yet guarded, as she directed me to a living room sofa. Her living room was decorated with the trophies and ribbons that commemorated the many academic and athletic achievements of her four teenage children. We talked for maybe an additional hour when she consented to be interviewed. Before I pressed “RECORD” on my tape recorder, she ushered her four children down the hallway, directing the two older ones into a bedroom to the right of the hallway and her two younger kids into a bedroom to the left, gently closing the doors. Almost immediately, her two older children switched on their stereo and her two younger children launched into video games. A muffled mix of Sade’s crooning and PlayStation machine-gun fire wafted down the hallway as Eulice returned to the living room and sank into the couch, leaning her head on her right hand. 

In 1977, Nebraska authorities found that Washington’s biological mother was unfit to raise her three daughters—Eulice, Tracy, and Tasha—due to her heroin addiction. The sisters subsequently became wards of the state and were placed in the home of Jarrett and Barbara Webb. Eight-year-old Eulice was the eldest of the Washington sisters—Tracy and Tasha were six and two. The Webbs ultimately adopted the Washington sisters, and they were stamped with the Webb surname. The Webbs also adopted two other children, Wally and Robert, and three additional foster siblings were placed in their home—Kevin, Kiya, and Ken. (Kiya and Ken were fraternal twins.) 

The forty-one-year-old Jarrett Webb was a twenty-year employee of the Omaha Public Power District, a utility company that supplied electricity to the greater Omaha area, and he also sat on the Franklin Credit Union’s Board of Directors for two years. Barbara was thirty-nine years old and a cousin of Larry King. Jarrett was tall, thin, and withdrawn, and Barbara was short, large, and outgoing. 

The Webbs lived in a lovely blue and white ranch house that was surrounded by rolling acreage and shrouded by oak trees—their home was approximately twenty miles north of Omaha in Washington County. The property had been in Barbara Webb’s family for three generations. Her grandparents founded Nebraska’s first orphanage for African-American boys, Oakview Home for Boys, near the site where the Webbs resided. Up to twenty children lived at the Oakview Home for Boys at any given time. “My grandmother never made a difference between all the children she raised,” Barbara once remarked to a reporter. “To her, a child was a child. Being with her and my grandfather taught me so much about love.” Barbara Webb would publicly declare that it was her calling to continue the good works of her grandparents. 

The Washington sisters quickly discovered that the Webbs’ house was not as it appeared. “I was in third grade when my sisters, Tracy and Tasha, and I were adopted by the Webbs,” began Eulice, born in June of 1969. “The first night we were scared. Tracy and Tasha were crying. Tasha peed on herself, and Mrs. Webb tied her to a doorknob. Then she beat her and left her there all night.” 

Washington would tell me that she and her sisters suffered repeated beatings for the next eight years. Her accusations are not only corroborated by her sisters, but by a trove of documents from Nebraska’s Department of Social Services (DSS). 

The DSS documents pointed out that the Webbs’ other adopted and foster children received repeated beatings too. The Webbs introduced the children to an extension cord, bullwhip, rubber hose, and a black strap dubbed the “railroad prop,” a twofoot strip of black rubber perforated with holes. “They beat us all the time,” said Washington. “I took most of the abuse so they wouldn’t beat Tracy and Tasha.” 

Indeed, in separate interviews, the Webbs’ adopted and foster children flooded DSS personnel with bone-chilling anecdotes of horrific physical abuse. A myriad of infractions incited the beatings: The grade of a “C” or lower, using the telephone without permission, or even having the temerity to have friends call the Webb home. The girls would also be beaten for not telling Barbara Webb that they were having their menstrual period. Additional infractions that incited beatings included breaking a glass, chewing gum, “making noise when shutting off a light switch,” or folding their clothes improperly. Though the beatings generally occurred because of perceived transgressions, Eulice and Tracy recalled suffering beatings for no reason at all—Barbara Webb would just simply announce: “I’m going to beat everyone today.” During the beatings, the children were generally required to remove all their clothes—the beatings could last for five minutes or persist for well over an hour. 

Tracy Washington told authorities that she often wore long-sleeve blouses to school, because they hid the bruises and marks the beatings left on her arms. After her physical education classes, she would wait until the other students left the locker room before changing clothes so they wouldn’t notice the marks on her body. The beatings were generally administered to the children in the solitary confines of the basement or a bedroom, but a DSS document stated that all the children in the Webb household were lined up in the basement to witness Wally being whipped while naked. 

DSS records detailed that the Webbs, as a punishment, consistently denied the children food. A DSS document related that Tracy Washington was deprived of food for four days—she was only allowed to eat school lunches. In the summertime, the children were tasked with mowing and manicuring the acreage around the Webb’s house: The chore would usually take them two days, and they were deprived of food until the task was completed to the Webbs’ satisfaction. “They starved us as a regular punishment,” Eulice Washington told me. “After dinner, we would clean off the table and eat the scraps from the Webbs’ plates, because we were so hungry.” Tasha Washington would later tell me that the Webbs forced her adoptive brothers to eat dog food from a bowl on the floor. 

The children were also subjected to mental cruelty and mind games, and they were brainwashed into believing that being welcomed into the Webb fold was their good fortune. One of the adopted boys, who had a deformed leg, was warned by Barbara Webb that because of his handicap the Webbs were the only family willing to ever provide him with a home. A DSS document noted the following: “All of the children have frequently been told by the Webbs that ‘no one else would want you.’” Like Orwell’s Big Brother, the Webbs also sought to either eradicate the Washington sisters’ past or reframe it—they burned the girls’ family pictures and recurrently told them that their biological mother was “no good” and a “slut.” 

The Webbs kept the children’s brainwashing intact by not permitting them to socialize with other children or participate in school activities. A DSS document mentioned the children’s “social isolation from school and community.” Indeed, the Webbs repeatedly told school officials that their children were not allowed to use the school’s telephone, nor was the school to provide the children with the phone number to the Webbs’ house. Moreover, the children were not even allowed to use the telephone at home. If the Webbs left the house for an extended period, they would lock the phone in their bedroom or actually take the telephone with them. 

Jarrett and Barbara had an unorthodox arrangement with the DSS—they received state subsidies for all eight adopted and foster children living in their home. The rationale of the Webbs’ receiving state subsidies for even their adopted children was that they came from extremely troubled backgrounds and required extensive counseling. But the Webbs never voluntarily provided the children with counseling —Barbara Webb’s preferred form of “counseling” was to simply tell the children to “forget” their past. 

Barbara Webb attended Omaha’s Seventh Day Adventist Church almost every Saturday, and she sang in the choir—she had a honey-coated voice, just like her cousin Larry King. Her entrance into the church would be a wondrous spectacle: She would be adorned in a mink coat, designer clothing, and expensive jewelry— her hair was perfectly done. The children would be immaculately dressed and silently follow in her wake. The children, wearing their Sunday best, sat in the church’s pews like little cherubs. They never acted up or made the slightest peep. But the Webbs’ fellow churchgoers found them aloof and occasionally intimidating, because Barbara’s hair-trigger temper periodically erupted. 

The Webbs also dressed up the children and took them to the lush home of “Uncle Larry” King and to soirées hosted by King. The Webbs made Eulice attend functions at the North Omaha Girls Club, where Larry King served as president. Eulice said that these gatherings gave her the creeps: She said the functions included approximately fifteen “older men,” and they seemed to salivate over the twenty or so teenage girls who were present. 

In addition to being kin, Eulice found out that Larry King and Barbara Webb shared more sinister bonds. Eulice claimed that she was at King’s home, watching television, when King and Barbara Webb entered the room—King unlocked one of the room’s cabinets and handed Barbara Webb a number of videotape cassettes, which she slipped into a large handbag. Shortly afterward, the Webbs were out on the town and they forgot to lock their bedroom door. According to Eulice, she and the other children found the videotapes and popped them into the Webbs’ VCR— one of the tapes explicitly showed “teenagers” engaged in sex. The children also discovered pornographic pictures tucked away in the Webbs’ dresser. 

Unfortunately, the Webb children would find out that even their school wasn’t a safe refuge, because the Webbs cultivated friendships with some of the school district’s administrators—Tracy said they periodically visited the Webb home and Barbara often dropped by the kids’ school to talk with them. 

DSS documents reported on one occasion Tasha showed up at school with “marks all over her body” and her “eyes were swollen”—she revealed to a friend that she had been beaten by the Webbs. Tasha’s DSS caseworker contacted a school district administrator who was reportedly a friend of the Webbs, and he claimed that no one informed him about the marks on Tasha’s body—he felt that Tasha was put up to her wild fabrication by Eulice and Tracy. The same administrator said he asked Tasha’s adopted brother, Robert, if the Webbs hit Tasha, and Robert replied that the Webbs had never hit her. The administrator then told the caseworker that Robert said the Webb household was the “best place he’s ever lived.” 

The Webbs managed to cultivate the public image of ideal parents. In 1983, the Omaha World-Herald ran an article—“Making the Best of it … a House full of Kids”—about the Webb household, and it depicted Barbara and Jarrett as the wellspring of love and compassion, including a Norman Rockwell-esque photograph of the “family.” A beaming Barbara was seated on a sofa, and the Washington sisters were draped around her as if she was the physical embodiment of heavenly compassion. The two adopted boys, with ear-to-ear smiles, stood next to Jarrett in the background. 

The article’s author was enamored with Barbara Webb’s good-natured mirth and “deep, hearty” chuckle as she tossed out thoughtful, maternal quips about smothering her adopted children with “the love that I think they need.” The article talked about the Webbs’ “love” producing a truly miraculous transformation in the lives of the Washington sisters. Barbara Webb said that when the sisters arrived at their home, their threadbare clothes were “so bad you couldn’t even give them to the Goodwill.” She pointed out that the girls were malnourished too—they didn’t even know the difference between an orange and a peach—and two had learning disabilities. But under the compassionate guidance of the Webbs, she said, the sisters were now happy and flourishing. 

The article also stressed the financial sacrifices that the Webbs had made to meet all the needs of their adopted children. The author discussed Barbara Webb “gardening, canning, and cooking a lot of casseroles—things that will stretch,” and Barbara Webb chimed in on the economic tribulations of spreading her love among so many children: “Financially, things get tight sometimes, but we just draw in our strings and go around another way to see that the children have everything they need.” 

The article in the Omaha World-Herald would be part and parcel of a propaganda campaign that culminated in Barbara Webb being named Nebraska’s foster care mother of the year! The award was presented to Barbara Webb by then-Nebraska Governor Bob Kerrey. The Washington sisters distinctly remember donning their Sunday best and driving with the Webb's to Lincoln, where Kerrey bestowed the award. The girls were utterly baffled by the afternoon’s festivities. 

In a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, the children started to doubt their perceptions of the Webbs’ omnipotence, and the psychological levies that held back their fear and anguish ultimately started to crumble. The incident that precipitated the first breach was Kevin committing the grave offense of ripping his jacket. 

According to a Washington County Sheriff’s report, Jarrett and Barbara Webb suddenly awoke Kevin and Wally, who slept in the basement, around 1:00 A.M. Barbara Webb held up Kevin’s jacket and asked who had ripped it, but neither boy was willing to confess to such an unforgivable transgression. Barbara Webb ordered Kevin to strip, and Jarrett cracked Wally atop the head with a screwdriver, making him dizzy and leaving a golf ball-sized lump. Jarrett Webb then grabbed the naked boy and smashed his head into the ceiling, and after that Barbara Webb started to wale away on him with the “railroad prop.” As she mercilessly pummeled Kevin, she shouted, “I will bust you open … now tell me the truth!” To avoid further beating, he confessed to the offense, even though he wasn’t exactly sure how the jacket had been ripped. 

Approximately ten days later, in June of 1985, Kevin and Wally fled to their neighbors’ house and talked to their son. They divulged to him that they planned to run away because the Webbs habitually and mercilessly beat all their children. Kevin lifted up his T-shirt and showed the neighbors’ son the numerous welts that covered his back. The neighbors’ son told his mother about the incident, and she phoned the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. 

After a deputy sheriff talked to the neighbors, he paid a visit to the Webbs. When the deputy sheriff met with Kevin and Wally, they voiced their reluctance to utter a word about the Webbs’ abuse, because they would surely receive a severe beating if they talked. But they eventually opened up to the deputy sheriff and told him of repeated floggings—Kevin also showed the deputy sheriff the welts on his back. 

Barbara Webb dismissed Kevin and Wally’s allegations by telling the deputy sheriff that the welts on Kevin’s back were merely the result of a spanking. The deputy sheriff didn’t buy her explanation and took Kevin and Wally into custody. Kevin was taken to a local hospital and examined by a doctor whose report stated that the welts on Kevin’s back were “most likely caused by something similar to a heavy rubber hose.” A Washington County Sheriff’s report noted that law enforcement, accompanied by Child Protective Services, returned to the Webb household the following day. 

The Webbs, mindful of their impending visit by the authorities, threatened and cajoled the other children about keeping the family secrets under wraps. Unfortunately, the primary concern of Child Protective Services was the foster children—Kevin, Kiya, and Ken—and Wally. Kiya and Ken, nine-year-old twins, were noticeably frightened to talk, but they ultimately accused Kevin of lying and said the welts on his back were from a fight. The youth workers requested that Kevin draw a picture of the railroad prop on a chalkboard, and then they interviewed Kiya and Ken individually. When Ken was shown the picture on the chalkboard, he identified it as the railroad prop. But he quickly realized that he had volunteered too much information and shut up. Kiya initially refused to look at the chalkboard—she finally took a cursory glance, and quickly responded that she had never seen the instrument before. The three siblings were then brought into the family room—Kiya and Ken continued to say Kevin was lying as he pleaded with them to tell the truth. 

The authorities had seen enough and they took the three foster children and Wally out of the Webb home. The foster children would be placed in a new foster home, but the Webbs wouldn’t be charged with a single count of child abuse—they also retained custody of their other adopted children. In Wally’s case, the Webbs denied the child-abuse allegations: He was ruled “uncontrollable” and eventually became a ward of the state. 

According to DSS documents, the Webbs changed their punishment regimen after the DSS intervention and started beating the remaining children on the bottoms of their feet, as if they were POW’s at the Hanoi Hilton. But liberation of the four children had an effect on the others; roughly two months after the foster children and Wally escaped, Tracy and Robert ran away to a second neighbor’s house, alleging physical abuse. This time the Webbs convinced the children to return home before law enforcement and DSS personnel arrived. DSS caseworkers converged on the Webb home the following day, but Tracy and Robert recanted their allegations of abuse, saying they “ran away” to avoid being disciplined for “wrongdoing”— DSS workers noted that Barbara Webb was in earshot of the conversation. 

In November of 1985, Eulice managed to find her biological grandmother, Opal Washington—despite the Webbs’ concerted efforts to disavow the sisters’ family of origin—and she fled to Opal’s house in Omaha. Eulice phoned the Webbs from her grandmother’s and said she would only return to the Webb’s house if her sisters were allowed to visit their grandmother. The Webbs consented to let Tracy and Tasha visit, and the sisters stayed with their grandmother for a few days. 

The children then opened up to their grandmother about the physical abuse in the Webb household. Opal reportedly placed a call to the Omaha Police Department, and the responding officer told her that the Washington sisters were legally adopted by the Webbs and lived in Washington County: the matter was out of O.P.D’s jurisdiction. 

At the conclusion of the girls’ visit with their grandmother, she drove them to the rendezvous location designated by the Webbs, but the Webbs were nowhere to be found—Opal Washington and the girls then returned to Opal’s home. Following their arrival back at Opal’s, the O.P.D showed up—the Webbs had phoned the O.P.D alleging Opal had kidnapped the children! 

The Webbs in concert with the O.P.D picked up the Washington sisters at their grandmother’s. Upon their return to the Webb home, DSS documents reported, the three sisters were pushed into chairs, and the Webbs barked, “You are dead to us!” The sisters were also derided as “whores” and “bitches.” The Webbs made the sisters clean and scrub their house the entire night and into the morning. The ten year-old Tasha became too exhausted to continue scrubbing; so the Webbs heaved her onto the kitchen’s counter and shook her every time she appeared to be falling asleep. 

The following day, November 18, the Webbs’ attorney notified DSS personnel that the Webbs wanted to relinquish their custody of Eulice and Tracy. Later in the day, in near blizzard conditions, a Washington County Deputy Sheriff and three DSS caseworkers descended upon the Webb household. Though Jarrett and Barbara answered the door, they wouldn’t let the deputy sheriff or the caseworkers into their home. One of the caseworkers had a heated exchange with Barbara Webb, and she slammed the door on his hand. The Webbs finally consented to allow Eulice and Tracy to leave with DSS personnel. As snow cascaded to the ground, Eulice and Tracy were driven away from their eight-year nightmare. The girls were rapturous to see the Webb home recede into the background, but they expressed tremendous concern for Tasha’s safety. 

Later, the Webbs, accompanied by their attorney, rolled into the Washington County Courthouse, and they accepted a temporary foster placement for the two girls with a “goal of family unification.” Under conditions of the temporary placement, the Webbs consented to have Eulice and Tracy psychologically evaluated and to participate in family therapy. But then the Webbs canceled Eulice’s evaluation and made no arrangements for family therapy. Barbara Webb phoned Eulice and Tracy’s DSS caseworkers and said that she and her husband no longer wanted to assume any financial responsibilities for either girl, including counseling or medical care. 

Roughly a month after Eulice and Tracy were removed from the Webbs’ home, Washington County filed a petition to make the girls wards of the state, and a December hearing was held to determine the Webbs’ parental rights regarding Eulice and Tracy. But the girls had yet to be assigned a guardian ad litem— someone, usually a lawyer, appointed by the court to represent minors in litigation. So the judge appointed the girls a guardian ad litem and postponed the hearing. 

In front of the judge, Eulice voiced her concerns for the welfare of Tasha and insisted that she and Tracy be allowed to visit their little sister, but the judge ruled that Eulice and Tracy wouldn’t be granted visitations to the Webb home, prompting Eulice to break down in tears. Inexplicably, that judge told Washington County Attorney Patrick Tripp that he wanted nothing more to do with the case, and the county imported a judge from a neighboring district to adjudicate the predicament. 

Eulice and Tracy were ultimately placed in the foster home of Ronald and Kathleen Sorenson. The Sorensons had temporarily taken in Wally and Kevin right after they were liberated from the Webbs—Kathleen Sorenson witnessed firsthand the “walnut-sized bruises” on both boys’ backs. 

The girls’ caseworkers had frequent telephone contact with Kathleen, who by all accounts was a very pious and loving woman. The sisters’ first weeks with the Sorensons were extremely joyful, but they frequently expressed concerns for Tasha —they surely felt that their little sister would become the focal point of the Webbs’ aggression. 

After Eulice and Tracy had been in the Sorenson home for a month or so, Eulice started to seem very distressed. The Sorensons discovered that she slept in the closet one night, and then she started to talk about a friend who had been raped by her adoptive father and also of orgies. Kathleen Sorenson gradually earned Eulice’s trust, and Eulice eventually said that Jarrett Webb had repeatedly molested her— Sorenson notified DSS personnel of Eulice’s allegations. 

On January 2, 1986, shortly after Eulice’s disclosures to Kathleen Sorenson, the sisters met their guardian ad litem, Patricia Flocken, for the first time. Flocken had a private practice in Fort Calhoun and served as a guardian ad litem for several children, including the girls’ adoptive brother Wally. Flocken remembered showing up at the Sorensons’ house in a yellow jogging suit, which was a recent Christmas present, and being teased for not looking very lawyerly. Shortly after her arrival, though, the atmosphere became dreadfully serious. 

Kathleen Sorenson watched as Eulice and Tracy discussed the physical abuse in the Webb household—their allegations of physical abuse corresponded closely with the allegations Wally had made to Flocken. The girls also talked about being terrified of the Webbs’ lawyer, and then they started to mention Barbara Webb’s cousin. They said he was powerful and politically connected, and they were terrified of him— Flocken had never heard of Larry King before. After Eulice started to feel comfortable with Flocken, she brought up her molestations at the hands of Jarrett Webb. Tears streamed down her face as she discussed being violated by Webb. Flocken left the Sorenson home that day troubled and concerned. 

As Flocken familiarized herself with the girls’ case, DSS personnel began to pursue Eulice’s allegations of sexual abuse. A DSS caseworker contacted the Washington County Deputy Sheriff who had originally taken Wally and Kevin into custody and had also accompanied DSS caseworkers to the Webb home when Eulice and Tracy were removed from the home. He made arrangements for Eulice and Tracy to be interviewed by a Nebraska State Patrol investigator at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. 

On January 21, 1986, Kathleen Sorenson drove Eulice and Tracy to the Sheriff’s Office, where a female NSP officer interviewed them separately. Eulice stated to the investigating officer that she was initially molested by Jarrett Webb after living in the Webbs’ home for approximately a year—the first molestation occurred towards the end of her ninth year or in the beginning of her tenth year. Jarrett Webb made Eulice take a “nap” with him, and he “played with all parts” of her body. 

According to Eulice, over the next three years, when Barbara wasn’t home, Jarrett Webb would threaten her with a “whipping” if she didn’t accompany him into the Webbs’ bedroom. Eulice somehow gathered gumption and started threatening to tell Barbara Webb—Jarrett Webb said he would hurt her if she uttered a word about the molestations. 

Eulice told the NSP officer that Webb didn’t molest her from her twelfth to her fifteenth year, because of her threats to tell Barbara. But when Eulice was sixteen years old, Jarrett Webb walked into her bedroom and ordered her to take her clothes off; and as she lay face down on the bed, he pelted her on the back with the railroad prop. While wearing only his underwear, he then ordered Eulice to turn over, and he climbed on top of her. Eulice quickly started to cry, and Webb finally left her bedroom. In addition to providing the NSP investigator with considerable detail about her molestations, Eulice said she was willing to take a polygraph on her statements. 

A DSS caseworker of Eulice’s met with Washington County Attorney Tripp and discussed the sexual abuse allegations with him. Tripp told the caseworker that since Eulice had consented to take a polygraph, he felt that she should follow through with it. After talking to Tripp, Eulice’s caseworker inferred that if Eulice passed the polygraph, a petition to emancipate Tasha and Robert from the Webb home would be forthcoming, and Tripp might “possibly” bring criminal charges against Jarrett Webb. On January 30, Eulice was driven to NSP headquarters by Kathleen Sorenson to be polygraphed. In fact, over the course of a few hours, she took four series of polygraphs or polygrams on her previous statements to the NSP investigator. The polygraph examiner concluded that Eulice was telling the truth. 

Flocken then had a meeting with two DSS caseworkers, the NSP officer who originally interviewed Eulice, and County Attorney Tripp concerning Eulice’s allegations. Flocken said that everyone at the meeting believed Eulice about the sexual abuse allegations with the important exception of Patrick Tripp. According to Flocken, Tripp had talked to the Webbs’ attorney, and he felt that Eulice had so intently rehearsed the allegations that she actually believed them—Tripp opted not to file abuse charges against Jarrett Webb. 

In February, Eulice and Tracy had their relinquishment hearing. The Webbs’ lawyer attended the hearing, but the Webbs were conspicuously absent. In a rather bizarre twist, the presiding judge ruled that Eulice and Tracy were “uncontrollable,” so the Webbs were voluntarily relinquishing their parental rights. The judgment made absolutely no mention of the inhumane abuse and torment, even though DSS documents are replete with seemingly countless incidents of abuse. 

Right after the relinquishment hearing, Flocken was shocked: Eulice told her that Tripp and the Webbs’ attorney, Gary Randall, had informed her that she and Tracy were immediately scheduled for a deposition with Randall. Flocken later said she approached Tripp and inquired why she hadn’t been notified of the girls’ forthcoming deposition—Tripp responded that since the girls’ parental rights were terminated, she was no longer their guardian ad litem. Flocken replied that she would accompany Eulice and Tracy to the deposition and represent the sisters pro bono. A major feature of the deposition was Randall grilling Eulice about her allegations of sexual abuse, but she refused to recant the allegations. 

Later in February, Washington County filed a “Juvenile Petition” to have Tasha and Robert removed from the Webb household. A week later, Tasha and Robert were taken out of school and placed in a foster home. Unfortunately, Tasha couldn’t be placed with the Sorensons since the family had the maximum number of foster children under the terms of their licensure. 

Tasha and Robert were placed in the home of Jerry and Patricia Roethmeyer, which was a few blocks from the Sorensons’. DSS reports noted that Tasha and Robert had difficulties sleeping, and they initially had a habit of hoarding and hiding food. Both Tasha and Robert told the Roethmeyers that they no longer wanted to live in the Webb household—they were terribly frightened that the beatings would continue. 

When a counselor asked Tasha about the prospect of returning to the Webb home, she started to cry and replied, “God wouldn’t let this happen to me—He wouldn’t make me go back to the Webbs.” Tasha also confided to Patricia Roethmeyer that she had been forced to perform oral sex on an “uncle” who visited the Webbs. Tasha said that though Barbara Webb knew about her being molested, she did “nothing.” Roethmeyer immediately reported her allegations to Tasha’s DSS caseworkers. 

To the utter shock of DSS personnel, in March of 1986, a judge ruled that Tasha and Robert would be returned to the Webb household with a “rehabilitation plan.” Kathleen Sorenson, Patricia Roethmeyer, Tasha, and Robert were equally shocked by the judge’s decision. A DSS document mentioned that Tasha’s allegations of sexual abuse hadn’t been properly investigated, and Kathleen Sorenson and Patricia Roethmeyer were stunned that they hadn’t been called to testify on the children’s behalf. Tasha grasped Patricia Roethmeyer’s leg and screamed, “Please don’t make me go back!” She refused to let go of Roethmeyer, and the judge ordered Roethmeyer to leave the courtroom. Robert said nothing, cocked his head downward, and looked at the floor. 

The judge ordered that Tasha, Robert, and the Webbs undergo psychotherapy and family counseling. Though the judge essentially sentenced Tasha to a second stretch of unremitting torment and agony, he conceded that she should be allowed to have supervised visits with her sisters.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Barbara Webb allegedly charged at a pregnant DSS caseworker of Tasha’s, poking her in the stomach and saying, “I hope your baby dies.” 

After the hearing, Randall threatened the DSS with a lawsuit if the Webbs’ casework wasn’t transferred out of Washington County’s jurisdiction. At first, DSS personnel refused to accommodate Randall, but they eventually knuckled under, and the Webbs’ casework was assigned to a Douglas County branch of the DSS. The Webbs’ new Douglas County caseworker noted they “were outraged at the accusations” of child abuse, and he found the children “very cooperative with a good attitude.” In fact, the psychologist working with Tasha, Robert, and the Webbs seemed to be rather sympathetic to the Webbs’ concerns. She wrote that Tasha’s contact with her two sisters was “thwarting” her relationship with the Webbs, and she suggested that her visits with Eulice and Tracy be “discontinued.” Strangely enough, the psychologist would find that the children’s social isolation stemmed from depression instead of the Webbs’ oppression! 

Despite the Webbs finding a kinder, gentler social services milieu, Tasha and Robert were ultimately removed from their home in August of 1986, and the Webbs relinquished their parental rights to the two children approximately a month later. As was the case with the previous children, the Webbs denied allegations of abuse; Tasha and Robert were deemed “uncontrollable.” 

It’s astounding that Jarrett and Barbara Webb evaded child-abuse charges over the years. If the authorities weren’t cognizant of the Webbs’ cruelty and malice, their failure to press child-abuse charges would be understandable, but they had pages and pages of documented corroboration regarding the abuse, and Eulice passed a polygraph on her repeated molestations by Jarrett Webb. Yet even after the abuse became all too apparent, the Webbs still meted out cruel and inhumane punishment with impunity. 

Social service documents identified various agencies that facilitated the Webbs’ abuse through willful neglect, but the FBI may have proactively abetted the Webbs. According to documents I possess, a DSS social worker who made home visits to families renewing their foster care licenses had a very bad feeling about the Webbs, and she took it upon herself to make inquiries. She wrote a letter to her superiors explaining her suspicions about the Webbs; she also found that many of the DSS files pertaining to the Webb children were missing. The social worker said that FBI agents contacted her, and they told her it would be in her best interests to “forget this information.” 

I interviewed the Washington sisters’ guardian ad litem Patricia Flocken, and she said that her representation of the Washington sisters was the most stressful period of her life: Flocken told me that she was routinely followed by unidentified individuals when representing the Washington sisters, and she also told an investigator employed by the Nebraska legislature that she felt her phones were tapped or her office was bugged during this period. Flocken became a Deputy Attorney for Washington County after Tripp left his position as County Attorney. 

Could FBI intervention possibly account for the authorities not investigating the Webb household? If so, the next logical question is: “Why?” 

As I’ve previously mentioned, a month or so after Eulice arrived at the Sorenson home, shortly before her first meeting with Flocken, she talked of a “friend” who had been molested by her adoptive father. At the time, Kathleen Sorenson was perplexed by her disclosures, but then she realized that Eulice was attempting to gauge her reaction to determine if it was safe for her to divulge that Jarrett Webb had molested Eulice herself. She talked of orgies too, again perplexing Kathleen Sorenson. 

As Eulice grew more and more comfortable with Sorenson, she tentatively asserted that the Webbs’ powerful cousin, Larry King, had flown her and other children, via a charter plane, to Chicago in the fall of 1984 and to New York in the spring of 1985. Eulice said that King forced her to wear negligees and attend orgies. She told Sorenson that Boys Town students were on the flights, and she recognized a nationally prominent politician, who procured a kid at the orgy in Chicago and quickly slipped out. 

Kathleen Sorenson was initially dumbfounded by Eulice’s revelations, but everything that Eulice had previously mentioned had panned out: Sorenson had personally seen the welts on Kevin’s back when he and Wally resided in her home, and Eulice and Tracy had extensively corroborated their accounts of physical abuse; so she was absolutely shocked that the Webbs hadn’t been charged with child abuse. She had also witnessed Eulice pass four polygrams, yet Jarrett Webb wasn’t charged with a single count of molestation. Because the Webbs had completely escaped child-abuse charges, Sorenson began to feel that the system’s traditional checks and balances that safeguarded children had been corrupted in the Webbs’ case. So she relayed Eulice’s allegations about Larry King and Boys Town students to Julie Walters, a friend of hers who worked at Boys Town. 

Walters then approached the Director of Boys Town, Father Valentine Peter, and told him about Eulice’s allegations—Peter said she should check them out. Walters interviewed Eulice and Kathleen Sorenson on three occasions in March of 1986— Tracy and a friend of Sorenson’s, Kirstin Hallberg, were also present. Eulice gave Walters details of the abuse in the Webb household and also accounts of her trips with Larry King. Eulice and Tracy also discussed seeing Boys Town students at parties hosted by King in Omaha. Walters brought Boys Town yearbooks to the second interview, and Eulice and Tracy identified former students who they alleged were involved with King. Walters penned a forty-three page, handwritten “report” on Eulice and Tracy’s information. 

Walters then began to ask around about King’s affiliation with Boys Town and Boys Town employees—she quickly discovered that the Franklin Credit Union employed a Boys Town teacher. She heard additional rumors that a yellow, limited edition Tojan sports car leased by King had repeatedly prowled the Boys Town campus, and three Boys Town teachers had been spotted driving the car. Walters mentioned the rumors to Father Peter, who said he would look into it. Walters eventually learned that a Boys Town administrator whom she didn’t trust was tasked with investigating the rumors. 

Within a week of transcribing Eulice Washington’s allegations, Julie Walters contacted Eulice’s former guardian ad litem, Patricia Flocken, and introduced herself. Walters said she was investigating Eulice’s allegations on behalf of Boys Town and requested a meeting with Flocken. At this point, Flocken had fallen under the scrutiny of the nameless and faceless, and she had become a bit wary about her involvement with the Washington sisters. She made a few calls to confirm Walters’ identity. 

She then phoned Walters back and they agreed to meet at Boys Town’s campus. Shortly after Walters greeted Flocken in her office, she handed Flocken a photocopy of her report, and they reviewed it together. As they leafed through the report, Flocken noticed parallel after parallel between the confessions she had heard and Eulice’s disclosures to Walters. If Flocken had any doubts about Eulice’s allegations, they seemed to have been dispelled after her two-hour meeting with Walters. 

In the following days, Flocken struggled with the enormity of Eulice’s revelations: a network that pandered children to a cabal of America’s highest political strata. She also struggled with the ethical quandaries involved in divulging information garnered from juveniles. She discussed the latter quandary with the Washington County Judge who had inexplicably removed himself from the Webbs’ relinquishment hearing of Eulice and Tracy Washington. She opted to confer with him due to the fact that he was partially cognizant of the Webb predicament—he suggested that she back away from further involvement in the matter. Flocken phoned Walters and said she was extricating herself from the Boys Town “investigation.” Julie Walters would eventually leave Boys Town, and the content of her report would essentially lie dormant for almost three years. 

Kirstin Hallberg was a close friend of Kathleen Sorenson, and she’d been present while Eulice Washington made her initial confessions to Julie Walters about Larry King in March 1986. Two months later, in May 1986, Hallberg went back to work for Uta Halee, a residential psychiatric facility in Omaha for adolescent girls. She had previously worked there in 1981, but a pair of pregnancies punctuated her first and second stints. She was now a thirty-six-year-old mother of two. 

Hallberg was a “resident adviser” on the 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. shift at Uta Halee, and her duties included admitting the girls, administering their treatment plans, one-on-ones, overseeing their conduct, and driving them to activities. In June 1986, she was tasked with the intake duties for twelve-year-old Shawneta Moore. The facility’s Intake Unit consisted of a cozy one-bedroom apartment, and, as Moore sat in a chair, crocheting a potholder, Hallberg reclined on the couch and interviewed her. Though Moore was thin and slightly undersized for her age, Hallberg immediately noticed that she had an exceptional precocity. 

Moore grew up in North Omaha, and her parents had two children. Moore’s parents had a rocky four-year marriage that ended in divorce when Shawneta was two years old—her brother was four years old. Two years after the divorce, Moore’s mother and her two children moved in with her boyfriend. Moore developed a tight, nurturing relationship with her mother’s boyfriend, but she and her mother had a tumultuous and troubled relationship. Moore was ten years old when her mother and her boyfriend split up—Moore then started staying out late, and some nights she didn’t even bother to come home. Moore’s mother had no idea how her ten-year-old daughter had the means and wherewithal to disappear for such periods. Moore’s mother ultimately found her daughter to be incorrigible—Moore became a ward of the state and was placed at the Uta Halee facility.

Hallberg inquired if Moore had any hobbies or pastimes, and Moore replied that she once frequented the North Omaha Girls Club. Hallberg was aware of King’s affiliation with the Girls Club, and she asked Moore if she knew the Webb girls. Moore said that she was acquainted with Eulice and Tracy—Hallberg then posed a question or two about the Girls Club. Moore became acutely distressed, started to crochet in a staccato whirlwind, and suddenly blurted out that she had been involved in a prostitution and pornography “ring.” Moore said she had attempted to break away from the ring, and her mother was raped in reprisal. After Moore’s startling revelation, she became withdrawn and extremely frightened. 

Moore’s account of her mother’s rape is corroborated by an O.P.D report. At around 3:00 A.M. on June 15, 1986, Moore’s mother was in bed sleeping when a short, thin African-American man, wearing a nylon stocking over his face, slipped into her bedroom, put a butcher knife to her throat, and in a high-pitched voice said, “Where’s Shawneta?” After the rape the police were phoned, but the responding officers told Moore’s mother that she needed to collect herself and then phone the O.P.D if she wanted to make a complaint. Moore’s mother phoned the O.P.D the next day and the sergeant who initiated a follow-up investigation noted that the responding officers didn’t even write a police report, take the victim to a hospital, or contact the crime lab, and, unbelievably, they advised Moore’s maternal grandfather to fix the door that the perpetrator had broken to enter the house. The assailant was never apprehended. 

After Moore discussed her mother’s rape, Hallberg attempted to probe for specific information, but Moore said the ring had too much power, and if she made further disclosures to Hallberg they would both be in danger. Moore then shut down emotionally and refused to discuss the ring any further. Though Moore didn’t specifically mention Larry King’s name, Hallberg was mindful of King’s affiliation with the Girls Club from Eulice and Tracy Webb. 

Hallberg charted Moore’s allegations about her involvement in a pornography and prostitution ring, and then she approached her supervisor about the allegations. Hallberg told her supervisor that she knew of a girl who had also attended the Girls Club and made similar allegations—she suggested they contact the Nebraska State Patrol. Hallberg recalled that her supervisor became very agitated at the suggestion, replying that Hallberg would be breaching confidentiality statutes if she single handedly contacted the authorities—Hallberg assumed her supervisor contacted the authorities and also Moore’s mother. 

During Hallberg’s tenure at the Uta Halee facility, she attempted to coax Moore into providing additional details about her abuse, but was repeatedly rebuffed. Hallberg worked with a second girl there who also made allegations of being in a child prostitution and pornography ring. Moreover, a third girl also alluded to organized abuse, even though she too declined to be specific. Hallberg usually wasn’t assigned to the unit where these three girls resided. Nevertheless, when they were in the midst of emotional turmoil or a crisis, they had a tendency to reach out specifically to her. 

Hallberg gradually began to have gnawing suspicions that Uta Halee personnel might be covering up malfeasance, and her reservations produced a mounting discomfort: She wasn’t absolutely certain her suspicions were well founded, and there were times when she felt terrible about even having these suspicions. However, her supervisor’s reaction to Moore’s allegations made her extremely uneasy, and she heard unsubstantiated rumors that girls were sneaking off campus in the middle of the night—she voiced her concerns to a co-worker. Hallberg’s concerns quickly ricocheted back to her supervisor, who informed her that “everything was fine.” 

Hallberg’s supervisor also seemed to be overly concerned with the relative ease with which certain residents confided in Hallberg—her supervisor suggested that she interrupt the girls who confided in her to ask, “Are you sure you can trust me with this information?” Hallberg’s suspicions were further intensified by the fact that an Uta Halee employee was a friend of Barbara Webb, and that Alice King actually sat on Uta Halee’s Board of Directors. 

Shortly after Hallberg’s supervisor expressed concerns about the residents confiding in her, a co-worker of Hallberg’s was suspended for harboring one of the residents —Douglas County Sheriff deputies then converged on Uta Halee to make inquiries about the co-worker and her relationship to the resident. Hallberg then found herself summoned by her supervisor’s supervisor. According to Hallberg, her superiors informed her that she had jeopardized her job by preemptively phoning the Douglas County Sheriff. She was then grilled about whom she “knew” at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office—Hallberg replied that she hadn’t blown the whistle. 

The next day Hallberg phoned the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department to request that it notify her superiors that she didn’t make the call in question. Strangely enough, the deputy who spoke to Hallberg said that he had talked to Uta Halee personnel the previous morning, and he was asked if Hallberg had, in fact, phoned the Sheriff’s Department—he responded that she hadn’t. Hallberg thought it peculiar that she had been accused of contacting the Sheriff’s Department even after it informed Uta Halee personnel that she wasn’t the one who blew the whistle. Later that day, Hallberg’s supervisor approached her and said she was in “deeper trouble” for requesting that the Sheriff phone her superiors to reiterate that Hallberg hadn’t made the initial call. 

Shortly thereafter, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department conducted a pornography investigation at Uta Halee—the Sheriff’s Department ultimately cleared the facility of any illicit activity. During the investigation, however, Hallberg noticed that Moore was “extremely fearful”—Hallberg again attempted to talk to Moore, but she refused to open up. Hallberg asked Moore if her trepidations were associated with Uta Halee—Moore replied “it” was too big, and if Hallberg continued to pry she would “get hurt.” 

On March 5, 1987, Hallberg’s supervisor and two administrators summoned her to a meeting and informed her that Uta Halee was suspending her for five days. They said Hallberg had been “over-involved” with the residents “beyond a therapeutic level.” Hallberg assumed that her superiors were referring to Moore and the two other girls who disclosed to her that they had been involved in organized child exploitation. At the meeting, Hallberg voiced her concerns about Alice King sitting on Uta Halee’s Board, and, according to Hallberg, her supervisor’s boss exploded and started screaming at Hallberg. On March 10, Hallberg would be given the option of resigning from Uta Halee—she refused to resign and was fired. 

After Uta Halee terminated Hallberg, she eventually landed a job at Richard Young Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Omaha. While Hallberg was employed at Richard Young, Moore was discharged from Uta Halee—she returned to her mother’s home and enrolled in an alternative high school. In June 1988, Moore phoned Hallberg and said she had been confiding in her school counselor, who wanted to confer with Hallberg. The three agreed to meet on June 27, but on the eve of their meeting, Moore phoned Hallberg and sounded suicidal. Hallberg placed a frantic call to the school counselor, and asked for his advice since he had been working closely with Moore. The counselor suggested that Hallberg pick up Moore and take her home for the night. 

Hallberg picked up a friend, also a former Uta Halee employee, and drove to Moore’s mother’s house. When they pulled up to the house, Moore was sitting on the front steps of the house, wearing a white sweater and blue shorts—she was crying. Hallberg talked to Moore’s mother, and she was given permission to harbor Moore for the night. After Hallberg and Moore made it back to Hallberg’s home, Moore became very despondent and started to bawl. Moore said she wanted to end her life, because it would be far less painful than if “they” decided to murder her. “If they find out I’ve talked,” Moore cried, “they will torture other kids in my name.” Moore gradually calmed down and fell asleep around 2:30 A.M. 

The next morning Hallberg drove Moore to see her school counselor. While they sat in the counselor’s office, Moore seemed to be smothered by hopelessness—she had great difficulties articulating words and expressing herself. The counselor turned to Hallberg and revealed that Moore had told him “everything about Larry King,” and he asked if Hallberg knew about King—she recounted what Eulice had conveyed to Kathleen Sorenson and Julie Walters. As the counselor and Hallberg talked, Moore sounded increasingly suicidal. She refused to promise the counselor and Hallberg that she wouldn’t hurt herself, so the counselor decided she needed to be hospitalized. 

The counselor opted to hospitalize Moore at Richard Young Hospital, but said he required the consent of Moore’s mother. He also told Hallberg that it was important that Moore’s mother be apprised of her daughter’s allegations. Hallberg was stunned by his disclosure, because she assumed that Uta Halee personnel had contacted Moore’s mother about the allegations two years earlier—Moore’s mother would later confirm that Uta Halee hadn’t notified her about the allegations. 

On June 27, Moore was admitted to Richard Young’s adolescent unit where Hallberg worked. Shortly after her hospitalization, Moore’s attending psychiatrist, Kay Shilling, gave her a physical and mental health evaluation. Dr. Shilling noted that Moore was very calm and soft spoken, but she suffered from “major depression with suicidal ideations.” Dr. Shilling wrote that Moore’s “self esteem is very low based on her belief that suicide was the only way to correct her problems.” However, Shilling found that Moore’s hypothetical judgment was “good” and she was “orientated to person, place, and time.” In other words, Moore wasn’t psychotic or delusional. Moore also confessed to Shilling that she had been entangled in an underage pornography and prostitution ring. 

Richard Young’s July “Nurses’ Notes” on Moore depict a truly troubled adolescent. One morning in July she was found sitting in a chair and sobbing inconsolably—she eventually covered herself in a blanket and silently rocked back and forth. She seemed to be harboring horrific nightmares—yet she was unwilling to share them with hospital personnel. She told staff that her past was too “painful to think about,” and she couldn’t possibly forgive herself. 

In the middle of August, Moore evidently began to trust her caregivers, because she started to open up about deeds of unfathomable evil. Moore had offered Hallberg a few tidbits earlier at Uta Halee, but she gave Richard Young personnel a surfeit of evil that’s utterly divorced from mundane reality. In the winter of 1983, Moore said, when she was nine years old, she started attending the North Omaha Girls Club, where she met an older man named “Ray,” who also befriended four or five other girls at the Girls Club. Moore thought Ray was a volunteer at the Girls Club and described him as an overweight forty-year-old African-American male, standing 5’7” to 5’8”. 

Shawneta Moore indicated that Ray transported the girls to various locations in a white van, but whenever he drove the girls he would blindfold them. Ray originally took the girls to an abandoned building and broke out a joint. After Ray and the girls smoked the joint, they sat around the building and talked for a while, and then he returned them to the Girls Club. Ray spent three or four weeks driving the girls to the abandoned building, and smoking marijuana with them, before he brought them to a “party.” 

The men at the party were in their mid-thirties—they initially sat around and talked to the girls about their “problems.” They then started to drink and take drugs with the girls, and, after the girls were “wasted,” the men started having sex with them. 

The girls didn’t have a choice of who would have sex with them. Moore said she attended parties for approximately six months before she was taken to her first “power meeting” in the summer of 1982. The meeting was held in an abandoned shack, and Moore told hospital personnel that “candles and other weird stuff” were at the power meetings. Moore identified the men by pseudonyms—Ace, King’s Horses, Jerry Lucifer, and Mike. The men were dressed in robes adorned with upside-down crosses, and the leader wore a long black cape and gold skull head rings on his fingers. Moore and the other girls were told that the room would start spinning; and after the room started to whirl around Moore, she realized she’d been drugged. At approximately 7:00 P.M. Moore was locked in a small room with a Caucasian baby girl—Moore and the infant were alone in the room for about five hours.

At around midnight, she said, the men opened the door to find Moore holding the little girl. They took the infant from Moore, and told her that she would achieve “power” by killing someone she really loved. Moore then detailed a series of inconceivably gory and horrific events that entailed the men ritualistically murdering the infant. Though the events that Moore described are incomprehensible, she provided hospital staff with the unflinching, meticulous specifics of the events as she said they unfolded. After the infant was murdered, Moore divulged to hospital personnel that she became hysterical and one of the men had to hold her down. Moore then disclosed that she was forced to remain locked in the small room for approximately twenty-four hours. While Moore sat in the dark, locked room, she said she heard the men whipping and beating one of the girls. 

Moore told hospital personnel that as she sat in the locked room, she felt that the girl who was whipped and beaten had it much easier than she did. Shortly after the men stopped assaulting the girl, they unlocked the door of the small room and informed Moore she passed the test. The men then drove Moore to a park near her house and dropped her off. Moore said she felt dazed as she wandered home, and, upon entering the house, her mother gave her a beating for having been missing for two days. Moore said the next time she saw the men was at a party, where the girls were again forced to “sleep around.” She identified Larry King as attending this party. 

Moore also told Richard Young staff about four additional “sacrifices.” She said that a little boy was ritualistically murdered because he threatened to notify authorities of the sacrifices. She also named one of the girls who had been slaughtered. As Moore continued to describe the various sacrifices, Richard Young’s “Nurses’ Notes” detail that Moore started to have dreams about the cult murdering Richard Young staff, she wrote a suicide letter, and also conveyed to staff that she could not “forgive herself.” In September, Moore told the staff that she harbored no more secrets, but she was convinced that she was “going to hell.” In October, a nurse walked into Moore’s darkened room and found her curled into a fetal position. 

A few months before Moore was hospitalized at Richard Young Hospital, Larry King’s name started to surface at the Omaha Police Department regarding the exploitation of children. In the upcoming months, OPD Chief Robert Wadman would declare in the newspapers that King had been thoroughly investigated and that the allegations had “no substance,” but numerous bystanders were skeptical of his assurances. Moreover, rumors of a friendship between the controversial chief and King wafted throughout the OPD’s rank and file. 

On paper, Chief Wadman had a stellar career as a peace officer, and Omaha Mayor Mike Boyle hired him as OPD Chief in 1982—Boyle would woefully regret the decision. The then forty-one-year-old Wadman was born and raised in San Diego, California, and he had the physical traits that typecast Southern California natives— a tall, athletic physique, sandy brown hair, and blue eyes. Wadman was married and the father of four children—three sons and a daughter. He began his law enforcement career as a beat cop for the San Diego Police Department in 1962—he was third generation law enforcement. Over Wadman’s seven-year tenure with the San Diego Police Department, he rose to the rank of sergeant. Wadman, a Mormon, left California and completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Law Enforcement at Brigham Young University in 1970. 

Wadman then made the big leap to federal law enforcement. In less than two years, he went from being a sergeant in San Diego to being a special agent in charge of New Mexico’s Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, a precursor to the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

Wadman left the feds three and a half years later and opted for graduate school—he received a Masters of Public Administration in 1975 from Brigham Young. Afterwards, he embarked on a two and a half year tenure as the Police Chief for Orem, Utah. As Orem’s police chief, Wadman received national press because his department played an instrumental role in apprehending killer Gary Gilmore— Wadman even made it into Norman Mailer’s bestselling book, The Executioner’s Song, about the Gilmore murder spree. 

Wadman then served as Utah’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Safety before commencing his stint as OPD chief. Chief Wadman and Omaha Mayor Boyle had a relatively short honeymoon. The two repeatedly butted heads, and Wadman filed a lawsuit in Douglas County that challenged the mayor’s authority over certain personnel decisions within the OPD. The judge ruled that Boyle was, in fact, Wadman’s boss, and Wadman lost the lawsuit. 

As the hostility between Wadman and Boyle escalated, Boyle claimed that he and his family were subjected to “constant, thorough, and never ending” police harassment. Boyle was pulled over in the car that the city leased for him, and given a ticket for expired tabs, his twin seventeen-year-old sons were arrested for the solicitation of prostitution, and a third son was arrested on a bench warrant for misdemeanor traffic violations. Boyle told the media that he had been warned about driving through a certain Omaha neighborhood—he said he would be “ticketed for looking cross-eyed.” In response, Wadman said he knew of no police officers who were setting their sights on Boyle. 

In October of 1985, Boyle’s brother-in-law was arrested for drunk driving. Though he was legally intoxicated, the arrest was a bit shady, because the arresting officers weren’t run-of-the-mill traffic cops—they had been assigned to the narcotics and intelligence units of the OPD. The officers would eventually confide to a Boyle ally that an OPD lieutenant assigned them to conduct surveillance on Boyle’s brother-in law in unmarked cars for seven days, eight hours a day, using special police radios, and the purpose of the arrest was to entrap Boyle or a family member into obstruction of justice if they attempted to pull strings on the brother-in-law’s behalf. 

So, a two-term mayor of a major American city felt threatened and intimidated by his own police force, which in and of itself is disconcerting, and the two police officers arresting Boyle’s brother-in-law confessed to an elaborate plan to vanquish the mayor, but then the story takes an even stranger turn: The lieutenant who ostensibly put the scheme into motion eventually disclosed that the FBI and the OPD had jointly targeted Boyle’s brother-in-law because he may have been involved in illicit gambling. 

The head of Omaha’s FBI Field Office confirmed that the OPD and FBI were acting in unison, but he denied the FBI was attempting to set up Boyle for obstruction of justice. FBI officials said that the gambling probe conducted by the FBI and OPD placed Boyle’s brother-in-law under surveillance, and the arresting officers noticed that he often drove erratically. After the officers expressed concerns that the city would be liable if he caused an accident, the feds agreed that he should be taken down for a DWI (Driving While Intoxicated). The FBI’s account significantly differs from that of the arresting officers, and, as this story unfolds, it will become evident that the Omaha FBI isn’t an outfit that lets truth trump its version of reality. 

The Boyle administration decided that the OPD captain overseeing the surveillance of Boyle’s brother-in-law should be terminated and the two participating lieutenants suspended for thirty days. But Chief Wadman refused to sign the disciplinary notices of the officers, and he was fired for insubordination in November of 1986. It should be noted that throughout the strange saga that led to Wadman’s dismissal, the Omaha World-Herald championed Wadman as “good” and “ethical,” and repeatedly condemned his sacking as a gross abuse of power and a miscarriage of justice. 

Shortly after Wadman was fired, a group of citizens calling themselves “Citizens for Mature Leadership” started collecting signatures to have Mayor Boyle recalled. The group denied their drive to sack Boyle was motivated solely by his giving Wadman the boot, but it acknowledged that Wadman’s termination was the catalyst. Conversely, the Omaha Police Union was overwhelmingly (80%) against Wadman’s return as chief. World-Herald editorials quickly ripped the Police Union for opposing Wadman’s return. 

As the World-Herald clobbered Boyle, the Police Union, and anyone else who opposed Wadman, it facilitated Citizens for Mature Leadership in forcing a recall vote. Fifty-five thousand Omahans voted to recall Boyle and forty-three thousand voted against his ouster. Wadman, however, was absent from the melee—he had left his family in Omaha and taken a temporary assignment in Washington, DC, heading a joint project between the Drug Enforcement Administration and the International Association of Police Chiefs. The purpose of the project was to make recommendations to Congress on how it should best earmark monies to combat the nation’s drug problems. 

After Boyle was recalled, Wadman had a hearing before the Omaha Personnel Board, and it upheld his termination. Wadman then took his case to Douglas County District Court, and in March of 1987 a Douglas County Judge ruled that his firing was “unlawful,” and he should be immediately reinstated as Omaha’s top cop. Upon Wadman’s reinstatement as OPD Chief, Larry King sent him a fabulous bouquet of flowers. 

King claimed he and Chief Wadman were pals—he said that whenever Wadman was beset by difficulties he would be in his “corner 100%.” But Wadman adamantly denied their friendship ever existed—he said King’s “gaudy display of wealth” made him suspicious. Wadman insisted that he had only three social contacts with King. The first contact was at a party King threw in his home for the Omaha Symphony’s new conductor. Wadman maintained that the second occurred at a large reception King had at the airport. Finally, Wadman acknowledged that he had attended a party in Washington, DC at King’s townhouse after he had been fired by Boyle and was working in the Capitol. 

Though Wadman would say that these three occasions were the extent of his social interactions with King, a former Franklin executive stated under oath that King had a reception for Wadman at the Franklin Credit Union when Wadman initially took over as OPD chief in 1982. Wadman’s name also shows up on two of King’s party guest lists. The guest list for a party King threw in September of 1986 has a “No” written next to the name of Wadman and his wife—Wadman’s name also appears on a guest list for King’s birthday party in September of 1987 with nothing written next to the name. 

Wadman also did a few documented favors for King as OPD Chief—Wadman said that the favors didn’t entail special treatment and were performed as a straightforward public service. One of the favors involved King phoning Wadman because a relative’s suitcase had been confiscated during a drug bust. King wanted the suitcase out of police impound, and Wadman helped facilitate King’s wishes. Wadman contended that he fielded King’s call just as he would field any call from John Q. Citizen, and that King’s request went through the proper OPD channels before the suitcase was given to King. 

A second documented favor involved a King-owned restaurant, the surly proprietor of a Porsche, and a perplexed cop. Over the years, King embarked on various culinary ventures, but his pièce de résistance was Café Carnivale, a stylish Omaha eatery. Café Carnivale attracted the city’s happening crowd and featured a 26-ounce slab of prime rib dubbed “Mr. King’s Cut.” 

The owner of the Porsche decided to treat his wife and friend to dinner at Café Carnivale. The fifty-something man apparently felt a sense of entitlement, because he parked in the restaurant’s handicapped parking, which just happened to be adjacent to King’s reserved parking space. The assistant manager of Café Carnivale requested that he move his Porsche from handicapped parking—he refused to get up from the table and offered to forgo having dinner if he had to move it. The assistant manager then phoned King’s attorney who wanted to talk to the Porsche’s owner, but again he offered to forgo dinner. The assistant manager then reportedly put in a call to Larry King and also phoned the OPD. 

Approximately half an hour after the initial call, a female officer pulled into Café Carnivale’s parking lot, where the restaurant’s assistant manager met her. The responding officer recalled that the assistant manager said Larry King was a friend of Chief Wadman’s. The officer parked behind the Porsche, ran its plates, and wrote a ticket. After the officer slapped a ticket on the Porsche, an OPD dispatcher told her to contact an on-duty lieutenant, and she phoned him from inside Café Carnivale. The officer couldn’t recall if it was the lieutenant or the assistant manager who informed her that “Wadman called in a second time” about the incident. 

As she was talking to the lieutenant, the owner of the Porsche was outside the restaurant convulsing in anger. He jumped into his car and attempted to make tracks from the parking lot, but, since he was boxed in by the squad car, he was having great difficulties. When the officer emerged from the restaurant, she found the owner of the Porsche driving on the sidewalk, and an extremely heated discussion ensued. According to the officer, the Porsche’s irate owner wrote a letter to Wadman, inquiring about the relationship between the OPD and Larry King. During a deposition, Wadman was asked about this incident, and he denied that King called him at home. Wadman maintained that King’s lawyer called him at home, and he referred the complaint to the proper OPD channels—Wadman said that his home phone number was listed and that the call was just like “a thousand other calls” he’s received over the years.

Ten months after Wadman’s reinstatement as OPD Chief, Larry King’s name made its first documented echoes throughout the OPD concerning the exploitation of children. In May of 1988, a twenty-four-year-old man with dishwater blond hair and a moustache, standing 5’11”, weighing 150 pounds, approached a seventeen-year old girl working at an Omaha supermarket. The man introduced himself as Rusty Nelson and informed the girl he was a photographer. He told the red-haired girl that he was taking pictures for Easter Seals, and he just happened to be looking for red haired models—he gave her his card and proposed that she stop by his studio for a photo shoot. 

The seventeen-year-old girl no doubt brimmed with enthusiasm as she made her way home that afternoon. She announced to her mother that she had bumped into a photographer at the supermarket, and he was very interested in photographing her. The girl phoned Nelson and left a message on his answering machine—Nelson called her back almost immediately, and they set up an appointment. The girl requested that her mother accompany her—Nelson said that would be all right. 

Nelson’s “studio” was located in the Twin Towers, a pair of luxury apartment buildings near downtown Omaha. The apartment’s extravagant furnishings and plush interior instantly impressed the mother and daughter. After they seated themselves on a living room settee, Nelson placed a large bowl of strawberries in front of them and also offered both flutes of champagne. The mother’s first red flag shot up when Nelson disclosed that his “boss” kept the apartment well stocked, because he had initially said to her that he was self-employed. Nelson attempted to allay her concerns by boasting that he worked for the city’s top modeling agencies and also for an upscale mall in Omaha. 

Prior to the shoot commencing, Nelson had the mother and daughter sign a minor release form. The mother and daughter spent the next five hours with Nelson, and they became increasingly uncomfortable—Nelson made repeated references to photographing the girl in her “birthday suit.” Though he never specifically asked her to pose in the nude, he attempted to have her bare more and more skin and also slip on lingerie—she and her mother declined his overtures. 

As Nelson was in the midst of a shooting frenzy, the girl’s mother started to peek at photographs scattered throughout the apartment. To the mother’s shock, she spotted several pornographic pictures of girls who appeared as young as twelve years old. The mother had seen enough, and she told her daughter that it was time to leave. Nelson invited the girl back to his studio, but he insisted that her mother not accompany her—he felt that the mother made the girl nervous. 

The next day, the girl’s mother phoned the various agencies that Nelson referenced as clients. An employee at one of them wasn’t particularly enamored with Nelson, referring to him as a “pervert” and directing the mother not to let her daughter near him. The mother ultimately decided to phone the OPD and report Nelson. The officer who fielded her call jotted down the mother’s information and directed the complaint to the OPD’s Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit. The case landed on the desk of Officer Irl Carmean a few days later. The thirty-eight-year-old Carmean was married and the father of two. A scar descended from his right ear to his chin—a female suspect had slashed him across the face with a knife nine years earlier. 

Carmean graduated from Ohio State University with a Bachelor’s in Journalism in 1974—he had been the news director of a Lincoln, Nebraska radio station for three years before deciding to join the OPD in 1977. Carmean left the OPD in September of 1982 to study law at Omaha’s Creighton Law School. After attending law school for a year, he returned to the OPD in 1983 and pursued his law degree part-time. Carmean graduated from Creighton Law School in 1985, but continued to serve as an OPD officer. Among his fellow officers, Carmean had a reputation for having a sharp mind and being a top-notch investigator. 

On May 9, 1988, Carmean contacted the girl and her mother—he took their statement and wrote up a report. The following day, a superior of Carmean’s, Officer Michael Hoch, talked to the owner of the Twin Towers in an effort to gain background information on Nelson. The owner of the Twin Towers told him that Nelson resided in an apartment that was sublet to him by Larry King. According to Nelson, he was a small-town boy from rural Nebraska who had wandered to the big city, Omaha, in the hopes of making it as a photographer after being discharged from the Army. Nelson said he was taking pictures of a “drag show” at a gay bar in Omaha when he caught Larry King’s eye—King was on the lookout for a “photographer,” and Nelson fit the bill. 

On May 11, Carmean drove through the Twin Towers parking lot, and spotted a Ford van registered to Nelson. He radioed in for priors on Nelson: With the exception of a speeding ticket the previous year, his record was clean. Carmean also spoke to a professional photographer familiar with Nelson. The photographer had placed an ad for “test photographers” approximately six months earlier, and Nelson had replied. The photographer told Carmean that Nelson’s portfolio confirmed he was a talented photographer, even though it included pictures of an inordinate number of nude females. The photographer said he hired Nelson to assist him in a photographic shoot; Nelson, however, had an altercation with a male model. The employer found Nelson to be “rude, excessive, and unprofessional,” and was sufficiently appalled by Nelson’s behavior not to give him a second chance. 

The initial reports filed by Carmean and Hoch on the incident listed “child pornography” or “possible child pornography” in the reports’ “Offense” headers, but none of the reports listed a name in the “Suspect” header. Approximately two weeks later, Hoch filed a “Supplemental Report” on the “child pornography” investigation, and Larry King’s name showed up in the “Suspect” header. The report detailed a conversation Hoch had with the property manager of a second luxury apartment building in Omaha. She informed Hoch that King’s one-year-lease on an apartment had expired four months earlier—he had paid the entire year’s rent in advance. King’s concurrently renting a luxury apartment at the Twin Towers struck Hoch as “very strange,” and he asked the property manager if she was privy to any scuttlebutt on King. She relayed rumors of King being a “drug dealer” and also of his penchant for “young men or boys.” 

The following day, Hoch drove to the Twin Towers and talked to the owner once more. He told Hoch that in addition to renting the apartment where Nelson resided, King also rented a penthouse apartment. The owner said that King had spent up to $50,000 refurbishing the penthouse—he recalled that King bought a couch for the penthouse that wouldn’t fit into the elevator and rented a crane for $1,200 to have the couch hoisted into the penthouse. The owner also reported that King rented three parking spots in the basement garage, and he had at least five cars, including a Mercedes-Benz and a Cadillac. He expressed bafflement about King’s newfound wealth too, because a realtor informed him that King had attempted to buy a home five years earlier and had difficulties making the down payment. 

The owner of the Twin Towers also gave Officer Hoch the name of King’s cleaning lady. Hoch never had a documented contact with her, but two FBI agents would interview her. She disclosed to the agents that she cleaned both the apartment where Nelson resided and also the penthouse apartment. Though she hadn’t personally observed child pornography in either apartment, she said that a Twin Towers security guard alerted her to the fact that Nelson photographed “young boys.” 

By the end of June, Shawneta Moore’s initial confessions at Richard Young Hospital had prompted Dr. Shilling to phone the OPD, and Officer Carmean visited the hospital to interview Moore, who had recently turned fifteen. Officer Carmean, like Kirstin Hallberg, found that Moore “spoke and acted rather maturely for her years.” Moore told Carmean that at the age of nine she and a handful of other girls had been transported from the Girls Club to a studio and photographed in the nude. Moore said that the adults who participated in photographing the children were the “leaders” of the Girls Club. She also indicated that other prominent individuals were involved, “including doctors and lawyers.” 

Moore informed Carmean that the adults used threats against the girls to ensure their participation in the kiddy porn. If the girls refused to participate, the adults warned, they and their entire families would be murdered. In addition to discussing child pornography, Moore disclosed that she had also attended “devil-worship rituals.” Carmean noted that Moore’s descriptions lacked the names of the participating adults and the specific locations where the child pornography and rituals had occurred. 

On June 30, Officer Carmean’s supervisor phoned Dr. Shilling to discuss Moore’s disclosures to Carmean. She informed him that Moore had been intentionally ambiguous with Carmean to test the waters, but she said Moore had “no problem” continuing her dialogue with Carmean. Carmean’s supervisor replied that he would assign Carmean to revisit Moore the following week. Apparently, Moore had begun to feel comfortable with Carmean relatively quickly, because she phoned him at OPD headquarters later that day. 

During the course of their conversation, Moore divulged to Carmean that she believed Larry King to be a “supporter and participant” of both the child pornography and the devil worship. She also talked about a “sex and drug” party at one of King’s residences, where she witnessed three or four teenage boys performing oral sex on each other. Moore said the residence was on Wirt Street in North Omaha, but she couldn’t provide the exact address. In Carmean’s report on the conversation, he wrote down that Moore became evasive and lacked “specificity” when she talked about King, making it evident to him that she was reluctant to provide further “detail.” 

Six days later, Moore called Carmean and disclosed the exact address and phone number of King’s residence on Wirt Street. After Carmean hung up the phone, he dialed the number provided by Moore: “King Company,” said the man who answered the phone—Carmean told him that he had the wrong number and hung up. Carmean then drove by the address provided by Moore and noticed a large two story, gray frame house with a gray awning. Carmean noted the awning “extended from the front door of the house to the sidewalk” and had “KING” inscribed on it. 

Officers Carmean and Hoch expended a considerable number of hours investigating King’s possible link to child pornography. They uncovered financial irregularities and potential leads concerning the exploitation of children, but their probe hit a wall, which is evidenced by the fact that they stopped generating reports on the subject. Rusty Nelson told me that a high-ranking OPD official was paid off to ensure that the investigation was stymied, but I found it difficult to take Nelson’s word at face value. 

As the OPD was uncovering leads on King’s exploitation of children, and seemingly not pursuing them, officials who oversaw the state’s foster care system were starting to hear murmurs about King too. Nebraska’s Foster Care Review Board is a state agency that reviews the plans, services, and placements of children in foster care to ensure their optimum welfare. The Executive Director of the Foster Care Review Board was the then thirty-four-year-old Carol Stitt. 

Born in 1954, and raised in the western Nebraska town of Minatare, Stitt ventured east after high school to attend the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The industrious Stitt usually worked a couple of jobs as she put herself through college, earning a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in social work. Stitt started her career in social work as an employee of Child Protective Services and then transferred to the Foster Care Review Board. Stitt quickly developed a reputation as conscientious, sharp and diligent, and she was appointed Executive Director of the Board in 1983. 

Roughly four years after Stitt became the Board’s Executive Director, she had her first encounter with the name of Larry King. In December 1987, the vestiges of Tasha Washington’s DSS files belatedly made their way to Stitt and the Board. After officials at the Board scrutinized Tasha’s perilous odyssey, they were absolutely dumbfounded by the universal failure to safeguard her. The Board started to make inquiries about the “system breakdown” concerning Tasha Washington, and her former guardian ad litem, Patricia Flocken, quickly received a letter from the Board. 

Flocken might have decided to disengage from further pursuit of Eulice Washington’s allegations relating to Larry King, but the allegations continued to pursue her. Before the Board contacted Flocken, she received a call from the Washington County Deputy Sheriff who had previously assisted DSS personnel in confronting the Webbs. He informed Flocken that the Washington County Sheriff’s Department was conducting an investigation into illicit pornography, and he asked if Eulice had been enmeshed in pornography. Flocken told him about Julie Walters’ report, and he stopped by her house the next day and picked it up—he returned it to Flocken the following day. She never heard another peep from the Sheriff’s Department concerning its investigation or the report. 

When Flocken received the Board’s letter about Tasha, she phoned Stitt. Flocken and Stitt weren’t strangers—Flocken had served as guardian ad litem for a number of children whose out-of-home placement had been evaluated by the Board. After Flocken and Stitt exchanged a few phone calls concerning Tasha and the other children placed in the Webb household, Flocken dropped a bombshell on Stitt—she disclosed the sum total of Eulice’s allegations and informed her about the existence of Julie Walters’ report. Stitt pressed Flocken for the report, but Flocken felt ethical conflicts—she told Stitt that she would mull it over. 

At the end of January 1988, Stitt called an Executive Committee meeting of the Board to discuss Flocken’s revelations. In addition to Stitt, the Executive Committee included Dennis Carlson and Burrell Williams. Stitt’s position as the Board’s Executive Director was full-time and permanent, but Carlson and Williams served the Board in a voluntary capacity. The Nebraska Bar Association employed Carlson, and Williams earned his livelihood as a junior high school assistant principal. Though the three kicked around Eulice’s allegations, they had scant information to make sound decisions. So they decided that Stitt would direct Board personnel to review the case histories of all the children who had the misfortune of falling into the Webbs’ clutches. 

Within months of the Board’s Executive Committee meeting in January, additional accounts of Larry King’s exploitation of children started filtering into Stitt. In early May, a DSS employee approached Stitt and asked her, “Are you aware of Larry King and his activities with our children?” The question “came out of the blue” and shocked Stitt like a thunderbolt. A few weeks later, Kirstin Hallberg and Stitt exchanged phone calls that intensified Stitt’s concerns. Hallberg told Stitt about the girls at Uta Halee who reported being enmeshed in a child exploitation ring. Moreover, Hallberg said that a young man hospitalized at Richard Young hospital made allegations of sexual abuse against King to hospital personnel. Hallberg wasn’t willing to breach their confidentiality, and wouldn’t provide their names to Stitt. 

Hallberg also disclosed to Stitt that she had recently attended a child exploitation conference in Kansas City. At the conference, a Kansas City Police Department detective approached her and inquired if and when Nebraska authorities were willing to address Larry King’s use and abuse of children. Hallberg gave Stitt the detective’s name, and Stitt phoned her. The detective informed Stitt that King had been in the Kansas City area donating money to a boys’ group home, and shortly afterwards three boys came forward with allegations of sexual abuse against him. The detective would repeat the same story to the Board’s Dennis Carlson. 

As Stitt became increasingly alarmed about the accusations swirling around King, she continued to press Flocken for Julie Walters’ report—Flocken finally relented in July. The two met at Flocken’s office, and Flocken handed her a copy of the report. A week or so later, Hallberg phoned Stitt once more. At this point, Shawneta Moore was hospitalized at Richard Young, and she was detailing allegations about her sexual exploitation and the sacrifices she had witnessed. Hallberg updated Stitt on Moore’s grisly disclosures, but, again, confidentiality protocols prevented her from disclosing Moore’s name. 

The Board’s Executive Committee, particularly Stitt and Carlson, had a very hectic July. On July 13, 1988, Stitt met with Nebraska governor Kay Orr, and Orr directed her to take the “necessary” measures to investigate the allegations. Stitt and Carlson set up a second meeting with the governor to discuss the allegations, but Orr inexplicably canceled the meeting. The governor’s response would become an all too-familiar pattern as Stitt and Carlson pushed to have officials address the allegations. 

Stitt also compiled the various documents that the Board had collected, including Julie Walters’ report, and wrote a letter to Nebraska’s Attorney General Robert Spire. Her letter to Spire, dated July 20, 1988, discussed evidence of a “child exploitation ring” and “respectfully requests an investigation.” After Stitt’s opening salvo to Nebraska’s Attorney General, Dennis Carlson would help her navigate the shoals of Nebraska’s judiciary and law enforcement. 

Carlson was a 1974 graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Law, and from 1974 to 1981 he served as a deputy public defender for Nebraska’s Lancaster County. In 1981, Carlson was appointed Counsel for Discipline of Nebraska’s Bar Association, which required him to supervise a staff of attorneys who investigated and prosecuted grievances against Nebraska lawyers. As the Nebraska Bar’s Counsel for Discipline, Carlson had steadfast connections to just about every stratum of Nebraska’s legal community. 

The day Stitt sent a letter and accompanying documentation to Attorney General Spire, Carlson phoned Spire and also discussed the child abuse allegations with him. Carlson and Spire had cultivated an amicable rapport over the years, and Spire assured Carlson of a prompt response. Shortly after Carlson contacted Spire, he talked to Stitt—she had recently found out that OPD Officer Carmean interviewed a girl at Richard Young Hospital who had made allegations of sexual exploitation regarding King. Though Stitt was referring to Moore, Board personnel weren’t privy to her name as of yet. According to Carlson’s notes, he phoned Officer Carmean at OPD headquarters that afternoon and left a message for him—Carmean returned his call later in the day. 

Carmean and Carlson had never met face to face, but Carmean told Carlson that he had graduated from law school three years earlier and that he was familiar with Carlson’s status as the Nebraska Bar’s Counsel for Discipline. Carmean confirmed that he interviewed the girl at Richard Young, and she did make allegations against Larry King. Carmean then informed Carlson that the OPD had investigated additional allegations of child abuse related to King, but he wasn’t aware of Julie Walters’ report and Eulice Washington’s allegations. Carlson updated Carmean on the Board’s documentation relating to King, and he asked Carmean if the OPD would be interested in the Board’s information. Carlson wrote that Carmean was “very interested” in obtaining the Board’s documentation, and the two scheduled a meeting for the following week at Carlson’s Lincoln office. 

Carmean then made a stunning disclosure to Carlson: He confided that the investigation of King was “super sensitive,” and being concealed from Chief Wadman, because of rumors that Chief Wadman and King were friends. Carmean said that the officers conducting the investigation weren’t submitting their reports on King to the OPD’s stenography pool to be typed so they wouldn’t be accessible to Wadman. Carmean also told Carlson that an assistant to Wadman had asked officers in the Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit if they were looking into King, and the officers lied to him, replying that King wasn’t under investigation. 

The following day, Nebraska’s Assistant Attorney General, William Howland, made a jaunt to Carlson’s office. Carlson gave Howland a run-down of the Board’s information regarding King, and he voiced his reservations about OPD Chief Wadman. Carlson said that he felt it was necessary for the Attorney General’s Office to oversee an investigation into King’s activities, because the OPD might be too compromised to adequately investigate King—Howland assured Carlson that the Attorney General’s Office would act decisively on the Board’s behalf. 

On July 25, OPD officers Carmean and Hoch made the forty-five minute drive from Omaha to Lincoln to meet with Carlson. At the meeting, Carlson handed Carmean and Hoch the packet of documents compiled by the Board, and they talked for roughly an hour. Carlson felt that Carmean and Hoch were extremely enthusiastic about pursuing the Board’s information as they left his office. Carlson described Carmean as a “horse at the starting blocks, raring to go.” 

Carmean, however, later claimed that he never had a chance to look over the Board’s documentation—he said that Hoch reviewed the materials and concluded that the allegations were out of the OPD’s jurisdiction and also had statute-of limitations impediments. 

On the same day Carmean and Hoch stopped by Carlson’s office, Carlson met with an investigator from the Attorney General’s Office, Thomas Vlahoulis. He gave Vlahoulis a packet of the Board’s materials too, and Vlahoulis guaranteed Carlson that the Attorney General’s Office would investigate the allegations. In fact, Vlahoulis, Carmean, and Hoch had coffee at a Perkins Restaurant in Omaha three days later and discussed the Board’s information. 

Both Carlson and Stitt experienced a collective relief after fielding assurances from the OPD and the Attorney General’s Office that Nebraska’s law enforcement was finally embarking on a long overdue investigation of Larry King. Their optimism was reinforced by Carmean, who phoned Carlson and said that he had met with Vlahoulis—Carmean also mentioned he would be re-interviewing Moore. 

But the optimism of Stitt and Carlson would be short-lived: On September 21, Stitt received a frantic call from Moore’s Richard Young social worker—she reported that Moore hadn’t been revisited by the OPD. Throughout September and October, additional phone calls from Richard Young personnel trickled into the Board, reporting that Moore still hadn’t been reinterviewed by law enforcement. On October 17, an infuriated Carlson phoned Assistant Attorney General Howland. He told Howland that the girl at the Richard Young hospital was giving intricate details about several homicides, and nobody from law enforcement had revisited her. Howland declared that he was “on top of it,” and he assured Carlson that there was a “good reason” for state law enforcement’s paralysis concerning King. Although Howland said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the particulars of the paralysis, Carlson sensed an implication that the feds were taking over the investigation. 

Carlson’s interpretation of Howland’s response is consistent with an OPD “InterOffice Communication” from Carmean to Chief Wadman: Carmean wrote that the head of the Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit assembled the Unit’s officers and told them that the feds had ordered the OPD to “slow down or back off” from its “Larry King investigation.” Wadman, however, would assert that such a meeting never went down. In a later Inter-Office Communication, Wadman noted that he spoke to one of the officers whom Carmean identified as attending the meeting, and the officer said that no such meeting ever took place. 

The story initially offered by OPD personnel for Carmean not revisiting Moore was that he had voluntarily transferred from the OPD’s Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit to its Research and Planning Section before he had an opportunity to reconnect with Moore. But Carmean didn’t make the transfer until early September—he had well over a month from the time he met with Carlson until his transfer to drop by Richard Young Hospital. 

The OPD’s cover story also flies in the face of Carmean’s prior pursuit of the investigation. Six days after he originally interviewed Moore, she phoned him and provided a phone number and address for King, and that same day Carmean called the number and hopped into a squad car and drove past King’s Wirt Street residence. Carlson also noted that Carmean was “very enthusiastic” about pursuing the Board’s information, and Carmean phoned him after their meeting and said he would definitely be revisiting Moore. Moreover, Carmean himself would say that he found Moore to be credible. So, given Carmean’s earlier eagerness to investigate King and the fact that he thought Moore was credible, it seems highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have reconnected with Moore unless he had been ordered to “back off.” 

On November 22, Carlson talked with OPD officer Hoch, who said that the OPD had undergone reorganization—Hoch said he was no longer involved with the investigation, but that it was still active. Hoch also told Carlson that Moore’s social worker had not come forward with additional information and “could not verify anything.” From this conversation, Carlson inferred that the social worker had been reinterviewed by the OPD. When Carlson phoned her, however, she claimed to have had only one conversation with law enforcement, and that was her initial interview with Carmean. 

Carlson’s November notes are unclear about whether or not Carlson explicitly asked Hoch if Wadman was now aware of the investigation or if Hoch volunteered the information: But Hoch did disclose that the Chief had been apprised of the Larry King investigation. 

By November 1988, various state and local agencies had been alerted to King’s alleged exploitation of children: The OPD had cultivated its own leads on King and also received the allegations compiled by the Foster Care Review Board, the Attorney General’s Office had been given the Board’s material, and Patricia Flocken handed Julie Walters’ report to a Washington County Deputy Sheriff. Despite various sources alleging King’s use and abuse of children, and Julie Walters’ report being circulated among at least three branches of the state’s law enforcement, Eulice Washington had yet to be interviewed. 

It seems highly unlikely that Larry King—by himself—would have the clout to immobilize state law enforcement, but the feds certainly possess the juice to shut down a state investigation. And, to this point in the story, the feds had purportedly intervened on King’s or the Webbs’ behalf on three occasions. The FBI threatened a DSS employee who took it upon herself to investigate the Webbs. The feds also reportedly told Nebraska’s Attorney General’s Office that they were taking over the King investigation, and they also ordered the OPD to “back off.” If the feds had interviewed Eulice Washington or Shawneta Moore, their intervention would surely have been justified, because, after all, Larry King was accused of being an interstate pimp. But by early November neither the US Department of Justice nor the FBI had interviewed either girl. 

The feds shut down the Franklin Credit Union on Friday, November 4, 1988, and shortly thereafter a foul stench arose from the credit union’s remains and drifted westward from Omaha to the state’s legislature in Lincoln. Unique in the United States, Nebraska has a single-chamber system—an amendment passed in the 1930s discarded the state’s House of Representatives and created the “Unicameral,” consisting of forty-nine senators from forty-nine legislative districts that today contain approximately 35,000 people. 

Early accounts of Franklin’s monetary woes led senators to believe that they were dealing with something akin to a staph infection that could be treated with a course of antibiotics. “We will take immediate action to determine the facts and to decide on the appropriate response,” King had declared at a press conference the day after Franklin was closed. The feds said that they initially closed the credit union because of its financially “unsound practices.” 

On Monday, employees of the National Credit Union Administration set up shop at Omaha’s Federal Courts Building as hundreds of bewildered Franklin depositors gathered to file claims. As the working-class folks lined up in a scene reminiscent of the bank runs at the onset of the Great Depression, the World-Herald ran an article commenting on the “vital” role Franklin served for Omaha’s underprivileged community and quoted a depositor: “They have given strong support to the poor, the disabled, single parents.” The World-Herald’s publisher, Harold Andersen, also chimed in on the importance of the credit union to Omaha’s underserved. 

A week after Franklin’s closing, the credit union’s treatable infirmities had turned terminal—the feds acknowledged that $30 million had vanished, and Franklin had been hawking high-interest CDs from coast to coast and racking up millions and million of dollars. The little, homegrown credit union in North Omaha was much more than a nickel-and-dime boiler room—it was a nuclear reactor. 

“I’ve talked to my staff, and they’ve told me that there are no unrecorded CDs,” said King of the latest revelations. Shortly after the feds announced the missing $30 million, they said that King kept a second set of books. The feds then announced King had looted $34 million—and counting. 

On November 18, during the Unicameral’s year-ending special session, senators had seen enough Franklin press about missing millions and cooked books to conclude that something was seriously awry. The senators unanimously approved Legislative Resolution 5, which called for an investigation into the credit union’s failure. Senator Loran Schmit, who chaired the Unicameral’s Banking Committee, drafted Resolution 5. Schmit was a third-generation corn farmer from rural Bellwood and a twenty-one-year veteran of Unicameral. 

The sixty-year-old Schmit was Nebraska’s version of a rural Renaissance man: He had earned a B.S. in Agriculture from the University of Nebraska, juggled various business ventures, and was a licensed pilot. Schmit was a devout Catholic and staunch Republican, and he wore conservative suits that were occasionally accentuated by Stetsons and cowboy boots. Over his years of public service, Schmit had cultivated respect and admiration among both his Republican and Democratic peers in the Unicameral. He had a reputation for being a shrewd politician, but projected a benign, grandfatherly presence. In fact, he had ten children and numerous grandchildren. 

As chair of the Unicameral’s Banking Committee, Schmidt had witnessed major improprieties with three Nebraska savings and loans during the 1980s. Though these savings and loans were federally regulated, Schmidt perceived endemic corruption within the state’s banking community that needed to be fixed. He initially thought Franklin was merely one more example of Nebraska’s banking industry chicanery. “You can’t get rid of that much money without someone knowing about it,” said Schmit the day he introduced Resolution 5. 

Schmidt had no idea that the resolution would bring about an ignominious end to his distinguished political career and almost result in his financial ruin. Shortly after the Franklin Committee formed, though, Schmit received an anonymous phone call that foreshadowed the forces that the Committee would be challenging: The caller urged Schmit not to pursue the investigation into Franklin, under the auspices of being a “good Republican,” because he said it would “reach to the highest levels of the Republican Party.” 

This was not likely to deter Ernie Chambers, the fifty-two-year-old Democrat representing North Omaha, who immediately jumped on the Resolution 5 bandwagon. Chambers was a nineteen-year veteran of the Unicameral and its only African-American senator. Chambers, a firebrand liberal, wore T-shirts and khakis to the floor of the Unicameral and repeatedly infuriated his fellow senators with protracted filibusters. Chambers graduated from Creighton University School of Law, but had opted not to take the bar exam, citing the bar’s racist bias—he earned his livelihood as a barber in North Omaha. 

The national spotlight shone on Chambers when he appeared in the 1966 Oscar nominated documentary A Time for Burning. The film depicted the instrumental role he played that year in quelling Omaha’s race riots by negotiating concessions from Omaha’s power structure on behalf of disenfranchised African-American youths in North Omaha. “There might be some prominent toes in the path we will have to walk,” Chambers quipped of Resolution 5. 

The vast majority of senators voting for an investigation into the financial collapse of Franklin weren’t aware of the child-abuse allegations regarding King, but the streetwise Chambers was fully cognizant of King’s alleged pedophile network. Carol Stitt had briefed Chambers on the child-abuse allegations, and Chambers had put heat on the Attorney General’s Office for stonewalling the Foster Care Review Board. Chambers also brought the concerns of Stitt and Dennis Carlson to the attention of the Unicameral’s Executive Board, a nine-member committee that functions as Nebraska’s legislative body when the Unicameral is between sessions. 

On December 12, the Unicameral’s Executive Board had a “closed-door meeting,” where Chambers brought up the Foster Care Review Board’s information and discussed how law enforcement had neglected to investigate the allegations. Prior to the Executive Board retreating into a closed session, Chambers dispensed a few remarks that were intended for public consumption. He talked about receiving reports of “sexual and physical abuse” of children in connection with Franklin and said he suspected a “cover-up.” 

A December 19 World-Herald article, bylined James Allen Flanery, made mention of the Executive Board meeting—and also of Franklin-related child abuse for the first time. The article reported that a second Executive Board meeting was slated for the next day, and that “three people with state foster care” had been subpoenaed to testify at the meeting. The article then quoted the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge of Nebraska and Iowa, Nick O’Hara, who said the feds were investigating the allegations, because federal statutes make it a felony to transport children “across state lines for immoral or illegal purposes.” 

Stitt, Carlson, and Williams made a December appearance before the Unicameral’s Executive Board. Over the course of two hours, they reiterated Chambers’ account and provided additional details. “The information brought tears to my eyes,” said Senator Schmit. “I do not cry easily, and I was not the only person that was moved.” After Stitt, Carlson, and Williams addressed the Executive Board and fielded questions, its members decided on the senators who would complete the special subcommittee investigating Franklin. 

In the upcoming days, the World-Herald and Lincoln Journal ran articles on Franklin-related child abuse that quoted Attorney General Spire and OPD Chief Wadman. “We did receive some sensitive information in July,” said Spire. “My office acted promptly and professionally and nothing was sat on.” Wadman spoke of a thoroughly conducted investigation and denied a lack of action by the OPD: “Every step that should have been taken was taken.” 

The remarks of Attorney General Spire and Chief Wadman were all the more remarkable, considering that Shawneta Moore had been interviewed only once by law enforcement, and Eulice Washington had never been interviewed. Wadman also said the “information and evidence” were so scant that he wasn’t apprised of the investigation until Chambers shepherded the allegations into the public spotlight in December—Carlson’s notes, however, explicitly state that Hoch informed Carlson in November that Wadman was cognizant of the King investigation. 

The World-Herald article also reported on an interview Flanery conducted with Julie Walters, who left Boys Town in 1988 and took a job as a juvenile probation officer in Cincinnati, Ohio—she told Flanery that the OPD had yet to contact her, and commented on the veracity of the allegations. “The conclusion I reached was the kids I spoke with were not lying,” said Walters of Eulice and Tracy Washington. Almost three years after Julie Walters interviewed Eulice Washington, her allegations were finally coming to light. 

The Unicameral went into regular session on January 7, and Schmit’s Legislative Resolution 5 was again ratified on January 10. The Franklin Committee would have a sweeping mandate to determine “what happened,” “how it happened,” “who was involved,” and “what could or should have been done, and by whom, to prevent it.” To carry out its mandate, the Committee would scrutinize both state and federal agencies, including the DSS, Child Protective Services, and the Foster Care Review Board. In other words, the Committee was going to take a long, hard look at the child-abuse allegations. 

Schmidt was named the subcommittee’s chair and Chambers its vice chair. The conservative corn farmer Schmit and the liberal urbanite Chambers were the yin and yang of the Unicameral, but they were tasked with taking the helm of the Franklin Committee. The Committee members quickly realized that they would be navigating through perfidious waters, so their first major order of business was to appoint a chief legal counsel. 

The Committee members kicked around a number of names for a week or so, and at the suggestion of Schmidt they voted to invite former CIA Director William Colby to apply for chief counsel. “I felt after some of the comments I heard that the scope is broader than just Nebraska, and I thought that Mr. Colby might be able to handle that,” Schmidt said. Since the credit union’s demise, several rumors were wafting around Lincoln and Omaha that Franklin monies had been covertly diverted to the CIA in its efforts to support the Nicaraguan Contras’ fight against the Communist Sandinistas. The Lincoln Journal even mentioned the murmurs in an article, but then it reported “there is no evidence to support the rumors.” 

Colby had taken up the practice of law in Washington, DC after being fired from the CIA in 1975—Colby and Schmidt had a mutual friend: John DeCamp. Colby directed the CIA’s Phoenix program in South Vietnam from 1968 to 1971, and then-Captain John DeCamp had been one of Colby’s Phoenix subordinates. Colby developed a paternal affection for the brash, young Nebraskan, and over the years they remained very close—DeCamp had introduced Schmit and Colby in 1983. Colby flew to Nebraska to be interviewed by the Committee. 

Colby, the “super spy,” had parachuted behind Nazi lines as an intelligence officer during World War II and headed the Rome CIA station early in the Cold War, working to prevent the election of a Communist government. He clearly had the chops for the job. 

Colby told the Nebraska media that his knowledge of the case came primarily from newspaper reportage, but the “paper trail” presumably left by the missing money was enough to capture his interest: “You’ve got $35 million that is unaccounted for,” said Colby. “You start on these trails, and it frequently goes into some startling areas. It’s not just used up on fancy cars or something. You’ve got to have some kind of bigger activity in mind.” 

Schmit lobbied intensely for Colby to be named as the Committee’s chief counsel, but his fellow Committee members shot down Colby’s appointment by a narrow margin—four to three. The dissenting Committee members felt that Colby’s $250- an-hour rate would quickly exhaust the Committee’s $100,000 budget, even though Colby made it clear that he was willing to lower his standard hourly rates. A second reason cited for rejecting Colby was his “political baggage.” Committee members were worried—“once CIA, always CIA”—and Colby flew back to Washington without the appointment. But this would not mark the end of Colby’s involvement with the Committee, and Franklin lore attributes his enigmatic death to his association with the investigation. 

After interviewing a handful of candidates, in early February the Committee eventually voted in the forty-two-year-old, Lincoln-based attorney Kirk Naylor as its chief counsel. Naylor had grown up in Omaha, where his father served as the president of Omaha University and oversaw its merger into the University of Nebraska system. Naylor graduated in 1971 from the University of Nebraska’s College of Law and specialized in criminal defense. He was tall, always impeccably dressed, and urbane. 

Senator Chambers had encouraged Naylor to apply as the Committee’s chief counselor, but after applying for the job he had withdrawn his name—Naylor claimed that he initially didn’t think the Committee would grant him the authority to properly pursue the allegations. He said a couple of factors played a role in his reconsideration: First, the Committee’s senators assured him he would have the requisite authority to adequately address the allegations. The second factor was a conversation he had with Dennis Carlson, who told him that the allegations were legitimate and touched on the failure of government agencies to tackle the accusations. 

Naylor had feathered his cap roughly five years earlier by successfully prosecuting a Nebraska Attorney General for perjury in connection with a looted savings and loan. But at least one senator on the Committee thought Naylor’s prosecution of the former Attorney General was little more than a cover-up—he felt that the inner circle of Nebraska’s former governor Bob Kerrey had been instrumental in plundering the savings and loan, and the Attorney General was merely a convenient scapegoat. So Naylor didn’t have the unanimous backing of all the Committee members.

Naylor quickly conscripted Lincoln Police Department officer Jerry Lowe to serve as the Committee’s primary investigator. Lowe was a nine-year veteran of the LPD, and he had acted as Naylor’s principal investigator when Naylor previously prosecuted the looted savings and loan. Lowe took a leave of absence from the LPD, and initially commenced his work for the Committee at Naylor’s law office in Lincoln. Lowe’s initial forays into Franklin involved collecting all the newspaper articles about Larry King and the credit union, and reading the materials compiled by the Foster Care Review Board. 

After reviewing the Board’s information, an apparently dumbfounded Lowe sent a February memo to the Committee’s members. “What appears to be documented cases of child abuse and sexual abuse dating back several years with no enforcement action taken by the appropriate agencies is … mind boggling,” he wrote. “The information that became public in 1988 relative to Larry King’s family connection with one of the principals … is cause for further concern.” 

The Committee’s formation and its early questions about whether or not Franklin related child exploitation had been properly investigated made it impossible for state and federal law enforcement to take refuge behind claims that the allegations had “no substance.” The Nebraska State Patrol and the FBI were now forced to actually conduct an investigation. 

A February 5, 1989 World-Herald article, by James Allen Flanery, discussed federal and state investigations into Franklin-related child abuse. The article quoted the FBI’s Nick O’Hara, who said that the FBI had maybe “one or two follow-up interviews to conduct,” but after “dozens of interviews” he concluded that there was no “substance to the initial allegations,” even though the FBI had yet to interview the initial victims to come forward—Eulice Washington and Shawneta Moore! The article also quoted two beacons of truth—Larry King and Barbara Webb. “It’s all hearsay and it’s all garbage,” said King of the allegations. His beloved cousin then had her say about the Washington sisters: “They are not telling the truth—we don’t know anything about this.” In the February article, Flanery wrote that Chief Wadman reiterated that the OPD immediately “followed up” on the Foster Care Review Board’s July report and concluded there was “no substance.” 

Shawneta Moore was the first victim to be interviewed by the FBI and NSP, and their tactics were questionable. Moore had spent five months at Richard Young Hospital before being discharged to the care of her mother. At the time, Moore’s mother was staying with her grandmother in North Omaha, a few blocks from King’s Wirt Street residence. A handful of Moore’s caregivers at the hospital decided that she was potentially too vulnerable at her grandmother’s house; so they decided to shuffle her around to their respective homes until she had official placement. I’ve talked to one of the caregivers who gave Moore refuge, and she acknowledged that harboring Moore was counter to standard professionalism, but her caregivers were overwhelmed and perplexed by the extraordinary circumstances: Moore was making horrific allegations and law enforcement was ignoring her—they felt a humane obligation to protect her despite the ethical quandaries. 

On December 15, Hallberg met with investigator Vlahoulis of the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office and an FBI agent at the NSP office in Omaha. Vlahoulis informed Hallberg that he would be stepping away from the “investigation” and told her that Chuck Phillips of the NSP would be the state’s primary investigator into the child-abuse allegations. Vlahoulis said that it was the intention of the FBI and NSP to re-hospitalize Moore and question her about the allegations she made at the Richard Young facility and to Officer Carmean. Vlahoulis apparently felt that Moore’s re-hospitalization would offer her protection and the same support system she had prior to her discharge—Vlahoulis said he would instruct the Douglas County Attorney’s Office to authorize a petition to have Moore committed. 

Hallberg’s notes state that Vlahoulis originally said a Douglas County Deputy Sheriff would pick up Moore at the address where she was staying, but later Vlahoulis phoned Hallberg and instructed her to deliver Moore to the Douglas County Sheriff—a deputy would then give her a ride to the hospital and she would be committed. Moore, however, balked at a second stretch at the Richard Young facility and refused to accompany Hallberg to the Sheriff’s Office. Hallberg abandoned her ill-fated attempt to deliver Moore to the Sheriff’s Office, made a dentist’s appointment, and eventually drove to Richard Young Hospital, where she was scheduled to work the second shift that day. 

While there, Hallberg contacted one of Moore’s caregivers and told him of her troubles with Moore. The caregiver harbored second thoughts about law enforcement’s motives in Moore’s case and opposed the idea of recommitting Moore. He suggested that Moore spend the weekend at his girlfriend’s house, but Vlahoulis reportedly vetoed his offer. Hallberg’s co-worker grudgingly agreed to gather up Moore and phone her mother. Moore became hysterical when the caregiver informed her about the commitment petition, and it took a number of hours for him and Moore’s mother to calm her down and deliver her to the hospital. 

Hallberg was in for the first of many shocks when she talked to Moore’s new case nurse at Richard Young Hospital—she told Hallberg that the Douglas County commitment petition stated that Moore was suicidal and living on the streets, which the Douglas County Attorney’s Office knew was untrue. The petition also specifically directed that Moore have absolutely no contact with her mother—nor was the hospital to give her mother any information on her hospitalization. The psychiatrist who admitted Moore then ordered that Moore was to have no contact with her previous caregivers, including Hallberg and the caregiver who coaxed Moore back into the hospital—Hallberg later learned that the Douglas County Attorney’s Office issued the latter order. Law enforcement had succeeded in having Moore committed under false pretenses and severing her from her support network, and she was then subjected to FBI agents whom she found to be extremely hostile. 

The day of Moore’s initial interview by the FBI and NSP, December 19, 1988, Hallberg received an anonymous phone call: “You and your friend … are doing the wrong thing, trying to bust up my boy Larry King.Now it’s too late. Now I’m turning into a bloodhound.” That night Hallberg phoned Phillips at the phone number provided by Vlahoulis and told him about the threatening phone call—she also provided him with information on the whereabouts of a former Uta Halee facility resident. During their conversation, Hallberg noted, Phillips asked her if there was a connection between Moore and King. Hallberg was taken aback, because she knew Phillips had interviewed Moore that day, and she thought he was being deceitful by asking what she thought to be such a disingenuous question. 

The next day, Hallberg agreed to introduce Phillips and two FBI agents to the former Uta Halee facility resident they wanted to interview. The former resident worked at a Target department store in Omaha, and she told Hallberg that she would clock out at 3:00 P.M. Hallberg told the investigators that she and the former resident would rendezvous with them at a restaurant near the Target at 3:30. 

But there was a communication mix up—Hallberg arrived at the Target at 3:00 P.M., and the young woman was nowhere to be found. Hallberg drove to her house, which was roughly a mile from the Target, and she wasn’t home. Hallberg decided to quickly stop by Target before meeting the investigators at the restaurant. When she popped into Target, she spotted the young woman, who informed her that she’d switched shifts with a co-worker. 

Hallberg then rushed to the restaurant where the investigators awaited. She told Phillips and the two FBI agents about the communication snafu and informed them that the young woman didn’t wish to be interviewed at work. Hallberg wrote that Phillips became “quite agitated” and insisted that he speak to her that night so he could at least make arrangements to interview her. Hallberg reluctantly consented to meet Phillips at the Target forthwith. Hallberg drove back to Target and, after entering the store, Phillips followed her to the snack bar, where the young woman was taking a break with a couple of co-workers—she refused to talk to Phillips at work. Hallberg noted that he became “extremely angry” and said he was tired of “these kids being too scared to talk.” 

Hallberg met with the thirty-two-year-old Phillips at Omaha’s NSP office later that night. Phillips seemed to wear an omnipresent scowl, and Hallberg found him to be very overbearing and hostile. She felt that Phillips would only accept statements that had absolute, irrefutable proof, and she brought their meeting to an abrupt close. After Hallberg met Phillips at the NSP office, she wrote the following about him: “My impression at the time was that if I, as an adult, could be so easily intimidated by him, I wonder how kids will react if he is the one to question them.” 

Phillips had been with the NSP since 1978—he had spent three years in the Army’s military police prior to signing on with the NSP. Phillips started out with the NSP in rural western Nebraska, assigned to the traffic division, working as a uniformed trooper. After a year or so, he was transferred to Omaha, where he continued to work as a uniformed trooper. In 1981, Phillips took a big career leap to the NSP’s Drug Investigations Division, and approximately six years later he was assigned to the Criminal Investigations Division. At the onset of the NSP’s Franklin “investigation,” Phillips worked in close conjunction with FBI agents Peter Brady and Jerry Tucker, but the FBI would eventually undergo a changing of the guard concerning Franklin. Though Brady and Tucker receded into the background, Phillips would aid the FBI’s second crew of agents tasked with investigating Franklin. Phillips would ultimately see Franklin through to the bitter end. 

Phillips and FBI agents knocked on Opal Washington’s front door on December 28, looking for Eulice, Tracy, and Tasha. The children’s grandmother also felt intimidated by the investigators, and she initially wouldn’t let them into her house. Opal says they ultimately wedged themselves through her front door and pressed her to provide them with the whereabouts of her granddaughters, but she refused to acquiesce. She told the investigators that she wanted her granddaughters to meet with Senator Chambers before they talked with them. 

The NSP and FBI weren’t willing to accommodate the grandmother’s wishes—they tracked down Eulice the following day, and, according to Eulice, grilled her for three to four hours. They then had her come to Omaha’s FBI Field Office the next day where they grilled her for an additional three or four hours. Though Eulice found the ordeal to be extremely grueling, she didn’t divert from many of the details about her trips to Chicago and New York as she had related them to Julie Walters. 

After the NSP and FBI “interviewed” Eulice, they set their sights on Tracy—she was subjected to the same harsh treatment as her sister. A long-lost relative of the Washington sisters who became reacquainted with them after their removal from the Webb household gave a quote to the Lincoln Journal about Eulice and Tracy’s ordeal at the hands of the FBI: “The FBI has accomplished what it set out to accomplish—to make the girls seem as though all this were a fabrication.” The FBI interviewed Patricia Flocken in January 1989—Flocken too found the FBI to be extremely hostile. In fact, she told investigator Lowe that the agent questioning her “seemed pissed” and repeatedly snapped that Flocken’s information was only “hearsay.” 

Earlier, I cited a February 5 article in the World-Herald that quoted the FBI’s Nick O’Hara, stating that the FBI carried out “dozens” of interviews, and maybe had “one or two follow-up interviews to conduct,” but he was convinced that the allegations were without “substance.” O’Hara made that declaration even before FBI agents interviewed their prime suspect in the investigation—Larry King! 

FBI agents and NSP Investigator Phillips would, in fact, finally interview King at his Wirt Street residence on February 10. After they gave King his Miranda rights, a seemingly benign chat ensued, where King was tossed a succession of softballs. He denied everything: the pandering of children, kiddy porn, drug involvement, and even homosexuality. He talked extensively about his participation in the Presbyterian Church and of his piety. King adamantly maintained that he never had “nasty” parties at the Twin Towers—he said the closest one of his soirées ever came to depravity was when he had hired a couple of belly dancers for his birthday party two years earlier. 

He owned up to subletting a Twin Towers apartment to Rusty Nelson and that Nelson might have accompanied him to New York on a business trip. King told the FBI that he found Nelson to be mentally deranged, unclean, and malodorous. King said he summarily evicted Nelson from the apartment when he heard that the police were looking into Nelson for taking pictures of a young woman. King’s depiction of Nelson corroborates Nelson’s statements to me that he left the King sphere on very bad terms. 

King disclosed to FBI agents that he was a good friend of World-Herald publisher Harold Andersen, OPD Chief Wadman, and Nebraska Attorney General Spire—all three show up on King’s party invitation lists. But, because of the unsavory rumors, nobody wanted to acknowledge their friendship with him or to admit that they attended his fabulous parties. He said that even FBI agents had frequented his parties in the past—he then looked at one of the FBI agents questioning him and contended that he had attended one of his parties. 

King concluded the interview by saying that he never lied, and that he would be more than willing to take a polygraph. Investigator Phillips was later called before a grand jury and said that King was never given a polygraph, even though he consented to take one. Under oath, Phillips maintained that the NSP or FBI didn’t polygraph King because they hadn’t finished their investigation—he stated that the NSP and FBI were still in the process of culling facts and interviewing additional witnesses when they interviewed King, even though the FBI’s O’Hara stated publicly the investigation was winding down. 

The FBI and NSP interviews documented in this chapter reveal that investigators approached all interviews with unbridled skepticism and hostility. Eulice and Tracy Washington and Shawneta Moore alleged that the investigators who interviewed them were extremely antagonistic, and Kirstin Hallberg and Patricia Flocken support their accounts. The FBI’s starting maxim seems to have been: the allegations are bogus, and we will prove that they’re bogus. Or, more ominously: we will steamroll over the allegations whether they are true or false. 

The backdrop for the Franklin Committee commencing its long day’s journey into night was OPD’s Wadman and FBI’s O’Hara proclaiming that the child-abuse allegations had no substance, but the Committee’s members decided early on that law enforcement’s viewpoint would not deter their investigation. “We’ll pursue our investigation without regard to what the chief or the FBI says,” Chambers told the World-Herald. Indeed, Lowe started to kick out memos and reports, and the Committee commenced to orchestrate hearings. 

Lowe would backtrack on the accounts gathered by the Foster Care Review Board and essentially conduct an investigation of the state and federal investigations. Some of the individuals who played an instrumental role in the Board’s inquiry— including Dennis Carlson and Kirstin Hallberg—gave him meticulous blow-by-blow accounts of their tribulations and he conducted protracted interviews with others. 

The FBI and NSP had been caustic with Shawneta Moore and Eulice Washington; so they weren’t particularly enamored with the prospect of being re-interviewed about their respective abuses, but Senator Chambers facilitated Lowe’s interviews with both. Eulice Washington told me that she didn’t find Lowe to be particularly gracious either. 

When Lowe first met Shawneta Moore at her mother’s home, her mother and Senator Chambers were also present. Lowe and Moore initially discussed the latter’s contacts with the OPD. Moore told Lowe that Carmean interviewed her once in person, and they talked twice over the phone, corroborating the OPD reports. 

Moore then discussed her second stay at Richard Young Hospital and the FBI interviews. Moore disclosed that a Douglas County attorney and an individual on the hospital’s staff made it clear to her that she wouldn’t be released from the hospital if she didn’t talk to the FBI agents. Moore felt the agents who questioned her were hostile and incredulous. She maintained that the agents made a concerted effort to keep her off balance and trip her up. Lowe asked her to cite an example of the FBI’s tactics: She responded that FBI agents simply told her to relate her story from the beginning to the end, implying that they wouldn’t interrupt her. But after she commenced telling her story, they repeatedly interrupted her and demanded that she provide additional details.

At the conclusion of Lowe’s first meeting with Moore, he wrote the following: “My initial observation of Shawneta is that she seems to be a very articulate young lady.” Lowe scheduled a second meeting with Moore the following week. During their second meeting, Lowe questioned Moore about the two parties she said Larry King attended. The details she initially provided Carmean and then the FBI regarding the parties are consistent with the details she provided Lowe. 

Moore also talked of being transported from the Girls Club at the age of nine to a studio and photographed in the nude—she claimed four other girls accompanied her. Lowe asked her if the African-American man she identified as “Ray,” who shuttled her to the parties and power meetings, delivered her to the studio where she had been photographed. At first she indicated that Ray had not brought her to the studio, and then she said she couldn’t remember. Lowe suggested the use of hypnosis to jog her memory—she started to cry, replying she didn’t want to be hypnotized. 

Moore initially described five homicides to Richard Young Hospital personnel, but she only described three homicides to the FBI. Lowe pointed out the discrepancy to her, and she said that she felt hurried and badgered by the FBI. Lowe noted that the information provided by Moore to the hospital staff, the FBI, and Lowe about the names of the men attending the sacrifices and the descriptions of the locations were consistent. Lowe also noted that Moore’s hospital accounts of the sacrifices’ aftermaths were consistent with the aftermaths she conveyed to him, including her being dropped off in a park following the first sacrifice. According to all of Moore’s interviews, Larry King was never present at any of the sacrifices, and Lowe “pressed” her regarding her contention that King was an alleged participant in the devil worship. Lowe wrote that Moore disclosed to him that a specific individual said that King was involved, but she later told Lowe that the individual in question hadn’t made such a disclosure. 

Though Moore previously disclosed to Richard Young Hospital personnel that she had been blindfolded when she was driven to parties or power meetings, she told Lowe that she might be able to identify one of the buildings in Omaha and also a building in Fort Calhoun. Lowe drove Moore past various locations in Omaha and Fort Calhoun, and she wasn’t able to identify any buildings in Omaha. However, she tentatively identified a building in Fort Calhoun—she asked Lowe if the building in Fort Calhoun recently had an addition built onto it, and he replied in the affirmative. Lowe later found out that the building identified by Moore was in close proximity to the home of a school administrator whom Moore said had attended the child-sex parties and power meetings. The building’s owner had also employed Barbara Webb. 

After Lowe’s three interviews with Moore, he was ambivalent concerning her veracity: “At this point I don’t really have a firm read on the information which Shawneta has provided, other than the opinion that if she has fabricated or imagined the information … she is indeed a young individual in desperate need of counseling. If the information that she has given has any validity, it’s my opinion that she has succeeded in blocking the information out of her mind and will not share it with anyone.” 

Lowe met with Eulice Washington twice the following month. His first interview with her primarily centered on her upbringing by the Webbs, and the second interview focused on her trips with Larry King. Washington’s depiction of her abuse and the abuse suffered by the other children in the Webb household were consistent with the Board’s information. Lowe questioned her with regard to the North Omaha Girls Club, and she admitted to hearing stories of older men connected with the Girls Club having sex with the young girls who frequented it— she emphasized, though, that her information was “second hand.” 

Washington and Lowe then discussed the sex parties that she was flown to in Chicago and New York. She initially discussed her Chicago trip, which occurred in September or October of 1984. She gave Lowe a general description of the chartered plane, and, after exiting the plane, she said, they took a limousine to a fancy hotel in Chicago, but she couldn’t remember the hotel’s name. She told Lowe that the party occurred in the same hotel, recalling it was on a different floor because she had to take an elevator from her room to the party. Prior to the party, Larry King came to her room and gave her a black negligee to wear. He then escorted her to the party, and ordered her to sit, like a mannequin, on a little “pedestal.” When King and Washington initially arrived at the party, the young men who had been on the plane were already in the room, and hors d’oeuvres were being served. 

Washington indicated that two African-American men, stationed at the door, scrutinized the older men as they started rolling into the party—she said the two men had been on the chartered plane. Once the party was in full swing, she noticed the older men giving money to King and leaving with the boys. Though she didn’t see any explicit sexual acts between the boys and the men, she observed the older men hugging and kissing the boys. 

Approximately forty-five minutes into the party, Washington said, she recognized a nationally prominent politician enter the gathering—he was greeted by Larry King and accompanied by a pair of Caucasian bodyguards. She related that the politician left with a former Boys Town student named “Brant.” Lowe asked her how she was able to positively identify the politician, and she responded that his political campaigns gave him widespread visibility—she had also seen a picture of him and Larry King in King’s home. Washington said that Brant didn’t return to the party after leaving with the politician, and he wasn’t on the flight back to Omaha either. 

Washington specified that the flight to New York occurred in February or March of 1985. She left school early on a Friday and was driven to King’s home. A limousine then collected her and King and drove them to the airport—she told Lowe that King chartered the same plane that delivered her to Chicago. She said that some of the boys who were on the plane to Chicago accompanied King to New York. Washington informed Lowe that two older female “hookers” and two young girls, no older than seven years of age, were on the plane too—she described the young girls as “fast” and was startled by their streetwise lingo. She also stated that King’s son was on the plane. 

Washington said that a limo drove them from the airport to a hotel in Manhattan, but, again, she couldn’t recall the name of the hotel. As in Chicago, she stayed in a hotel room by herself. Lowe asked her where the little girls lodged, and she replied she didn’t know. Once more she was forced to wear a negligee without underpants and sit on a pedestal poised like a mannequin—she pointed out that it was a different negligee than the one she wore in Chicago. She recounted that the party in New York had considerably more sexual activity than the party in Chicago. At one point, she was surrounded by men who were masturbating in front of her. Washington said she missed school the following Monday and Tuesday and later found out that a secretary from the school phoned the Webbs about her absence. She presumed the Webbs told school personnel she was sick. 

For Lowe, his interviews of Moore and Washington seem to have been a tale of two victims: He noticed inconsistencies between Moore’s accounts of her abuse as she related them to the FBI and to him, but he noted that the accounts Washington furnished to the FBI and to him were “consistent.” In fact, the only major discrepancy between the Julie Walters’ report and what Eulice related to the FBI and Lowe, and to me years later, was that she only accompanied King to Chicago and New York, whereas Walters jotted down that Eulice was flown to Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. Eulice denied telling Walters that she had been to DC, but she did tell her that King had a townhouse in DC; so perhaps Walters thought that she had also been to DC. 

I’ve spent numerous hours with Eulice Washington, and she’s never wavered in her accounts of the two trips. I’ve also spent considerable time with her two sisters, Tracy and Tasha, particularly Tasha, and they definitely don’t doubt her accounts of the trips with King. Indeed, Tasha disclosed to me that she felt Barbara Webb was grooming her for out-of-town flights with King—Webb informed Tasha about the possibility of her flying to New York for “dancing lessons.” 

As the Franklin Committee began its work, and Lowe started pumping out reports, the local press, namely the World-Herald and the Lincoln Journal, escalated their reportage on the burgeoning scandal. But the local press was by no means the only media taking an interest in Franklin. During December 1988, the nation’s paper of record, the New York Times, ran a pair of articles on the “lurid, mysterious scandal shaping up in Omaha.” The articles discussed King’s theft of millions from the credit union and also the nascent “reports of sex abuse.” A February 1989 Village Voice article also commented on the “sexual abuse of children.” But the allegations trickling out of Omaha were so bizarre and divorced from conventional perceptions of the heartland that many major media outlets apparently took a wait-and-see attitude. 

In March, a World-Herald article by Flanery and a Lincoln Journal-Star article featured the Foster Care Review Board’s Dennis Carlson and OPD Chief Wadman sparring over the abuse allegations. Both newspapers quoted a nonplussed Dennis Carlson publicly jabbing at law enforcement: “I’m still concerned as to whether the allegations have been thoroughly investigated.” Carlson said that the Board enlisted the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office to investigate the allegations because it had grave concerns about the OPD. In the articles, Carlson revealed that Officer Carmean told him that OPD officers lied to Wadman in an effort to ensure that the OPD’s investigation into King remained a secret from the chief. Wadman responded to Carlson with a flurry of counterpunches: He said that an officer, presumably Carmean, made “a mistake in judgment,” and he produced reports from five officers stating that he hadn’t been kept in the dark concerning an investigation into King. The World-Herald article attributed the following quote to Wadman: “The genesis of most of these allegations comes from non credible sources.” 

In the same March World-Herald article, Carlson said that Carmean divulged to him that an envoy of Wadman’s inquired if the Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit was investigating King, and it was reported to him that King wasn’t under investigation. Wadman would admit that he made an inquiry into the investigation, but he couldn’t recall exactly when. An OPD lieutenant would state that Wadman’s inquiry occurred when King wasn’t under investigation. Lowe interviewed the lieutenant, but he denied making the comment—he told Lowe that the inquiry happened between July 5 and July 20. If Wadman made his inquiry in July, as the lieutenant asserted, and he didn’t find out about the investigation until November or December, then it stands to reason that he was kept in the dark about the investigation as Carmean had claimed. 

Needless to say, Lowe was quite interested in talking to Carmean, but he didn’t want to contact him at the OPD. He staked out Carmean’s residence for a few days, but their paths never crossed, and Lowe eventually contacted him at the OPD. Lowe felt it was optimal not to talk to Carmean at his workplace; Carmean consented to be interviewed at Naylor’s Lincoln office. Lowe, Naylor, and Carmean met for two and a half hours on Sunday, March 12. During the initial stages of their meeting, Carmean expressed a great deal of consternation over his conversations with Dennis Carlson being made public—he had assumed they were confidential. He told Lowe and Naylor that having his exchanges with Carlson hit the papers had heaped anxiety and embarrassment upon him. 

Carmean said he had acquired a copy of Carlson’s notes and related that he didn’t tell Carlson that the investigation of King was “super sensitive,” but, rather, he conveyed to him the investigation was merely “sensitive.” Moreover, Carmean took issue with Senator Chambers’ public statement that he had been transferred from the Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit to the OPD’s Research and Planning Section to waylay his investigation of King—he said that he voluntarily made the transfer. 

Though Carmean would fault Carlson for making their conversations public, he extensively corroborated Carlson’s notes. He confirmed to Lowe and Naylor that the OPD swelled with rumors of a friendship between King and Wadman and of rumors about Wadman staying at King’s DC residence. Carmean also said that he bypassed the OPD’s standard stenography pool when he investigated King to ensure that word of the investigation didn’t leak out of the Robbery and Sexual Assault Unit. Carmean informed Lowe and Naylor that he thought Shawneta Moore was a credible witness, and he mentioned a meeting where it was stated that a federal agency told the OPD to “back off” from its investigation of King. 

Four days after Lowe and Naylor interviewed Carmean, Lowe was contacted by the OPD’s Internal Affairs Unit. The IA officer said he was calling on behalf of Chief Wadman and inquired why Lowe hadn’t used the OPD’s customary channels to contact Carmean—Lowe responded that he and Naylor had decided to circumvent those channels when lining up their meeting with Carmean. The IA officer then told Lowe that Wadman wished to talk to Lowe and gave him Wadman’s number. Lowe phoned Wadman, and they agreed to meet at OPD headquarters the following week. 

When Lowe and Naylor showed up at the OPD, Wadman commenced the meeting by saying that he felt that the OPD had conducted an adequate investigation of the child-abuse allegations and that the NSP and FBI validated its findings. He stressed that he didn’t have a friendship with King, and the extent of their social contact was the three parties of King’s he had attended. He maintained that he had been invited to additional parties, but he declined the invitations. According to Lowe, Wadman also made a point of questioning Carmean’s stability—Wadman stated that Carmean was receiving mental-health counseling. It’s rather astonishing that Wadman would violate Carmean’s confidentiality by telling Lowe and Naylor that he was under the care of a mental-health professional. 

Interestingly, Wadman’s comments to Lowe and Naylor about Carmean’s mental health proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: Three months later, Wadman sent an Inter-Office Communication to Omaha’s Public Safety Director, the city’s overseer of the fire and police departments, requesting a psychological referral for Carmean. Wadman wrote that Carmean’s symptoms “seemed to fall into two areas.” The first class of symptoms consisted of Carmean feeling that the OPD hadn’t adequately investigated the allegations of child exploitation pertaining to King. Carmean’s second area of symptoms revolved around his thinking that Wadman “intentionally hindered” the OPD’s investigation into King’s activities because of the latter’s “influence and association” with Wadman. The Public Safety Director concurred with Wadman’s assessment and referred Carmean to a psychologist. The Public Safety Director just happened to be a cousin of Larry King’s, and under Wadman’s tenure as OPD Chief he had been promoted to a captain.

After Wadman interceded on behalf of Carmean’s mental health, the Lincoln Journal ran a rather shocking story about a phone call between Chief Wadman and Senator Schmit: The paper reported on a meeting that Schmit had with three citizens who were concerned about law enforcement’s approach to the child-abuse investigation, and Schmit stated to them that Wadman threatened him. The Lincoln Journal reported that Schmit told the concerned citizens that Wadman had said the activities of Committee members could be monitored: “He said, ‘We can get something on anybody’ or something of that nature,” the paper quoted Schmit. Schmit also told the group that he did, in fact, feel that his activities were being monitored, and that he was being followed. At this point, Schmit had also become the target of threatening, anonymous phone calls. 

In addition to the threats dispensed to Schmit, the members of the Franklin Committee found themselves navigating upstream against a strong current of opposition by the OPD, NSP, and FBI. But the repeated denials of both state and federal law enforcement only served to heighten the suspicions of some Committee members: “Me thinketh they protest too much,” remarked Chambers of law enforcement’s repudiations. “Unless the purpose of doing so is to try and discourage the Committee from pursuing our investigation or to try to trick us into revealing what we may have developed in the way of information.” 

The Committee was also hindered by the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office. The Attorney General’s Office allowed Naylor to look over its investigative reports on King, but at least one member of the Committee distrusted Naylor, and other Committee members wanted to see the reports for themselves. So in June, the Committee issued a subpoena that required Assistant Attorney General Howland and investigator Vlahoulis to cough up the reports, but the Attorney General’s Office refused to honor the subpoena. The ludicrous response initially provided by Howland and Vlahoulis for not surrendering the reports was that someone else in the Attorney General’s Office was actually in possession of them! The Franklin Committee was probing the sexual abuse of children, the most heinous of crimes, and the Office of Nebraska’s Attorney General was seemingly hindering their investigation. 

As the Attorney General’s Office stonewalled the Committee, and the OPD, NSP, and FBI declared that the King-related child-abuse allegations had “no substance,” a number of Omaha’s citizenry looked on with shock and disbelief, because talk of King-related child abuse had drifted throughout their community for years, and the closing of Franklin only served to intensify the innuendo. By the summer of 1989, eddies of Nebraska’s populace who had lost faith in their local, state, and federal institutions of government’s ability to protect the community’s children took it upon themselves to form a group called Concerned Parents. Initially, Concerned Parents met at an Omaha church, and it attracted only a trickle of members. But as the cover-up of King’s activities intensified, its ranks started to swell. 

Bonnie Cosentino was a co-founder of Concerned Parents. The forty-year-old Cosentino was the soft-spoken single mother of a twelve-year-old boy. Cosentino designed and constructed team mascots for a living—the life-sized mascots that are spotted running around college and professional sporting events, enthusing fans. She had heard of King’s harem of boys since the early 1970s; so the allegations didn’t surprise her, but she was sickened and dismayed by law enforcement’s response. 

“We had heard on numerous occasions about young people who had dared to go to law enforcement with the allegations, and they would simply be laughed at,” Cosentino told me. “If you’re fourteen years old and you can’t trust law enforcement, who can you trust—it’s like the fire extinguisher was on fire.” 

Concerned Parents sought to provide a “constructive” voice for the victims and to investigate their allegations, because of law enforcement’s unwillingness to act. Concerned Parents also acted as a support network for adults who had become bewildered and furious that the child-abuse allegations were receiving such scant attention from the authorities. 

Cosentino’s role as an organizer for the disenchanted singled her out for a campaign of terror. One day she and her son were crossing the street when an approaching car sped up and sideswiped them—a bomb was also detonated in her backyard. She, too, started to receive life-threatening phone calls. 

“There were several people who ran Concerned Parents so one person wasn’t on the front lines all the time,” said Cosentino, “because it was clear that whoever took a stand would be subjected to retaliation, or their families would be subjected to retaliation. Our lives were turned upside down by fear. We felt that our phones were tapped, so just ordinary day-to-day routines like talking on the phone took on a new meaning.” 

On June 22, 1989, the Franklin Committee held public hearings, and it subpoenaed the Foster Care Review Board’s Carol Stitt and Dennis Carlson, Officer Carmean, Attorney General Spire, Assistant Attorney General Howland, and investigator Vlahoulis. Officer Hoch was also subpoenaed to appear before the Committee, but he claimed a scheduling conflict, and the Committee let it slide. The witnesses were sworn in before their testimony, and then Naylor and members of the Committee questioned them. 

Stitt and Carlson testified together, and they basically rehashed their repeated rebuffs by law enforcement. Prior to the hearing, Stitt had cultivated excellent relationships with some of the Committee’s members—Senator Chambers had turned up the heat on the Attorney General’s Office after it reacted to the Board’s allegations with mere apathy at best, and she found Schmit to be very receptive to the Board’s concerns when the Committee was forming in December. But the day before Stitt testified in front of the Committee, Naylor threatened her with a perjury charge concerning her account of the conversation she had with the detective from Kansas City, who was reportedly privy to King’s abuse of children. The detective had told Hallberg, Stitt and Carlson in three separate conversations about King exploiting children in Kansas City, but she had completely denied having the foggiest idea of King’s abuses when questioned by the FBI and then by investigator Lowe. Stitt also received a life-threatening phone call the night before she testified in front of the Committee. 

Carmean was the next witness called before the Committee, and he essentially reiterated the statements he had made to investigator Lowe. Carmean, however, was making these statements in a public forum: A TV camera caught him saying that he heard rumors of an “association” between Wadman and King and also of his belief that Shawneta Moore was credible. Within two weeks of Carmean’s testimony before the Committee, Wadman requested that King’s cousin refer Carmean to a psychologist. 

After Carmean, members of the Attorney General’s Office were called to face the Committee. Howland and Vlahoulis were subjected to the wrath of the Committee members, particularly Chambers, not only for their failure to adequately investigate the Board’s allegations in a timely manner, but also for refusing to honor the Committee’s subpoena. Though Howland and Vlahoulis did their best to soft-shoe away from the accusations that they “sat on” the Board’s materials, they couldn’t dance fast enough to belie the grim reality. Vlahoulis confessed that he had not interviewed a single victim. 

But as Howland and Vlahoulis dipped and dodged, they couldn’t help themselves from making relevant disclosures. Howland initially testified that the Attorney General’s Office wanted to oversee the OPD’s investigation of the abuse allegations and requested updates from the OPD. Howland said he received no reports from the OPD on its investigation of the abuse allegations until he met with Chief Wadman in late October or early November. So both Howland and Officer Hoch said that Wadman knew of the King investigation in or before November, even though Wadman told the media that December marked his first inkling of the investigation because the evidence was so scant. 

Howland also testified that the US Attorney for Nebraska had informed him that the FBI was investigating King not only for his financial improprieties but also for child exploitation and drug dealing. Howland said he was told about the federal investigation by the middle of October, but the feds later claimed they were only investigating King’s financial crimes at the time—either Howland or the feds were being untruthful.

By the time Attorney General Spire testified, the Committee had decisively established that the Attorney General’s Office had, in fact, sat on the allegations, and Chambers used a number of adjectives to characterize its investigation —“slipshod,” “superficial,” and “incompetent.” Chambers also inquired of Spire why the Attorney General’s Office hadn’t honored the Committee’s subpoena. After considerable circumlocution, Attorney General Spire replied that it wouldn’t be “legally appropriate” for his office to turn over its reports to the Committee. 

Shortly after the Committee’s initial hearings on June 22, Committee members held a meeting to discuss its Interim Report—Resolution 5 mandated that the Committee submit a progress report to the Unicameral by July 1. Naylor would be tasked with writing the Interim Report, and he submitted a draft of it to Committee members before the July 1 deadline. 

Schmit read Naylor’s draft of the Interim Report, and he was outraged, because Naylor seemed to focus on a lack of response primarily by the Attorney General’s Office. Naylor’s draft of the Interim Report also said that the Committee’s investigation of the King-related child-abuse allegations was “intensive and ongoing,” but it would be wrapping up at the end of August. Schmit absolutely wouldn’t sign off on the Committee discontinuing its investigation of the child abuse allegations by the end of August. 

Schmit then wrote a three-page addendum to the Committee’s Interim Report. His addendum conceded that the Committee hadn’t uncovered prosecutable offenses relating to child abuse; he believed that it needed to change its investigative tactics and follow the money in order to ferret out improprieties, including child abuse. Schmit’s addendum provoked Naylor, Lowe, and also Chambers to resign from the Committee. 

A World-Herald article, “Sen. Schmit Told of Pressure to Halt Probe,” written by Flanery, reported on the Committee’s rupture. The article quoted Lowe, who said Schmit had remarked to him that there was “pressure to stop the investigation.” In the article, Schmit confirmed the pressures: “I have gotten phone calls threatening me,” he said. “I’ve been told to leave it alone or my kids were going to be orphans.” 

The article also reported on comments made by Chambers about Schmit’s addendum and his own resignation. Chambers said that Schmit’s change of direction “dried up possible avenues of information” and “de-emphasized the investigation of child abuse”—he felt that the Committee’s probe was becoming a “sham” and “might intentionally or inadvertently be a cover-up.” Chambers added that it would be impossible for the Committee to follow the money trail, because the NCUA and other federal entities wouldn’t grant the Committee access to the credit union’s records. 

Schmit responded to Chambers’ comments: “I resent the implication I’m not concerned about the children and determining whether or not the allegations of child abuse are true.” He retorted that he hadn’t changed his mind about the child-abuse allegations, but the prior tactics of Naylor and Lowe hadn’t yielded prosecutable offenses. “Find out where the money went, and you’ll find the rest,” said Schmit, and then he cited a $2,800 credit card receipt that showed King purchased a coat for Charlie Rogers, whose death had unconvincingly been ruled a suicide. 

The distrust and apprehension that caused the Franklin Committee to rupture would become a salient characteristic of this story. Those who were touched by its shadow learned to mete out trust carefully and cautiously—if at all. In addition to anonymous, life-threatening phone calls, the narrative is brimming with examples of people who trusted law enforcement and were burned. When citizens come to believe that both state and federal law enforcement are covering up crimes against children, their trust in all government institutions quickly evaporates. Moreover, as this tale unfolds, suspicious suicides and mysterious deaths will multiply.

next
Caradori  

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.