Part 4:The Franklin Scandal...A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal...A Carefully Crafted Hoax...

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

A Carefully Crafted Hoax 

One of Gary Caradori’s ultimate objectives was to move the Committee’s child abuse investigation beyond the shady margins of provincial law enforcement and into a grand jury. As I’ve already mentioned, after the Committee submitted Caradori’s videotaped statements of Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King to Attorney General Spire in January of 1990, Spire requested that Douglas County’s district judges convene and call for a grand jury to investigate Franklin-related child-abuse allegations. And on January 31, Douglas County’s Presiding Judge, James Buckley, announced that the Douglas County judges had signed an order to impanel a grand jury. Spire didn’t consult with Senator Schmit about the grand jury, but Schmit weighed in on the Committee’s role in the grand jury’s formation: “I think we contributed to the facts that led to the calling of a grand jury,” said Schmit. “There would not have been a grand jury if there had not been a legislative committee.” 

Though Caradori initially welcomed the impaneling of a grand jury, he also realized the inherent flaws of the grand jury process, which makes the initial decision to indict—formally accuse—a criminal defendant to stand trial. Unlike a trial, a grand jury proceeding is private, and there is no cross-examination or presentation of the defense’s case. The special prosecutor calls the witnesses, questions the witnesses, and selects the evidence that is shown to the grand jurors, who are ordinary citizens. Generally, only witnesses and evidence deemed relevant by special prosecutors are pursued by grand juries, and special prosecutors are in a unique position to twist grand jurors’ judgments in a particular direction. A former Chief Appellate Judge of New York State once quipped that a special prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” 

The Douglas County judges originally wanted to name Douglas County Attorney Ronald Staskiewicz as the grand jury’s special prosecutor. But Staskiewicz publicly rejected their offer, citing a possible “conflict of interest” because of innuendo that Douglas County law enforcement had abetted a cover-up of the child-abuse allegations. In early February 1990, the Douglas County judges tapped Samuel Van Pelt as the special prosecutor. 

The tall, lean, fifty-three-year-old Van Pelt grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and was a graduate of the University of Nebraska Law School. In 1972, Nebraska Governor J.J. Exon appointed him as a district judge in Lancaster County. Van Pelt had a judicial pedigree—his father had been an esteemed US District Court Judge—but he concluded that being a judge was an “unpleasant job” and resigned after eleven years on the bench. Van Pelt lived on a farm in rural Hickman, Nebraska—he was twice divorced with two sons, one from each marriage. 

Spire said that Van Pelt was an “absolutely outstanding” choice for special prosecutor, but outside the Attorney General’s Office, Van Pelt received mixed reviews, ranging from bafflement to outrage. Some government insiders felt that Van Pelt’s rubbing shoulders with Nebraska’s high-flyers was integral to his appointment and questioned whether or not he possessed the wealth of experience required to tackle Franklin’s complexities. “There’s a good-old-boy aspect to Van Pelt,” commented a former state senator. “He likes to get together with, and buddy up with, influential people…. Van Pelt’s probably not the most experienced person for the job he has right now.” 

Though some Nebraskans gave Van Pelt a lukewarm appraisal, others viewed him with scalding contempt. Shortly after Van Pelt’s appointment had been announced, forty-three Nebraskans sent a letter to the Speaker of the Legislature charging that Van Pelt was merely a “hired gun for the state.” Their feelings about Van Pelt centered on an investigation he had directed five years earlier—they claimed he covered up the shooting death of a Nebraska farmer by an NSP SWAT team. The farmer was holed up in his house after the bank foreclosed on his farm, and NSP officials claimed that he charged into his front yard with a blazing M-16, where an awaiting SWAT team mowed him down. 

The farmer’s friends and family argued that he never fired his weapon—their allegations were reinforced by the fact that the NSP never performed gunpowder tests on the farmer’s hands. The farmer’s son commented on Van Pelt’s 607-page report exonerating the NSP of any misconduct: “A lot of it was not true. There were little nooks and crannies that changed the outcome of the way the story read.” 

Van Pelt declined to comment on the citizens’ letter that declared his appointment proved the fix was in, but a World-Herald editorial lauded Van Pelt and insisted he had simply “followed the evidence” in the farmer’s shooting. The editorial maintained that the letter was a “cruel” denunciation promulgated by wayward citizens entwined in a “conspiracy theory,” and didn’t merit Van Pelt’s response: “The accusation that he is a ‘hired gun’ for the government didn’t deserve the dignity of his reply. But others need not be silent. The accusation deserves to be condemned.” 

Van Pelt granted an interview to the World-Herald in the first week of February. He confirmed that the grand jury would convene in March 1990, and he pledged to bring himself up to speed on the investigation in the interim. “I feel the integrity of the system is being challenged,” he said. “I feel the system needs to work.” To help ensure the system’s integrity, Van Pelt stressed he would curtail his public comments on the upcoming grand jury, because he hoped to quell the “unsubstantiated and unfounded” rumors that had arisen thus far. It’s telling that Van Pelt would already be focusing on unsubstantiated and unfounded “rumors” in early February, prior to commencing his investigation. 

In a March World-Herald article, Van Pelt commented on his seeming obsession with Franklin: “It’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever encountered in my life,” he said. “It’s just a fascinating tale.” The newspaper reported that because of his preoccupation with the case, he had narrowly avoided three car accidents in recent weeks: “I think about it when I’m driving—it’s all consuming. I’ve been barraged with so much information.” 

As Van Pelt was reportedly having difficulties behind the wheel, a three-member panel was tasked with the duty of selecting sixteen grand jurors and three alternates. The panel included presiding Judge Buckley, a lawyer chosen by Judge Buckley, and Douglas County’s Election Commissioner. The panel claimed to have interviewed forty individuals randomly chosen from a pool of eighty citizens who were at least nineteen years old and either registered to vote or licensed to drive. The panel released a statement that said they were striving to ensure that the nineteen grand jurors represented a wide cross-section of society regarding “age, gender, occupation, race, and station of life.” The identities of the nineteen grand jurors were kept secret and the press was not even allowed to take their pictures. I eventually obtained transcripts of most of the grand jury’s proceedings. 

The grand jury formally convened in the landmark Douglas County Courthouse on March 19, 1990, in a courtroom that was normally used by the Douglas County Juvenile Court, and the proceedings had all the pomp and circumstance of a media spectacle. Nebraska’s citizens and the media from far and wide eagerly anticipated the grand jury. All and sundry seemed to have countless questions and uncertainties about the “lurid” allegations, and, starving for answers, they expected Van Pelt and company to nourish them with the truth. 

Before Van Pelt called his first witness, Judge Buckley gave a litany of instructions to the grand jurors, including their ultimate objective, or “charge.” Buckley said he was placing “no limits on the grand jury’s power and duty to investigate every aspect of this case.” The grand jurors were “empowered to uncover any wrongdoing by all individuals, however prominent or obscure, who have been accused in the Legislative Committee’s investigation, whether or not they have any relationship to the Franklin Credit Union.” 

After Buckley dispensed with the opening instructions and formalities, Van Pelt called the grand jury’s first witness, Patricia Flocken, and introduced the first exhibit: Julie Walters’ interviews of Eulice Washington. As noted, the grand jury’s proceedings and testimony were blanketed in secrecy, but if Flocken had been able to tell the press about her grand jury experience, the hopes of everyone who wanted to see justice on behalf of children would have been dashed. “Van Pelt was a jerk,” Flocken told me. “I don’t think he was brought in to find the truth—I think he was brought in to expose the children as liars. I didn’t think he was at all interested in the kids I represented.” 

Van Pelt and his assistant, Terry Dougherty, fired questions at Flocken for an hour or so. Their questions primarily pertained to the inferno that was the Webb household, and the unadulterated abuse the Webbs had doled out to the children living in their home. Van Pelt grilled Flocken on the sexual abuse allegations levied against Jarrett Webb by Eulice Washington—Flocken discussed the NSP polygraph that Eulice had passed concerning Webb’s repeated molestations and also the Washington County Attorney’s refusal to press formal charges against Webb. 

Flocken told the grand jury that she, an NSP Investigator, and two DSS caseworkers had a meeting in the office of Washington County Attorney Patrick Tripp. Everyone at the meeting, except Tripp, believed Washington’s allegations about Jarrett Webb. Flocken testified that Tripp said the Webbs’ attorney informed him the Webbs found a book Washington was reading that had “a story line” similar to the allegations she was making about Jarrett Webb, and Tripp felt “it was possible for her to pass a polygraph exam because she had somehow psyched herself into believing that it was all true.” 

Van Pelt eventually asked Flocken about Julie Walters’ report, and she gave him the chronology of her receiving the report from Julie Walters and handing it off to Carol Stitt. Though Van Pelt inquired about the sequence of events leading to Stitt’s acquiring the report, he didn’t focus on the contents of the report. 

When Van Pelt and Dougherty finished questioning Flocken, the grand jurors had an opportunity to question her too. The grand jurors followed the lead of Van Pelt and Dougherty, so they didn’t concentrate on the Julie Walters’ report either. Rather, they focused on the Webbs’ physical and emotional abuse of the children. After the grand jurors’ questions, Dougherty asked Flocken if she believed Eulice Washington’s allegations regarding Jarrett Webb and also the allegations about Larry King contained in Julie Walters’ report. “I believe everything the child has said,” Flocken replied. Dougherty then pressed Flocken on why she believed Washington was telling the truth about both series of events, and she replied that Washington’s accounts of her abuse by Jarrett Webb to the NSP and to Julie Walters had “enough similarity and commonality” for her to believe that Eulice was telling the truth on both accounts, even though she hadn’t told the NSP about her interstate flights with Larry King. 

The grand jury didn’t release its final report until July, but it filed an “Interim Report” in May that specifically dealt with the allegations regarding Jarrett Webb’s molestations of Eulice Washington. The Interim Report found that Webb molested Washington “on or about” May 15, 1985, and also on June 1, 1985, after her sixteenth birthday. It urged Washington County authorities to pursue third-degree sexual assault charges against Webb. The Interim Report neglected to mention the allegation that Webb started molesting Washington as a child. 

Van Pelt and company filed the Interim Report in May, because they ostensibly wanted the prosecution of Webb to fall within a 1989 Nebraska law that extended the statute of limitations on felony sexual assault from three years to five years. But the Interim Report noted that “certain legal questions may exist” about whether Webb could be prosecuted under the 1989 statute of limitations extension. 

Bystanders who wanted to see justice on behalf of the children were reassured by the Interim Report—they felt that the first steps were being taken toward bringing child molesters to justice. But the Interim Report was little more than a sham. 

Webb was charged with third-degree sexual assault, a misdemeanor, and misdemeanors in Nebraska carried a mere eighteen-month statute of limitations, so Jarrett Webb walked on the misdemeanor charges. One would expect Van Pelt, a former judge, to realize that Webb’s misdemeanor charges had an eighteen-month statute of limitations and that the 1989 law extending the statute of limitations for felony sexual assault had no bearing on a misdemeanor. 

Under Nebraska statutes, second-degree sexual assault, a mandatory felony, should have been charged if “serious personal injury” occurred during the assault. I realize that “serious personal injury” is open to interpretation, but Webb beat Washington with the railroad prop before molesting her, and he could easily have been charged with second-degree sexual assault. 

The Douglas County grand jury admittedly spent the majority of its deliberations on “the videotaped statements” taken by Caradori, but it called several witnesses to address the “early allegations” prompted by the Foster Care Review Board’s report. In addition to Flocken, witnesses called by Van Pelt to deal with the early allegations included Kristin Hallberg, Dennis Carlson, Officer Irl Carmean, Kirk Naylor, and NSP Investigator Charles Phillips. 

Hallberg was the second witness called by Van Pelt, and he questioned her about her relationship with Shawneta Moore. Hallberg testified that she first met Moore at the Uta Halee facility in June of 1986, and Moore told her that she had been enmeshed in a child-pornography and prostitution ring. Hallberg then testified that Moore started to call her periodically from her mother’s home in June of 1988. She then recounted her conversations with Moore’s school counselor, and the events that led to Moore’s first hospitalization at Richard Young Hospital. The Board’s Carol Stitt, Dennis Carlson and Burrell Williams followed Hallberg, and they testified about the early allegations and law enforcement’s unwillingness to investigate them. 

One of the standard procedures for Van Pelt seems to have been to hear the message and then kill the messenger: Following the testimony of Hallberg and the Board’s Executive Committee, a succession of witnesses deconstructed their accounts and questioned their credibility. NSP Investigator Phillips would be called to give testimony to the grand jury on at least eight different occasions, and he would invariably taint the testimony of previous witnesses or upcoming witnesses. 

Phillips testified that NSP personnel jumped right into action when they received the Board’s materials on December 16, 1988: He and the FBI questioned Moore on December 19. Dougherty then questioned Phillips about the three homicides that Moore discussed with him and the FBI agents. Phillips stated that Moore didn’t provide any specifics concerning victims, perpetrators, and locations, and her statements to him were completely untrustworthy. It’s certainly true that Moore’s allegations are virtually incomprehensible, and the statements she made to Phillips and the FBI contradict the statements she made to Carmean, hospital staff, and Lowe, but the NSP and FBI had Moore committed under duress, and, according to Moore, they were extremely hostile—her accounts of their animosity are repeatedly corroborated by other FBI interviewees. 

Though she wasn’t specific with Phillips and the FBI, she named specific perpetrators and locations to Carmean and hospital personnel that perhaps law enforcement could have investigated. Phillips would say that he had read the OPD’s reports on Moore, and those reports lacked specifics too, which isn’t true. In Carmean’s initial interview with Moore at Richard Young Hospital she was vague, but in her subsequent phone calls to him she provided a number of details. 

Phillips also testified that Moore was recommitted because “everybody” had been told that there were “threats against Shawneta’s life,” and he implied that Hallberg was integral to fostering those fears. The truth of the matter was that the Douglas County Attorney’s Office recommitted Moore for reasons that included a pair of falsehoods—that she was both living on the street and suicidal. 

After Phillips demolished Moore’s veracity, Dougherty and Van Pelt asked him questions about Hallberg. Phillips testified that he interviewed a Richard Young coworker of Hallberg’s, who disclosed that Hallberg took it upon herself to shuttle Moore around from place to place after she had left the hospital in early December of 1988; in reality, several Richard Young Hospital personnel took it upon themselves to shuttle Moore around. 

Van Pelt questioned Phillips about an interview he conducted with one of Hallberg’s Uta Halee supervisors. It just happened to be the supervisor that Hallberg initially briefed concerning Moore’s earliest allegations, and who had neglected to contact Moore’s mother about the allegations. The very same supervisor had also suggested that Hallberg interrupt Uta Halee residents who confided in her to ask them, “Are you sure you can trust me with this information?” Phillips told the grand jury that Hallberg’s former supervisor said Hallberg was guilty of rumor mongering while working at Uta Halee. 

Van Pelt then queried Phillips about Hallberg’s exchange with the Kansas City detective who had made statements about Larry King’s exploitation of children to Hallberg. Phillips cited the FBI report that said the detective in question denied making those statements. Van Pelt had the Committee’s information that the Kansas City detective made similar statements to Stitt and Carlson regarding Larry King, and Stitt had phone records proving a phone call, but either he hadn’t read the Committee’s materials or he opted not to discuss evidence that would have corroborated Hallberg.

Following Phillips’ hatchet job on Hallberg’s credibility, Van Pelt turned his attention to Eulice Washington’s allegations of interstate flights. With Phillips still on the stand, Van Pelt focused on the FBI’s interview of Kathleen Sorenson. Phillips testified that Sorenson told FBI agents that Eulice and Tracy Washington said Larry King flew them to Paris; New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; California; and Texas. 

Phillips’ account of Sorenson’s FBI interview was vastly different from the notes that Sorenson provided to Lowe. Sorenson’s notes make no mention of Tracy being on interstate flights, and she explicitly stated that Eulice was flown to Chicago and New York—Sorenson writes that Eulice may have been to DC, but she wasn’t sure. The Julie Walters’ report also makes no mention of Tracy being on interstate flights or of Eulice flying to Paris, California, or Texas, and Sorenson was present for those interviews. 

Sorenson’s FBI interview, as conveyed by Phillips, portrays Eulice and Tracy as given to flights of fancy or outright delusions, and they contradict Sorenson’s notes, Walters’ report, and also Eulice and Tracy’s accounts. The FBI interviewed Sorenson in February of 1989, but by the time the Douglas County grand jury convened, anybody could have attributed anything to Sorenson, because she had been in a fatal car accident. 

Though Franklin lore is rife with Sorenson’s accident being a contract murder, she died as the result of an eighteen-year-old woman with an infant swerving into her lane. I’ve talked to a member of Sorenson’s family about it, and he came to the conclusion that her death was merely an accident. 

Phillips then discussed an interview with Boys Town teacher John Barksdale that he and the FBI conducted. Barksdale was apparently a workaholic—Boys Town and the Franklin Credit Union simultaneously employed him. Barksdale told Phillips and the FBI that he had traveled extensively with King, and freely admitted he accompanied King in chartered planes to several destinations, including San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC. Barksdale maintained that he witnessed no inappropriate sexual activity during the trips, but he eventually came to believe that King was a homosexual through rumors at the credit union. 

Earlier I mentioned that Julie Walters heard rumors that a Tojan sports car leased by King prowled the Boys Town campus, and three Boys Town teachers had been spotted driving the car—Barksdale was reportedly one of the teachers. But Barksdale, Phillips said, claimed that he knew nothing of a Tojan sports car on the Boys Town campus. Phillips also testified that Barksdale said he wasn’t aware of Boys Town youth having sexual relations with King. In fact, he said, he had never seen King on the Boys Town campus or heard his name mentioned by Boys Town personnel. He recalled, though, noticing a Boys Town graduate at King’s Café Carnivale. 

It’s interesting that Barksdale would mention seeing a former Boys Town student at Café Carnivale: In my interview with Monsignor Hupp, he said that he found out Barksdale was taking Boys Town kids off the campus and allegedly bringing them to Café Carnivale. One of the grand jurors asked Phillips if he and the FBI felt Barksdale was being honest during the interview, and, without missing a beat, he said, “Yes, we did.” 

Phillips testified that the FBI essentially conducted a national dragnet to find the Boys Town students who were purportedly linked to Larry King, and he discussed an FBI interview with a former Boys Town student named “Brant”—Eulice Washington had said that Brant left a party in Chicago with a nationally prominent politician. As it turned out, Washington hadn’t conjured up a Boys Town student named Brant who had ties to King. 

The Franklin Committee discovered that Brant graduated from Boys Town in 1983 and had actually moved into King’s home upon his graduation. Brant’s name also shows up in a document of the Youth Affairs Committee of the National Black Republican Council, authored by none other than Larry King. In his capacity as an “adviser” to the Youth Affairs Committee, King apparently wrote letters to various “Black college campuses” requesting that they contact Brant to establish a National Black Republican Council affiliate on their campus. 

According to Phillips, the FBI interviewed Brant in rehab, where he was said to be recovering from a $2,500-a-day cocaine habit. Brant told FBI agents that King hired him to babysit King’s son, and as a babysitter he accompanied King on numerous trips around the country. Brant said at no time did he see Eulice Washington on any of the flights, but, interestingly, he commented to the FBI that he recalled seeing her in New York with the Webbs. Both Washington and the Webbs maintained that Washington never traveled with the Webbs; so it’s interesting that he would confess to seeing her in New York. Brant would tell FBI agents that Washington was mistaken about his presence in Chicago during September or October of 1984, because he was then in the Navy. 

In Larry King’s interview with the FBI—the very interview where he said he never lied—he acknowledged that Brant was one of three Boys Town students who moved into his house to babysit his son. King said that he didn’t meet Brant via Boys Town, but at his church. He admitted that Brant frequently traveled with him, but asserted that he wasn’t involved in any sexual improprieties. 

I was most interested in talking to Brant, and I found him residing in Detroit. I attempted to contact him a number of times, but he never responded to my messages. 

Jerry Lowe and Kirk Naylor appeared before Van Pelt and company to discuss the “early allegations,” and their respective accounts vastly differed. Lowe stated that he didn’t think criminal prosecutions could have been conducted with the information that the Franklin Committee had cultivated when he resigned, but he thought there were enough leads to warrant further investigation. He said that the public hearings the previous June, before the Committee ruptured, had spurred people to come forward with additional information, and their leads might have been fruitful. 

As Van Pelt questioned Lowe, he took several opportunities to hammer Kirstin Hallberg. He maneuvered Lowe to discuss the OPD’s opinion of her, and Lowe said that he talked to three OPD officers who found Hallberg “unreliable” and “flaky.” Van Pelt then asked Lowe, “Did you receive a lot of information from her that you didn’t think was important?” Surprisingly, Lowe didn’t agree with Van Pelt’s assessment: “I think she’s a very credible person, a committed person,” he said. Lowe then described what he thought was an OPD campaign to discredit her. Van Pelt then worked over both Hallberg’s and Stitt’s credibility by questioning Lowe about discrepancies between their claims and those of the Kansas City detective. 

Midway through Lowe’s testimony, Van Pelt dropped a surprise on him—he questioned him about Michael Casey, whose name hadn’t surfaced in the proceedings thus far. Van Pelt referred to Casey as a “very colorful individual.” Lowe disclosed that Casey claimed he had a videotape of King engaged in sexual acts with children. Van Pelt pounced on the lack of any evidence for the tape and quickly established Casey as not credible. 

Whereas Lowe said the Committee had numerous leads that may have been fruitful, Naylor’s testimony about the Committee painted it black—he told the grand jury that he sided with the FBI’s conclusions concerning Larry King’s non-exploitation of children. He felt that Shawneta Moore was lying, and Eulice Washington was a “victim” of “delusion.” And taking a page from the FBI’s debriefings of Owen, Boner, and Danny King, he stated that the allegations surrounding Larry King were the byproduct of “screwed-up kids” capitalizing on the “glamour and excitement” of the scandal. Van Pelt also had Naylor chime in on Hallberg—Naylor said he felt that Hallberg bore “a lot of the responsibility” for the “distortion.” 

With Naylor on the stand, Van Pelt editorialized on how an election year superimposed on a crazy public had created a synergy that triggered the unruly rumors. Van Pelt commented on the “unsubstantiated and unfounded rumors” shortly after he was named special prosecutor, and, given his remarks to Naylor on April 3, it’s obvious that his thoughts on King’s pedophile network hadn’t changed. He nevertheless continued to call witnesses for nearly four more months. 

Van Pelt initially called Gary Caradori to the stand on March 28—he had a little over three months to live. Before Caradori’s videotaped interviews were shown to the grand jurors, Van Pelt ostensibly wanted him to provide the grand jurors with a brief synopsis of the investigation that led to the interviews. After extensively quizzing Caradori on his background as an NSP investigator and a private detective, Van Pelt inquired about the Franklin investigation. As Caradori attempted to explain the investigation, Van Pelt repeatedly cut him off. Caradori eventually talked about his earliest forays into Franklin, working the streets and bars, cultivating informants. At one point, Van Pelt interrupted Caradori and asked him if he was a “homosexual,” to which he simply replied, 

“No.” 

Van Pelt assured Caradori that he would appear before the grand jury again, and he did on two subsequent occasions. Before Caradori’s next grand jury appearance, however, the grand jurors watched his videotaped interviews of Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King. Though the grand jurors could not know this at the time, much of the corroborating content of Caradori’s Owen and Boner interviews was edited out. Before Caradori’s second appearance the grand jurors also heard Boner and Danny King give the FBI’s revised versions of their stories, recanting allegations of their abuse. 

Though Caradori’s March 28 appearance before the grand jury had been brief, he realized that the process was a fait accompli. A forlorn Caradori kissed his wife that night and told her, “It’s all over.” 

The day after Caradori’s initial appearance before the grand jury, Troy Boner made his first appearance—Boner made a second appearance in June. Of the initial three victims videotaped by Caradori, Boner was the logical choice to be the first to testify—Danny King lacked the gray matter and charisma of Boner, and he would have major difficulties juggling the lies that were required of him, whereas Boner’s innate intelligence, drug addiction, and hustling had forged a gifted and well practiced liar. Amazingly, Alisha Owen was sticking to her story; so it was important to have both Boner and Danny King deconstruct her account before she took the stand. 

Though Boner’s testimony was littered with discrepancies and contradictions, he had been given the FBI’s seal of approval by virtue of his passing the FBI polygraph with “excellent results.” Van Pelt was quick to point out that Boner had the FBI’s endorsement, and it was a point that was not lost on the grand jurors. 

At the outset of Boner’s testimony, Van Pelt took him through his initial meeting with Caradori and his videotaped statement. Boner maintained that Caradori and Ormiston brought him back to the offices of Caracorp, where, over the phone, he conversed with Owen for twenty minutes, and she brought him up to speed on the “plan.” But, as I’ve noted before, according to Caracorp’s phone records, the phone call that Boner pinned the entire “hoax” on never happened. 

During Boner’s two grand jury appearances, he spilled a morass of conflicting lies about the events that led to the phantom phone call and about the call itself, but his conflicting accounts didn’t seem to bother Van Pelt. 

Boner testified that Caradori sold him on the idea that the individuals he would be making statements against were very “bad” people, and Boner would reap five to six million dollars by suing them—he said a book and movie deal were discussed too. But in response to a question by a grand juror, he denied that money motivated him; he replied that he was stirred by the moral calling of putting child abusers in jail—child abusers he’d never heard of. Boner also testified that he disclosed to Caradori “countless times” that his story was a scam, but then he denied that Caradori knew it was a scam. 

As previously mentioned, the FBI apparently felt it was imperative that Boner and Danny King immediately disavow the flight to California, where Boner claimed that Larry King sold the two little boys. Boner told the grand jury that immediately upon arriving at the offices of Caracorp, Caradori described the flight to California with Larry King, Danny King, Owen, the two little boys, and himself. But later in his testimony, Boner couldn’t recall how he had gleaned the details of the trip.

Boner’s phone conversation with Owen at Caradori’s office was the focal point of numerous contradictions. His FBI statement alleged that Caradori phoned Owen and handed the phone to him, but before the grand jury he testified that Owen phoned him at Caradori’s office. When Boner appeared before the grand jury a second time, he couldn’t recall if Owen called Caradori or Caradori called Owen. Boner then gave the grand jury two completely different accounts of where the conversation with Owen actually took place in the offices of Caracorp—“Jill’s office” and then “Joe’s office.” 

Boner told Van Pelt that during his twenty-minute conversation with Owen, she gave him 85% of the content that was contained in his seven-hour, videotaped statement to Caradori. He initially testified that he didn’t take notes while he was talking to Owen—he jotted down dates, times, and places afterward. But during his second appearance before the grand jury, Boner maintained that he didn’t take any notes and that Caradori didn’t provide him with notes—he said Caradori would help him “over the hump” by giving him “hints.” In complete contradiction to his FBI statement and earlier testimony, he also stated that he had a number of calls with Owen to craft the hoax. Boner initially testified that he briefed Danny King for five minutes on the hoax at Danny King’s apartment, and then he said he briefed King for twenty minutes at King’s apartment; but during his second appearance, he claimed King had several calls with Owen too. 

During Boner’s first appearance, a grand juror asked him if he was currently employed, and he let slip that he was too “busy” meeting with the FBI “every other day it seems like.” His taskmasters at the FBI spent a considerable amount of time refining him for the grand jury, and their game plan was obviously for him to disavow everything regarding Larry King. In Boner’s taped statement to Caradori, he elaborated on his first meeting with Larry King at The Max, but he flat out told Van Pelt that he had never been to The Max—he then later admitted to hanging out at The Max, and Van Pelt reminded him of his earlier statement. Boner gave a befuddled reply: “Oh, yeah, I have been. I thought maybe you meant, you know, now or something.” 

Boner’s “lie or die” affidavit explicitly conceded that FBI intimidation forced him to disavow the vast majority of his abuse and the names of his abusers. But before the grand jury, he inculpated Baer as a john. Boner maintained he was Nebraska’s age of consent—sixteen years old—when they started having their dalliances; so Baer wouldn’t be charged with child molestation in Boner’s case. However, since Danny King would have been under the age of consent when he started having dalliances with Baer, he simply told the grand jury that he had never even met Alan Baer. 

Boner maintained that Baer was his one and only homosexual relationship, and he received money and drugs for services rendered. A grand juror inquired why he frequently hung out at The Max if he wasn’t gay, and he responded, “I don’t know.” A grand juror then asked Boner about his last contact with Baer, and Boner responded that he was seventeen or eighteen years old. Though Boner told the grand jury that he hadn’t had any contact with Baer in four or five years, he disclosed to FBI agents that he had phoned Baer in January of 1990. 

Before the grand jury, Boner also named Eugene Mahoney as a homosexual. Mahoney was a former state senator and the Commissioner of Nebraska’s Parks and Games—he was also a power behind the throne in Nebraska politics, with numerous friends among Nebraska’s power elite, including Harold Andersen. Boner alleged that Mahoney requested oral sex from him at an adult bookstore. Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci had also implicated Mahoney as a pedophile. 

Though Boner denied ever attending parties at the Woodman Tower or the Twin Towers, he testified that he was present at a January 1985 party at the Brandeis Building. Then a minute or two later, he told Van Pelt that he was never at the party: two contradictory statements within just minutes of each other. But Van Pelt was undeterred and abruptly changed the subject. Boner also gave conflicting accounts about his FBI debriefings within a minute or two of each other: He originally said that he stuck to the story as he related it to Caradori during his first meeting with the FBI, but, shortly afterward, he told the grand jury that he immediately recanted that Owen and Danny King had any involvement with Larry King, Alan Baer, or Robert Wadman. 

Boner would make contradictory statements about Wadman in rapid succession too. He initially testified that he had previously met Wadman, but then said he’d never met Wadman. At first he stated that everything he conveyed to Caradori about the relationship between Owen and Wadman was imparted by Owen during the phantom phone call, but he later maintained that Caradori said, “You can’t forget Wednesdays when you would take Alisha to meet Bob Wadman at the Starlite Hotel.” 

Boner would have considerable problems keeping it together when testifying about his relationship with Owen. He initially said they met in the summer of 1988, then asserted it was absolutely the summer of 1987. Boner would tell the grand jury he knew Owen for three months, and then he recalled their relationship lasted six to eight weeks. He disclosed that they parted on very bad terms in the middle of 1988. 

Boner testified that he had two subsequent communications with Owen after their breakup. The first was at the end of 1988 when she called him from a jail in Greeley, Colorado and asked him to bail her out—shortly afterwards he said Owen actually called him from Greeley in February or March of 1989. Though Boner couldn’t remember the month of the call, he said the upshot of the conversation was that he refused to bail her out—their next contact was in Caradori’s office, where they hatched the hoax. So, ultimately, Boner spun an extremely implausible yarn to the grand jury: He and Owen had a very short relationship, they parted on bad terms, he was unwilling to bail her out of jail, and yet he concocted an elaborate scheme with her even though he was engaged to another woman. 

Danny King would be called to the stand only once—shortly after Boner’s first appearance. Boner, admittedly, had been schooled by the FBI concerning his testimony, and he was considerably sharper than Danny King. If the FBI enrolled King in a memory retention seminar and pumped him full of ginkgo biloba, it would have all been for naught—he didn’t have the cognitive chops of Boner, and years of repeated molestations and drug abuse had beaten him down. Though Van Pelt pretty much spoon-fed Boner, he would have to pull out an eyedropper for Danny King. Van Pelt usually allowed Boner to give short, three or four sentence responses to his questions, but he would have to lead Danny King, whose answers were often “That’s correct,” “Yeah,” or “No.” 

Given Danny King’s shortcomings as a witness, the strategy for him was to deny just about everything. But, even then, he still became bogged down and mired in uncertainty. Boner told the grand jury that he imparted the hoax to Danny King in the latter’s apartment while Caradori waited outside. But Danny King testified that Caradori drove Boner and him to Lincoln’s Residence Inn, where Boner gave him the low-down on the hoax in the bar over beers. 

His story of becoming tuned into the hoax at a bar is just one of many inconsistencies—he repeatedly had problems with reality impeding on the FBI’s version of events. The following Q & A is between an agitated Van Pelt and an acutely confused Danny King: 

Q. And is that true, is that what went on and what went through your mind the night you were visiting with Troy in the bar at the motel? 

A. Yeah. 

Q. And is that why you decided to do this? 

A. Yeah. 

Q. And was any of this true at that time? 

A. Any of what true? 

Q. Any of the business about the basis for suing these people, the parties with all these people? Other than … and the other people that you mentioned, anything about Alan Baer or any of those—Larry King, any of those people true at that time? 

A. Yeah, so I wasn’t really— 

Q. I beg your pardon? 

A. Yeah, I was—I wasn’t really making nothing up about any of the persons. 

Van Pelt was again forced to walk Danny King through his conversation with Boner at the bar, and help him snap back into line—but King still had considerable difficulties staying on track. Boner testified that Alan Baer had been his only homosexual relationship ever, but Danny King testified that he and Boner had previously engaged in homosexual acts together. Both Boner and Danny King told Caradori that Larry King forced them to sodomize each other during a party at the Woodman Tower. Danny King, once more, outright contradicted Boner and came perilously close to the story he had conveyed to Caradori. 

Danny King initially testified that he met Alisha Owen in the summer of 1988. They hung out “four times and each time was, you know, a couple of hours.” But in response to a grand juror’s question, he discussed a trip to California that he took with Owen. Boner also mentioned Danny King and Owen’s trip to California during his testimony. Moreover, Owen discussed a short jaunt to California with Danny King when interviewed by Caradori and the FBI. 

By the time Danny King stepped down from the stand and was unshackled from his confusion, his role in generating the hoax, contradictions aside, would be distilled to talking to Boner at the Residence Inn bar for an hour, discussing the “case” with Caradori for an hour, and then giving a five-hour videotaped statement. Throughout his testimony, Danny King, like Boner, suffered repeated bouts of amnesia about his ability to provide such intricate details to Caradori over the course of his videotaped statement. A grand juror was even inspired to ask him about the elaborate minutiae he provided Caradori, and he responded, “I just played it by ear.” 

When Boner and Danny King appeared before the grand jury, they recurrently lost themselves in a labyrinth of lies and contradictions—I’ve mentioned a rather limited litany. Their testimony had a comedic aspect—a sort of Abbott and Costello Meet the Grand Jury—but the grave abuses they would later admit to covering up severely detract from the comical facets of their testimony, rendering their grand jury appearance a disfigurement of American justice and a true tragedy. 

Danny King testified in front of the grand jury on April 5, and Alisha Owen was slated to appear on April 30, but her appearance would be pushed back to May 8. Prior to her grand jury testimony, she would be subjected to a merciless campaign of viciousness and betrayal that was to become an all-too-familiar occurrence in her life. Owen had been confined to segregation at York since January—she was isolated, and FBI agents essentially had her in a vise that they were screwing tighter and tighter. But, astonishingly, she wouldn’t even bend … let alone break. 

On April 10, York’s Visitor’s Register shows that FBI agents paid a final visit to Owen. She said the FBI made her an attractive offer that day: If she recanted her story, she would be granted her freedom. She still refused to recant. The FBI would now be forced to put all of its cunning, resources, and power to bear upon a twenty one-year-old. Needless to say, the FBI had a number of potent weapons in its arsenal to carry out its objective, including Pamela Vuchetich. 

Owen had given Vuchetich, her trusted lawyer, a folder of letters, poems, and other personal papers that she didn’t want the FBI to snatch, because she felt an FBI search was imminent. One of the documents in the folder was a list of Owen’s former friends and relationships—Vuchetich had told Owen to write out the list. Though Owen and her mother initially objected to Owen’s making such a list, Vuchetich convinced them that the list optimized Vuchetich’s ability to defend Owen—it ensured Vuchetich wouldn’t be sandbagged by people from Owen’s past who held grudges and might be called as witnesses. In response to subpoenas, Vuchetich didn’t invoke attorney-client privilege, but, rather, surrendered the folder —including the list—to the NSP and FBI! Witnesses who played pivotal roles in deconstructing Owen’s credibility before the grand jury were on that list.

For example, two of the witnesses called by Van Pelt to impugn Owen’s integrity came from that list. The first had had sex with her when she had been a minor and he was an adult. He was also fond of smoking marijuana, even though he had a security clearance to work at Offutt Air Force Base. So, because of the possibility of jail time and the loss of his job, he would have been particularly vulnerable to threats from the FBI. Law enforcement also found other witnesses who were willing to testify against Owen. As a teenager and young adult, Owen certainly had bouts of being dissolute, and many of her friends and acquaintances were dissolute too; so their lifestyle made them particularly vulnerable to intimidation by law enforcement. 

Moreover, Vuchetich left Owen high and dry just prior to her testimony before the grand jury. Though Danny King started to recant his videotaped statements to Caradori in early March, Vuchetich didn’t skip a beat in her representation of Owen —in an apparent conflict of interest, she would continue to represent Owen for nearly two months after Danny King began to sing the FBI’s tune. Fortunately, Donna Owen had sensed trouble with Vuchetich, and she contacted Omaha attorney Henry Rosenthal, who consented to represent her daughter. When Vuchetich deserted Owen shortly before her grand jury appearance, the sixty-year-old Rosenthal would sprint to Owen’s rescue. “The poor girl was floundering,” he told me about Owen. “Nobody wanted to represent her.” 

Rosenthal’s first official act as Owen’s attorney was to request that her grand jury testimony be postponed while he brought himself up to speed on her predicament. Van Pelt would have the benevolence to push back her grand jury appearance until May 8, but the damage Vuchetich had wreaked upon Owen by then was considerable and, perhaps, irreversible. 

Before Owen took the stand to testify, Troy Boner, Danny King, NSP Investigator Phillips, and also a prominent Nebraskan had thoroughly tainted her character and testified she was a liar—several subsequent witnesses also leapt on the bash-Alisha Owen bandwagon. Chuck Phillips repeatedly took the stand and recounted NSP and FBI interviews that were extremely damaging to Owen—I’m aware of a friend of Owen’s who refused to sign his FBI statement, due to the fact that it significantly differed from the actual disclosures he had made to the agents. 

Over the course of two separate appearances, Phillips discussed FBI interviews with Jeff Hubbell—Owen named Hubbell as the Boys Town student who introduced her to Larry King et al. (Bonacci alleged Hubbell’s involvement with the Franklin pandering network too.) Caradori had attempted to find Hubbell, and FBI agents informed him that Hubbell was living in California, but they wouldn’t disclose his exact location. 

Phillips testified that Hubbell was living in Arizona, and an Omaha FBI agent initially made “telephone contact” with him, and then he described Hubbell’s having a face-to-face interview with FBI agents. According to Phillips, Hubbell told the FBI that he did indeed attend Boys Town and met Owen at a dance, but he didn’t know Larry King—nor had he ever been enmeshed in a sex network. Hubbell reportedly said Owen was “demented” for insinuating such a story. 

Alisha Owen spent two days in front of a hostile grand jury that had been primed to look upon her as a petulant, pathological liar. She was also painted as a wanton tramp who would sleep with just about anyone, anywhere, anytime. Owen attempted to explain that her teenage promiscuity was the result of her sexuality having been so deeply disfigured at an early age: “I had absolutely no concept of what sex … was supposed to mean because my sexual experiences started in such a warped way.” But her explanations apparently stirred little sympathy among the grand jury, as evinced by a grand juror ruminating aloud, “I can’t imagine Alisha being around a man and not having gone to bed with him.” 

As Dougherty grilled Owen, she was unwavering about the truth of the videotaped statements she gave to Caradori. Dougherty’s meticulously choreographed examination of Owen touched upon her psychiatric hospitalizations, suicide attempts, drug deals, bounced checks, flight from the law, etc. He also focused on her relationship with Michael Casey, and the brief period of time she had spent at the home of Casey’s friend. Owen said that Casey made repeated efforts to contact her while she was incarcerated at York. Though she really didn’t have a favorable opinion of him, she had written him one letter to be polite. 

Dougherty also pressed Owen about her relationship with Robert Wadman. She claimed that Wadman was definitely the father of the child she had given birth to at sixteen, and stated she would be willing to take a blood test and also a polygraph. She provided details of their Wednesday afternoon encounters and also described the French Café’s basement. Dougherty questioned her about social services documents that listed someone else as her daughter’s father. 

Owen replied that she and her mother went to social services to enroll her daughter in Medicaid, and social services personnel required her to provide a name for the father. She said she attempted to skirt around providing the father’s name, but social services insisted; so she jotted down the name of an acquaintance—Owen’s mother corroborated her account of this impasse when she appeared before the grand jury. As a sixteen-year-old, Owen told the grand jury, it would have been extremely unwise for her to name the OPD Chief as her daughter’s father—her daughter’s birth certificate didn’t list a name for the father. 

A grand juror inquired if she thought of having an abortion, and Owen discussed her difficult decision to have her baby. She claimed that while Larry King’s enforcer was trying to threaten her into having an abortion, she attended her parents’ pro-life church and a video on abortion had been shown to the congregation. “I looked at it,” she told the grand jury, “and thought that’s almost as bad as what happened to me. And I thought I can’t do that—I can’t—I can’t do that.” She concluded that having an abortion was a moral line she just wouldn’t breach, even though she felt that her decision was potentially life threatening. 

Dougherty asked Owen why she didn’t reach out to her parents for help, and she replied with a pair of rhetorical questions: “What power do they have? Who are they going to go to?” She then said, “They can’t call the police…. They can’t go to the FBI.” Owen further related her quandary of powerlessness to the grand jury: “There is [sic] two ways to do things. You either do it the easy way and you don’t get hurt as much or it isn’t as painful, or you do it the hard way. Either way you’re going to do it … I would much rather have it be as pleasant as possible, and in that situation nothing was pleasant, but at least I wasn’t bleeding and at least I wasn’t dead.” 

Dougherty interrogated Owen regarding Danny King’s participation at the Twin Tower parties in the fall of 1983, and she continued to stick to her original story. Dougherty then brought out the smoking gun that would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Owen was lying: Danny King’s school records. He held up Danny King’s school records and handed them to Owen—the records were “proof positive” that Danny King attended school in Texas from September of 1983 to January of 1984. Owen didn’t flinch, replying, “He was in the state, I saw him”—she said he stayed with Boner’s family. Owen then looked at the records and showed Dougherty that Danny King had missed forty days of school over the four-month period: half of the school days. 

Danny King’s mother would then be hauled before the grand jury to testify that her son had never left the state when he attended school in Texas. During Boner’s second grand jury appearance, however, a grand juror asked Boner if Danny King lived with him while King’s mother was in Texas and Oklahoma, and Boner replied, “He was only gone for a couple weeks, and he came back and moved in with me … he lived with me for about six months.” The grand juror then started to make specific inquiries about King’s stay with Boner—Boner quickly realized that he had told an inconvenient truth and started to backpedal. But he floundered and barked out a swift succession of contradictory stories about when King lived with his family. Finally, Van Pelt had to intervene and come to the rescue: 

Q. Troy, are you saying was there ever a time that Danny was way down in Texas or Oklahoma with his family for four to five months? 

A. Yeah, yeah. 

Q. During that four to five month period, did he come back and visit you in the Omaha area? 

A. He came back and moved in with me. 

Q. After the four to five months? 

A. Yeah. 

Q. Okay. So what you’re saying is that during that four- to five-month period he didn’t live with you, he was down in Texas? 

A. Yeah, he was in Texas with his family, and he called me a couple times. 

As the grand jury trudged onward, the family of Al and Donna Owen would be subjected to a Kafkaesque assault. For months the Owens heard incessant racket on their phones, and they had no doubts that someone somewhere was listening to their conversations. Moreover, mysterious individuals in unmarked cars routinely parked outside their home. 

On the night of Friday May 25, the grand jury’s looming specter rolled up to the Owens’ front doorstep in the inhospitable form of the NSP’s Chuck Phillips and a second NSP officer. They had an order, signed by a Douglas County Judge, “to effect whatever detention is necessary to obtain” a blood sample from Alisha Owen’s five-year-old daughter. If Owen’s daughter failed to “comply with the provisions” of the order, she would be “guilty of contempt of court and punished accordingly.” The type of order Van Pelt had Phillips serve was usually reserved for the alleged perpetrators of a sexual assault, not for the alleged victims—let alone the five-year-old daughter of a victim. 

Al and Donna Owen had seen their daughter subjected to truly shocking injustices by the end of May, and attorney Rosenthal had insisted that Robert Wadman, Alisha Owen, and Owen’s daughter simultaneously submit to blood tests to ensure that the testing would at least have an air of integrity. Though Rosenthal and the Owens made a reasonable stipulation, Al and Donna Owen felt that Van Pelt and the NSP might pull something underhanded like snatching their granddaughter. As a result, the Owens took precautions guaranteeing their granddaughter was nowhere to be found the night Phillips showed up “to effect whatever detention is necessary.” 

Phillips served the order on a Friday night, and the blood test wasn’t scheduled until Wednesday, and, given the order’s wording and the prior conduct of the NSP, the Owens believed it was certainly within the realm of possibility that the NSP would “detain” their granddaughter for five days. After Phillips’ visit, Donna Owen quickly contacted Senators Schmit and Chambers, who vociferously voiced their objections to the order. 

Their criticisms even inspired Samuel Van Pelt to break his code of silence on the machinations of the grand jury and issue a public statement. “I just think this needs some explanation,” he told the World-Herald. Van Pelt said he obtained the order only after the voluntary plan fell apart. In the article, Henry Rosenthal stated that his client was perfectly willing to take a blood test: “I have authority to tell you that my client and her daughter will submit to a blood test at either the pathology center at Creighton University or the University of Nebraska Medical Center, as long as the alleged father is there.” 

Donna Owen appeared before the grand jury on the Wednesday following Phillips’ Friday night visit—she was still shell-shocked by the fact that a Douglas County Judge had issued an order of detention against her little granddaughter. She no longer had any illusions about the grand jury vying for justice—she felt it was rigged, and nothing she could possibly say would affect its outcome. 

Dougherty initially quizzed Donna Owen about her and her daughter’s background. She described Alisha’s abnormal behavior, starting as a teenager—abnormal behavior that was both perplexing and inexplicable to her parents. Dougherty then questioned Donna Owen about Alisha’s relationship with Troy Boner. She testified that Alisha announced her engagement to Boner in July 1988, and the Owens invited Boner to their house for dinner. 

Alisha claimed to have recently met Boner, but Donna Owen said, “No one at the dinner table thought they had just met.” She felt that they were just too familiar with each other—“It was almost like they had been married for four or five years.” After the dinner, Donna Owen asked her other children if they were previously aware of Boner, and Alisha’s younger sister said that a “Troy” had repeatedly phoned their home over the years. 

Dougherty then inquired about the Owens’ first contact with Gary Caradori. Donna Owen responded that Caradori phoned the Owen’s home, looking for Alisha, and her husband told him that she was incarcerated at York. After Caradori’s call, Al and Donna visited their daughter at York and informed her that someone had phoned their home, inquiring about her whereabouts. Donna Owen said that her daughter had a “panic attack” about Al Owen disclosing she was at York, and she made her parents promise they would never disclose her whereabouts again. Dougherty asked Donna Owen if Caradori promised “benefits” to Alisha for her cooperation, and Donna Owen said point blank, “That is a rumor started by the World-Herald. That is absolutely not true.” 

By the time Senator Schmit made his first appearance before the grand jury on May 15, Van Pelt had called witnesses who either portrayed the senator in an unfavorable light or severely ravaged his credibility. One witness in particular commented on Schmit’s “paranoia,” testifying that he wasn’t “well physically or mentally.” Van Pelt also seemed to be obsessed with illuminating Schmit’s ties to John DeCamp and establishing DeCamp’s undue influence over Schmit and the Committee. 

Van Pelt interrogated Schmit about his relationship with DeCamp, and Schmit replied that they had met in the legislature twenty years earlier—they were close friends, and DeCamp represented him in a legal capacity. Van Pelt asked Schmit if DeCamp had seen the Committee’s reports or records—Schmit flat-out denied that DeCamp ever had access to any of the Committee’s files, reports, or tapes. Van Pelt inquired where DeCamp had garnered the names for his infamous memo—Schmit said he had made the same inquiry of DeCamp, who responded that the five names were a ubiquitous buzz on the streets. 

The grand jury had been primed about Schmit’s “paranoia”; so when he talked about the fact that he thought his phones were tapped, it likely became easy for grand jurors to dismiss him. Schmit testified that his suspicions about his phones being tapped were confirmed when he provided Caradori with the name of a possible witness over the phone: Before Caradori contacted her, she received a visit from the FBI. He told the grand jury that he didn’t want to sound “melodramatic,” but he wouldn’t discuss “anything over the telephone that I didn’t want repeated over the television, I’ll tell you that.” 

Schmit departed the grand jury feeling perturbed, because he felt that Van Pelt had neglected to address numerous pertinent issues. Moreover, Van Pelt hadn’t left time for the grand jurors to ask him questions. He requested that he appear before the grand jury once more, and his request was granted. Between Schmit’s first and second appearance before the grand jury, he heard murmurs that Alisha Owen would be indicted for perjury and Caradori for obstruction of justice. 

During his second appearance, he read a prepared statement and gave an impassioned plea for the grand jury to carefully consider all the evidence. Schmit said that “based upon the evidence the Committee has heard, we are convinced that certain prominent citizens have abused children, are abusing children, and will abuse children in the future. It would be a great tragedy if nothing is done about it.” He also discussed law enforcement’s unwillingness to act and its hindrances: “Too many unanswered questions, ladies and gentlemen, too many leads not followed and too many roadblocks placed in the way of the investigation.” Prior to Franklin, Schmit had been an almost dogmatic believer in “the system,” and it clearly broke his heart when he realized that his pleas had fallen on deaf ears. 

Caradori was called before the grand jury a second time at the end of April and would make a third appearance in the middle of May—in the wake of Boner and Danny King telling Van Pelt and company that they lied during their videotaped statements. Though Caradori had concluded that the grand jury was essentially a runaway train after his first appearance, he had an unyielding optimism and again hoped that just maybe his sincerity and honesty had a chance of saving the day. 

Caradori was familiar with the grand jury format, and he knew that grand jurors had the prerogative to request the subpoenaing of witnesses; so his underlying strategy was to provide the names of prospective witnesses whenever Van Pelt gave him the latitude. He dropped the names of three pilots who had flown charters for King and had said kids were on the flights. He also named the woman at the charter service who informed him that King and a gaggle of young men made almost weekly flights. The grand jury wouldn’t subpoena any of them. 

After Van Pelt went to great lengths to address the “relationship” between Caradori and Michael Casey, he focused on Casey’s providing Caradori with Alisha Owen’s name. Caradori stated that “Alisha Owen” was just one of countless names Casey and others had rattled off that he scribbled on his “scratchpad.” Caradori maintained Casey told him that he had no idea where Owen lived, her connection to Franklin, or even if she was still alive. Caradori told the grand jury that he located Owen weeks after gleaning her name, and, even then, it took him an additional three weeks before he made his initial trek to York.

Following Van Pelt’s examination, Caradori had to contend with Dougherty, who inquired about the phone call Owen made to Boner or vice-versa, depending on Boner’s various accounts, in Caradori’s office, which was the supposed linchpin of their cooking up the ruse. Caradori recalled that he took Boner directly to the Residence Inn. He said if, in fact, they stopped by his office, it would have been a brief pit stop for videotape, but he was certain that Boner was never “out of my sight.” Boner’s purported phone call to Owen ultimately came down to a “he said” versus a “he said and she said,” meaning it was Boner’s word against the word of Caradori and Ormiston. 

Dougherty questioned Caradori about the day he and Boner drove to Omaha and met Danny King, and Caradori replied that Boner and Danny King were alone for “maybe a minute to a minute and a half.” In response to a grand juror, Caradori said he brought Boner and King back to his office that night—he sent Boner to his apartment, and then he took King to the Residence Inn, where they both spent the night. A grand juror questioned Caradori about Boner and Danny King having beers in the lounge of the Residence Inn before Caradori videotaped King—Caradori replied that the Residence Inn didn’t have a lounge. 

After Caradori’s stint in front of the grand jury in April, he found and videotaped Paul Bonacci, who corroborated the allegations by Owen, Boner, and Danny King on various perpetrators and numerous details. Caradori was called before the grand jury in May to discuss Bonacci. “The believability to me came when he kept talking about Troy, Danny, Alisha, and not a whole lot of people knew about Troy, Danny, and Alisha and some of the circumstances,” Caradori said to Van Pelt of Bonacci. “He described people that I knew he was on target with.” 

Van Pelt questioned Caradori about Bonacci’s previous statements to the OPD regarding Larry King et al., which he had recanted. Caradori testified that Bonacci was frightened to death of Larry King and Alan Baer, but he recanted only after an OPD officer threatened to charge him with additional crimes if he didn’t. Caradori then elaborated on Bonacci’s videotaped interview, where Bonacci mentioned a host of improbable occurrences, including his sexual liaisons with politicians in Washington, DC and the filming of a boy being murdered near Sacramento. Caradori said the following about Bonacci’s Sacramento account: “I don’t know if it happened, but one thing I do know is this kid described three people—Troy, Danny, and Alisha—in similar circumstances that matched their stories.” 

Caradori told the grand jury that he retrieved a number of Bonacci’s notebooks and letters from his grandmother’s apartment, where he was living at the time of his arrest. Caradori came across one of Bonacci’s diaries that had a number of pages ripped out of it, and he asked Bonacci about the missing pages—Bonacci stated to him that the OPD was previously in possession of the diary, and someone with the police must have purloined the missing pages. 

After Caradori testified to the grand jury about Bonacci, and before Bonacci testified, Van Pelt called an OPD detective to the stand who demolished Bonacci’s credibility. This wasn’t exceptionally difficult, considering Bonacci suffered from multiple personalities and was an incarcerated sex offender. The detective talked about Bonacci’s “wild stories,” and he said the OPD had polygraphed him, but the results were inconclusive because of his psychiatric disorder. The detective testified that Bonacci eventually recanted all of his tall tales; Van Pelt asked him if the OPD threatened Bonacci into recanting his prior statements. He replied with an unequivocal “No.” 

Before Bonacci recanted his “wild stories” to the OPD in March of 1990, he had told investigators about a sexual relationship between Alisha Owen and Robert Wadman. A grand juror inquired of the OPD investigator how Bonacci could have come by that information. The investigator unhesitatingly replied, “Out of a newspaper I would imagine.” The grand juror mentioned that Owen’s name had yet to appear in the paper. The detective then said that “word spreads like wildfire” through the jailhouse grapevine. The grand juror remarked that they were incarcerated at different prisons. The OPD investigator responded that the jailhouse grapevine more or less had telepathic powers: “It’s a network that you couldn’t imagine.” 

A subsequent grand juror questioned the detective about his thoughts on Caradori’s interviewing Bonacci, and he was amusedly dismissive, as if Caradori had lost his mind: “I just heard he went and interviewed Bonacci, and I said, ‘Oh, my God.’” 

Bonacci was called before the grand jury at the end of June—about a month after the OPD officer impugned his credibility. Bonacci had been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder in April, and he was still in the midst of struggling to understand his condition. He told me that appearing before the grand jury was like being dragged in front of a hostile inquisition; he found the experience extremely stressful. To cope with the stress, he said, his psyche started to unconsciously shift into different personalities or “alters.” 

Throughout the majority of Bonacci’s testimony, he was apparently in a color-blind alter, because Dougherty asked him about the color of an individual’s eyes, and a grand juror asked him the color of an individual’s hair—he replied in each case that he couldn’t say for sure because he was color-blind. Dr. Mead’s report on Bonacci stated that one of his alters was color-blind. 

Bonacci reiterated much of the information he gave to Caradori about perpetrators, victims, places, and times. He testified that he recanted his statements to the OPD only after threats from a particular officer—it was the very same officer whom Van Pelt called to shred Bonacci’s credibility. When Caradori interviewed Bonacci, he had named a renowned multimillionaire as one of his abusers—Van Pelt questioned him about this, and Bonacci denied being molested by him. 

The grand jury took a brief recess, and then Bonacci returned to the stand. Bonacci told Dougherty that he lied about the renowned multimillionaire, because he was scared to death of him, but he had, in fact, been abused by him. Dougherty then questioned Bonacci about their liaisons—he was very specific about the locations and said Larry King arranged them. 

After Dougherty interrogated Bonacci, the grand jury recessed for lunch. During the lunch break, Bonacci told me, someone affiliated with the grand jury threatened him and advised that he recant his morning’s testimony. When the grand jury reconvened, Van Pelt immediately asked Bonacci if he wished to change any of his prior testimony—Bonacci said, “No.” 

As the grand jury was in its homestretch, Van Pelt paraded several witnesses before the grand jurors who testified about the moral turpitude and conniving of Michael Casey. Two of the witnesses testified that Casey took them for a ride financially, and Casey’s termination from Boys Town was extensively discussed. NSP Investigator Phillips was called in to give a summary of Casey’s criminal history. 

The “Hollywood producer” whom Casey coaxed to Nebraska was called to the stand. The FBI tracked him down in Beverly Hills and served him with a federal subpoena, demanding that he appear before the federal grand jury looking into Franklin. The day he showed up to testify in front of the feds, he was handed a state subpoena that required him to appear before the Douglas County grand jury. The FBI had him jot down notes on his sojourn to Nebraska with Casey; Dougherty just happened to have a copy of the notes, and handed them to the producer to “refresh” his memory. 

Both Van Pelt and Dougherty questioned the producer. Dougherty guided him into making a number of unsavory disclosures about Casey, including the fact that Casey had burned him for $3,225. But Dougherty was particularly interested in his meeting with Casey and Caradori at the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln. The producer testified that he introduced himself to Caradori after the latter came to the door of his suite—he said they had a brief discussion before Casey entered the room, corresponding to what Caradori told Franklin Committee counsel Berry shortly after he met the producer. 

The producer testified that he spoke to Caradori about the possibility of Caradori assisting in a movie that included “immoral crimes and espionage and very powerful individuals.” Dougherty then stated that he had read the producer’s notes and it “appears to me that it was Mr. Caradori who came up with the idea that the emphasis would need to be on child sexual abuse.” The producer initially responded that he received the same impression, but then he said that he may have “miswrote” Caradori’s comments, because he quoted Caradori: “He said that, well, ‘I can’t say anything right now but it’s big, real big. Heads are going to roll. This is an important issue.’ And that was primarily, to answer your question, what he said.” 

In addition to Caradori’s telling Berry about his “meeting” with the producer, he discussed their interaction in front of the Franklin Committee when it surfaced that the FBI was building a case against Casey and Caradori for scripting the child-abuse allegations. Caradori told the Committee that he talked to the producer for approximately ten or fifteen minutes before Casey slipped into the room. He said he and Casey had a fairly acrimonious exchange about Casey’s not delivering on the promised pictures, and then he left. 

Though the producer’s grand jury testimony essentially recounted the same story Caradori related to the Committee, he said that Caradori and Casey also discussed Alisha Owen. The producer said that Casey wanted Caradori to compensate him for providing Owen’s name, but Caradori wasn’t willing to even entertain the idea. At that point, Van Pelt went on a tear, attempting to squeeze everything he could from the producer’s comments on Casey and Caradori’s exchange about Owen. However, the producer could provide little additional information.

Van Pelt asked the producer if Caradori wanted a “percentage” of the project, and he replied that “it’s a sales technique” to offer someone a cut of a project. Van Pelt pressed the producer, asking if he and Caradori specifically discussed a cut of the movie. “I believe I would have said that,” the producer replied. Van Pelt continued to press the producer—“to the best you can remember”—if Caradori specifically requested a cut of the movie. The producer responded, “At least the best that I can remember. Because why else would he show up?” 

According to Caradori, the producer in question didn’t discuss a movie deal or Michael Casey when they initially talked over the phone, and Caradori was under the impression that he wanted to make use of Caracorp’s investigative or protective services. I think this account is to some extent corroborated by the fact that Casey didn’t show his face for the first “ten or fifteen” minutes of their conversation, and that Caradori split shortly after Casey emerged from the other room. Moreover, the producer explicitly testified that Caradori told him, “I can’t say anything right now” about the investigation; so it seems counterintuitive that Caradori would request, or a producer would offer, a cut of a story that Caradori wasn’t even willing to discuss. 

After Van Pelt evidently thought he’d established that Caradori was making clandestine Hollywood deals, he inquired if Caradori told the producer that he would have “to cut anybody else in on the deal like members of the Legislative Committee” or anyone else. The producer replied, “No, sir.” Van Pelt then seemed to be given to flights of fancy for Caradori’s upcoming Hollywood career, because he asked the producer if Caradori requested a specific movie star play him in the movie. “I don’t think Caradori mentioned to me, sir, anything like that,” said the producer. 

Van Pelt forgot to ask the producer if Caradori followed through on his quest for Hollywood notoriety, but a grand juror asked the producer if Caradori contacted him after their initial meeting. The producer said that Caradori didn’t contact him again, and they didn’t have a second meeting, even though he phoned Caradori requesting one. So Caradori didn’t contact the producer after their first meeting, and he obviously wasn’t receptive to a second meeting, but Van Pelt nonetheless asked the producer if Caradori requested a particular star to play his role. Van Pelt seemed to be considerably more enthralled about Caradori’s box-office potential than Caradori himself. 

The producer was also questioned about whether or not he had heard that the victims were recruited to tell their tales of abuse—he said “third parties” had related that fact to him. A grand juror asked him to identify the third parties, and the only definitive third party he mentioned was the FBI. The producer also discussed an Omaha FBI agent flying to Southern California to take his statement, and, after reading that statement, he noticed several inaccuracies. 

Though Michael Casey would become a focal point of the grand jury, and was subpoenaed, he was inexplicably nowhere to be found. In June 1990, NSP investigator Chuck Phillips was called to the stand and questioned about Casey’s whereabouts. Phillips sounded as if Casey had become one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted and a national dragnet was being conducted to find him. Phillips testified that the FBI received word that Casey had suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized in Las Vegas—he said the FBI quickly mobilized, but they arrived at the hospital too late. He told the grand jury that Casey managed to slip out of the hospital, and the FBI missed him by a mere “40 minutes.” One of the grand jurors speculated that he had snuck “out the window.” It is absolutely astonishing that despite the national manhunt for Casey, authorities just weren’t able to collar him to testify before the Douglas County grand jury. 

Though Senator Ernie Chambers had resigned from the Committee, he remained a very vocal critic of law enforcement’s handling of Franklin-related child-abuse allegations and of the Douglas County grand jury. Chambers had a reputation among Nebraska’s disenfranchised as their Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and he was trusted and revered by the downtrodden and oppressed. Now he was also becoming a champion for citizens who had lost faith in the willingness of Nebraska’s judiciary to prosecute child abuse. 

Chambers made it known, loud and clear, that the Douglas County grand jury was a kangaroo court, and he refused to testify before it. A local television station filmed him addressing a meeting of Concerned Parents: He unabashedly told the meeting’s attendees that the grand jury was an unequivocal sham and that Van Pelt and Dougherty were merely putting the state of Nebraska’s seal on a cover-up. Chambers told me that he talked to additional victims of the Franklin pandering network, but he advised them not to step forward because of the horrors that had befell the victims who spoke out. 

As a consequence of Chambers’ outspoken and scathing criticisms of Van Pelt, he became a lightning rod for grand jury witnesses who felt abused by law enforcement—two grand jury witnesses visited Chambers and leveled charges of improprieties directly against Van Pelt or Dougherty. Bonnie Cosentino of Concerned Parents approached Chambers after giving testimony to the grand jury, and said that Dougherty had harassed her shortly before she took the stand. Initially, Cosentino gratefully volunteered to appear before the grand jury, but then she heard about the NSP attempting to detain Alisha Owen’s little girl and quickly realized that all was not well with the Douglas County grand jury. 

According to her affidavit, the day before she took the stand, Cosentino phoned the number provided by the grand jury. She conveyed to the person fielding her call that she wished to cancel her grand jury appearance—the phone was summarily handed to Terry Dougherty. She stated that she expressed her misgivings about the grand jury proceedings to Dougherty—she claims he then single-handedly played “good cop, bad cop” with her: He told Cosentino that her testimony was important and preemptively offered a peculiar statement—he said they “weren’t trying to drag this thing out just to make money.” After Dougherty played good cop, she says, he threatened to subpoena her. So, under threat of subpoena, Cosentino showed up at the Douglas County Court House the next morning. 

Cosentino was ushered into a small room while she waited to be called as a witness. In her affidavit, she stated that she was alone, reviewing her notes, when Dougherty walked into the room and introduced himself. Cosentino maintained that Dougherty dispensed with the cordial formalities that are customarily reserved for an initial encounter and launched into a hostile diatribe, portraying the Owen family as troublemakers. As Dougherty’s diatribe became louder and louder, Cosentino wrote, she suggested that he talk to Senator Chambers, who was better informed on the issue—Dougherty barked, “‘Oh, Ernie Chambers,’ and waved his hand downward, then made a sound with his mouth as though he were spitting.” Evidently, Dougherty didn’t hold Chambers in very high esteem. 

“I was aware that Mr. Dougherty,” Cosentino continued in her affidavit, “a complete stranger to me, intended to let me know that he knew my private opinions, my knowledge of the situation, and also my friendship with the Owen family. He made me aware through his demeanor in angrily discussing this that I was not in an impartial and fair environment of truth, but rather that I was sort of in enemy territory…” 

Approximately two months after Cosentino gave her affidavit to Chambers, a twenty-year-old woman who had testified before the grand jury in the latter half of June turned up at his office with a very bizarre story. Alisha Owen had mentioned the young woman during one of her videotaped statements to Caradori: Owen thought she had seen the young woman with Larry King’s enforcer, but Owen said she had never seen her at a sex party. 

Caradori and Ormiston found her living in Lincoln, Nebraska, and they interviewed her. She confessed to being repeatedly molested by her father since the age of ten. She also said that her father brought her to a “trailer house” to be used for kiddy porn. She told Caradori that after high school she had drifted into prostitution and dabbled in Satanism. Though she said that she hadn’t attended King’s parties, nor could she recall meeting Owen, she was somewhat familiar with the names of certain individuals involved with King but lacked first-hand information. 

FBI agents interviewed her too, and she gave the agents basically the same story. Despite the fact that she was in the dark concerning Larry King, she was subpoenaed to appear before the Douglas County grand jury: She would be a perfect candidate to discredit Owen, because Owen had tangentially mentioned her, and yet she knew nothing of Larry King. The FBI wouldn’t even need to threaten her. 

After she received the subpoena, she phoned the grand jury and requested that she be provided with transportation to Omaha—her lift to the grand jury came in the form of Samuel Van Pelt, who actually chauffeured her to Omaha! The young woman told Chambers that she initially didn’t have a clue regarding Van Pelt’s status with the grand jury until he disclosed that he was its special prosecutor. After Van Pelt informed the woman of his role, she said she would “plead the Fifth” unless he divulged how the grand jury had acquired her name. Van Pelt reportedly revealed to her that Alisha Owen mentioned her name on “some tapes.” Van Pelt also reportedly told her that Owen had made accusations of sexual abuse against OPD Chief Wadman and that the grand jurors didn’t believe her. 

In the woman’s statement to Chambers, she said that Van Pelt confessed to her that he was weary of the grand jury proceedings and coveted returning to his farm—Van Pelt hoped the grand jury would be “over soon” and complained that it had been drawn out too long. Van Pelt theoretically had ultimate control over the scope and span of the grand jury. If the woman’s statements are truthful regarding Van Pelt’s complaint about the grand jury’s duration, one must wonder who was actually controlling the grand jury? 

The woman also told Chambers that Van Pelt plied her with a number of questions concerning parties at the Twin Towers, and she replied that she had never been to a party there. “I didn’t have or know about any of the information the grand jury was dealing with,” she said. “So it seemed to me like he was going to use me just to discredit Alisha.” 

The woman said she felt threatened by Van Pelt too, because she thought that he might use her previous transgressions as legal leverage: “There were some things in my past that I was afraid he was going to charge me with.” In addition to mentioning misconduct on the part of Van Pelt, she discussed an utter lack of decorum and concern on the part of the grand jurors. She said that the grand jurors talked among themselves and laughed while she testified: “Nobody from the jury actually seemed to care what was going on at all about the case.” 

After the woman testified to the grand jury, Van Pelt had the generosity to shuttle her back to Lincoln. During the ride back to Lincoln, she maintained, Van Pelt told her he had an “easy day” coming up because the witness being called before the grand jury on the following day would take the Fifth. “He told me that he was a homosexual and that he had sex with little boys,” she said. “So he would plead the Fifth so he wouldn’t get indicted.” 

The woman’s statement to Chambers on this detail is very telling—Alan Baer was the witness called before the grand jury the following morning. He took refuge behind the Fifth and didn’t even show up. The grand jury proceedings were blanketed in secrecy, which included the witnesses called to testify; so it would have been nearly impossible for the woman to be aware that a homosexual who had “sex with little boys” would be called by Van Pelt the next morning unless he had actually told her. Moreover, Van Pelt was seemingly admitting that he knew Alan Baer had sex with little boys. 

Chambers sent the woman’s statement and an accompanying letter to the media and also to Douglas County Attorney Ronald Staskiewicz. In the letter, Chambers stated that Van Pelt appeared to have been in violation of the grand jury’s “secrecy requirement” and also guilty of “tampering with a witness.” In response, Staskiewicz wrote that Douglas County Deputy Attorney Bob Sigler and an “investigator” interviewed the woman for more than two hours and concluded that Van Pelt hadn’t committed a crime.

I tend to believe that the vast majority of the grand jurors were most likely good citizens, who were simply worn down and utterly confused by a four-month deluge of unremitting testimony that gushed truth, lies, irrelevancies, and outright absurdities. The last category was made absolutely evident when Van Pelt called a man to the stand who was clearly unhinged and knew nothing of Franklin. Van Pelt told the grand jurors that the man had written a letter to the grand jury requesting to appear as a witness, and after he personally talked to the man over the phone, he had decided to call him as a witness. 

Van Pelt didn’t even ask this witness questions, but, rather, let him rant. He went off on various tangents concerning Communist plots and was particularly piqued about KGB infiltration of the Food and Drug Administration: “Now, so I believe that Communism is a simplex theory, which has no practical application in reality, and Communists are lacking in judgment, and also that both the CIA and the three FDA networks are manipulated by double agents of the KGB.” The witness then discussed the “models and theories” he developed that would aid the treatment of cancer, high blood pressure, and muscular dystrophy; unfortunately medical researchers in Nebraska, whom he concluded were KGB agents, had undermined his revolutionary medical advances—he demanded that the Douglas County grand jury take action on his behalf! “Now, I do have a request for the grand jury, I mean, I came here with that specific purpose, and I’m asking for an indictment against the Nebraska Medical Center.” None of the grand jurors felt compelled to question the witness. 

During the third week of July, an exhilarating hum saturated Nebraska’s airwaves: Television newscasters and radio talk show hosts tingled with excitement as they quoted “sources” in the know who whispered that the Douglas County grand jury was in the homestretch of its deliberations. Van Pelt had pledged to restore “integrity” to the system, and his grand jury had worked unremittingly to that end for month after month. Finally, all the confusion and uncertainty would be cleared up—criminals would be indicted and the innocent cleared. 

On July 23, 1990, within two weeks of Gary Caradori’s conveniently timed demise, the Douglas County grand jury released its whopping forty-page report, and it seemed as if Moses had descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. The World-Herald bore a banner headline, flaunting a font size that probably hadn’t been seen since Apollo 11 landed on the moon or, perhaps, the Kennedy assassination: “Grand Jury Says Abuse Stories Were a ‘Carefully Crafted Hoax.’” A subheadline stated: “Three Indicted; Many Rumors Debunked.” Below the banner headline were three blown-up pictures—Alan Baer, Alisha Owen, and Senator Schmit. (The World-Herald had the tact to use a police mug shot for Owen.) The grand jury concluded that “Franklin” entailed absolutely no child abuse except within the confines of the Webb household: Alisha Owen was indicted on eight counts of perjury, Paul Bonacci was indicted on three counts of perjury, and Alan Baer received two indictments for adult pandering. 

The World-Herald published the Douglas County grand jury report, and on the report’s first page Van Pelt and company discussed the thoroughness of their deliberations—convening for “82 days,” reviewing “395 exhibits,” issuing “136 subpoenas,” hearing from “76 witnesses,” and watching “over 30 hours of videotapes.” The first page of the report also included an introductory comment on Owen: “Two of the victims recanted their video statements and testified that a third victim, Alisha Owen, was perpetrating a hoax for personal gain.” 

There were some difficulties with the truth even on the report’s first page—I have trouble with “reviewed 395 exhibits.” On July 23, the very day grand jury foreman Michael Flanagan signed off on the report and it was released to the public, Van Pelt introduced eighty-seven exhibits into evidence. I find it inconceivable that the grand jurors could have adequately “reviewed” eighty-seven exhibits on the grand jury’s final day of “deliberations,” even if they had been enrolled in an Evelyn Wood speed-reading crash course and were provided with bottomless cups of espresso. 

However, here’s where it gets interesting: sixty-two of those exhibits were given the same number—exhibit “394.” So it ultimately appears that Van Pelt only introduced twenty-six exhibits on that final day. And here’s where it gets even a little more interesting: Among those eighty-seven exhibits introduced on July 23 was a “review” of Caracorp’s phone records. NSP investigator Phillips picked up a copy of Caracorp’s phone records on May 23, and they weren’t introduced into evidence until July 23! Thus, Van Pelt had possessed evidence that the phantom phone call never existed, but never questioned Boner about his veracity concerning the call. 

The grand jury’s report was remarkably bizarre in its own right, even though it was intended for public consumption. The report declared that the child-abuse allegations concerning Larry King et al. were nothing more than the insidious work of “rumormongers,” and it even quoted Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “Rumor is a pipe, blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures.” The grand jury’s foreman would later confess that Van Pelt had an integral role in writing the report; so perhaps its literary contrivances were a byproduct of Van Pelt’s fertile imagination: 

Perhaps never in the history of Douglas County has the discordant multitude played so feverishly upon the rumor pipe as in the allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Franklin. As Shakespeare observed, nearly four centuries ago, the local rumors have been blown by surmise, jealousy, and conjecture. Although many in the community both spread and received the gossip, three individuals are particularly illustrative. 

The grand jury report named three primary rumormongers who couldn’t get enough of playing so feverishly on that old rumor pipe: Michael Casey, Kirstin Hallberg, and Bonnie Cosentino. The grand jury report gave a rundown of Casey’s countless transgressions and extensive “criminal record.” Casey was the fountainhead of all those nasty rumors—he labored incessantly, surely around the clock, to weave his web of innuendo that entangled the gullible masses, the Franklin Committee, Concerned Parents, Gary Caradori, etc. According to the report, the city and greater metropolitan area now had to recover from the blight of Michael Casey—an ethical eunuch who had masqueraded as a freelance writer: “Meanwhile, Omaha must go forward and try to leave behind the rumors, fear, accusations, and lies which Casey helped spread.” 

The report then gave an account of Casey admitting himself to Saint Joseph Hospital and befriending Alisha Owen—they “lived under the same roof” and even “corresponded” after Owen was incarcerated. “We believe that Caradori would not have found Owen if it were not for Casey. Owen then led Caradori to other potential victim/witnesses.” The grand jury report clearly distorted reality when it discussed Casey and Owen’s relationship: Owen wrote Casey one letter from York —they didn’t have a continuing correspondence. 

Casey’s primary impetuses for being a rumormonger were “grudges” and “creating a sensational story,” but the grand jury felt that Kirstin Hallberg concealed a different motive: “Hallberg believed that she was acting in the public’s best interests. However, many of those testifying disagreed, viewing her as a troublemaker, gossip, and self-appointed conscience of the public.” 

The report made another departure from reality when it stated, “Hallberg’s name surfaced in almost every stage of this investigation.” Hallberg accompanied her friend, Kathleen Sorenson, when the latter brought Eulice Washington to meet Julie Walters—she certainly wasn’t the prime mover in Walters’ report. Moreover, Shawneta Moore merely told Hallberg that she had been in a prostitution and pornography ring while Hallberg worked at the Uta Halee facility and Moore was a resident—she was too frightened to name names. Moore told her school counselor about the specifics of the ring and named Larry King—the counselor then phoned Hallberg, requesting her assistance. Conversely, Hallberg played absolutely no role whatsoever in identifying Owen, Boner, Danny King, or Bonacci. So Hallberg’s name “surfaced” in connection with two victims. Assigning her an almost ubiquitous role in the investigation was ridiculous. 

The report fingered Bonnie Cosentino as a key rumormonger “who appeared to react from emotions rather than fact.” Cosentino supposedly colluded with Casey in the spreading of “misinformation, rumor, and innuendo…” The report flat out excoriated her as if she had emerged from some murky, reptilian netherworld: “If indeed there was a spawning ground in which Franklin rumors were born, nurtured, and grew, Cosentino would be found as an inhabitant.” 

The report ripped Cosentino for discussing Dougherty’s diatribe with Senator Chambers: “We believe that Cosentino reported, in violation of her oath, to Senator Chambers, and eventually indirectly to the media, that the Grand Jury was not attentive, cohesive, or effective.” The grand jury found Cosentino’s “misrepresentation” to be “inappropriate, unfair, and untrue” and designed to “harass and demoralize the grand jury” and “its prosecutorial staff.” It appears Van Pelt and company tell an outright lie in their statements concerning Cosentino contacting Chambers: The events described in Cosentino’s affidavit occurred before she entered the grand jury, so she wasn’t in “violation of her oath.” Furthermore, the report asserted that Cosentino harassed Dougherty rather than the opposite. I’ve personally known Cosentino for over five years, and I find it difficult to believe that she would “harass and demoralize” anyone. 

The grand jury smeared and castigated the rumormongers for three and a half pages before it tackled the early allegations, which consisted of the abuses recounted by Eulice Washington and Shawneta Moore. I never managed to acquire the grand jury testimony of Washington and Moore, but Washington has told me that she’s never recanted her allegations, and the grand jury report implied that she stuck to her story. The report, however, mentioned that a number of witnesses who traveled extensively with King were interviewed by the grand jury, and it found no evidence that Lisa Webb (Eulice Washington) or any other children were ever transported on interstate flights for illegal purposes.

Examples of the grand jury’s lack of due diligence are practically inexhaustible, but its unwillingness to track down passenger manifests or interview the pilots who flew Larry King’s charters was particularly egregious. The grand jury had access to scores and scores of Larry King’s flight receipts, as accumulated by both the Committee and the feds, and the overwhelming majority of them didn’t have accompanying FAA-mandated passenger manifests. 

The missing passenger manifests, in and of themselves, should have triggered red flags for the grand jury. Caradori’s testimony and his Investigative Reports also provided the grand jury with the names of pilots and employees of the charters who could have corroborated that children were on Larry King’s flights, but the pilots and employees named by Caradori were never subpoenaed. The grand jury ultimately demoted the missing passenger manifests to an almost inconsequential afterthought: “It is recommended that the FAA enforce requirements that all charter airline flights have a passenger manifest filed along with flight plans and logs similar to commercial airline flights. Since this investigation included allegations that certain persons were transported by charter flights for illegal purposes, passenger records would have facilitated the grand jury’s work.” 

Shawneta Moore was seventeen years old when she appeared before the grand jury, and, given the phrasing of its report, it is difficult to discern whether or not she recanted portions of her story or the crafters of the report decided she recanted portions of her story: “Although the girl insisted that some of her events did occur, she admitted that it is difficult for her to now distinguish between reality and fantasy because of her heavy alcohol and drug use at the time.” The report remarked that the “young woman” was under the treatment of a therapist, and “possible prosecution would be counterproductive to further rehabilitation and would not be in the girl’s best interests.” So the grand jury demonstrated its abounding compassion and opted not prosecute Washington and Moore for perjury. Van Pelt and company would indict two victims for perjury, but indicting four might create problems. 

The grand jury felt that the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office could have responded to the Foster Care Review Board “in a more timely manner” concerning the early allegations, but it “followed the proper policies and procedures.” The report then blasted Carol Stitt and Patricia Flocken! The report stated that Stitt should have personally contacted the Uta Halee facility, Richard Young Hospital, and Boys Town instead of the Nebraska Attorney General “regarding Kirstin Hallberg’s allegations.” 

Yet again, the grand jury made a departure from reality concerning Hallberg. Yes, it’s true, Hallberg had a dialogue with Stitt about Uta Halee residents, a former Boys Town student hospitalized at Richard Young, and also about Shawneta Moore. But Stitt’s initial concerns were sparked by a conversation she had with Flocken, and Flocken provided her with Julie Walters’ report. Also, various Richard Young Hospital employees discussed Moore’s allegations with either Stitt or Dennis Carlson once they realized that the OPD was unwilling to follow up with Moore. 

The report noted that Flocken should have “pressed for the filing of charges” against the Webbs, even though Washington County Attorney Tripp refused to file charges. Two DSS employees, an NSP officer, and Flocken painstakingly attempted to persuade Tripp to file sexual abuse charges against Webb, but he had rebuffed all of them. If the County Attorney was unwilling to file charges after listening to four individuals who were intimately familiar with the case, Flocken in effect had no other options. 

After the report reprimanded the rumormongers, consigned the early allegations to mere delusions, and took pot-shots at the various people who sided with the victims, it tackled the statements videotaped by Gary Caradori. Van Pelt and company admitted that they spent the majority of their comprehensive “fact finding and deliberative effort” on Caradori’s videotapes and came to the following conclusion: “There is no doubt after reviewing all relevant evidence, that the story of sexual abuse, drugs, prostitution, and judicial bribery presented in the legislative videotapes is a carefully crafted hoax, scripted by a person or persons with considerable knowledge of the people and institutions of Omaha, including personal relationships and shortcomings.” 

But here’s where a very strange report becomes even a little stranger: It never definitively named the careful crafters who “scripted” the hoax; rather, it simply listed several individuals with an accompanying paragraph or paragraphs. Alisha Owen was the first person mentioned. “We think that Owen might have been sexually abused during her early years, but not by the people and in the way she has alleged,” the report stated. “Owen, being a promiscuous young woman, has had many experiences from which to draw the details of her allegations.” The grand jury found that Owen’s “motivation” for fabricating her statement to Caradori was “a reduced sentence” and to “collect money from her story or from civil litigation.” 

Paul Bonacci is the next person the report ravaged: “Bonacci was perhaps the most pathetic witness to appear during the entire proceedings.” Bonacci was a young man struggling with a mental illness, and the grand jury report labeled him as “pathetic.” Van Pelt and company seemed to have lost the abounding compassion that they exercised with Moore. Moreover, I’m unsure of the grand jury’s groupthink connotation of “pathetic”—if, in fact, groupthink was involved in its characterization of Bonacci. 

The report made yet another swerve from reality when it addressed Bonacci’s inability to tell the truth: “He has been diagnosed as having multiple personalities, and his psychiatrist doubts that he can tell the truth.” Bonacci’s psychiatrist, Dr. Mead, testified before the Franklin Committee, because its members wanted to understand Bonacci’s disorder, and he was questioned about the grand jury’s report panning Bonacci’s veracity. Mead told the Committee that he had appeared before the grand jury, but his appearance had been extremely brief, and he couldn’t recall if Bonacci was even mentioned: “For the life of me,” he said, “I can’t even remember that we talked about Paul.” 

It’s peculiar that the grand jury report discussed Mead, and Mead confirmed that he appeared before the grand jury, even though his name is nowhere to be found on the grand jury’s “Witness Schedule.” Whether or not this was an oversight or willful neglect is open to speculation, but Mead had explicitly told the Committee that he didn’t doubt Bonacci’s capacity for truthfulness: “I can’t really believe that I said that he was not capable of telling the truth. I don’t believe I would, because that’s not what I believe now, and that’s not what I believed then.” 

Mead’s belief in Bonacci’s veracity would have been an extremely inconvenient truth for the authors of the grand jury report, as Bonacci was a monkey wrench in the workings of the “carefully crafted hoax.” The report implied that the hoax was imparted from Casey to Owen, who in turn conveyed it to Boner, who imparted it to Danny King. Bonacci’s intricate knowledge of the perpetrators and the nuances of the network don’t fit into the “script” with the greatest of ease, and it would have been imperative that the crafters of the grand jury report allotted him absolutely no credibility. 

The grand jury report then discussed Troy Boner and Danny King, who possessed the good sense to see the light and had “cooperated with the grand jury.” Boner and King were inspired to participate in the hoax for untold “monetary gain” through “litigation” and the “sale of movie and book rights.” The report emphasized that they were never “threatened” into recanting their original statements to Caradori. 

After the Douglas County grand jury concluded that the six victims who accused Larry King of child abuse and pandering children were lying, its acute discerning powers shifted to Larry King and separated the man from the myth. The report found that King shelled out cash and gifts for homosexual trysts, but his sexual activities were limited to consenting adults, and he certainly wasn’t an interstate, pedophilic pimp: “Lawrence E. King, Jr. was mentioned by Owen as a regular participant in Twin Towers parties involving minors and out of town drug/prostitution activities. We have found no evidence that King was involved in these activities as stated by Owen.” 

The report reads as though Owen was the only one connecting Larry King to “out of town drug/prostitution activities.” The report’s authors seemed to have overlooked Eulice Washington, Troy Boner, Danny King, and also Paul Bonacci. All five link Larry King to the “out of town” pandering of children. It’s true that Boner and Danny King recanted, but, even then, Eulice Washington and Paul Bonacci testified about King’s cross-country child-pandering network. Maybe Van Pelt and company had too much on their minds to recall such trivial facts? 

The grand jury “found probable cause” that Larry King “used money or items of value” to procure men in their late teens or early twenties, and, thus, “committed the crime of pandering”—adult pandering—but the majority of “these activities occurred in the early eighties.” The grand jury prudently decided that since King was facing forty felony counts in federal court, it would defer his prosecution to the feds. “Should the matters pending against King in the federal system come to naught, we implore state authorities to act upon the overwhelming evidence against King relating to both pandering and theft offenses.” 

King would ultimately enter into a plea bargain with the feds for his financial crimes, but he was never charged with a single count of pandering by state or federal authorities—let alone child abuse. King was safely ensconced at the US Medical Facility in Rochester, Minnesota while the grand jury ostensibly deliberated his fate. 

The report noted that the grand jury didn’t subpoena King because he invariably would have taken refuge behind the Fifth Amendment. The report also commented on King’s psychiatric malady: “Evidence and testimony heard regarding the issue of King’s incompetence to stand trial for his crimes have shown much disagreement on the incompetency ruling.” The grand jury apparently believed King to be a “very clever and manipulative person” who had most likely inveigled himself into the federal hospital. The report neglected to mention that King had been whisked off to the federal facility in Springfield, Missouri, where he was found incompetent without a motion from him or his attorneys.

King would be magically restored to sanity about five weeks after the Douglas County grand jury released its report. He returned to Omaha at the end of August. 

After the report discussed King, it focused on Alan Baer: “We have found no direct connection between Alan Baer and [Larry] King or the Franklin Credit Union, other than limited social and business dealings.” Even if Gary Caradori’s videotaped testimony of Owen, Boner, Danny King, and Bonacci is to be discounted, the grand jury heard from an accountant whom the NCUA conscripted to ascertain how Franklin’s $39 million evaporated—he testified about financial breadcrumbs that led directly from Baer to Larry King. 

The accountant’s inopportune disclosure didn’t occur during his examination by Van Pelt or Dougherty, but was in response to a grand juror’s question. He was asked if there was a “connection” between Baer and Larry King, and the accountant replied, “Well, there must be some connection, because Alan Baer wrote him a check for $12,000 in December of 1988 after the close.” The grand juror apparently thought he was on to something, because he started to spout other names, seeking additional connections. But Van Pelt cut him off after only three names: “Excuse me, are you done?” The grand juror managed to squeeze in a fourth name. 

If Baer and Larry King had only “limited social and business dealings,” it seems highly unlikely that Baer would cut a $12,000 check for King after Franklin had been closed. Since King was facing meager employment opportunities in December, demonstrated by the fact that he ended up working for a florist, it’s difficult to imagine that he and Baer would have had “business dealings” necessitating a $12,000 exchange. 

Though the grand jury would conclude that Larry King and Baer “had no direct connection,” it also found that “Baer enticed other persons to become prostitutes or commit acts of prostitution” and indicted him on two counts of adult pandering—so Baer wasn’t charged with a single count of child abuse either. Each of Baer’s indictments carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison: he was potentially looking at ten years in prison. An Omaha newscaster said of Baer after the grand jury’s report was released: “He’s in for the fight of his life!” 

Baer evidently realized, or maybe he was even informed, that he would be the grand jury’s fall guy, because he reached out to the Committee and inquired about the possibility of immunity, which, according to an affidavit from Senator Schmit, prompted a death threat from FBI agents. Baer did indeed snap back in line and keep his mouth shut. Despite his indictments, he would ultimately be handsomely rewarded for remaining mute and enduring a little public disgrace. 

The grand jury report then commented on the various individuals who were written into the “script,” but it persisted in never actually naming the scriptwriters. For example, Peter Citron had been “written into the script because of his known homosexual and pedophile behavior.” 

The report absolved Nebraska’s political godfather Eugene Mahoney of any “sexual misconduct” and offered suspected reasons for writing him into the script: “Mahoney may have been included because of his personal friendship with Harold Andersen as well as his long-time political connections within the state of Nebraska.” Boner testified to the grand jury that Mahoney requested that Boner perform oral sex on him in an adult bookstore, but apparently the grand jury didn’t believe Boner’s account of their interaction. The writers of the grand jury report thus believed Boner’s testimony concerning Owen but evidently didn’t believe his testimony concerning Mahoney. Though that would justify an indictment for perjury, Boner was never indicted. 

The grand jury report ascribed striking incompetence and deception to Gary Caradori, who was dead and unable to defend himself when it was released. The report concluded that he “fed” information to the victims he interviewed: “He led the witnesses, and the videotapes were stopped and started at suspicious intervals with the substance of the witnesses’ stories changing.” The report also mentioned that Caradori was “duped into working with Casey.” 

The interviews conducted by Caradori were lengthy and tedious—the victims were periodically overwhelmed by emotion and broke down in tears; Caradori would take breaks and allow them to recuperate. I’ve watched Caradori’s videotaped interviews, and it’s just not true that the videotaping was “stopped and started at suspicious intervals” with the victims’ stories thereafter undergoing substantial alteration. Moreover, Ormiston’s polygraph results on the subject clearly indicated that the victims videotaped by Caradori weren’t coached. 

I’ve also talked to a handful of people who were acquainted with both Caradori and Casey, and I’ve asked them if Caradori could have possibly been “duped” by Casey —they found the idea preposterous and laughable. 

The grand jury report unleashed scathing criticism on the Franklin Committee and Senators Schmit and Chambers. The report cited the Committee’s “several hidden agendas” and declared that if Committee members had acted as “statesmen,” instead of politicians, the “grand jury would not have been necessary.” The report also remarked that the Committee lost focus on its original task—looking at Franklin’s financial improprieties—once it ventured into investigating the child-abuse allegations. It is true that Schmit was only cognizant of financial improprieties when he originally drafted Resolution 5 during a special, year-ending session of the Unicameral in November of 1988; but after the Unicameral was in full session in January and monies were allocated to the Committee, the mandate of Resolution 5 included probing the child-abuse allegations. 

The report ripped Schmit for a “lack of security during the Committee hearings and investigations,” and more or less held him personally responsible for the leaks that ignited the widespread rumors. Van Pelt and company also pronounced that Schmit was politically irresponsible on several occasions, and they were deeply concerned about his unsubstantiated comments “to the media that there were people who wanted to see Caradori dead.” 

The report reserved its harshest rebukes for Senator Chambers, noting that his “recalcitrant attitude is counterproductive to the overall outcome that is desired by the community and its citizenry.” The grand jury apparently felt that it labored slavishly to uncover the truth and that Chambers did everything in his power to undermine its quest: “In most circumstances, Chambers’ information was far from the truth and was one-sided. However, because of the secrecy of the proceedings, we legally could not defend ourselves, as Chambers was fully aware. Nevertheless, he continued to taunt and harass the grand jury system. We found this practice to be unethical.” 

Chambers filed a lawsuit in Douglas County District Court to have all references to him expunged from the grand jury report. He contended that the grand jury overstepped its legal authority by commenting on individuals that it hadn’t indicted, but a Douglas County Judge disagreed and let the report stand, warts and all. Chambers then appealed the judge’s ruling to the Nebraska Supreme Court, and it handed down a unanimous ruling in his favor: “A grand jury has no right to file a report reflecting on the character or conduct of public officers or citizens unless it is accompanied or followed by an indictment charging such individuals with a specific offense against the state.” The Nebraska Supreme Court not only expunged Chambers’ name from the grand jury report: It expunged the entire report and ordered it sealed. But Nebraska’s high court didn’t make its ruling until December of 1993, and its decision was too little, too late. By then, the grand jury report had propagated irrevocable damage. 

The grand jury’s proceedings and report were macabre and surreal, and its indictments of Owen and Bonacci were also extremely unconventional. Perjury indictments generally specify exact statements where the indicted gave false accounts that were designed to mislead, but the report didn’t pinpoint the definitive statements where Owen and Bonacci perjured themselves—it only offered excerpts from their testimony. 

Each of Owen and Bonacci’s perjury counts contained various exchanges with either Van Pelt or Dougherty that included several questions and answers—one of Bonacci’s perjury indictments was spread out over three pages of rambling testimony on a number of subjects. So it’s difficult to identify the precise statements of Owen or Bonacci that the grand jury concluded were false and misleading. With that in mind, I’ve distilled the sprawling exchanges that underlay each of their perjury indictments into a single sentence: 

• Alisha Owen’s first count of perjury included statements she made about meeting Robert Wadman and then-Omaha-World publisher Harold Andersen at Twin Towers parties in the fall of 1983. 

• Owen’s second perjury count consisted of her statements regarding her second party at the Twin Towers alleging that Larry King, Harold Andersen and Robert Wadman were present. 

• Owen’s third count of perjury included a series of statements she made regarding accusations of Harold Andersen fondling an eleven- or twelve-year old boy at the first Twin Towers party she attended. 

• Owen’s fourth perjury count consisted of statements concerning an alleged first sexual encounter with Robert Wadman at the Twin Towers. 

• Owen’s fifth count entailed a series of statements relating to a liaison with Robert Wadman at the French Café, subsequent liaisons on Wednesday afternoons, and also her allegation that Robert Wadman was the father of her child. 

• Owen’s sixth count was based upon a series of statements regarding Robert Wadman’s inserting the barrel of a handgun into her vagina. 

• Owen’s seventh count included statements she made about “Larry the Kid” telling her that “Rob” was, in fact, Robert Wadman. 

• Owen’s eighth count of perjury consisted of her statements about performing oral sex on Douglas County District Court Judge Theodore Carlson as a fifteen-year-old. 

• Paul Bonacci’s first count of perjury included statements he made about witnessing Alisha Owen and Robert Wadman having sexual relations on two occasions. 

• Bonacci’s second count entailed accusations regarding Harold Andersen tying him up, burning his genitals with a cigarette, and cutting him with a knife. 

• Bonacci’s third count of perjury consisted of a statement about witnessing Robert Wadman snorting cocaine. 

The individual perjury indictments leveled against Owen and Bonacci carried a penalty of one to twenty years of imprisonment: Owen was staring at up to one hundred-sixty years in prison, and Bonacci was looking at a maximum of a mere sixty years. I’ve talked to Bonacci about his perjury indictments, and he’s still perplexed that the grand jury only indicted him on his statements regarding Wadman and Andersen—he also testified about alleged underage sexual encounters with Larry King, Alan Baer, Peter Citron, and a host of others. Though the grand jury report concluded that those statements were also false, Van Pelt and company inexplicably opted not to indict him on that content. Moreover, it’s interesting that the World-Herald published the grand jury report, but it failed to publish the indictments of Owen and Bonacci. 

After Samuel Van Pelt fulfilled his civic duty of restoring integrity to the system, he receded back to the obscurity of his farm in Hickman, Nebraska. Van Pelt for all intents and purposes handed the torch of integrity to the World-Herald. His carefully crafted grand jury report gave the newspaper free rein to use the Franklin Committee for batting practice, and it started swinging for the bleachers.

The World-Herald began with a series of editorials pounding Schmit and the Committee. The first editorial following the report minced no words: “The Franklin Committee a Disgrace to Nebraska.” The two opening sentences of the editorial succinctly sum it up: “Members of the Nebraska Legislature should be embarrassed at the behavior of the Franklin Committee. The Committee has disgraced itself and the state.” The editorial then proceeded to trash Senator Schmit, a deceased Gary Caradori, and also Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci. 

The editorial essentially commended Troy Boner for having the courage to stand tall and “recant” before the grand jury, and it commented on his superior veracity compared to the other videotaped victims: “Boner was the most believable of the three young people on the Caradori videotapes.” In Boner’s 1993 affidavit, he largely confessed to being the most accomplished liar of the three. The WorldHerald, like the grand jury, didn’t seem to hold Paul Bonacci in very high esteem: “Caradori later found a fourth person who claimed to be a victim of sexual abuse. This person, Paul Bonacci, told a story so patently ridiculous that none but the most naïve could swallow it.” 

The editorial also pounced on Caradori, whose “shortcomings as an investigator were plain”—he was “influenced by Michael Casey, a strange, shadowy man with a history of duping people….” The World-Herald then made a sly departure from reality and parroted the grand jury report: “It was Casey who put Caradori in touch with Boner, Miss Owen and James Daniel King, who has also recanted stories he told on the videotapes about sexual abuse by prominent men.” In actuality, Casey simply provided Owen’s name to Caradori; Casey never mentioned Boner or Danny King. 

A second World-Herald editorial—“Schmit Panel Can’t Duck its Responsibility in the Hoax”—gave Schmit a public flogging for criticizing the grand jury’s report. A third editorial excoriated the Committee for leaking the first federal subpoena served on Caradori, and also Caradori’s videotaped statements: “Reporters who were friendly to the Committee came into possession of the subpoena that was issued to the Committee’s investigator and were among the first to get selected parts of the videotapes.” 

Mike McKnight was the first television reporter to come by the tapes, and he told Alisha Owen that the FBI sold him the tapes. Moreover, McKnight almost immediately recruited J. William Gallup to publicly view the tapes, and Gallup severely rebuked Caradori’s interviewing techniques. McKnight appeared to be about as “friendly to the Committee” as Woodward and Bernstein were to the Nixon administration. 

As the World-Herald raked the Committee with vicious editorials, it ran articles that buttressed the grand jury report. In one article, “Lawyer: Client Told Caradori of His Lies,” Pamela Vuchetich discussed Danny King’s chipping in on the hoax: “Mrs. Vuchetich said she agreed with a Douglas County grand jury report that used the words ‘carefully crafted hoax’ to describe a series of sexual abuse allegations uttered by Danny King and two friends and encouraged by some older adults.” Vuchetich said that Danny King told Caradori “five or six times” that his videotaped statement was fictitious, but Caradori just “wouldn’t give up on him.” She also commented on her gradual realization of the hoax: “It came slow for me.” 

The World-Herald also battered the Committee with an article on Troy Boner, “Witness: I Lied Seeking Riches,” who confessed that “a promise of riches” was his primary motivation for cooking up the hoax. Boner said Caradori assured him that big, big money was to be made: “When we’re done, Troy, you can sue for 10 or 15 million dollars. At the very least 5 million dollars guaranteed.” In the article, Boner asserted that every statement he made to Caradori had been fabricated: “The only thing on the tape that is the actual truth is my name.” 

I’ve talked to conservatives and liberals alike who feel that “Pravda of the Plains” is an apt depiction of the World-Herald, even though no one denies its influential sway among Nebraska’s populace. Despite the World-Herald’s incessant assaults on everyone who took a stand for the victims, Abraham Lincoln’s adage about fooling all the people all the time still rings true: A Lincoln Journal poll found that 56% of Nebraskans felt illegalities had been covered up in the Franklin investigations; Omaha’s KETV conducted a call-in poll in which the station’s viewers disagreed with the grand jury report by a margin of ten to one; and an Omaha radio station found 72% of its listeners were disbelieving of the grand jury report. 

The grand jury report declared that the Franklin Committee had “hidden agendas,” but the majority of people I’ve interviewed felt that the World-Herald had an agenda of discrediting the victims and their supporters. Moreover, the World-Herald made a very minimal effort to pursue information that could have countered the grand jury report, even though Van Pelt’s grand jury appeared to be a perversion of justice, and a preponderance of Nebraskans thought it facilitated a cover-up. 

But the World-Herald wasn’t the only media source to trumpet the Douglas County grand jury report: The New York Times essentially acted as a mouthpiece for the manufactured story. Shortly after the Douglas County grand jury’s report was released, America’s paper-of-record announced, “Omaha Grand Jury Sees Hoax in Lurid Tales.” The article began, “Lurid reports of sexual abuse, drug trafficking, pornography and political intrigue that have held Omaha enthralled for nearly two years were a ‘carefully crafted hoax,’ a county grand jury in Nebraska has concluded.” 

The New York Times article noted that the grand jury didn’t name the crafters of the hoax, and it also included a quote from Senator Schmit who called the report “a strange document.” But the crux of the article was the findings of the grand jury. The article concluded with the perjury charges leveled against Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci, and commented that they were currently incarcerated for “unrelated offenses.” The New York Times article also discussed “a state investigator” being “duped” by a disgruntled former employee of Boys Town “identified as Michael Casey”—who “might have fueled the ‘fire of rumor and innuendo’ because of personal grudges.” 

As fate would have it, Casey testified before the federal grand jury on the very same day the Douglas County grand jury released its report. Inexplicably, the FBI had been able to collar Casey with a subpoena for the federal grand jury, even though its national dragnet failed to locate him for the Douglas County grand jury. If the Douglas County grand jurors had actually scrutinized Casey in the flesh, perhaps his portrayal as the personification of dishonesty would have been undermined. 

Shortly after Casey testified in front of the federal grand jury and stepped out of the federal courthouse, synchronicity intervened in his life for a second time that day— he would be quickly arrested by the OPD on a South Dakota bench warrant. Casey was thrown in the Douglas County Jail and eventually extradited to South Dakota for committing the offense of bouncing a $1,430 check—a Douglas County Judge ordered him held on $100,000 bail. 

Michael Casey granted the World-Herald an interview from the pokey. In the subsequent World-Herald article, “Casey Says He Shared Franklin Data with Caradori,” published three days after the grand jury released its report, Casey acknowledged that he and Caradori swapped information, but he didn’t think Caradori acted improperly: “He had information and I had information and I think we were both after each other’s information. I don’t think Caradori at all betrayed the confidence and responsibility of his job.” The World-Herald article quoted Casey on the role he played connecting Caradori and Owen: “I told him about Alisha, where she was at, that she claimed she was abused and was very familiar with street life in Omaha.” Caradori’s Investigative Reports, his grand jury testimony, and Karen Ormiston refute Casey’s latter statement—Owen refutes this statement too. 

Casey was a bit perplexed about his newfound infamy—he told the World-Herald that he was puzzled that the Douglas County grand jury had anointed him as the supreme hoaxer without ever hearing his testimony. Also in the article, Casey said that Van Pelt had actually requested that Casey furnish the grand jury with background research on King and Franklin “within the first two weeks” of its formation. 

Van Pelt and company’s report asserted that they had “little knowledge” of Casey when commencing their deliberations in March, but as their investigation pressed forward “his name kept surfacing.” Casey’s account of Van Pelt conscripting his assistance shortly after the Douglas County grand jury was impaneled was in direct contradiction to the grand jury report—Van Pelt “could not be reached” for comment on Casey’s contention. 

The federal grand jury investigating the credit union was initially impaneled in September 1988, and it issued indictments against Larry King in May 1989 for his financial crimes. The federal grand jury would then shift its focus from Franklin related financial improprieties to Franklin-related child abuse, and then be given a six-month extension in April 1990 to continue exploring the allegations; so it was ultimately impaneled for two years. The federal grand jury didn’t have the sweeping “charge” of the state grand jury: It focused on whether or not federal statutes had been violated. The FBI served as the investigative entity for the federal grand jury. 

Though I have never seen the witness schedule for the federal grand jury, I’ve been able to identify some of its witnesses through newspaper clippings and Douglas County grand jury testimony: The federal grand jury subpoenaed the Hollywood producer whom Casey had coaxed to Nebraska, Casey’s friend who put up Owen for a handful of nights, and the “shadowy” Michael Casey himself. 

The federal grand jury’s pursuit of hoaxer extraordinaire Michael Casey indicated that it chased the same red herring as Van Pelt and company. Casey’s friend who briefly accommodated Owen broke his vow of secrecy and commented to the World-Herald about testifying before the federal grand jury—his remarks revealed that the feds were fixated on Michael Casey and had also depicted him as an ethical eunuch. “Most of the questions had to do with Mike,” said Casey’s friend. “One of the jurors asked me if I still consider Mike Casey to be a friend. I said, ‘Yeah I still consider him a friend.’ And the juror said, ‘Then you’re a better person than I am.’” 

Alisha Owen alleged to me that one of the federal prosecutors pilloried her with threats at the federal courthouse before she took the federal grand jury’s oath. She said that he was livid and discharging spittle as he shouted that she would suffer grave consequences if she didn’t recant her prior statements to Caradori, but Owen still refused to recant. The feds, like Van Pelt and company, cast Troy Boner as their star witness to impeach Owen. 

The day after Boner signed his federal immunity agreement, he was apparently frightened and confused, making a late-night phone call to Gary Caradori. He told Caradori that a high-ranking official in the US Attorney’s Office, who frequented adult bookstores and had a sexual predilection for “young kids,” had threatened Boner with perjury charges. According to Caradori’s Investigative Report, the threat issued by that esteemed federal official seemed to have left Boner utterly demoralized. It was evidently the critical mass that crushed whatever will he might have mustered to stand by his videotaped statement. 

I’ve never been able to corroborate Boner’s allegations about the official in question, but that official played an instrumental role prosecuting the federal grand jury: He was the very same prosecutor who allegedly pilloried Owen with threats before she took the stand there. 

In September 1990, the federal grand jury released a three-page report stating that it found absolutely no evidence of interstate transportation of children for illicit purposes, and also indicted Alisha Owen on eight counts of perjury. Both the New York Times and Washington Post reported on the federal grand jury’s findings. 

The grand juries and the merciless media onslaught were the final coffin nails for the Franklin Committee. One Committee member confessed to me that they had been brutally overmatched and outgunned by federal firepower and media manipulation—he likened the Committee’s task to bear hunting with a BB gun. 

In 1992, Senator Schmit lost his Unicameral seat of twenty-four years, and he discussed the personal and political fallout he had endured because he refused to be warned off from pursuing the Franklin investigation. 

“I had, I think, as distinguished a record as anyone could put together in twentyfour years—I was told that that would be curtailed, and it was,” Schmit told Yorkshire Television. “I was told I would have financial problems, and I did. The message was not lost on most of the politicians in Nebraska—I think the message that was delivered was that if any legislative committee ever tries to conduct a thorough investigation again, the same thing will happen. It has shaken my faith in the institutions of government. I used to be a firm believer that the system would work."


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