I’ve been trying to fill in some gaps in my knowledge of modern American history lately. I found myself reading about John Wayne Gacy, who, as I was born in 1982, I only heard a little about in the news when he was being executed and had picked up via pop-cultural osmosis that he was a clown who killed kids. What I discovered, mostly via Wikipedia and Youtube, wasn’t quite what said osmosis had lead me to believe - he was, in fact, a pedophile who preyed on boys and young men, and claimed that he had accomplices who made snuff films of some of his killings, and he claimed to have taken some inspiration from Dean Corll, who’d similarly preyed on boys in Houston several years earlier.
That’s when things get weird, because as I kept reading I found out Dean Corll had claimed to his teen accomplices that he was associated with a “white slavery” ring out of Dallas that was trafficking boys, and pictures and videos of his victims turned up in a cache of child porn that California police seized in 1975. Then there’s John Norman, a panderer who was arrested in Dallas shortly after Corll was killed by his own accomplice, who was in possession of thousands of index cards with information on clients (which the police supposedly refused to investigate and eventually burned), and who would continue running his human trafficking ring while in prison, and later relocated to Chicago where Gacy named him as an accomplice who made snuff films of some of his killings. One Youtuber I’ve found makes some further connections between Norman, the Mafia, the Temple of Set, the disappearance of Jonny Gosch, and even Jack Ruby, suggesting the existence of this vast ring of traffickers who were supplying young boys to wealthy men in the '70s that the police steadfastly refused to investigate because several politicians and celebrities were implicated.
My question is: is any of this even remotely true? On the surface, it seems plausible, and it lacks any of the really outlandish claims associated with, say, the Satanic Panic or QAnon. Still, I’m leery of falling for conspiracy theories, and this has all the earmarks of one - vast criminal organizations that go undetected, authorities refusing to investigate, ties to some of the most infamous people to ever live, and so on. I’ve gotten an impression from reading older sources that pedophilia and ephebophilia were generally considered to be not as much of a big deal back then as it is now, especially in the gay community which was already being treated as inherently criminal back then (cf. Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband Walter Breen, who were both gay pedophiles and the latter of whom wrote a book defending the act of pederasty before dying in prison), but it seems hard to believe that tens of thousands of people nationwide were getting these newsletters from Norman offering boys up for sale and nothing was ever done about it.
Did anything ever become of these allegations beyond what I’m reading on Wikipedia? Were there later busts that confirmed these suspicions? Is this just people finding connections where they don’t really exist? Please fight my ignorance.