John Wayne Gacy, Dean Corll, John Norman, and the vast pedophile ring coverup of the '70s - what's the Straight Dope?

Factual Questions
1

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.

2

There’s a tendency to imagine a vast conspiracy that correlates with the plethora of serial killings of young gay men in such a relatively short time frame. The only “conspiracy” I’ve seen documentation for is the gross indifference of law enforcement to solving the murders and disappearances of a demographic that they had no compassion for or understanding of. That indifference left open a window of opportunity for those that preyed on that demographic.

3

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out that there were various kinds of underground by-mail networks back in the pre-Internet days. It would seem that the fairly robust laws against mail tampering combined with the inherently concealed nature of text letters would lend itself to all sorts of things, especially if combined with in-group code phrases, etc… The article you link on John Norman details just that sort of thing with the Odyssey Foundation and the Delta Project.

But… where it goes off the rails into conspiratorial territory is the allegation that it was super widespread and that thousands of people were getting these letters, and that there was never any sort of crackdown/investigation because various sorts of celebrities and luminaries were involved. That’s the part that I don’t buy at all. I’d have thought the cops of the era would be itching to bust pedophiles or gay people however they could, and that it’s more likely that any celebrities/people of influence would be quietly left out of any particular dragnet/investigation, rather than being a damper on investigation in the first place.

I wonder if the advent of the photocopier at about the same time had anything to do with the prevalence of these sorts of rings at that era, or if it’s a coincidence.

4

No particular knowledge, I’d just like to note that one reason to not investigate something would be that the suspect gave you a bunch of info, nearly all of it was vague and spooky with nothing to even try and follow up on and, of the stuff that did have specifics, none of it checked out.

I’d also note that, in conspiracies, there’s just one uber-organization that does everything, all as one body and one mind. Here, we’re talking about three different criminals in three separate states and, so, three different sets of investigators. For crimes involving, potentially, dozens of victims - even back 50 years ago - I’d have to expect that you have more than one person on the investigating team. Whether that’s 2 or 5 people involved per group, you’re looking at somewhere between 6 and 15 people who all need to have decided that there’s no there there, even as TV producers, authors, tabloids, etc. all hit them up and offered them money, over the decades.

There’s also the matter of all the non-murdered victims of the sex ring. Even if the group was terribly good at identifying adolescent gays, so those boys went on to live closeted lives, they’d all have needed to fail to live until the 1990s, when the need to stay closeted melted away. If you were a victim of a pedophile ring, involving top name celebrities and three famous serial killers, and the whole world has stopped caring about whether you’re gay or not, there’s really no reason to keep the lid on that.

Plausibly, for some, you might argue that the former celebrities will have paid them money to keep their lips shut. But if we’re talking about “thousands” of participants, you’re just not going to be able to successfully buy them all off.

And celebrities, back in the day, weren’t as wealthy as the ones now. You look at the homes of most famous people from the 1960s, and they’re just modest, three bedroom houses not mega-mansions. It’s only in recent times that an A-List celebrity can buy his own island and start a country.

That all said, if we assume that 5% of all people are gay or queer, and that Hollywood had some fairly openly gay circles, then - during that era - we are talking about millions of people living a secret life and secretly meeting one another, across the country and several thousand doing so more flamboyantly in Hollywood. And, certainly, among the younger gays - 18, 19, 20 years old - we’d expect that some of them would have been meeting and dating boys who are a few years younger. Young men who wanted to break into the business might have been sneaking into parties.

So, to some extent, we might say that these men were telling the truth. From the vantage of a 1950s housewife, there really was a large, secret group of people holding events with young boys. It just happened that, that wasn’t any more unusual than a co-ed party that might have a mixture of young boys and young girls, with less than strict adherence to the law on age appropriate interactions, especially near the 18 year old boundary.

As some creepy dudes, angry at the world, it would make sense for them to portray this in the most sinister sounding way.

5

Wikipedia mentions that the tip that lead to Norman’s arrest in 1973 came from a male prostitute who got a bad vibe from a client in Houston, potentially Dean Corll himself. That’s what seems to lend some credence to the connection in my head - one of the unmurdered victims of this supposed ring did come forward.

My personal inclination is to believe that some sort of national ring did exist, but it was largely decentralized and that most of the people Norman had contact information for might have just been into looking at pictures of teen boys (which, mind you, is still extremely exploitative and evil) and had no idea about the more unsavory stuff he was involved in.

And when you look at the way female victims of sexual assault get treated in our society, I can definitely believe that an older gay man today who was abused by a politician or Hollywood celebrity 50 years ago might see no good reason to come forward about it now.

6

I mean, NAMBLA was a thing. Not the same thing, but within shouting distance.

7

Gacy claimed he was innocent and that killers were breaking into his house and stashing bodies there.

Not the most believable of sources.

8

One news story I do recall matched some of the OP’s details was that of Fox Island in Lake Michigan

  1. Rich dudes in the 1970s running a child pornography ring.
  2. Flew young boys to the island on a private plane under the guise of a charity to help children.
  3. Ties to a serial killer, or at least to unsolved child murders
  4. Main rich dude (Francis Shelden) flees the country and escapes justice.
  5. Very little can be found online about the whole story.
9

IIRC, he said something like “All I’m guilty of is running a cemetery without a license.”

10

IIRC, most of what we know about how Gacy killed his victims came from his jailhouse confessions, although there are definitely inconsistencies in what he told the cops at various points.

We never got to hear directly from Corll, since somehow the people of Houston apparently had no idea there was a serial killer in their midst until his teenage accomplice killed him. (Honestly, I’m surprised they’ve never made a movie about that - the details of his final hours seem like prime horror flick material.)

True - and like I mentioned in the OP, Walter Breen wrote and published a book defending pederasty. It seems like there was a time not that long ago when adults pursuing sexual relationships with minors was thought of as not necessarily immoral as long as it was a teenager and they were getting something out of it.

11

This doesn’t seem that unusual to me. It probably happens more frequently than you’d think.

12

It doesn’t “seem”, it was – not so much that it was “not thought immoral”, as that it was viewed as a private matter and at best as one of those “eh, so the world is not improving as fast as we’d like” kind of things… or otherwise as just “eh, it happens, what else is new, as long as they’re getting something from it, it’s been the way for centuries”. And of course if the adult was a single male and the minor was a teenage girl, and everyone were class peers, there was always pappy’s shotgun to incentivize “making things right”.