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I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the entire world is run by pedophiles who sacrifice children as their religion.
And every time one of these networks gets exposed, we’re encouraged to treat it like some isolated scandal involving one exceptionally evil man.
Jeffrey Epstein had an island. Epstein had rich friends. Epstein abused children. Epstein “died,” case closed.
Except Epstein wasn’t the first wealthy man to buy a private island, fill it with vulnerable children and surround himself with other powerful men who wanted access to them.
This was happening in America decades before most people had ever heard the name Jeffrey Epstein.
Today we’re talking about North Fox Island, a tiny private island sitting in Lake Michigan about 50 miles north of Traverse City.
The island is only a little over three miles long and about a mile wide and in 1960, a wealthy Detroit millionaire named Francis “Frank” Shelden bought the entire thing.
By the 1970s, Shelden was using the isolation of North Fox Island and a supposed charity called Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission to operate a massive child sexual abuse, pornography and trafficking ring where young boys were delivered to high-level pedophiles.
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FRANCIS SHELDEN, THE ‘JEFFREY EPSTEIN’ OF THE 1970s
When Francis Shelden bought North Fox Island in 1960, the island was extremely difficult to access.
So as the extremely wealthy usually do, he built his own landing strip. He also built cabins and trails and eventually turned the property into a secluded resort and “summer camp” for disadvantaged young boys.
In 1975, Shelden and his associates incorporated a tax-exempt charitable trust called Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission, marketing itself as providing services to children with reading problems as emotional counseling.
On paper, it sounded like exactly the kind of charity wealthy people love attaching their names to.
These extremely wealthy men claimed they wanted to help adolescent and teenager boys, aged 7 to 16, from underprivileged communities by giving them mentorship, guidance and opportunities they normally wouldn’t have access to.
Parents were told their sons would spend their days hiking, swimming, exploring nature and learning new skills alongside other kids, giving them the kind of summer camp experience that was usually reserved for children of more privileged families.
In reality, Shelden and the men around him were recruiting and exploiting these boys so they could sexually abuse them and produce child sexual abuse material. Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission served as a front for these operations and boasted a client list of wealthy visitors to the island.
During sessions on the island, boys were filmed in sexual acts with each other and with adults and were prostituted to paying customers of the network.
For the people who couldn’t afford to actually travel to the island, there was another option. Sexually abusive photographs of the children were produced and distributed to them instead.
Shelden sat right at the center of the entire operation, essentially functioning as the CEO of a sex-trafficking ring with his private island serving as its headquarters.
But Shelden obviously wasn’t standing outside elementary schools recruiting these kids himself.
That job fell to men like Gerald Richards.
Richards was a Catholic school gym teacher and aspiring politician from Port Huron, located in southern Michigan.
More importantly, he had direct access to children.
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Richard was tasked with luring and recruiting children for Brother Paul’s, including some of his own students, by convincing their parents that they were sending their sons away for an innocent summer camp experience.
Richards would eventually plead guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct and later testified at a congressional hearing about his involvement in Michigan’s pedophile community.
And he openly admitted what Brother Paul’s actually was.
According to Richards, the organization had been created to victimize children while also avoiding taxes.
He gave investigators an idea of just how large the network surrounding this operation really was.
“Although I had contact with about 600 correspondents and customers … I gave away a lot of materials in an effort to latch on to a very few wealthy men as supporters.”
Richards was deliberately giving material away because he was trying to attract a handful of wealthy men who could financially support the operation.
But before police arrested Richards on July 23, 1976, records say he managed to make one extremely important phone call.
He called Frank Shelden and warned him, prompting Shelden to flee Michigan in late 1976, taking up residence in the Netherlands, which at the time lacked an extradition treaty covering child sex offenses. He obtained Dutch citizenship, which precluded extradition. He died in Amsterdam on July 9, 1996.
It’s telling that the only member of the North Fox Island operation to face any real punishment was Richards, a gym teacher without the money or resources to flee the country or otherwise escape justice.
Meanwhile, the wealthy customers who funded and participated in the sexual exploitation of these children walked away without punishment. It’s a pattern we’ve seen over and over again, including the Jeffrey Epstein and Marc Dutroux cases. The operation gets exposed, a few names become infamous, and the larger network of wealthy and well-connected people surrounding them somehow remains untouched, free to continue abusing children.
AND ANOTHER CHILD SEX ABUSE RING…
North Fox Island was not the only operation Sheldon was connected to.
The men behind Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission weren’t content keeping their activities confined to one private island in Michigan.
Shelden was also connected to another trafficking operation hundreds of miles away in Tennessee called The Tennessee Boys Farm, which was run by the Rev. Claudius “Bud” Vermilye Jr.
As Richards testified to Congress, the network was overwhelmingly connected via the U.S. Mail. During his testimony, Richards actually drew an elaborate diagram showing how this network of child exploitation operated and how the different people involved were able to connect with one another.
Richards knew exactly how this underground sadistic market worked because he had seen it from the inside.
At one point, he worked as an assistant to the manager of an adult bookstore in Chicago, where he said he paid very close attention to what customers were asking for. From there, he began keeping track of the companies producing illegal sexual material involving children, which obviously wasn’t sitting openly on the shelves for anybody walking into the store to see.
The people looking for this material knew where to look.
Richards and others involved in the trade communicated through personal classified ads buried in the backs of homemade newsletters. They also used direct-mail lists built from previous orders and contacts made through other adult bookstores.
And those contacts became customers.
The same underground network of classified ads, newsletters, bookstores and mailing lists could then feed customers toward operations like Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission, the Tennessee Boys Farm and countless others.
These operations didn’t exist in isolation with random predators somehow stumbling across one another by accident. There was an entire system for connecting the people producing this material with the people actively looking for it. The newsletters carried the ads. Adult bookstores provided another point of contact. Mailing lists allowed those connections to continue privately once they were made.
That was how a man interested in sexually exploiting children could find the people producing the material he wanted and gain access to a much larger underground network.
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“BOYLOVER” NEWSLETTERS
So what did this underground network actually look like?
One way these men found each other was through newsletters.
The North Fox Island operation circulated advertisements through publications including Better Life Monthly and Hermes. Sheldon was financing Hermes.
Hermes was an underground “boylover” newsletter printed in Chicago during the 1970s and became a communications hub for a nationwide child trafficking and pornography network.
According to an FBI memo, Hermes was connected to an operation authorities believed was attempting to establish a large-scale network for the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children.
The publication used coded classified ads to connect men across the country, advertise mail-order child sexual abuse material and provide a communications channel for a much larger underground network that stretched far beyond North Fox Island.
And these men even had their own language for identifying one another.
Members of this community reportedly referred to themselves as “chickenhawks,” a reference to a hawk hunting young chickens.
But Hermes wasn’t simply advertising illegal photographs.
It also carried advertisements for clandestine groups that offered support and instructions for men looking to gain access to children through legitimate organizations.
That included information about infiltrating the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers programs and church-affiliated youth groups, along with material describing how children could be groomed. In other words, exactly what Sheldon was doing at North Fox Island.
And Shelden’s involvement with this world didn’t end when North Fox Island was exposed.
After being warned by Gerald Richards and fleeing to Amsterdam, Shelden continued publishing material under the pseudonym Frank Torey, where he founded PAN Magazine, short for Paedo Alert News.
PAN became another publication serving the international pedophile underground, providing a platform for organizations and individuals operating within a much larger network outside the United States.
So Shelden fled the country after North Fox Island was exposed but he didn’t simply disappear. He resurfaced in Europe under another name and continued publishing material for the same underground world he had already been connected to back home.
Remember, all of this was exposed more than 50 years ago.
These men were finding each other through classified ads buried in newsletters. They were mailing photographs across the country, keeping handwritten lists of customers and using youth organizations to gain access to children.
That was the 1970s.
It makes my stomach churn thinking about how much more sophisticated these networks must be today. Imagine what the internet, encrypted messaging and the dark web have allowed them to build since.
And if they were infiltrating youth organizations 50 years ago, how far has that infiltration spread since then?
Maybe the more disturbing question is: which organizations haven’t they gotten into?
Back then, they had to find ways to lure children into these operations through boys’ groups and youth organizations. Today, they can simply hop on social media and have direct access to millions of children.
So tell me: had you ever heard of North Fox Island before reading this article? And what other pedophile rings do you know about that most people have never even heard of?
And unfortunately, we’re not finished with North Fox Island.
Stay tuned for Part Two, where I’m going to show you how this same network became connected to the still-unsolved Oakland County Child Killings.
Relevant reading:
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I keep my news, investigations, and analysis free and accessible to everyone. If you value my work, your support makes it possible for me to keep doing it. Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.
Sources:
“Before ‘Epstein’s Island’, power and privilege shielded abuse on Michigan’s North Fox Island,” Michigan Advance, February 20, 2026. https://michiganadvance.com/2026/02/20/before-epsteins-island-power-and-privilege-shielded-abuse-on-michigans-north-fox-island/
“Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Paul%27s_Children%27s_Mission
“FBI Digs In On Detroit Millionaire’s North Fox Island Of Secrets,” Hoodline, February 2026. https://hoodline.com/2026/02/fbi-digs-in-on-detroit-millionaire-s-north-fox-island-of-secrets/
“North Fox Island,” disinfo.zone https://theinfoweb.disinfo.zone/places/north-fox-island/#fn-1 and https://theinfoweb.disinfo.zone/organizations/hermes/
No, never heard of Fox Island or Sheldon before.
There’s enough sinful behavior in full view, on the news, that turns our stomachs and saddens/angers us. Imagine all the secret, hidden sin that we will never know until God makes all things known.
Tough subject. Thank you for digging and presenting.
I had not heard of this before either. Another chapter in the somewhat sordid history of the Beaver Island archipelago. There was the whole "King" James Strang Mormon offshoot kingdom that practiced polygamy, probably sexual abuse of children too. Good research and information. You are absolutely correct that this is undoubtedly far more widespread now with the internet. Looking forward to part two. BTW, that area is incredibly beautiful and it sucks to have an association with this shit