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The Delta Project was the operational name for John David Norman’s child trafficking and prostitution network, also known as the Odyssey Network, which operated through the 60s and 70s. It began in Chicago and later moved to Dallas, operating through a system of adult “sponsors.” These were connected through coded communications in the underground Hermes newsletter and front organizations including the Odyssey Foundation and Educational Foundation for Youth.
And what exactly did being a “sponsor” mean?
These men, and I use that term loosely, would provide housing and financial support for young boys in exchange for sexual access to them. The sponsors stayed connected through newsletters and personal contacts, creating an interlocking network that stretched across multiple states and gave predators a way to find one another, communicate and gain access to children.
Even after Norman was sent to prison, the operation continued. He managed the network from behind bars while his closest associate, Phillip Paske, handled the day-to-day operations. They communicated in coded language and operated through front organizations, including educational foundations and religious charities, while running a network that provided adult men with sexual access to young boys.
JOHN DAVID NORMAN
John David Norman had been doing this for years.
According to police in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas, Norman ran a succession of organizations that supplied boy prostitutes to paying clients across the country, including the Norman Foundation, Epic International, the Odyssey Foundation and eventually the Delta Project.1
He operated under multiple names, including Evan Goodwin, Allen Hitchcock, John Shanks and Steven Gurwell, and also used the Hasting Foundation.
And Norman was hardly unknown to law enforcement. By 1977, he had already been arrested thirteen times for sex offenses dating all the way back to 1954.
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HERMES
Hermes was an underground “boylover” newsletter printed in Chicago during the 1970s that served as a communications hub for a nationwide child trafficking and pornography network. Through coded classified ads, the publication promoted John David Norman’s Delta Project and Odyssey Network while openly advertising hardcore child pornography through the mail.
Its readership consisted of predatory pedophiles who referred to themselves as “chickenhawks,” a term derived from a hawk that hunts little chickens. But Hermes went far beyond connecting these men or distributing child pornography. The newsletter also carried advertisements for clandestine groups offering support and instructions on how to infiltrate organizations where men could gain access to children, including the Boy Scouts, Big Brother programs and church-affiliated youth groups. Some even provided guides on how to groom children.
And the connections surrounding Hermes extended far beyond Chicago.
It has been widely alleged that Hermes was financed by Francis Shelden, the man behind the pedophile operation on the private island of North Fox Island in Michigan.
You can read more about the atrocities that took place on that island here:
CHICAGO AND THE DELTA PROJECT
Norman moved to Homewood, Illinois, in mid-1973 and lived with an Epic International client, who told police that Norman had supplied him that summer with a sixteen-year-old Missouri boy for a three-week, $4,500 dollar tour of Europe. Using the name Steven Gurwell, Norman was arrested in October 1973 after a tip that he had plied ten teenagers with beer to have sex with him; police seized pornography and a list of 5,000 names and addresses of clients.2
Held in Cook County Jail in 1976 on charges of indecent liberties with ten boys, Norman used the jail’s printing facilities to send three newsletters to clients announcing the Delta Project, which would place boy “cadets” with “dons” in “Delta-Dorms” around the country: “The nature of the relationship between cadet and sponsor is left entirely to the two of them.”
He said he corresponded with more than 7,000 people from the jail. Someone in California whom police could not identify paid his $36,000 bail in cash. In December 1976 he pleaded guilty to eight counts of indecent liberties with a child and was sentenced to four years; his associate Phillip Paske, “a convicted murderer and thief” on probation, kept the project going from post office box 5094 in Chicago.
The police said both the Delta Project and the Chicago newsletter Hermes “were controlled by separate groups of men working together in an interlocking web of vice.”3
Paske later worked for the contracting business of John Wayne Gacy, who after his conviction named Paske and Norman in connection with his crimes. Norman was arrested again in Pennsylvania in 1983, jumped bail, was recaptured in Illinois in July 1987, and died in 2011.
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SUPPLYING KIDS TO PROMINENT PEOPLE
Lieutenant Harold Hancock of the Dallas police arrested Norman in March 1973 on charges of contributing to juvenile violations of state drug laws and seized more than 30,000 index cards listing clients:
some of them prominent people and some federal employees in Washington. I felt that some federal agency should get the cards and I contacted the State Department through the FBI. All the cards were sent to Washington to the State Department, and that’s the last I heard of.
-Lieutenant Harold Hancock
Matthew Nimetz, a counselor of the State Department, told the Chicago Tribune that officials had found “the cards were not relevant to any fraud case concerning a passport” and destroyed them; he “was unable to explain” why the department had looked at them only for passport irregularities or why it had not passed them to the FBI or the postal inspectors.4
Tribune reporters told a Senate subcommittee in May 1977 that the department said it had shredded the cards in 1974 “because they couldn’t find any use for them,” and that “some passports were issued for taking a boy across the seas and into another country.”5
Dallas police told the Chicago police that they had information associating Norman with the ring that supplied boys to Dean Corll, whose murders of 27 boys in Houston came to light in 1973 after Elmer Wayne Henley shot him; a Tribune reporter testified that Dallas had investigated Norman “as a possible solicitor for these boys.”6
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DELTA PROJECT CONNECTIONS
An FBI memo from February 1977 confirmed the Delta Project’s connection to Troop 137 in New Orleans and noted that Norman’s December 1976 conviction had ended an ongoing investigation into the operation, which had continued under his associate Phillip Paske.
Troop 137 was a Boy Scout troop organized in New Orleans in 1974 by Richard Halvorsen and Raymond Woodall, with about 40 boys as members. From those 40 boys, the two men selected about ten to take on Scout trips, where sexual acts took place. One boy was injured badly enough that he had to be hospitalized.
New Orleans police raided the troop's headquarters in September 1976 and arrested Halvorsen and Woodall. Halvorsen, 51, and twelve other men were charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated rape and aggravated crimes against nature.
And their clients were not just ordinary men.
Among those charged were Richard C. Jacobs, millionaire president of the Jet Spray Corporation and a former part owner of the New England Patriots. Robert B. Mallers, a California millionaire, and Hugh Scott Mellor of Brighton, Massachusetts, president of a real estate holding company.
Then police found another name.
John David Norman: whose name appeared in Woodall’s address book.
A search of Halvorsen’s home also produced card files containing the names and addresses of boys in other states. Detective Mason Spong described what investigators were uncovering:
It seems to be like spider webs strung out all over the nation.
And he wasn’t talking about a handful of cities. Spong said the investigation extended into 34 states, and nineteen men were eventually charged.
The Delta Project was also linked to John Wayne Gacy’s network in Chicago. Yes, that John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown. Turns out he wasn’t just the psychopathic serial killer the media claimed he was after all. Shocker.
In interviews conducted in 1992, Gacy alleged that Paske and Norman were pimping and selling young boys and making snuff films involving them.
And then there’s Dean Corll, yet another serial killer who murdered 27 boys in Houston. Dallas police told Chicago police they had information linking Norman to the ring that supplied boys to Corll. A Chicago Tribune reporter later testified that Dallas police had actually investigated Norman “as a possible solicitor for these boys.”
I’ll stop there because we could spend the entire article going through these connections, and we still wouldn’t get through all of them.
So tell me: had you ever heard of the Delta Project or John David Norman before this? And are you surprised by how often these so-called “serial killer” cases seem to have connections to much larger, nationwide trafficking operations?
Relevant reading:
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Moseley, Ray, with Michael Sneed and George Bliss. “Chicago Is Center of National Child Porno Ring.” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. Sexual Exploitation of Children,hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 433-435. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
Moseley, Ray, with Michael Sneed and George Bliss. “Chicago Is Center of National Child Porno Ring.” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. Sexual Exploitation of Children,hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 433-435. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
Moseley, Ray, with Michael Sneed and George Bliss. “Chicago Is Center of National Child Porno Ring.” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. Sexual Exploitation of Children,hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 433-435. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
Moseley, Ray, with Michael Sneed and George Bliss. "Chicago Is Center of National Child Porno Ring." Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. Sexual Exploitation of Children,hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 433-435. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
Testimony of George Bliss and Michael Sneed, U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation, hearings, Chicago, May 27, 1977, 95th Congress, 1st session. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
Moseley, Ray, with Michael Sneed and George Bliss. “Chicago Is Center of National Child Porno Ring.” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. Sexual Exploitation of Children,hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 433-435. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
I lived in Illinois during the John Gacy ordeal. I always suspected that there was more to it than what we were told. I wonder if Dennis Hastert was involved in that web of evil at any time. He was coach at my husband's high school in the late '60's.
Were there no connections outside of the USA?