Original subtitles

They were more than 1000 miles apart.

Yet two of America's most notorious serial killers had a lot in common.

The most shocking and horrifying result

of older men having sex with young boys

is the story of Dean Corll in Houston, Texas,

and, more recently, John Gacy in Chicago.

These handcuffs were found in his residence during the search warrant.

Gacy later admitted that he got the handcuff trick from Corll,

and he also bragged that he got more kids than Corll did.

Not 28 like Corll, but 33.

He was...a pedophilia copycat.

This series investigates evidence they were connected

to a secret nationwide network in the 1970s.

They probably considered John David Norman

the kingpin of all of porno operations.

We searched the apartment and found over 2000 file cards

with the names of over 2000 boys, ranging in age from 14 to 20.

He couldn't stop.

This was a guy that just could not stop.

It was a wide and deep hidden web of pedophiles

preying on young men.

Doctors, lawyers all the way down.

Police departments.

Some of them were Boy Scout leaders

in Boy Scout Troop 137.

These people with power, especially political power,

they can get a lot of things erased.

And in never heard before tapes,

the killer clown tells a different tale of murder.

And two investigators race against time to close the case

on two of America's most notorious serial killers.

We know that time is not necessarily on our side.

As long as I'm here, I will not stop until I can't work it any longer.

Sitting on death row, John Wayne Gacy has been hugely successful

with his artwork, cashing in on his notoriety as a serial killer.

Gacy's crude paintings are on exhibit around the country.

Elvis, Jesus, the seven dwarves, and a self portrait has "Pogo the Clown".

Collectors have paid him more than $100,000.

Since his conviction in 1980,

the killer clown has been appealing his death sentence,

using the money from his artwork to pay his legal bills,

and basking in his notoriety as a serial killer.

The reason we're sometimes drawn to serial killers

is not because of their victims, but because of the serial killers themselves.

Here is the personification of evil.

And we want to sort of read about that.

We want to explore it. We want to see what that looks like.

In 1989, Randy White began talking to John Wayne Gacy

while he sat on death row.

Randy, a Canadian who calls himself an amateur researcher,

says it started with a book a friend suggested he read.

It was Buried Dreams, and he told me about this book and about Gacy.

and he told me, well, uh, you know, he killed all these kids.

And I saw it's interesting, and you could write to him,

there was his prison number on the back of the book.

You know, I read the book and

I thought it was just... It was curiosity...sake...

...to write to him.

White is not a journalist or an investigator,

but he was fascinated with Gacy and the case.

Some people just are.

He was a smooth talker.

It was a very charming...

Um, you know, you wouldn't dream that he was a killer.

It started with a letter and then became phone calls.

At first, it was mostly about his family, about his...his paintings

that we talked about.

Until now, these calls have never been made public,

Eventually, he said, you know, like all the books you read about me,

it's all trash garbage.

The more Randy looks into news articles

and the books written about the case, the more he wonders.

Is there something to what Gacy is telling him?

I knew that he killed.

But maybe he wasn't involved in all these murders.

Others could have been involved with him or did it on their own.

It's a far stretch from back in 1978,

where Gacy confessed to the police to murdering more than 30 boys.

He even drew them a sketch of where the bodies were buried.

Yet Gacey was desperate to fight off his death sentence.

So Randy begins digging up what he can about the victims

and some of the men who worked for Gacy.

Randy doesn't know it at the time, but John David Norman of Texas

is at the center of the story of John Wayne Gacy and Dean Corll.

It started with a raid in 1973 on Norman's apartment in Dallas.

Police in Dallas think they've uncovered

a nationwide procurement ring for homosexuals.

They raided an apartment and found hundreds of booklets

with the names and pictures of young men.

I was a detective in Dallas Police Department,

when we busted this guy.

And as I recall, Norman was sitting

at a kitchen table,

and a couple of kids sitting around.

Underage teenage boys, and on the table,

various cards and brochures on display.

Norman was recruiting teenage kids

to go around the country for prostitution.

Through his newsletter, The Odyssey Foundation,

Norman disguised the scheme as providing self help

for young people through travel programs.

It was anything but that.

It was kids for rent.

Christ, just...makes you sick to think about it.

Police are still trying to compile enough evidence

to file a charge of conspiracy to commit a felony,

namely sodomy, against 45-year-old John Paul Norman,

the alleged head of that homosexual procurement operation in Dallas.

We interviewed him, you know, all he had was a nod

or, I don't know, or, I'm innocent.

He didn't have anything to say.

Police compile the names of 30 juveniles from 13 states,

who were allegedly procured as companions for older men known as sponsors.

There were over 100 cards.

It was a nationwide child trafficking ring,

discovered one week after the Dean Corll mass murders in Houston made headlines.

So far, 24 bodies have been recovered.

They're all teenage boys who were tortured,

sexually abused and then brutally killed.

34-year-old Dean Corll sexually assaulted all of the victims.

Then they were tortured by 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley.

Henley was charged with four counts of murder.

There were all these rumors that Corll was part of an organization

where he was paid to send teenage boys to California

to be part of this homosexual teenage ring.

In fact, Elmer Wayne Henley had said in his confession,

that Corll said he belonged to a group out of Dallas that bought and sold boys.

Now Hamleys words make sense.

Police believe some of the boys killed by Dean Corll

may have been among those pictures.

Today, this would be an enormous scandal with every name investigated.

But in the 1970s, only Norman was charged.

Less than a month after the raid, Norman was released

on a $7000 bond.

There's no national tracking system, no sex offender registry.

Dallas police had to let him go.

Unfortunately, we never brought him to trial

in Dallas, just because he's gone.

Gone, but not long before he's back in business.

Less than a month after the Dallas bust,

Norman changes his name to Steven Gerwel,

and surfaces 1000 miles north.

I got a call from Illinois from a Detective Flannery.

Norman was there, doing the same thing

that we had got him for in Dallas.

It didn't take him...

Probably two or three days, he was back in business in Illinois.

It was true.

Detective Sergeant, Frank Flannery of Homewood Police

had received an anonymous call from a concerned neighbor.

And this woman said, Mr. Flannery, you don't know me,

but I'm telling you that there is a man in an apartment.

He is luring young boys, and performing sexual acts on them.

The caller identifies one of the boys,

as 13-year-old Kenny Hellstrom.

I almost fell out of the chair.

I knew the Hellstroms since grade school, this is their son.

I called Kenny Hellstrom's father, and I said, "You better come in here

and you better bring that boy with you," I said he's involved

in some very, very terrible activities that are going on.

The story Kenny Hellstrom tells Detective Flannery

is why parents tell their kids, "Beware of strangers."

He told me that he had first met this person

in a restaurant in Homewood,

and the man asked him if he wanted a ride home,

and he said, sure. So he put him in the car and instead of taking him home,

he brought him to his apartment and asked him if he wanted some beer.

He brought him in there and he gave him beer.

And that's the way that this thing got started.

13-year-old Kenny lives down the street from John David Norman.

So do lots of his friends.

Soon they're all gathering after school to meet the man with the free beer.

This John David Norman showed them pornographic films.

Then he would show them pornographic films

where it was just males having sexual acts with one another,

and the boys, they went along with it.

He would pull the boy's pants down and perform oral sex on them.

Sometimes one at a time, sometimes five in a row.

These are the testimonies that we have from the boys themselves.

Uh, you're talking about one evil...evil--

I can't use that kind of language on television.

But, uh, I've got a few more words

that could describe this man and as far as I'm concerned,

there is a special place in hell for that bastard.

When Detective Flannery raids the apartment,

no one is home, but there's plenty to see.

We went into every drawer, uh, and in an upstairs bedroom

that was not being used, this is where we found the camera,

the filming and these index cards.

I said to my partner, I said, "What... What in the world is this?"

White three by five index cards in file boxes. Just like in a recipe box.

All right, this is for tacos. This is for corn, beef and cabbage,

If you're Irish like I am.

Norman has started a new list of boys,

and the men who wanted them.

Over 2000 names on them. The names of children ranging in age

from 14 to 20, uh, from all over the United States.

Most of them were from out of state.

Dallas, Texas, San Diego, Maryland, Connecticut,

New York State, Florida, all over the place.

I had never seen anything like that in my life, no.

John Norman isn't just a local nuisance.

He runs a national pedophile ring, and the index cards are his database.

Everything police needed to make their case was on those index cards.

We gave everything that we had, the cards, all the files, everything

to the Chicago Police Department,

and they started their prosecution with him as well.

Chicago police would prosecute John Norman, all right,

but that's where it ended.

Where those cards were at today, I have no idea.

When the police find John David Norman, they charged him

with three counts of contributing to the sexual delinquency

of a child, and five counts of indecent liberties with a child.

He's sent to Chicago's Cook County Jail with bail set at $325,000.

I wish I was the one to put the cuffs on him to tell the truth.

He was nervous. There's no two ways about it.

I mean, I spoke to my partner the very next day.

He said he was shaking so bad he could barely sign his his rights waiver.

Detective Sergeant Flannery turned over the index cards

to the Chicago Police. A detailed catalog of names,

Power. People know judges.

People know other people in power themselves.

People like you and I would have been in jail a long time ago,

but these people, they do it and they get away with it.

13-year-old Kenny Hellstrom was one of Norman's victims,

and he testified against Norman.

One year later, Kenny was found stabbed to death on his way home from work.

Somebody stabbed him six times in his back

and he made his way home and was scratching at the door,

and he died in his mother's arms.

We never did figure out 100 percent why the person stabbed him.

$250 was in his pocket, making robbery unlikely.

But the police were never able to rule out retaliation

for his testimony against Norman.

In the Cook County Jail, while awaiting trial on his sodomy charges,

Norman meets 22-year-old Phillip Paske.

Paske is awaiting trial on attempted murder in a robbery.

Using the jail's printing press, Norman with Paske's help

gets his Boys for Rent newsletter back into print.

In early 1976, Phillip Paske was paroled

and ran Norman's Boys for Rent newsletter from the outside.

A year later, Norman is paroled, moves in with Paske,

and they continue the mail order sex business.

One reporter is about to blow the cover on an underground pedophile network.

I was a reporter for The Chicago Tribune in 1977.

I think I was all of 33 years old,

and it was my first sort of major investigation.

Michael Sneed is one of Chicago's most powerful journalists.

Back then, her career was about to take off.

A brochure about underage boys for rent arrives mysteriously on her desk.

Somebody sent me a flyer in the mail

and the flyer said, "The Delta Project".

And it had to do with boy love stuff.

We had no idea where it was coming from.

So I called the police department and I asked for the juvenile division.

And as soon as I said I'm curious about something called "The Delta Project."

Have you heard anything about it?

Total silence.

The end result was, he hung up.

I went to my editor, George Bliss, and I said,

I don't know how much further we can go with this.

Bliss is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter

with an established relationship with the Chicago police.

The police agreed to let Sneed and Bliss join in their undercover operation.

And it was sort of during a time when reporters and police

worked together a little differently.

We really worked together.

So every night we were on stakeouts.

We were in cars with cops.

We were watching what was going on.

And we'd go to the Chicken Hawk area.

The boys were considered chickens,

thought chicken hawks were considered the guys that went after them.

Embedded with the cops night after night, for weeks and months on end,

a dark web of child pornography

and prostitution emerges on the streets of Chicago.

Men were paying underage boys to have sex with them.

Which was an outrage.

Even I thought that men were only interested in the little girl's.

It didn't even occur to me that it was little boys that they were after.

Prostitution was not unknown, but we did not know

that there was an area in Chicago where this was going on

and that children were involved in these things.

The brochure Michael Sneed received in the mail,

The Delta Project, was part of this so called boy love world

and went far beyond the streets of the windy city.

This was the 70s.

There was no Internet, no social media.

It was newsletter, after newsletter,

promoting pedophilia as an unabashed lifestyle

from coast to coast and around the world.

They would send around these brochures.

Somehow they went through the mails,

and through word of mouth, people would know this is what this meant.

This periodical was just a way of summoning you to these places.

It was print, it was paper.

This was a pond of perversity.

And the ringleader was headquartered in Chicago.

John Norman was the guy.

He was the big guy.

He was the guy that produced all this stuff.

His arrest record dates back to May 20th, 1954,

when he was arrested for molesting a minor in Houston.

After that, he was arrested in Sacramento,

Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Santa Monica,

Dallas, Chicago and Homewood

for various sex related offenses.

Norman was a big player, but not the only one.

Sneed discovers child pornography and prostitution

operating across the country.

It was organized, profitable, and much of it was on film.

People then were filming children,

and sending this film overseas

or nationwide for people to view.

We were watching what was going on every night

trying to identify some of these men.

The customers were often the very people

who had volunteered to help children.

Trafficking in those days was done,

I think an awful lot through foster care.

These children would be taken in,

somehow they would either leave foster care,

or their foster parent would be involved in this filth.

It's a ghastly reality Sneed sees for herself

on her last late night stakeout.

It was in a cheesy-sleazy motel

on Sheridan Road.

The guy who was the foster father of this foster kid,

and he was filming him,

having sex with another boy that was much younger.

The guy who was the foster father,

I remember them putting him on the floor.

His hands behind his back.

And while they were handcuffing them,

one police officer threw me his gun and said,

"Hold it on him, will you please?"

I'm like, "Are you kidding me?"

After months of crisscrossing the country,

talking to police, pornographers and some of their victims,

the Chicago Tribune publishes the series

exposing the pedophile ring in America and the story explodes.

Here's the first one.

It was a massive moment for Sneed and for the country.

I had no idea that it would be this big.

I knew it was gonna be a big crime story.

It's just unbelievable.

The story went beyond Norman's operation

to the tragedy of missing kids,

especially boys in the 70s.

I remember, um, a police officer saying to me

after we did the child porn series, he said,

"So you've taken on the one taboo. Finally."

'Cause it's been taboo forever.

Nobody really wanted to talk about it.

Nobody really did anything about it.

Because a lot of it involved members of families.

There were no real child obscenity laws.

That's why this story became so big.

The series paves the way for new laws

protecting children from being trafficked

and made creating and distributing child pornography illegal.

But for some, the law came too late.

Since 2011, Lieutenant Jason Moran has been trying to identify

the last eight victims of John Wayne Gacy.

I don't wanna bring attention to the killer.

This isn't about him.

This is about victims of murder.

It's about missing persons.

Unidentified deceased persons.

Families, providing answers.

Not knowing the fate of your missing loved one

is worse than hearing what happened?

There wasn't a person in the United States

that didn't hear of the Gacy serial killings.

The media stories went on for months and months.

So if you had a missing person in your life,

a missing young man,

you would've had to have heard the message.

When police uncovered the bodies of 27 young men

buried at Gacy's home,

they assumed they'd be deluged with phone calls.

The parents of teenage boys who had disappeared the past few years would call,

and that would help in the identification of the victims.

But it hasn't happened.

Former Des Plaines detective Rafael Tovar

was on the Gacy case from day one.

We didn't have as much a response as we had hoped,

and my thought is that

1978, homosexuality was not as acceptable.

It was hard to get people to come forth because of stigma attached to it.

And I think some people probably just said, you know, I don't wanna go there.

If he's dead, he's dead.

But in 2011, when the Cook County sheriff reopened the case,

attitudes about homosexuality were changing.

The taboo of being gay was lifting.

It was really incredible the first couple of days.

Tip after tip was coming in

of people who had always wondered

and harbored some notion that maybe my son, my uncle,

my cousin, my brother was a victim of Gacy,

but really didn't know what they could do about it.

Thanks to DNA technology,

two of Gacy's victims were identified.

Six remain nameless.

I called up, and I said,

"I'm calling in response to the Gacy investigation

and I think my brother may be one of the victims."

For more than half of her life,

Dr. Willa Wertheimer wondered what happened to her half-brother.

Is he out there somewhere?

Incapacitated or suffering or...

on drugs or living under a bridge.

Or, you know, what happened, and where is he,

and is he okay?

I wanted so much to find him.

Fifteen-year-old Andy Drath of Chicago

disappeared in late 1977.

Andy was, um, almost two years older than I.

We were, you know, always together.

We fought sometimes like siblings do, but yeah, we were close

When our mother died, I was five and a half, he was a little over seven.

And I think the whole house fell apart.

My father, his stepfather, he would sort of keep tabs on the situation,

but they didn't have a good relationship, so...

I wouldn't know how to describe it.

When you're labeled a bad kinda kid

who is hyper, can't focus, grieving,

you know, and, um, he couldn't find a place to fit.

He started leaving home at around 10:00.

He was very young.

He was very traumatized, very unhappy.

And it just kept escalating and getting worse.

He'd come home, he'd go to a special school, he'd run away again.

No matter what the ups and downs,

even when he was off the grid, so to speak, he would call me

and we would catch up a little bit.

I was about 13 and we met up in the neighborhood

and I noticed his voice was changing and getting deeper.

And I had no idea that would be the last time I'd see him.

Missing person Andy Drath.

He was lean number 49, and he was the right age.

He was from the north side of Chicago where Gacy operated mainly

He had a weak family bond.

And was passed from placement to placement,

to foster parent to placement.

For a young man, uh, just had a hard time in life.

He just really couldn't win.

He further explained that Andy's Foster parent

would victimize him sexually.

He would put him in videos of him having sex with other men.

He would push him out on the street to be a prostitute.

This is a young man, white, operating as a prostitute on the north side of Chicago.

There's no one looking for this young man.

He's a perfect victim for John Gacy.

For 32 years, Willia Wertheimer of Chicago

wondered if her half-brother, Andy Drath, was a Gacy victim.

After submitting her DNA,

to the Cook County Sheriff's Office, all she could do is wait.

The day Detective Moran was ready to make

a positive identification, he drove out to me.

We went over things that we're connecting and lining up.

And then he sort of drew himself up a little bit

and -- and said quite formally, that he regretted to inform me

and, you know, told me.

I would've bet a week's salary that Andy was one of Gacy's unidentified victims.

I was wrong. My guess was wrong.

But Andy was still missing.

So now Willia's DNA profile gets uploaded

into the Federal DNA Database.

A database that we use to identify missing persons or unidentified deceased persons.

Four years later and 2,000 miles away,

Willia's wait comes to an end.

Willia's DNA profile

was similar to an unidentified homicide victim from San Francisco.

A young man that was found murdered

and concealed in the beach off of the ocean.

The genetic association between Willia and this unidentified murder victim,

and the circumstances surrounding Andy's disappearance,

and him traveling to San Francisco, we were able to say

that that unidentified murder victim was Andy Drath.

He was shot

and buried in the sand at San Francisco Beach.

I don't want to talk about the specific details,

but I could tell that he knew it was coming.

And he must have surely been terrified.

If Andy wasn't a Gacy victim, then who killed him and why?

My case really could have stopped them, but I had to follow up on it.

I couldn't leave Willa with those questions.

Then my role kinda shifted

to assisting the San Francisco Police Department

with their open murder case.

So I began looking for reasons why someone

would want to kill Andy, who seemingly hurt no one.

Lieutenant Moran has stepped into a story

uncovered when Andy disappeared in 1977,

that spider's web of predators preying on boys across America.

And I started to look more into Andy and learned that.

Andy's foster parent, the one who was victimizing him

by putting on the street to commit acts of prostitution,

was arrested for these crimes, eventually, back in the late seventies,

The foster father on reporter Michael Sneed's

last stakeout in May of 1977

was a photographer for one of John David Norman's newsletters, Hermes.

And the boy in the motel was Willa's brother Andy Drath.

He was a witness in a trial against his abusers,

a man who forced him to be a juvenile male prostitute.

The prosecutor at the time needed Andy

to testify against his foster parents.

It just seems from what I found, that this criminal prosecution

was too much for him.

And I started a locate documents

saying that he was going to move to San Francisco.

But Andy couldn't escape the web, a national ring with tentacles

in cities and towns across the country.

I began to think that perhaps Andy's killer

may be followed him from Chicago to San Francisco.

Was Andy one of the boys on Norman's index cards?

And what secrets could he have told?

To this day, Andy Drath's murder remains unsolved

For a good while, I kept reliving what I imagined he would feel,

and I used to have a fantasy of

dying with him so that he could look at the face

of someone who loved him, instead of his killer.

At the Cook County Sheriff's Office, Lieutenant Jason Moran

has been working tirelessly to give the last six

of Gacy's victims their names back.

He has leads on two more.

Victim number 5 and victim number 28.

Victim number 28 was found buried in the backyard

underneath the barbecue pit, and he still has never been identified.

This ring was on the commitment finger

of the left hand of Victim number 28,

The reason why this always puzzled me was because it appears to be like

a wedding ring or a promise ring,

which means that someone

should have been looking for this person.

Time is of the essence, every month that goes by

it's possible that we're losing individuals

that are related to the victims and we need their biological sample.

for testing.

As long as there's leads to follow, as long as

there's people that I could talk to about their missing family members,

we're going to pursue this.

The dangers confronting runaways are real in Houston,Texas,

In 1973, Dean Corll killed 27 young boys,

many of them runaways.

A national runaway hotline was established to help parents

from all over the country discover

if their runaway children were among the murdered.

When you put that final puzzle piece in,

it's like a light comes on and you feel like

you've really done something worthwhile.

And that's why it is so fascinating to be a forensic anthropologist.

Since2006, Dr. Sharon Derek has been untangling the mystery

of the last unidentified victims of Dean Corll.

One last boy remains.

If she can identify him, she can close the case

on the candy man's reign of terror for good.

This is the reconstruction of NL 73 33 56.

It is not a picture of the boy himself, but it is a facial approximation

that using his bone structure measurements and some of the information

we know about him. ace and a CT scan, artists put together

what he may have looked like.

We had submitted DNA samples from almost every bone in his body.

We did a full anthropological analysis, came up with a profile that says

that he was probably fifteen to seventeen years old.

He was Caucasian.

We call that European-American or he may have had some Hispanic.

Among his remains was a pair of boots,

a t shirt and a striped Catalina swimsuit.

Her best lead so far comes from a secret source.

I think this kid is possibly a boy

who I have several pictures of that were sent to me

by on anonymous individual who maintained that this boy's name

is Bobby French.

And that he was killed right after the pictures were taken.

I don't know if that is true, but I do know that the pictures

of this boy look very much like the facial structure of ML 73 33 56.

The hair looks good, the jawline looks good.

And so I'm very interested to know who that boy is

and why this person thinks that he was a victim.

Right now, the search for this boy's identity

is in the hands of genealogical DNA.

Dr. Derrick is no longer with the Harris County

medical examiner's office, But some things never leave you.

Whoever sent those photos remains a mystery,

and the best hope is to track down Bobby French.

If this production can do that, can track down family members

of a Bobby French who may either had be deceased or who is fine now.

It would be very helpful to the investigation.

Every one of Corll's victims came from the Houston area,

many from the same neighborhood.

If this boy wasn't from Houston, could he be one of sex trafficker

John David Norman's boys for rent?

Was Norman's ring bigger and more dangerous than anyone knew?

Even John Wayne Gacy.

During those first few months, Randy White delves into the victims.

And the more they talked, the more Randi wondered

if there was something to Gacy's claims.

In the police reports, yes, some were involved in prostitution,

and were a homosexual or hustlers or both.

Since first contacting John Wayne Gacy in prison,

Randy White has spent countless hours on the phone with him,

compiling articles,

books and documents

to help in Gacy's appeal.

He even visits the killer clown in prison.

It was Halloween, 1989,

and I've made my first visit with Casey at Menard.

And I was getting a little bit nervous

because here I am seeing a serial killer on death row.

And I'm looking down the hall while I'm signing in,

and there he is.

I'm thinking to myself, "He looks like a wimp."

And he was charming, he was smiling.

And we sat at a table just as close as you and I are.

All the time, like, I'm thinking, "Did he kill these kids?

How could somebody like that kill all these kids?"

He's like your next door neighbor.

The longer they talk,

and the deeper Randy digs into the victims and the details of the case,

the stronger his suspicion grows

that there's more here than meets the eye.

This call is subject to being recorded.

Hang up to decline the call.

To accept the call, dial three,

or clearly say, "Yes, I accept," at the tone.

Yes, I accept.

Phillip Paske was the young man

who was helping John Norman run his call-boy service for pedophiles

the Delta Project from the Cook County Jail.

It's a name Gacy knows.

Phillip Paske works for John Wayne Gacy.

So he knew about Paske.

Gacy told me that he knew the Paske worked for him,

and Paske was a good friend of David Cram, who also worked for Gacy.

In early 1976, Paske was paroled,

but continued to run Norman's boys-for-rent newsletter.

Norman was paroled in 1977,

and they kept their mail order sex business going

until Norman was arrested again,

this time for molesting two foster care boys.

That's when Paske went to work for Gacy.

And incredibly, Paske had a key to John Wayne Gacy's house.

Gacy handed out keys to some of his employees

and let them come and go while he was out of the house working.

Mmm-hmm.

I believe there was a connection between John Norman and John Gacy

through Phillip Paske, who was Norman's right-hand man.

Gacy floats the idea

this nationwide pedophile ring could get him off death row.

Yeah.

That means finding the ringleader of the sex trafficking network,

Paske's buddy, John Norman.

I was trying to track down Norman,

just see what I could get out of him

in terms of knowing Gacy or mis-operations.

Randy writes to Norman, and he responds right away,

describing himself as a writer,

former TV producer and a school teacher.

I wrote him in such a way

that he would think that I was a follow person of his interests.

My first letter with him.

he was very detailed in stuff that normally you wouldn't tell a stranger.

He brags that his boys for red business in Dallas

gave those young men a better life than they've ever known.

He admits to his relationship with Phillip Paske in Chicago,

and the Delta Project,

the newsletter that launched the Chicago Tribune expose on child pornography in America.

"Yes, the Delta Project is mine.

It's the operation Phil Paske and I ran during the months I was out on bail.

The program gave them access to businessmen and others who could help them.

And if sex was part of the deal, it was to their advantage."

In 1978, Paske wasn't just working for Norman,

he was living with him.

But when Norman was busted for molesting two foster kids,

the Delta Project fizzled out.

Paske was there at the time of the arrest.

Even though he was on parole,

he wasn't arrested for some reason.

Um, I could never find out why.

Shortly after that bust,

Paske got the job working for Gacy through his buddy, David Cram.

So who's to say that Paske wasn't using his crawl space

as a dumping ground for young kids who won't go along with Norman's operation,

or want to get out of Norman's operations?

This is huge.

How involved was Norman with Gacy?

Gacy was a bragger.

He always wanted to get others involved.

He got me involved.

Gacy couldn't have done it alone,

just like people like Dean Corll and Norman.

Norman was a big player

running a giant pool of boys across the country,

and his network had tentacles everywhere,

including some of America's most trusted institutions.

Call it fate or serendipity,

but a broken conveyor belt and a roll of film exposed one of them.

August 23rd, 1976.

We received a phone call

from the regional manager of Fotomat labs in Dallas, Texas.

The conveyor belt broke down,

and on the conveyor belt was a series of photographs

that had two adult males having sex with a young boy.

And he said it came from Harry O Cramer in New Orleans.

He said, "Are you all interested in possibly investigating the situation?"

And we said, "Absolutely, Can you send it to us?"

And that's how the case began.

We looked at the photos for several days

and there was no identifying information.

No address, the phone number was disconnected.

But while we were looking,

the lieutenant walked by and he said,

"There's a Boys' Life magazine on the coffee table.

You can only get those if you're Boy Scout, troop leader or member."

We headed immediately over to the Boy Scout office.

They completely stonewalled us.

In fact, they came out with one piece of paper

and said, "This is all we have."

After months of DAGA detective work,

they learned the two men in the photos

were both assistant scoutmasters in Troop 137,

38-year-old Raymond Woodall, and 22-year-old Harry Cramer,

the name on the original film receipt.

Harry Cramer, he was kind of like a minor player.

He just happened to make a mistake

by dropping that film roll.

Woodall, who in my opinion,

was probably one of the most devious and probably one of the smartest.

He was the organizer.

From talking to different kids,

and we got names of other individuals

that weren't Boy Scout leaders or members,

but they were grown-ups that would associate with them.

They had on index file that was quite voluminous,

hand-written, and it was all of their contacts.

They had literally business file cabinets full of information,

and they had this Rolodex of index cards,

recipe cards, if you would,

that they had with a lot of names on it.

I mean, we literally had a room full of evidence as a result of those searches.

Troop 137 was a front.

Their leaders recruited boys from broken homes into the troop,

and sent many of them around the country

for the pleasure of men willing to pay for them.

I would call it a pedophile cell,

they would infiltrate organizations like Big Brothers,

child welfare services, police departments,

who worked their way into positions

where they had access to children.

They actually had, like, a procedure, a guideline

on what type of kid to look for,

and what to do if this happens,

what not to do if this happens.

One year after finding the photos

of Woodall and Cramer having sex with a young boy,

they, along with two other Scout leaders,

were convicted of setting up Troop 137

for the purpose of molesting boys.

Woodall was handed a 75-year sentence and died in prison.

Cramer was given 45 years.

This time, some of their clients were also charged.

Like 54- year-old millionaire real estate broker,

Hugh Scott Mellor of Boston.

He was sentenced to 5 years.

Forty-one-year-old industrialist Richard Jacobs,

a one-time part owner of the New England Patriots,

was charged with 15 counts of aggravated crimes against nature,

but posted bail and skipped town before facing trial.

Jacobs was never found.

It wasn't only these people.

It was numerous other people.

Woodall admits

that top politicians from around the US

were some of the Troops' customers.

Not only national, but it was international.

I mean, we had pedophiles that we identified in Bermuda, in the UK,

- in Australia... - Germany.

Germany, uh, Czechoslovakia.

And Woodall's name was found in none other

than John Norman's address book.

They had a much wider network

and I think John Norman was looking at this is as an example and said,

"Hey, I can do this."

Mm-hmm.

There were definitely some characteristics

that pedophile cells have in common with terrorist cells.

The violence might be different,

but in terms of being like a sleeper cell,

where they're there and the general public doesn't know about it,

I think it's probably an apt comparison.

The Boy Scouts was a very good hunting ground for these pedophiles.

I mean, it just provides that cover.

It also helps them gather prey in one area,

and they can just pick and choose among they want.

Jerome Elam of Florida isn't just

an observer of the pedophile ring.

I was sexually exploited by a pedophile ring from age five to age 12.

In these series,

most of the victims of sex trafficking

have been photos of young men or names in police and news reports.

Jerome Elam of Florida was a victim of one of these pedophile rings,

abused and trafficked by his own family from the age of five.

My mother was an alcoholic, pregnant at 17,

my parents divorced

and my mother's alcoholism just spiraled out of control.

She began to date a series of dirt bags

until one day she brought home a man we thought would change our lives.

Uh, but this individual, after about six months, begin to molest me.

He used me to do child pornography, and then began to track me

through the pedophile ring he belonged to.

First time that I was actually sold

was at a truck stop in a truck stop bathroom,

so I was sold to five individuals, including it, one woman.

They would come and just rape me.

When it's your first time, you're just rolling,

that gear to deal with what's going on.

They use drugs, cocaine in my case,

you know, Quaaludes back in the '70s,

alcohol to make you more compliant.

And these individuals essentially pay to do whatever they want.

And there are just these depths of the pravity that exists in that dark world.

It's just really like looking into the abyss.

The traffickers would come in and slap you around

and really just make you compliant with what's going on.

You know, that was part of the training process

where they kind of, you know, they kind of got you to a point

where you are just the object where they would just kind of come in.

And you are a robot to do what they want.

If a child lost their life, they would just move on to another one.

As a child, I was desperate for affection,

like a drowning man's desperate for oxygen.

So, part of the grooming process

is that when someone comes along

and pays attention to you, um, you're immediately hooked.

I mean, these were kids who have been ground down.

You look at John Wayne Gacy and Norman and

Dean Corll, I mean, they were like kids in a candy shop,

because they just saw opportunity everywhere they looked in the '70s.

When they chose a victim,

they knew that victim was theirs to keep.

They could trap them in this emotional

psychological quicksand they couldn't escape.

When he was arrested in 1978,

Gacy told the police in great detail

how he picked up and murdered his victims.

But by the time he started talking to Randy White a decade later,

his story changed dramatically.

Since his arrest, Casey has turned down

every request for an interview from Truman Capote to Oprah Winfrey.

Finally, in May of 1992, armed with the information Randy dug up,

he was ready to tell the world a different story and get off death row.

And he knows exactly who he wants to talk to.

Currency and our businesses is the scope.

I, like every other person was not only interested in Gacy,

but interested in beating each other to get Gacy

and I started to write letters.

I wrote him a letter a week.

I called Menard State Prison, where he was on death row,

and ask to speak to him.

This went on for more than a year.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to get from him

because anything he said, was going to make news.

He said. "What do you want to know?"

"Whatever you want to tell me."

Despite his confessions,

Gacy now claims he didn't kill 33 boys

and paints himself as the misunderstood victim of circumstance.

He starts with smearing the victims.

And what we did with each one,

we did profile sheets on them...

We wanted to know what the kid was into, what his background was

when they paint the image that I was this monster who...

who picked up like these altar boys along the street

and swatted 'em like flies, this is ludicrous.

He really believes it.

He said the only thing I could be arrested and convicted for

was running a cemetery at my house.

His house did double as headquarters for his construction company

and a flophouse for some of his employees.

According to Gacy,

they could have buried the bodies in the crawl space

while he was out of town.

Michael Rossi, David Cram and Phillip Paske, all employees

of PDM contractors, all with keys to the house on Summerdale.

He tried to trap me into giving him a space

to talk to the world about what he didn't do

and in five minutes he was telling me how he did it.

Shoelace. You're in trouble now.

He asked my cameraman to give him a piece of string,

and a cameraman undid his shoes,

took a lace out, handed it to him,

and Gacy started to wrap it around his wrist.

The only thing I ever learned from Boy Scouts is a tourniquet knot.

It's hard trying to do this.

And he couldn't get it around because he had one hand being wrapped

and he couldn't tie a knot with the other hand.

So he asked me to give him my arm...

Knot in it.

Then you put a second knot in it.

Okay?

Then you take a stick and stick it in here,

and you just turn this

and it causes an tourniquet.

Precisely the kind of knot found on the ropes

wrapped around the necks of the victims

found under the house on Summerdale.

He did think that he could talk himself out of it,

that he could get this decision reversed,

that he wouldn't have to die.

Gacy's attempt to rewrite history fails.

The execution date is set for the 10th of May, 26 years to the day

after his first arrest for sodomy in Waterloo, Iowa.

Before my mother died, I remember her saying,

I want to be here the day that they put him to death.

I want to push the button.

Eugenia Godzik's brother, Greg,

worked for Gacy and was murdered by him in 1976.

Gacy was flown by helicopter

up to the state penitentiary in Joliet.

My husband and I went to the prison.

It's unbelievable.

It's a huge, a huge building, very ornate.

But it's kind of creepy.

When you walk in, you're like, "Oh, God."

I thought we were going to be able to see when they were injecting

whatever solution they use and they said, "Oh, you can't go."

And I said, "What?"

I said, "I'm doing this for my mom and I can't be in there?"

They said, "No." The media could be there, but we could not.

Just after midnight, Gacy, "the killer clown"

was put to death by lethal injection.

We're sitting there and you're waiting

and then all of a sudden, the phone rings.

It's like the Batman phone

and they pick it up and they go...

"He has now passed."

And I go, "That's it?"

C'est la vie, it's over.

Gacy showed no remorse.

and took to his grave clues to the identity

of his last nameless victims and their possible connection

to John Norman, Dean Corll

and the national pedophile ring.

When they executed him...

I hate to see anybody executed,

but I didn't shed a tear.

No.

Sad to say it like,

but it's hard to have any feeling for somebody like that.

Today, thanks to DNA technology,

Lieutenant Jason Moran of Cook County's Cold Case unit,

is optimistic he may be able

to give two more of Gacy's victims back their names.

I've been assigned to identify these victims.

When I accomplish the task I've been given,

it causes pain.

It's very hard to hear

that your loved one was

raped and murdered by an evil serial killer.

The thing that I've learned over the years

is that not knowing

is worse than knowing for the families.

Victim number 28, he was buried

in Gacy's backyard,

underneath a barbecue pit.

He was the last victim found

in March of 1979,

when they were destroying Gacy's house.

A... A family member recently called.

She had a missing half-brother.

Their in common mother was a bit of a rolling stone...

...and had multiple husbands and boyfriends.

Also reported of him being homosexual.

The circumstances

surrounding his disappearance...

Last seen getting in a car with an unknown older male white,

fits quite perfectly

with what we know about how

Gacy acquired his victims.

So, I collected a DNA sample,

uh, submitted it to the lab.

The tests don't confirm a match between the sister

and victim number 28,

but the results show it's a possibility.

Victim number 28 cannot be excluded

as a biological relative of this woman.

So, what that means is I have to do additional work.

I have to find other relatives

and collect additional samples,

and the lab will look at him, and they'll start seeing

if there's more genetic associations

between relatives of this missing boy

and victim number 28.

To identify earlier victims,

Lieutenant Moran took DNA

from family members of missing persons

and compared it with the DNA of the bodies.

If no family member

provided a sample,

the victim couldn't be identified.

A new method has come to light,

and that's forensic genealogy.

The forensic genealogy hopefully will lead me to a family,

as opposed to a family reaching out for me.

Lieutenant Moran has turned to Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick,

considered the founder

of modern forensic genealogy.

Forensic genealogy

in an informal sense,

you can say it's CSI meets Roots.

What they do, is they take your DNA

and they put it in a big supercomputer

and they compare it to everyone else's DNA in their database.

So that if me and another person share ten percent

of our DNA with each other,

we know we're in the range of first cousins.

And that's when it starts to get interesting.

And we could say that

this victim

is related in some way to this individual

in the genealogy database.

How are they related?

Who are their in common relatives?

And out of any of those in common relatives,

are any of 'em missing?

And that's where the conventional detective work starts.

The phone calls, the in-person meetings.

Who was this relative?

Dr. Fitzpatrick has solved cold cases across the country

by piecing together genetic fingerprints.

Some, faded with time.

We found right at the beginning,

we'd be working with highly degraded DNA

and very low level DNA,

so that has developed as our expertise

as we've gotten better and better at it,

and we made the first successful identification,

Buckskin Girl, in March of 2018,

and that was several weeks before the Golden State Killer

was identified using the same method.

Gacy's last unidentified victims

could be the hardest yet.

Gacy's victims were buried in a crawl space,

where they slowly degraded.

Gacy would put lime and acid

on the graves

to hasten decomposition and to counteract the odor.

These chemicals don't help.

Then, the remains are removed to the medical examiner's office

and then cleaned through a chemical process,

and then, they were buried in a grave

that has a lot of water, bacteria.

All these things are not helpful to the DNA re...

Required for forensic genealogy.

So, all we could do is try.

So, Doc, I was looking at victim number five has

the most usable DNA,

um, and I was wondering what you thought about

perhaps using

this victim as our first one

for the genealogy work.

You know, we know very little about 'em,

because his body was markedly decomposed, nearly skeletal.

He's estimated being in his 20s.

Like all the Gacy victims,

they identified Gacy victims.

Average height.

So, this individual potentially could be mixed race.

Between white or Caucasian.

An American Indian.

Okay, that's interesting.

Is he suspected

of being a local, local boy?

We don't know.

All we know is that the majority of Gacy's victims,

-they were local to the Chicago area. -Mmm-hmm. Right.

There was out-of-state victims

and this, uh...

This victim really could have been from anywhere.

This is very promising.

I think that we really have a good shot at it.

The DNA looks good.

It may take a while.

This is not something necessarily you can do overnight.

There's right now about 30 million people in those databases.

Case number five, the one with the most DNA, has below a nanogram,

and let's hope there's not a whole lot of bacteria.

A thousand miles away in Texas,

Dr. Fitzpatrick is also helping

to identify the victim known

as Swimsuit Boy.

You know, we'd really like to

be able to identify the last remaining victim

of Dean Corll.

That's been kind of a special case to me

for a long time.

The remains of the boy was sent to

the International Commission on Missing Persons,

who did the bone extraction in The Hague,

and we are now just getting the DNA into the lab.

I do believe that it's a race against the clock

to get this boy identified.

I'm really hoping that this new methodology

with the forensic genealogist will bear fruit.

While she waits for science,

Dr. Derrick wonders if this one distinctive piece of clothing

found on his body will jog someone's memory.

He had with him

a T-shirt, that on the back of it,

it had this decal

that had a peace sign

over a United States flag,

and then down underneath that

in handwriting, somebody wrote with an indelible marker,

"L84MF."

Late for my funeral,

which is sort of a military slang,

and so we're wondering if maybe

he had a family member, a father, an uncle,

an older brother who may have been serving

or had served in the Vietnam War.

She visits Corll's two accomplices in prison.

David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley

helped Corll abduct, murder

and bury his 29 victims.

According to Brooks and Henley, Dean Corll

did kill other people,

Uh, and that he was secretive about that,

and that there were many times...

Especially Henley

recalled this.

There were many times that he went out

by himself... Both Henley

and Brooks told me they felt that

Dean was running some kind of pornographic ring.

At least Dean told them he was

and he said that some of these boys

thought they were gonna go out to Hollywood

and be stars, that he had agents for them

out in California.

Is that what these photos are?

Photos sent to her anonymously

by someone claiming this boy named Bobby French

was Corll's last victim.

It is hard to look at those pictures,

thinking he may have been tortured

and killed right afterwards.

It's very hard. He looks like a nice boy.

However, it's also hard,

because the pictures are somewhat suggestive,

and I don't know if he was being used for something.

Poses, typical of the boys

found in the pedophile catalogs

of John David Norman in Texas in 1973.

John Norman had a business

and he had his catalogs and he had photos

and he was sort of like a modeling agency in a way.

So, I would not be surprised if the photos of Bobby French

might not have been sort of, uh, head-shots in a way,

and if John Norman had connections with Corll,

I wouldn't be surprised.

Is Bobby French Swimsuit boy?

And was he one of Norman's roster of boys?

The answers may lie back in Dallas in 1973.

At the time of the raid on Norman's apartment,

Dean Corll's victims were being unearthed

240 miles south in Houston.

According to former detective, R.C. Nelson,

who arrested Norman,

he found Norman's client list

and hundreds of photos of boys in his apartment.

Some real prominent people,

phone numbers, addresses,

what kind of kid they like.

Had to be hundreds... of people

all over the country.

They came from all walks of life.

Somewhere federal employees in Washington

and some were from the music world.

The head of a... A big orchestra

was his name printed on a card,

that my mother loved.

His cards said he liked...

...the youngest that he could get.

Blonde-haired and fair-skinned kid.

Uh, I'm not sure whatever wound up with the cards.

It'd be nice to have 'em now,

but... we don't. Can't find them.

After the police confiscated Norman's files and cards in Dallas in 1973,

they were all sent to the State Department.

They were destroyed.

Now why they would destroy those cards?

Who knows if there were politicians involved?

Who knows what names were in these cards?

But the preponderance of the cards were found

in other states.

Everywhere Norman set up shop around the country,

his index cards were there.

Every time he was arrested,

they were confiscated.

Every time they were confiscated,

they disappeared,

just like in the Homewood, Illinois, raid in '73.

Gone.

I wish I could help you.

I don't know.

These people with power, especially political power,

they can get a lot of things erased.

They can get a lot of stuff deep-sixed.

So, you say, "Were they deep sixed?"

Maybe. Maybe they were.

According to Norman, there was no maybe about it.

The records were destroyed.

He told Randy White,

if his client list was ever made public,

it would set off shockwaves.

"What scared the hell out of everyone,

I think, was my mailing list.

It included the names of a number of noted judges,

legislators and other officials."

There's no doubt in my mind

there weren't people in there that would want 'em destroyed.

What happened to the cards is certainly fishy.

Despite the Boy Scout convictions

in Louisiana in 1977,

federal authorities turned a blind eye

to what detectives Stansbury and Wicks uncovered.

Mountains of evidence showing the extent of the national pedophile ring.

We had requested the F.B.I.'s assistance

since it involved

multiple jurisdictions,

and we had one agent show up

and he spent about

four or five hours with us,

taking notes, and he was, like,

"Wow!"

And he said,

- "I'll be back in an hour" -And we're still waiting.

That's 40 years ago.

Do you think they could be sitting

- somewhere in a box... - No.

-...at the base of the State Department? -They're gone. They're gone.

If these cards contain names, they're gone.

Not all of them.

Our production unearthed footage from

a TV news archive from 1973.

It shows Norman's cards with his list of clients from the Dallas raid.

We tracked down some of the names.

Most were from Texas, one was in Hawaii

and one was a minister in California,

the founder of a church in Palm Springs.

Many of the men on those cards are dead.

None were ever charged

so we can't say their names.

As for the victims, like Jerome Elam, he knew the game all too well,

You know you're given a fake identity, a fake name to use.

it can't be traced back to you really are.

And so Colin was one of the names that I was given, among others.

It was all meant to disguise who I truly was and keep me below law enforcement's radar.

After seven years of fake names going from one truck stop to another,

Jerome Elam saw only one way out.

By the age of 12, I was hopeless and it felt like, um, my life had no value.

I went to my mother's medicine cabinet, got a bottle of sleeping pills,

and went to the liquor cabinet, got a bottle of vodka.

I went to my mother's rose garden,

which she loved her roses

more than she loved me, obviously.

I took the sleeping pills and drank the vodka and laid down.

and fell off to sleep.

At that point, you know, I heard a voice speak to me,

saying that, "Your time on this earth isn't done yet.

"I want to go back and work to save other children,"

and I woke up in the emergency room.

I had been gone for three minutes.

From that point on, I escaped the life of being sexually exploited.

He rebuilt his life, finished high school,

joined the Marines, even married, had children of his own.

He is now an advocate for the victims of child trafficking.

One of the things I tell victims, survivors,

is that we have to look at our lives like it is a blank page.

I don't care what happened to you yesterday or ten years ago.

You have a chance every day to reinvent yourself.

There's always hope in your heart.

It may be a pilot light, but I learned to ignite that flame

and let it drive me to making a difference

in other children's life in this world.

Dean Corll, killed by one of his accomplices.

John Wayne Gacy, executed.

The Boy Scout pedophiles, died in prison or escaped

and never paid for their crimes.

As for the kingpin pedophile, John Norman,

he hopped from one state to the next

and was in and out of prison.

In 1987, he was arrested in Urbana, Illinois,

for stealing his roommate's computer.

John Norman's mailing list was about to go digital.

Chicago reporter Michael Sneed

kept tabs on John Norman's movements over the years.

In 2009, she caught up with him in prison in California.

He was about to get out,

but he had been deemed so dangerous

he was going to go on trial because there were laws in California

where they could keep somebody in prison

if they thought they'd be a danger to society.

These are actual notes I made longhand

while I was in trial.

"And here was this guy that I had interviewed in 1977,

"and now he is a man with white hair wearing white sacks,

"large glasses, big bushy eyebrows."

and I said that he looked like an Irish priest.

Here's the picture of him.

I remember he had a mole on his face

and he had this curly hair and it was white.

He said, "I'd like to think that I've done no harm in my life,"

because, uh, whatever se he had done was with a consenting relationship.

Well, to these pedophiles, consenting means that child says, "OK,"

or a child will go along with it.

John Norman died in 2011

in a mental hospital in California.

Whatever secrets he had died with him,

the apex predator of the 1970s,

his pedophile ring stretched from coast to coast,

a man who turned his obsession with young boys into a business

who shipped children to anyone,

judges and politicians, for a price.

No one on his client list ever paid for his crimes.

But Norman wasn't the last.

With the advent of the Internet, the dark Web, um,

they've been more prolific and able to have a bigger outreach.

Things happen much faster that did in the 1970s with John Norman.

I think the distribution pipeline has changed,

but I think things are worse.

I think people are more aware,

but technology has become this tunnel of perversion.

A lot of people want to know,

"Are these monsters out there today?" and really operate in a way

where it's not obvious that they're your neighbor,

perhaps a coworker, and you're a fool

just like the people who knew John Gacy were fooled.

The Internet world has taken all of these

different horrible issues we have

and literally put them on steroids.

In as far as instant access,

oh, my God, it's never been so easy.

The network right now, these individuals

typically live in chat rooms on the dark web.

The price of admission to these chat rooms

is to send a video of yourself molesting a child.

It's the dot com of pedophiles and depravity.

You can find just about anything you want.

I mean, pedophile networks all over the world, you could connect with them.

The perpetrators aren't hunted down.

If you look at the Epstein case,

how many of his accomplices, his procurers,

how many of them have been tracked down?

You know, I double dog dare them

to go after Epstein's accomplices,

The ones who have the wealth and the power

are the ones that continue to do this

and just have not been yet brought to justice.

Norman and his nationwide sex trafficking ring

victimized hundreds of boys across America in the 70s.

And between them, Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy

murdered more than 60 young males that we know of.

I'd like to believe that a Gacy case

couldn't happen again, but I'm constantly reminded

that it's possible.

There are more Andys.

There's more Andys that haven't even been born.

In September of 2020, promising news.

DNA from Gacy's victim number five

produced a family name in the genealogical database,

a lead to a family line from another state, not Illinois.

Lieutenant Moran's detective work begins.

He's now tracking down the family

to see if they have been searching for a missing relative.

Victim number 28 remains unidentified.

And for now, Dean Corll's last victim.

Swimsuit Boy, is also without a name.