Ted mentions the following video...
"Conspiracy of Silence is a powerful, disturbing documentary revealing a U.S. child sex abuse and pedophilia ring that leads to the highest levels of government. Featuring intrepid investigator John DeCamp, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and 16-year Nebraska state senator, Conspiracy of Silence reveals how rogue elements at all levels of government have been involved in systematic child sex abuse and pedophilia to feed the base desires of key politicians."
2010 Video of Ted Gunderson
Ted mentions John Van Meter and here is a 2011 article regarding Vanmeter's book:
New book details 2006 shootout
Posted by: Foto News , December 7, 2011
http://www.merrillfotonews.com/2011/12/07/new-book-details-2006-shootout/
While a court of law determined in 2008 that he made up the whole thing, John “Homer” Van Meter continues to stand by his story. And a new book written by the longtime Rhinelander man sheds additional light on the controversial case.
Van Meter received statewide media attention in April 2006 after reporting five gunshot wounds he said he received while logging in a rural area near the Lincoln/Oneida county line. He alleged that two men in a black SUV opened fire on him, engaging in a drawn-out gun battle covering several wooded miles.
Van Meter was later rescued by a passerby, weakened and, he said, close to death.
“I know I would have died in the woods that day had he not been driving on that rural road,” said Van Meter. “They almost finished me off.”
At the initial point of the investigation, Van Meter told investigators he did not recognize his attackers. He later changed his story, saying he had been in a shoot out involving the same two men a year prior in Sonoma County, Calif.
“Biggest mistake I ever made,” said Van Meter of his decision to inform authorities of the prior California shoot out. “I could tell they were skeptical at the beginning, and they didn’t believe me at all after I told them I knew who the men were. I lied to them, because I didn’t want what happened in California to come back and haunt me. It didn’t matter. The authorities were no longer on my side.”
Van Meter gives his account of the shoot out, and the previous incident in California that he said led to it, in his newly-published book, The Dreaming Time: Anatomy of a Cover-Up.
The irony of the book’s title is not lost on Van Meter, especially since investigators ultimately ruled that he “dreamed up” the forest gunfight, inflicting the gunshot wounds on himself in the process. However, the title paints an entirely different picture, alluding to a quote from the Franklin Russell book, The Hunting Animal, pointing out that the time when a man is hunting (or being hunted) is “really the only time that he is fully alive.” The rest of his time, the book says, is “the dreaming time”.
“I felt the quote was appropriate, because I don’t think my mind has ever been more clear than it was during these two ordeals,” said Van Meter. “I know what happened. It was during the time that followed, and the fraudulent investigation, that things became unclear.”
Van Meter explained his belief that he was targeted by these two men in retaliation for the casualties Van Meter himself took in the October 2004 incident. He recalled happening upon a scene he found “extremely disturbing,” a Satanic cult sexually assaulting a young woman and preparing her to be sacrificed. Rather than call the authorities, Van Meter said he felt a personal obligation to stop this “insult on humanity,” and he opened fire on the group with his handgun. While Van Meter says he sustained four gunshot wounds in the ordeal, he inflicted much more damage, killing five men and wounding three more, while enabling the kidnapped woman to escape. He is convinced that two of the three men he wounded drove to northern Wisconsin in April 2006 for retribution.
Van Meter considers himself a realist, and he knows that his story sounds farfetched, to say the least. In 2008, he was found guilty of filing a false police report and obstructing an officer, receiving a sentence of one year probation. He did have at least one high profile supporter, though, in former FBI bureau chief Ted Gunderson. Gunderson, who Van Meter described as a good friend is most famous for handling the investigations of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination during his storied FBI career. With Gunderson’s assistance, Van Meter conducted months of follow-up investigation that, he said, proves his story “beyond the shadow of any doubt.” The details of that investigation, and Van Meter’s current leads that indicate that the cult he happened upon in California in 2004 has additional links to organized crime, are alluded to in the book.
Gunderson was so sure of Van Meter’s story that he wrote the forward of the book, including the following passage:
“Criminal history is littered with the broken lives and reputations of men who were wrongfully persecuted for doing the right thing. One such man is John ‘Homer’ Van Meter, who had the intelligent audacity to defy the questionable conduct of police investigators in two states, and suffered unconscionable prosecution in his effort to protect the lives and welfare of other innocent people involved in a dangerous situation.”
In the years that have followed the incident, fate hasn’t necessarily been kind to Van Meter. In February 2010, the Town of Newbold home he shared with his wife, retired teacher Darlene Machtan, was lost in a house fire. Van Meter suffered severe burns in an attempt to save the couple’s pet dogs (two of their three perished), and spent several weeks in the burn ward of a Duluth, Minn. hospital. Van Meter has fully recovered from his burns, and is once again logging.
“I think I’ll likely work until I drop dead,” said Van Meter. “I love being outside in nature, and working with my hands. It’s where I belong.”
Van Meter has also always been a writer, as The Dreaming Time is actually his eighth novel-length manuscript. His seven previous books are, he explained, a mix of realism and imaginative fiction, many telling vivid but violent stories.
They are a bit reminiscent of Van Meter’s namesake, Homer V. Van Meter, who was a childhood friend and sidekick of notorious gangster John Dillinger. Homer V. Van Meter, a cousin of John “Homer” Van Meter’s father, was part of Dillenger’s gang infamous for their year-long crime spree and violent gun battles with police. Homer V. Van Meter was killed by police in an August, 1934 gun battle at 27 years old.
“I don’t know if it was because I liked to shoot or what, but I got the nickname when I was a little kid, and I hated it for years,” Van Meter admitted. “I guess it eventually grew on me. It’s how everyone around here knows me, now.”
Van Meter knows that, regardless of the hit his character and reputation have taken throughout recent years, he did the right thing in California in 2004, and that he is telling the truth about paying the price for it in his 2006 gun battle. He also said that, if he could go back and do it over, the story would play out generally the same.
“It comes down to doing what you feel is right or running away, and I feel justified in the path I chose,” said Van Meter.
“I didn’t ask for it, but I believe it happened for a reason.
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1990 Ted and Brice
JUNE 29, 1989
FEB 7, 1987 WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE ABOUT THE FINDERS
OFFICIALS DESCRIBE 'CULT RITUALS' IN CHILD ABUSE CASE
By Saundra Saperstein and Victoria Churchville February 7, 1987
Authorities investigating the alleged abuse of six children found with two men in a Tallahassee, Fla., park discovered materials yesterday in the Washington area that they say points to a 1960s-style commune called the Finders, described in a court document as a "cult" that allegedly conducted "brainwashing" and used children "in rituals."
D.C. police, who searched a Northeast Washington warehouse linked to the group, removed large plastic bags filled with color slides, photographs and photographic contact sheets. Some photos visible through a bag carried from the warehouse at 1307 Fourth St. NE were wallet-sized pictures of children, similar to school photos, and some were of naked children.
D.C. police sources said some of the items seized yesterday showed pictures of children engaged in what appeared to be "cult rituals." Officials of the U.S. Customs Service, called in to aid in the investigation, said that the material seized yesterday includes photos showing children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and one photograph of a child in chains. Customs officials said they were looking into whether a child pornography operation was being conducted.
According to court documents, computers and software were seized from the warehouse, from a Glover Park apartment building and from a van that was recovered in Tallahassee along with the children.
Yesterday's disclosures about the mysterious group grew out of an investigation that was set in motion Wednesday by an anonymous call to Tallahassee police about two "well-dressed men" who were "supervising" six disheveled children in a neighborhood park. The men were arrested and charged with child abuse, according to Tallahassee police.
Their links to the D.C. area have led authorities into a far-reaching investigation that includes the Finders -- a group of about 40 people that court documents allege is led by a man named Marion Pettie -- and their various homes, including the duplex apartment building in Glover Park, the Northeast Washington warehouse and a 90-acre farm in rural Madison County, Va.
Tallahassee police, who arrested and charged men identified as Douglas E. Ammerman and Michael Houlihan with child abuse, contacted D.C. police Thursday in an attempt to establish the identities of the children. They learned that D.C. police had heard of the Finders group, according to Tallahassee police spokesman Scott Hunt.
No other member of the group had been located last night, police sources said.
According to U.S. District Court records in Washington, a confidential police source had previously told authorities that the Finders were "a cult" that conducted "brainwashing" techniques at the warehouse and the Glover Park duplex at 3918-20 W St. NW. This source told of being recruited by the Finders with promises of "financial reward and sexual gratification" and of being invited by one member to "explore" satanism with them, according to the documents.
According to the affidavit, the source told authorities that children were used in "rituals" by the members, and though the source had never witnessed abuse of the children, the source said the children's grandparents feared for their safety.
On Dec. 15, a D.C. police detective observed a clearing in the rear of the 3900 block of W Street NW where "several round stones had been gathered" near a circle, as well as evidence that people had gathered there, according to the document, which stated that "this practice is sometimes used in satanic rituals." Armed with that information and the report from Tallahassee police of the allegedly abused children, D.C. police sought search warrants for the Glover Park residence and the warehouse.
Meanwhile, authorities in Florida attempted to learn more about the six small children -- described by a police spokesman as "hungry and . . . pretty pathetic" -- who had set the investigation in motion.
The children, identified in a court document only by the first names of Honeybee, John, Franklin, BeeBee, Max and Mary, were described as "dirty, unkempt, hungry, disturbed and agitated." They had been living in the rear of the van for some time, the document said.
Yesterday, police spokesman Hunt said one of the children, a 6-year-old girl, "showed signs of sexual abuse," but that an examination by a local doctor showed none of the children as being ill.
Five of the children were uncommunicative, according to police, and none seemed to recognize objects such as typewriters and staplers.
However, the oldest was able to give investigators some information. She said that the two men "were their teachers," according to Hunt. She was not sure where they had been recently or where they were going. But until recently, they had been living in the District in "a house with other children and adults." They lived mainly on a diet of raw fruit and vegetables, she said.
The girl told the police that while they were in the District, the children received instruction from "a man they called a Game Caller or a Game Leader," according to Hunt.
According to the D.C. court document, a Tallahassee police investigator identified this man as Marion Pettie, who the confidential police source "also identified as the Stroller, leader of this 'cult.' "
The children have been placed in emergency shelters in Tallahassee, according to Merrill Moody of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. He said officials were trying to identify them.
Neighbors of the W Street house last night identified the photographs of two of the children as residents of the house.
Before their arrests in the park, Ammerman and Houlihan had told police that they were teachers from Washington "transporting these children to Mexico and a school for brilliant children," according to Hunt. When police asked the men where the children's mothers were, "they said they were being weaned from their mothers."
Yesterday, U.S. Attorney Joseph E. diGenova said that authorities were investigating "the crime of kidnaping" but that the investigation "is not limited to that as the evidence evolves."
George Wisnowsky, spokesman for the FBI in Jacksonville, said the FBI was "checking the transportation of children across state lines for immoral purposes or kidnaping."
Authorities in Florida, who searched the van, found 20 floppy computer discs and a device Hunt said could be used to hook into a computer in another location by telephone. He said D.C. police have obtained evidence that a computer linked to the group received a call from Tallahassee late this week.
Meanwhile, authorities in Washington were busy searching the warehouse and the Glover Park residence, side-by-side brick apartment buildings that, according to neighbors, stood out in the neighborhood because of a hot tub and satellite dish on the roof. Only women and children lived there, though men visited regularly, according to neighbors.
One woman from the neighborhood said the children from the house were "easy to spot because they were so dirty," adding that adults with them "seemed not to care." She said the group from the house reminded her of "leftover hippies."
But another neighbor, college professor John Matthews, who said he had lived at 3918 W St. for a short time while looking for an apartment, said the residents were "a close-knit group" of feminists who liked to help people and were not a cult. "The neighborhood talks about them because of their life style," Matthews said.
The Fourth Street warehouse, which authorities said also was used as a residence, had windows that were boarded shut. One wall was covered with a huge map of the world, lit by floodlights. Upstairs, mattresses were flung on the floors of various rooms.Staff writers Joseph E. Bouchard, Ed Bruske, Mary Thornton, John Harris and Linda Wheeler contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/07/officials-describe-cult-rituals-in-child-abuse-case/11f05df1-48e0-41f7-b46d-249c0bd2bc39/?utm_term=.4f471069559d
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