Incident Raises Questions About Child Abuse

Six dirty, ill-clad children were seen in a Tallahassee park on February 4, 1987. They were with two well dressed men who had an old Dodge van. Someone called the police and reported that something seemed amiss. The two men were arrested and charged with child abuse. They belonged to a Washington-based organization called Finders. The van had a mattress in back, and it seemed that all eight of these people slept there. One child showed signs of sexual abuse. All the children were seven or under ,, and only one would speak. Most of the children did not recognize toilets, telephones, staplers, typewriters, or telephones. They believed they were being taken to a school for very bright kids in Mexico and said they were fed as a reward for obedience. One said the men were their teachers.

Washington, DC and the Customs Service police raided a warehouse and apartment. The former agency was involved because it maintained a child pornography unit. belonging to the Finders. A police detective had previously acquired information that the warehouse had been used for orgies and blood rituals. A large quantity of toys was found. The search produced manuals on how to find children and photographs of nude children. One seemed to accent a child’s genitals. There was a large quantity of tapes, and the Finders had a capacity to produce and reproduce tapes. Telexes were found that showed that children had been moved to all parts of the world, and there was an album showing children and adults in white robes, participating in rituals centering in the slaughtering of goats.

The Washington Police Department quickly dropped the matter—“like a hot stone” in the words of the Tallahassee policy. A WPD official said the case “had become a CIA internal matter.”. The FBI advise the WPD not to forward any formation about the matter. The WPD files were sealed on the matter. However, the children were returned to their parents.

Today, Finders has facilities in Washington and in Culpeper, Va. It claims to be a communal organization that explores rational living and it provides intelligence studies, mostly foreign but some domestic. Its guru, Marion David Pettie, admits that his son and wife had worked for the CIA, but he insisted that he had spent his lifetime trying to keep tract of covert government activities. He insists he was never an employee. He died in 2003. Some speculate that he was a rogue former agent trying to duplicate the agent’s mind control experiments.