by professorpan » Fri Oct 06, 2006 3:37 pm
Times Publishing Company <br>St. Petersburg Times (Florida)<br> View Related Topics <br>February 15, 1987, Sunday, City Edition<br>SECTION: METRO AND STATE; Pg. 1B<br><br>LENGTH: 2593 words<br><br>HEADLINE: Finding the Finders // Tangled trail leads to mystery group<br><br>BYLINE: LARRY KING<br><br>BODY:<br> On the southwest summit of a Tallahassee park sits a small playground with a slide, a merry-go-round and six painted-pony swings.<br> <br> It was there, 11 days ago, that six ragamuffin tykes romped around Myers Park on a late, cloudy Wednesday afternoon. Watching them were two neatly dressed, mustachioed men who leaned against a blue Dodge Sportsman van that stank of rotting produce.<br> <br> Acting on an anonymous tip, police arrived, charged the men with child abuse and placed the children in foster care. Soon officials were talking of a devil-worshiping cult, of bloodletting rituals and child trafficking.<br> <br> That began the abidingly weird case of six small children and the inscrutable community from which they came - a secretive, Washington-based group known as the Finders.<br> <br> Who the children are, how they got to the park, and under what circumstances - none of the answers has been confirmed. Each seems tied to the practices of the Finders, a communal group led by an elusive former Air Force sergeant named Marion Pettie.<br> <br> The group has been called eccentric, playful, brainwashing, loving, destructive, even satanic - a label that police now admit was wrong.<br> <br>The only consensus is that the Finders - a group devoted to odd game-playing and permissive, communal child-rearing - are very unorthodox.<br> <br> Even critics admit that the Finders' philosophy is not illegal. But they say the group practices mind control and unhealthy lifestyles that can harm adults and children.<br> <br> "It is not illegal what they are doing," says Father Mike Rokos, an executive board member of the national Cult Awareness Network. "But that doesn't necessarily mean it's right."<br> <br> "Granted, we have an alternative lifestyle," says a Finders member who claims to be the mother of one of the children in Tallahassee. "We're different from Mr. and Mrs. America next door."<br> <br>The children <br> <br> From the playground, the children went to the Tallahassee police station. The boys said their names were Max and Ben and John Paul and Bee Bee. The girls went by Mary and Honeybee.<br> <br> "They were hungry. It was cold outside, and they'd been sleeping outside. They were tired," says police spokesman Scott Hunt. "We feel that we've got a pretty good (abuse) case to go on."<br> <br> According to police reports, the children, ages 2 to 7, said they hadn't eaten since morning. They were dirty and bitten by insects. Most wore no underwear. "The older children stated that they had to do good things to be rewarded with food, and they were given oranges, bananas, carrots and raw potatoes to eat," officer Tony Mashburn wrote.<br> <br> According to one court document, the children said Finders leader Pettie "tells everyone what to do; he is in charge. We kids slept outside and the mommies slept inside. The moms dress up and go out and do money jobs. Mr. Pettie weans the kids from their moms."<br> <br> An expert on child abuse hired by the state of Florida, Dr. Nauman Greenberg of Chicago, said Tuesday that the children were withdrawn, isolated, depressed, "clinging" and immature.<br> <br> All the children ate a lot, Greenberg said, and one even hoarded food. "One said, 'I like it here because I don't have to go outside."' The children remain in state-run shelters, their identities still not officially confirmed. Five women claiming to be the mothers of the children arrived in Tallahassee on Friday and hired a lawyer to help them regain custody from the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. Custody hearings are expected next month.<br> <br> The men charged with abusing the children have been tentatively identified as Douglas Ammerman, 27, and Michael Holwell, 28, also known as Michael Houlihan. Both men are from Washington, and both are thought to be Finders members.<br> <br> They remain in jail on misdemeanor charges, saddled with $ 100,000 bail that their court-appointed attorney calls "outrageous." They have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled for trial in late March.<br> <br> In the days after the arrests, police raided Finders-owned properties in Washington and rural Virginia. They seized computer equipment, documents, photographs, telephone numbers and, among other things, two goat skins and a goat head.<br> <br> But if they have any clear grasp of the Finders and their beliefs, officials aren't saying so.<br> <br> "So far it's very strange," says Leon County Assistant State Attorney C.L. Fordham, who is prosecuting the case. "There are more unknowns and questions in this case than in any other I've seen."<br> <br>'Weird press' <br>Could we but in another's ear <br>Our windy salutations hear, <br>'Twould make us meek.<br>Be quick then, as our Lord requests.<br>Be truthful, full of wit and zest.<br>We bid thee, speak.<br> <br> So went the message on the Finders' Washington telephone answering machine last week. A message at another number was sung in four-part harmony.<br> <br> Other glimpses of the Finders last week were equally strange. A member addressed a press conference while turned away from the cameras, wearing a Ronald Reagan mask on the back of his head. At a Finders warehouse, a shredded white flag flew overhead, symbolizing surrender.<br> <br>On the door of their Georgetown duplex, members pasted newspaper clippings that portrayed them as satanists.<br> <br> "There is a lot of practical joking, a kind of poking fun at the majority, if you will," says Carl Shapley, a Maryland educator who says he used to visit the Finders about once a month. "These are generous, wonderful people who are very benevolent. They've gotten such weird press, it needs to be turned around as to who they really are."<br> <br> It started Feb. 6, when Tallahassee police spokesman Hunt called the group "some type of satanic cult." He said adults were permitted to join the group if "they give up the rights to their children."<br> <br> Meanwhile, police in rural Virginia dug up part of a Finders' farm after getting a tip that bodies were buried there. They found nothing.<br> <br> By Monday police were backing off, saying they found no evidence that the Finders, as a group, practiced anything criminal.<br> <br> Hunt said his satanic description came from police in Washington, D.C., and Virginia who had obtained search warrants to seize Finders' property.<br> <br> One search warrant affidavit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, told of a clearing in the woods behind the Finders' duplex in Washington: "Several round stones had been gathered near the circle," it said, and "this practice is sometimes used in satanic rituals." The site turned out to be well beyond Finders' property.<br> <br> Another affidavit, filed in Madison County, Va., contained 11 photographs of a goat-butchering session. They were taken from a Finders photo album entitled, "The Execution of Henrietta and Igor."<br> <br> Many photos contained captions, such as, "The goats are tied. Max wields a knife," "Stan pronounces death sentence," "Ben eats chicken before the kill," "Max moves in," and "Dead Igor." Early news reports described these as part of a cultlike bloodletting ceremony.<br> <br> The photos depict three men in white smocks butchering two goats - Henrietta and Igor - on the Finders' farm in rural Virginia. Small children are watching. The sequence culminates with the children opening Henrietta's uterus and playing with a goat fetus.<br> <br> "Baby goats " the caption says.<br> <br>The Finders <br> <br> Normally a secretive group, the Finders and their acquaintances seemed compelled to explain the group last week.<br> <br> Pettie, 66, founded the organization in the late '60s or early '70s, they said, basically as a commune for educated professionals seeking self-improvement. They share finances, living quarters and child-rearing duties.<br> <br> The group has about 40 adults and seven children, members say. Some of them spend summers on farmland in southwestern Virginia, winters in warm areas such as Florida. The rest of the year they live in Washington.<br> <br> The goat-butchering took place in Virginia as the group prepared to move south, explains longtime Finders member Diane Sherwood.<br> <br> "None of us had ever slaughtered an animal before in our lives, we're all urban, yuppie types," Sherwood says. "We wanted the children to be in a warm place for the winter, so preparatory to the trip we slaughtered the goats. Does this sound like child abuse to you?"<br> <br> Finders members include former editors, lawyers, accountants and professors, says Ann Reiss, a Reston, Va., housewife who says she has known Finders members for several years.<br> <br> "They don't want permanent jobs," Reiss says. "They're into flexibility to the max."<br> <br> Children are reared in an unstructured, sometimes experimental way, Reiss says. Sometimes children are separated from the adults to see how they'll interact. If children don't want to wear clothes, they don't.<br> <br> "Some adult is always with them," Sherwood says. "What we try to do is respond to the kids, respond to their questions, respond to their needs, rather than to impose a structure."<br> <br> Members have meetings led by an appointed "Game Caller," where they decide what to do for the coming day or week. Sometimes it amounts to just that - a game.<br> <br> "For instance, sometimes they may say, 'The children are in charge today,"' Carl Shapley says. "And the adults get down and crawl around on their hands and knees and do what the children say."<br> <br> Most of the time, Shapley says, Marion Pettie acts as Game Caller.<br> <br>He has not been available for comment since the arrests.<br> <br> "He is one of the eccentrics of our time, a totally benevolent and benign man," Shapley says. "He's like a character out of Alice in Wonderland. I think he can be the Mad Hatter sometimes, and I think he can be the Rabbit sometimes, and sometimes the Red Queen. He has kind of a twinkle in his eye all the time."<br> <br>The trek to Florida <br> <br> Sometimes the Game Caller sends the Finders on what they call "adventures." Members, on the spur of the moment, will travel and take temporary jobs to earn money for the commune.<br> <br> "One of the things they do is emergency services, typing and mailing and so forth," says Reiss, whose husband runs a computer consulting business. "One time we needed some office work done. So they came marching in, single file and singing, 30 or 40 of them."<br> <br> Occasionally, adventures involve long-distance travel.<br> <br> Finders say the children's trek to Florida began in January. From Washington, they say, two members took the children to Berea, Ky., to inspect a fledgling commune that interested them.<br> <br> "We were kind of surprised when they showed up here before daybreak," says the Rev. Jim Wycker, a retired minister planning the commune known as New Hope. "They said they'd drove all night."<br> <br> Wycker recalls that the children were well-behaved. "There was no fussin' and squallin' and yappin' and hittin' and kickin', none of it."<br> <br> Finders say the men had permission from the children's mothers to take them camping in warm climates. Heading to Florida was not unusual, since members of the group spent part of the 1986 winter in a Tampa neighborhood.<br> <br> "I basically consider that everybody here is helping me to parent my child," said a Finders mother who refused to give her name. "To me, having my son sent off on a trip with those men was just like sending him off with his favorite uncles."<br> <br> Diane Sherwood says she was on a "working adventure" in San Francisco with the children's mothers when they heard of the arrests.<br> <br> "We were frightened. We didn't know what to do. We found out on a Friday, we had a meeting on Saturday, we flew back on Sunday... By this time (Tallahassee police) had 300 people calling and saying they were the parents."<br> <br> Sherwood said members will try to reclaim their children.<br> <br> "It's something very difficult to explain to a judge in North Florida that the children are coming home to a perfectly proper home," she said. "We're talking about something very subjective, and the burden of proof is on us."<br> <br>'Finders aren't harmless' <br> <br> Courtney Knauth, a Washington bank employee, doesn't think the Finders are all fun and games.<br> <br> She says her granddaughter is one of the children in state custody.<br> <br>And she says she has lost her daughter Kristin, the child's mother, to the Finders.<br> <br> "Kristin is not only bright, but she is a very good artist. She is very good at music, and she writes like an angel," Knauth says of her daughter. "I guess my daughter was just a little depressed and was trying to figure out what she wanted to do in life."<br> <br> Kristin was 21, and had just dropped out of college when she joined the Finders, Knauth says. "Nobody knew then that it was a cult. She said, 'Mom, I'm moving out. And I'll miss you.' " Gradually, Knauth says, Kristin stopped visiting or telephoning.<br> <br>After three years with the Finders, Kristin cut off all communication.<br> <br>Mother and daughter haven't spoken for two years.<br> <br> Toward the end of their contact, Kristin was always accompanied by another Finders member who took notes of their conversations, Knauth says. They explained that they discussed their conversations with the group.<br> <br> "If you want me to say that she had a vague, vacant, Zombie-like look in her eyes, I can't say that," Knauth says. "In some ways she was like herself, in some ways not. She seemed unable to synthesize new information."<br> <br> Knauth says she visited the Finders' Washington duplex last week.<br> <br>She was told that she might not hear from Kristin for 20 years.<br> <br> "I don't think they abuse their kids, and I don't think they worship the devil," Knauth says of the group. "But the Finders aren't harmless, and we who have been in contact with them know that...<br> <br> "I don't think the bottom line of the Finders, whatever it is, is love."<br> <br><br> <br>- Staff writer Lucy Morgan contributed to this report, in which material from AP was used.<br> <br> <br><br>GRAPHIC: BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO, (6); BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO, Larry King, (2); BLACK AND WHITE MAP, Anne Hand; Mary; Max; Ben; Honey Bee; Bee Bee; John Paul; The door of the Finders' duplex in Washington, D.C. is covered with recent newspaper clippings; The Finders' house in Madison, Va. was a focus of last week's investigations; Map of east coast from Virginia to Florida showing 5 Finder related locations<br><br>LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1992 <p></p><i></i>