Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is the show where we
pull on a single thread and watch a whole tapestry
of secrets, conspiracies, and just truly bizarre stories unravel. We
go straight to the source material to figure out what
really happened.
Speaker 2: And today the story we're getting into is, I mean,
it's a real tangle. It's this perfect storm really where
you have the you know, the free wheeling counterculture of
the sixties and seventies crashing head on into the Cold
Wars deep state paranoia.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the Finder's Cult.
Speaker 2: Exactly and specifically this one moment in nineteen eighty seven
when a couple of local cops in Florida pull over
a van and accidentally stumble into something so much bigger,
so much more connected than they ever could have imagined.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's set the scene, because this is really
where it all kicks off. The date is February fourth,
nineteen eighty seven. We're in Tallahassee, Florida.
Speaker 2: Right, and please get a call about two men acting
suspiciously in a park. They get there and these aren't
your typical vagrants or anything. The reports all emphasize this
one detail. They were well dressed men in.
Speaker 1: Suits, which immediately feels off right suits in a park
behaving strangely. It suggests something organized.
Speaker 2: But that's not even the shocking part. The real shock
was what was with them. They had six children.
Speaker 1: Six kids, and the ages range from just two years
old all the way up to eleven, and.
Speaker 2: Their condition was just horrifying. The reports are really graphic.
They were filthy, scruffy, hadn't been washed, they were covered
in insect bites, and a medical exam later confirmed they
were seriously malnourished.
Speaker 1: So this is severe obvious neglect.
Speaker 2: No question. But then the reaction of the adults is
what takes it to this whole other level of strange.
The two men, Douglas Hammerman and James Michael Holwell, they
don't panic, they don't make excuses, oh they do. They
just produce a card, a pre printed card that states
their constitutional right to remain silent.
Speaker 1: Wait, not a lawyer's business card, like a laminated card.
Speaker 2: They just had on them exactly like it was standard issue.
It showed this weirdly rehearsed, totally and frankly creepy lack
of cooperation.
Speaker 1: It was like a protocol that is bizarre. The contrast
between these buttoned up guys with their legal rights cards
and the condition of these poor kids.
Speaker 2: And if that's jarring, the state of the children themselves was, well,
it was something else entirely. The behavioral scientists who saw them,
they said the kids acted like they'd been and this
is a quote institutionalized for a prolonged period.
Speaker 1: Institutionalized What does that even mean?
Speaker 2: They were described as zombie like like shells, And maybe
the most telling detail of all, they seemed completely unaware
of the most basic modern things, like they didn't know
what a telephone was or a television.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so that detail the phone and the TV
that screams intentional isolation. That's not just parents who are
poor or struggling. That's the deliberate program of cultural deprivation.
Speaker 2: It had to be. So the initial charges are just
misdemeanor child abuse, but the whole situation is so weird,
so full of red flags, that it just explodes. Contemporary
AP news reports called it one of the weirdest conspiracy
stories to ever come out.
Speaker 1: So that's our mission for this deep dive. We're going
to follow that thread. We're pulling from those associated press reports,
but also from internal FBI documents that have been released
through the FBI record's.
Speaker 2: Fault, and some really crucial forensic and custom service analyzes.
We're going to try and untangle these totally competing stories.
Was this just a a misunderstood new age commune living
off the grid, or was.
Speaker 1: It a dangerous satanic cult ye know, cut up in
that whole moral panic of the eighties.
Speaker 2: Or and this is the big one, was it a
covert intelligence operation that went sideways so badly that the
CIA itself had to step in and shut down the
entire police investigation.
Speaker 1: That's the core conflict, right, the alleged cover up, because
on one hand, you've got local police seizing documents that
literally seem to be manuals on how to procure children, yeah.
Speaker 2: And Tell's messages about trafficking. But on the other hand,
the whole federal case just vanishes the customs reports we
have alleged the investigation suddenly became a CIA internal matter
and was classified secret from.
Speaker 1: Local child abuse to a classified national security.
Speaker 2: Issue in the blink of an eye. That's the story.
That's the thread we need to follow.
Speaker 1: Okay, So to get any kind of handle on this,
you have to start with the man at the center
of it all, the architect.
Speaker 2: Mary and David Petty. He's the founder, the guru, the
guy who created the Finders, and his own personal history
is well, it's the definition of a tangled thread.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his early life doesn't exactly scream commune leader. Yeah,
he was born in nineteen twenty. He actually retired from
the US Air Force in nineteen.
Speaker 2: Fifty six as a master sergeant. No less. So that's
a career built on structure, hierarchy, discipline, all the things
you wouldn't associate with this group.
Speaker 1: Right, And after he gets out of the Air Force,
he doesn't really have a formal job. He spends his
time building this persona of a like an intellectual guru.
He even gives himself all these dramatic titles.
Speaker 2: Oh they're very dramatic. He called himself the stroller, the student,
the pathfinder. But the most important one, the one that
really defines his role, was the game caller.
Speaker 1: The game caller. We're going to come back to that
because while these names sound kind of philosophical and harmless,
when the police started digging in eighty seven, they found
some biographical details that immediately raised all kinds of red flags.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the family connections to the intelligence world exactly.
Speaker 1: This isn't just a theory. It's documented. Petty's wife, a
woman named Isabella, was a confirmed CIA employee. She worked
in their record's division from nineteen fifty two to nineteen
sixty one.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's one direct link.
Speaker 1: But there's more. His son, George Petty worked for a
company called.
Speaker 2: Air America, And for anyone who doesn't know, Air America
was one of the most famous covert CIA front companies
in history. It was used for all sorts of operations
during the Vietnam era. It was the CIA's private airline.
Speaker 1: So this isn't a distant connection. This is his wife
and his son, two generations operating right inside the US
intelligence infrastructure.
Speaker 2: Which you know. It puts a huge amount of pressure
on the CIA's later claims that they knew nothing about
this group. It's just not credible.
Speaker 1: And Petty himself, he didn't run from this stuff. In
an interview in nineteen ninety three, he leaned right into it.
He claimed he ran a private intelligence game.
Speaker 2: He also claimed he'd been investigating the CIA before it
was the OSS. The OSS was the Office of Strategic Services,
the CIA's predecessor during World War Two.
Speaker 1: He even claimed he sent his own wife into the
agency to be a spy on the CIA.
Speaker 2: Now, whether that's true or just you know, paranoid grandiosity,
doesn't really matter. It tells you one crucial thing, what's up.
Marian Petty saw his entire world, his whole organization through
the lens of spycraft, surveillance, counter surveillance operations. That was
his mindset.
Speaker 1: So the group itself, the Finders, it started to take
shape around nineteen seventy one in Washington, d C. And
kind of evolved from this loosey goosey counterculture group into
something much more secretive. They called it an intentional community.
Speaker 2: And their philosophy was this incredibly eclectic mix of things,
which frankly, probably made it a perfect cover for whatever
they were really doing is.
Speaker 1: A total mashup. You had Eastern religions like Taoism, you know,
the idea of the path or the flow.
Speaker 2: Blended with all that New Age stuff from the Human
Potential movement, this idea of reaching your full self. Potential.
Experts who looked at them also said futurism was a
huge part of it, this obsession with predicting and shaping
the future.
Speaker 1: They even pulled ideas from Carlos Castaneda's books, which were
all about mystic self exploration and were super popular at
the time.
Speaker 2: The common thread in all of this is this idea
of transformation through really unconventional and often isolated experiences, and
that connects directly back to Petty.
Speaker 1: To the game caller.
Speaker 2: Exactly, he ran the entire group as a literal private
intelligence game. The documents explained that members would be sent
on these intense, open ended missions he called adventures.
Speaker 1: And the purpose of these adventures.
Speaker 2: Ostensibly, it was to correct some character flaw that Petty
had identified in you. He was the game, so he
would diagnose your weakness and then design a mission to
fix it.
Speaker 1: I just want to pause on that idea for a second.
The game psychologically, how does that framework give you an
advantage if you're trying to run a secret organization, whether
it's a cult or an intelligence asset.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect control mechanism. It's brilliant in a very
sinister way. If your entire belief system is built around
these missions that are designed to test you and make
you better, then you'll do anything anything, suddenly leaving your
family for months, traveling to a foreign country, handling strange information,
even doing things that are morally questionable. It can all
be justified as part of your personal growth. It's just
part of the game.
Speaker 1: It makes the members totally available, right. They can't hold
down a normal nine to five jobs.
Speaker 2: They were actively opposed to it. They saw permanent employment
as an obstacle to spontaneity, and that's a direct quote.
They needed to be able to drop everything and go
on a mission at a moment's notice.
Speaker 1: And these weren't like dropouts from society. The UMBER profile
was generally young, well educated professionals. People could get temp
work in DC easily.
Speaker 2: Which also means they had skills and they could blend in.
The organization had physical locations too. They had a ninety
acre property out in Nethers, Virginia they just called the Farm, which.
Speaker 1: Had its own camouflage. It had a history as a
sort of sixties hippie commune, a place that gave out
free organic meals.
Speaker 2: But by the early eighties neighbors started noticing a change.
They saw visitors showing up in business suits and professional clothes,
so it was shifting away from that rustic ideal towards
something more operational.
Speaker 1: And in DC itself, they had a house in Glover
Park and this big warehouse on Fourth Street. Any and
that warehouse, as we'll find out, was basically their operations center.
Speaker 2: And this is critical. They were incredibly sophisticated with their money.
The group pooled all their funds and they used what
the documents called bank secrecy protocols. This wasn't just passing
a collection plate. They were managing serious assets.
Speaker 1: We know this for a fact, right because of that
later court case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in nineteen ninety six, a legal dispute came up
that involved a briefcase. And in that briefcase where land
deeds belonging to the finders worth about two million dollars.
Speaker 1: Two million dollars in nineteen ninety six money.
Speaker 2: It speaks to decades of very careful, very sophisticated wealth accumulation,
way beyond what you'd expect from some simple back to
the Land group.
Speaker 1: So if we're summarizing this first part, the picture is
pretty clear. Mary and Petty built an organization that was
on the surface about self help and philosophy.
Speaker 2: But structurally it was designed for clandestine operations. It had
financially savvy members, it was secretive, and it was psychologically
conditioning its people through this game. That's the duality we
have to keep in mind.
Speaker 1: And it's that duality that starts to break down when
we look at how they tweeted their children.
Speaker 2: Right. The whole thing really shifted around nineteen eighty. That's
when the group moved from just being a secretive community
to becoming the target of a criminal investigation, and it
all hinged on their radical ideas about raising kids.
Speaker 1: This is where the story gets really dark. They decided
they were going to raise a new generation of quote
toughened children.
Speaker 2: The idea was to raise them communally, so without any
real parental intervention, because they saw traditional parenting as an
obstacle to the child's development.
Speaker 1: What was the stated sounds insane.
Speaker 2: The intent, as they explained it was high minded but
very bizarre. They believe they were replicating the original, self
reliant way of life of Native Americans. The goal was
to create these incredibly resilient, spontaneous children who weren't burdened
by modern society.
Speaker 1: But the reality of that was just systemic neglect.
Speaker 2: Profound neglect. The parents. The adult would be sent away
on their adventures for months at a time, leaving the
kids behind, leaving the kids to be cared for collectively
by whoever was around, who were themselves totally wrapped up
in the game.
Speaker 1: And the sources show this had immediate terrible consequence.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. Neighbors, both at the farm in Virginia and
the houses in DC, they reported hearing the children just
hollering and screaming about mama and daddy. This wasn't just
a kid having a tantrum. It was constant enough that
it got official attention.
Speaker 1: There was that one police complaint in nineteen eighty two,
right because a child was heard screaming for more than
an hour straight exactly.
Speaker 2: And neighbors in DC also said the kids would sometimes
just be running around with no clothes on in the summer,
So police were aware of this group's strange lifestyle years
before the big arrest in eighty seven. That nineteen eighty
two complaint didn't lead to charges, but it put them
on the radar.
Speaker 1: Which brings us back full circle to that arrest in Tallahassee.
You have that contrast again, the two men, Amraman and
Hoholwell in their business suits, trying to keep up appearances.
Speaker 2: But the state of the children just blows their cover completely.
The medical exams confirmed it all filthy, covered in bug bites,
and clearly malnourished.
Speaker 1: The psychological reports, though, that's what's so hard to get
your head around. You mentioned they acted like wild animals
or like they'd been institutionalized.
Speaker 2: It's the details. The fact that these kids, some as
old as eleven, had no concept of a telephone. It
suggests this wasn't just neglect. It was a program, a deliberate,
systematic campaign of isolation. It's a method of control.
Speaker 1: So the game wasn't just for the adults. The children
were being conditioned too.
Speaker 2: They were being conditioned to exist completely outside of normal society,
and the adults showed signs of it too. The report
said that when the men were being transported by police,
they would just go limp, and during questioning they acted
like they were in a trance like state.
Speaker 1: Another protocol, a rehearsed reaction designed to resist interrogation.
Speaker 2: It seems like it and their cover story, their official
explanation for what they were doing, was just flimsy.
Speaker 1: What did they claim?
Speaker 2: They claimed they were just transporting the children south. They
said they were on their way to Mexico to a
special school for smart kids.
Speaker 1: School for smart kids. But the kids are malnourished and
bug bitten.
Speaker 2: It makes zero sense. I mean, if you're taking gifted
children to a special academy, they don't look like that.
The Tallahassee Police saw right through it. They suspected this
was a huge operation, spanning from the East coast, maybe
up to Canada and down into Mexico.
Speaker 1: So they immediately notified the FBI and the DC.
Speaker 2: Police, who already knew about the group from those earlier complaints.
The whole thing, the weirdly professional adults, the institutionalized kids,
the pre printed silence card. It just screamed that this
was way bigger than a local neglect case. This looked
like a coordinated, maybe even international effort to move children
under the radar.
Speaker 1: U rest in Tallahassee was the spark, but the fire
really started when they searched the finders' properties back in DC.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is where the most sensational, most damning evidence
comes to light. The findings from these raids are what
took the story from a weird cult to a sophisticated,
potentially global trafficking and intelligence operation.
Speaker 1: They hit two places at once, right, the house in
Glover Park and that big warehouse on Fourth Street.
Speaker 2: Correct, And what they found inside just completely blew apart
any idea that this was some simple back to nature group.
This operation was for the mid nineteen eighties incredibly technologically advanced.
Warehouse especially the warehouse wasn't a home, It was an
operational center. It had a video room that was described
as an indoctrination center. They had professional video production equipment
in there, and.
Speaker 1: There were training areas for children.
Speaker 2: Yes, and then you get the really disturbing stuff. Investigators
found jars of urine and feces. The police theory at
the time was that this was part of some psychological
control regimen, you know, using biological functions as a way
to dominate or monitor people.
Speaker 1: But the real proof of their sophistication was the communications network.
This confirms the private intelligence game wasn't just a fantasy
in Petty's head.
Speaker 2: It was high tech. They found evidence they were using
MCI account numbers and t HeLEX machines. We have to
pause on that for a second. This is nineteen eighty seven.
This is an email or texting. No.
Speaker 1: Atelex was a dedicated network for sending typed messages over
long distances. It's what banks and governments used for secure
communication exactly.
Speaker 2: So they were using corporate levels secure communications infrastructure, not payphones,
to send out operational instructions all over the world.
Speaker 1: And the instructions were specific.
Speaker 2: Chillingly specific. They found messages detailing how to move the
children across different state lines and jurisdictions to avoid being
caught by the police. This is not a bunch of hippies.
This is an organization that understands communications, security and legal loopholes.
Speaker 1: This high tech setup is the backdrop for the really
bombshell evidence which comes from the documents they seized, and
these were detailed meticulously in the reports by a US
Customs Service special agent named Ramon J. Martinez.
Speaker 2: Martinez's reports lay out the strongest case for what was
really going on. He detailed what he found and the
documents are just direct. He reported finding files that he
called child procurement manuals.
Speaker 1: Child procurement Yeah.
Speaker 2: And these manuals had step by step instructions on how
to get children.
Speaker 1: What kind of methods were they talking about?
Speaker 2: The methods listened where I mean they're horrifying. The documents
included instructions on impregnation of female members, purchasing children, trading,
and explicitly kidnapping.
Speaker 1: So the documents themselves are evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
The question is were these just like theoretical fantasies for
their game or were they actual operational plans.
Speaker 2: Well, the international scope suggests they were operational. Agent Martinez
cited one specific telex message that was recovered. It was
an explicit order to purchase two children in Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, and it named a specific contact, someone
at the Chinese embassy there. This isn't a fantasy. This
is a direct operational order that was intercepted by law enforcement.
Speaker 1: And there were other files pointing to a much bigger network.
Speaker 2: A huge network. They found files indicating operations or contacts
in London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica.
They were even tracking passport data for travel to places
like Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Which in nineteen eighty seven was not something a tourists did.
Traveling to North Vietnam back then required deep cover state
level approval that list of countries looks like an intelligence
agency's operational map.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just about moving kids. They were also
gathering intelligence on American citizens. They kept these extensive intelligence
files on private families who had no connection to the group.
Speaker 1: How were they getting that information?
Speaker 2: It was insidious. They would answer local newspaper ads for
babysitters or tutors. Then they'd go into these people's homes
and gather all this intimate data on them, their habits,
their jobs, their identities, all on unsuspecting families.
Speaker 1: So they're running domestic intelligence operations.
Speaker 2: It looks that way. They also had documents on topics
like Pentagon, break in terrorism explosives, and detailed plans for
evasion of law enformith. It showed this extreme obsession with
spycraft and targeting critical infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And this is where the whole investigation just slams right
into the biggest cultural anxiety of.
Speaker 2: The nineteen eighties, this satanic panic. Because amidst all these
operational documents, they find a photo album and the title
of the album was the Execution of Henrietta and Igor.
Speaker 1: And the police at the time they see these photos
and they immediately interpret them through that satanic panic lens.
Speaker 2: What they saw were photos of adults and children dressed
in white sheets dismembering goats. There was a photo of
a child in chains, another one of a child holding
a dead goat fetus that had been pulled from its
mother's womb.
Speaker 1: Gosh.
Speaker 2: One of the photos was even captioned Ben finds Henrietta's womb.
The police were absolutely convinced this was evidence of cult rituals,
ceremonial blood letting, maybe even Satanism.
Speaker 1: There was that one officer, Scott Hunt from the Tallahassee PD,
who was totally convinced. He said he believed the parents
in the group had give up their rights to their
children as a right of passage.
Speaker 2: But then you get the counter narrative. The finer spokesman,
a guy named Robert Gardner Terrell. He comes out with
this completely different explanation.
Speaker 1: And this is the same guy who owned one of
the properties that was raided, right and the one connection
to that CIA contractor.
Speaker 2: The very same and he insists the group is made
up of rational people, that they are not devil worshipers
or child molesters.
Speaker 1: So what was his explanation for the incredibly disturbing photos.
Speaker 2: He said it was all a big misunderstanding. He claimed
the photos were just documenting a hands on educational experience
for the kids.
Speaker 1: An educational experience.
Speaker 2: He said they were teaching the children where their food
comes from by having them participate in the butchering and
preparation of goats for them to eat. He actually called
it a delightful activity.
Speaker 1: That is the whole case in a nutshell, isn't it.
This bizarre, almost folksy, eccentric defense for evidence that looks deeply,
deeply sinister.
Speaker 2: Exactly on one side you have law enforcement seeing abuse.
On the other you have the defense saying, oh, you're
just misunderstanding our quirky lifestyle. And that ambiguity is what
allowed the whole thing to spiral.
Speaker 1: So the evidence they found paints this picture of an
organization with two completely irreconcilable faces.
Speaker 2: Yes, they were Taoist philosophical seekers who were also a
high tech group with financial secrecy, global contacts and detailed
plans for kidnapping children, and those two things just don't
fit together unless there was a third party involved, someone
providing the infrastructure and the protection.
Speaker 1: And that leads us straight into the shadow government angle
the alleged CIA intervention, because with all this evidence, you'd
expect a massive, open and shut criminal case.
Speaker 2: Instead, the whole thing just pivoted almost overnight. It went
from a criminal investigation to a classified national security issue.
Speaker 1: The allegation that the investigation was suppressed is the real
core of this whole mystery, and it's all laid out
in those custom service reports.
Speaker 2: Special Agent Martinez alleged pretty explicitly that an informant inside
the federal government told him the investigation had become a
CIA internal matter and that it was now classified secret.
Speaker 1: Just that classification alone tells you that this was about
way more than child abuse.
Speaker 2: But it went even further. Martinez claimed that the FBI's
Foreign Counterintelligence Division, that's a branch that stops foreign spies
from operating in the US, gave a direct order to
the DC Metropolitan Police.
Speaker 1: What is the order?
Speaker 2: They told the DC Police not to tell the FBI's
own Washington Field office about any new developments in the case.
Speaker 1: Hold on, So one part of the FBI is actively
blocking another part of the FBI from getting information on
a major criminal case happening in its own city.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible procedural move. It effectively walled off the evidence.
It paralyzed the criminal side of the investigation by turning
it into this turf war that was all about secrecy.
And this allegation was so serious it eventually made its
way to Congress in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: So the big question is why, what was the basis
for the CIA to get involved at all? We know
about Marion Petty's family connections.
Speaker 2: His wife and son. Yeah, but there was also a direct,
confirmed corporate link between the Finders and the agency.
Speaker 1: Through that contractor Future Enterprises, Inc. Or FBI.
Speaker 2: Right, the CIA themselves confirmed this. They admitted they sent
their own employees to FI for computer training in the
nineteen eighties. And who was employed by the CIA contractor.
Speaker 1: Robert Gardner Terrell, the Finder spokesman.
Speaker 2: And he worked there until February nineteen eighty seven, the
exact same month as the arrests in Tallahassee.
Speaker 1: The timing is just it's too perfect. A key member
of the Finders leaves his job at a CIA contracted
computer firm at the very moment his organization gets busted
for child procurement.
Speaker 2: It provides a very plausible link in the mid eighties
computer tech was exploding. Agencies like the CIA would have
absolutely relied on contractors like FI for specialized training in
things like secure communications or database management.
Speaker 1: This is where the story splits again. You have the
official version and then you have what's in the customs reports.
Speaker 2: The official CIA story is that FBI was just a
normal contractor and Terrell was just a guy who worked
there for a little while, simple as that. But the
customs reports contain this unconfirmed but absolutely explosive claim, which
is that the CIA admitted to owning the Finder's organization
as a front for a domestic computer training operation, but
that it had gone bad.
Speaker 1: Wait an admission that they owned it, but that it
went bad. That is the single most incredible piece of
information in this whole case.
Speaker 2: If it's true, it changes everything. It would mean the
Finder started as some kind of sanctioned CIA front, maybe
to train agents, maybe to provide cover for operations, but
that Marion Petty's private intelligence game spun out of control.
Speaker 1: So the group went rogue. It started using the skills
and the cover the CIA gave them to do things
the agency could never approve of, like what was described
in those child procurement manuals.
Speaker 2: And suddenly pet 's own weird claims that he was
investigating the CIA, that he ran a private intelligence game.
They start to sound less like paranoia and more like, well,
like he was telling some version of the truth.
Speaker 1: But the CIA's public response was the complete opposite. They
didn't just deny it, they were aggressive.
Speaker 2: About it, oh, totally. The CIA spokesman at the time,
David Christian, he called the charges ridiculous, outrageous, a nothing burger.
He insisted FBI was a legitimate company and the only
connection was Terrell's brief employment.
Speaker 1: He even said, this is one of the weirdest we've heard.
Speaker 2: Which is almost funny. You know, by trying to dismiss
it so completely, they just made it look more suspicious.
When you have their flat public denial on one side
and these detailed customs reports about secret classifications and jurisdictional
blocking on the other, it forces you.
Speaker 1: To choose a side, which is the foundation of any
good conspiracy theory. The very fact that the CIA was
forced to address this on a national level years later
just shows you how powerful these allegations were.
Speaker 2: So you have this mountain of truly disturbing evidence procurement manuals,
international telexes, weird rituals, and these deep intelligence connections.
Speaker 1: And then the entire investigation just stops. It hits a
brick wall.
Speaker 2: It's stunning how fast it ended. By late March nineteen
eighty seven, so that's only six weeks after the Tallahassee arrest,
Florida dropped all the charges against Amerman and Holwell and.
Speaker 1: The reason was insufficient evidence.
Speaker 2: Insufficient evidence for prosecution. And at the same time, the
FEDS wrap up their big investigation and announce they found
no evidence of any criminal activity.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is the part that makes no sense. How
can they find no evidence of criminal activity when the
police literally seized manuals on how to kidnap people and
telex is ordering the purchase of children.
Speaker 2: Well, it could be a few things. Legally, the evidence
from the DC raids might have been challenged in court,
you know, on procedural grounds. The finders were clearly very
savvy about their legal rights.
Speaker 1: The silence card exactly.
Speaker 2: And there's a big difference between having documents that plan
a crime and proving that crime actually happened. It's incredibly
hard to prove active trafficking.
Speaker 1: And so the public story just completely flipped.
Speaker 2: It did a one to eighty. The DC Police Chief
Maurice Turner, he goes public and says his department found
no evidence of wrongdoing. He completely downplayed the whole ritual angle,
saying a photograph can paint one thousand and one pictures,
basically implying it was just people butchering a goat for dinner.
Speaker 1: And what happened to the kids.
Speaker 2: They were returned to their biological mothers, and the mothers
confirmed they were members of the group and that they
had willingly given the children over to the men's care.
Speaker 1: Which reinforces that official narrative. Yeah, they're not criminals, They're
just a weird family with a different lifestyle.
Speaker 2: But the damage was done, the initial shock, the mystery
of why the case was dropped, the intelligence connection. It
left this permanent stain. Sociologically, the case is now seen
as this like textbook example of the nineteen eighty satanic panic.
Speaker 1: That context is so important. The whole culture was prime
tol even secret cults doing ritual abuse. So the goat
photos in the word cult just lit a match.
Speaker 2: But maybe the more important legacy of the Finder's case
is that it became a kind of patient zero for
all these later, more modern conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point. It's this specific toxic mix
of alleged child abuse, a cult stuff, and a confirmed
link to a government intelligence agency.
Speaker 2: It created the template. It's the blueprint for later conspiracy
theories about intelligence agency is being involved in child exploitation,
from Pizzagate to some of the stuff around Jeffrey Epstein.
The Finder's case proved that the idea was plausible enough
for people to believe even if it couldn't be proven
in a courtroom.
Speaker 1: And the story just won't die. It keeps coming back.
Speaker 2: It does. In twenty nineteen, the FBI released hundreds of
declassified documents about the Finders, and the reason they did
it was because it was one of the most requested
topics on their public records website, the Vault.
Speaker 1: So for decades the public has been demanding answers.
Speaker 2: Constant pressure, and the files themselves confirmed the group was
under surveyor for years. They were being monitored under classifications
like violent crime organizations and most tellingly, foreign encounter intelligence
foreign counterintelligence.
Speaker 1: So even the FBI didn't see them as just a
weird domestic cult.
Speaker 2: No, the files detail a sophisticated financial operation, the bank secrecy,
the movement of huge amounts of money, like that briefcase
with two million dollars in land deeds. The FBI took
them very seriously.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure those twenty nineteen files are heavily.
Speaker 2: Redacted oh massive reactions, which only adds to the mystery.
It just confirms that there are still deep institutional secrets
surrounding this case.
Speaker 1: So when you synthesize all of it, what's so striking
is that contradiction we started with. Petty creates this whole
psychological world for his followers based on self discovery and spontaneity,
you know, being the Taoist stroller.
Speaker 2: But at the same time he gives them high tech communications,
bank secrecy protocols, and instructions for committing felonies. It really
makes you wonder if this group wasn't just a commune, but.
Speaker 1: Some kind of prototype, a prototype for what.
Speaker 2: For a new kind of clandestine operative, one that blends
this radical New Age philosophy with really high level operational security.
Speaker 1: That is precisely the ambiguity, isn't it. The Finders just
refused to be one simple thing. They were a bizarre
social experiment that was appallingly neglectful to children.
Speaker 2: And at the same time they had the tools and
the documented plans of an international criminal network, and the
fact that the intelligence community had a contract with one
of them, and that the investigation was allegedly shut down
by the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Division. It means the question
isn't if the CIA knew about them. They did.
Speaker 1: The question is how much control did they have. Were
they actively using them or just passively tolerating all of
their highly illegal adventures.
Speaker 2: It's a case where the official answer nothing to see
here is completely unsatisfying. It ensures that those details from
the cised documents, the procurement manuals, the Hong Kong telex,
the secret classification we will forever suggests something much much
bigger was going on.
Speaker 1: The Finder's case is just a perfect example of what
happens when the secrecy of a really unconventional group crashes
into the secrecy of government intelligence agencies.
Speaker 2: The truth just gets lost in the middle, It gets
permanently obscured, and all you're left with is the tension
between the public denials and these heavily redacted government reports.
Speaker 1: So we'll leave you with this to think about, considering
Marian Petty's confirmed family ties to the CIA in Air America,
his own claim that he was running a private intelligence
game since before the USS even existed, and the documented
fact that his group was tied to a CI contractor
What level of involvement do you think the US intelligence
community really had with the Finders? Was knowing tolerance or
was it active utilization? Let us know what stands out
to you in this very thrilling thread