Finally, after further calls to the captain who supervised the civilian employees at the center, Dorsey was told that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division would investigate the case.
The investigation, Col Rafferty was later to say, “proved that it could not be substantiated that abuse had occurred… From my understanding of the actual touching involved, there was a question of just exactly what was clearly a tickling type of incident that could be interpreted in a couple of different ways. I suspect the investigators took the care-givers’ interpretation of what that was.
A year later, Dorsey learned that her own daughter had been sexually abused at the center.
DORSEY AND THE OTHER PARENTS WOULD also learn that there had been sex abuse cases involving day care centers at several other Army bases. West Point was one of the most serious –until the Presidio. In July 1984, a 3-year-old girl was brought to the emergency room at West Point Hospital with a lacerated vagina. The child told the doctor who examined her that a teacher at the West Point day care center was the one who hurt her. In August, another parent came forward. By the end of the year, 50 children had been interviewed by investigators.
Children at West Point told stories that would become horrifyingly familiar. They said they had been ritually abused. They said they had had excrement smeared on their bodies and been forced to eat feces and drink urine. They said they were taken away from the day care center and photographed.
Some parents alleged that the Army tried to cover up the cases. “The whole underlying theme was that the image of West Point was more important than dealing with the reality of what happened,” said Dr. Walter Grote, whose 2-year-old daughter was among the children allegedly abused at the center.
Grote is now in private medical practice in New Jersey. A former Army captain, he turned down a promotion to major in 1984 to protest the Army’s handling of the day care case at West Point. He was well aware that the problem at the Point had started long before.
In August 1983, nearly a year before the sex abuse case broke, a 22 month-old child had been murdered by the mother’s boyfriend, an Army staff sergeant. After a court martial hearing, the sergeant was given an 18 month suspended sentence and dishonorable discharge.
Col. Richard C Eckert, a doctor then in charge of West Point’s Child Protection Case Management Team, was outraged at the leniency of the sentence. In an Aug. 1, 1983, letter to Lt. Gen. Willard Scott, Jr., then superintendent of West Point, Eckert wrote, “The community has received a devastating message–West Point and the Army take child abuse lightly and do not consider it a major offense.”
The guy that murdered the 22 month-old baby was let off Scot free,” said Dr. Pat Jones, a former pediatrician at West Point now in private practice in Texas. “They just kicked him out of the Army to prevent any publicity.”
Jones, who believes his 15 month old daughter was sexually abused at the center at West Point, was so outraged he resigned from the Army. “I tried to resign from the alumni association I feel ashamed for even being from that place.”
No indictments were returned in the West Point cases.
Fort Dix was next in July, 1986, two female employees were accused of sexually abusing four 3-and-year-old girls. No indictments were returned in the case, and the women returned to work at the day care center. Then Fort Leavenworth, Kan. And Fort Jackson, S.C. By November, 1987 the Army had received allegations of child abuse at 15 of its day care centers and several elementary schools.
There were also at least two cases in Air Force day care centers. And at a day care center run by the Navy in Philadelphia, a civilian was sentenced to three years in prison for sexually abusing children.
The Department of Defense decided in April 1987 to form special strike teams to investigate sex abuse cases in the military. The goal of the teams “is to not let things get any worse,” says Bob Stein, director of the Military Family Resource Center at the Department of Defense. “We need to be better prepared to deal with the magnitude of the problem. I don’t think anybody was prepared” at the Presidio or West Point.
Despite the military’s official stance of preparedness, a new horror surfaced in June 1988 when a special team of experts was sent to Panama to help determine if as many as 10 children at a Department of Defense elementary school had been molested and possibly infected with AIDS by a teacher who is dying of the disease.
Although the allegations of ritual abuse made by children at West Point and at the Presidio were similar, “we may never totally resolve whether there is any kind of external organization [of abusers] or if just a single pedophile” was involved in those cases, said Col. Jim Schlie, deputy director of the Military Family Resource Center.
But some of the allegations made by children at the Presidio, that they were taken to houses on – and off-post by men and women–led to investigation of the possibility that there was an “external organization” in San Francisco. INSIDE A CONCRETE BUNKER BEHIND THE MILITARY Intelligence Building at the Presidio, the words “Prince of Darkness” are painted boldly in red on one wall. Used decades ago to house artillery guns, the reinforced concrete batteries appear to have been converted to something like ritual chambers.
Emblazoned next to the “Prince of Darkness” is the word “Die,” and what looks like a list of names, painted in red, that have been crossed out with heavy black paint. One wall is covered with the numerals 666, a sign of the devil, and occult drawings. A clearing in the center of the concrete floor, where the ground is exposed, is filled with refuse and partly burned logs. On the front wall beneath the window that faces the Military Intelligence Building is a huge pentagram inside a circle. In the rear, where sunlight gives way to darkness, white and black candle drippings sit atop a dome shaped recession in the wall, apparently a crude altar. Incense sticks lie half burned to the side.
At another battery farther up Lincoln Boulevard, a large drawing of Satan, with red eyes and horns appears on an outside concrete wall. Doors to the battery are secured shut; there are no windows to climb though. No entry is possible here. It would be easy to dismiss the satanic graffiti as the pranks of adolescents, taking advantage of the isolated bunkers to play new versions of “Dungeons and Dragons.” But events in the Presidio case suggested something more sinister could have been involved.
Satanic goings-on are not new to the Presidio. In the early 1980’s, when he was an MP at the Presidio, Albanoski recalls, “We got a call from the Portola MacArthur housing area. One person reported a man dressed in black holding a little girl’s hand running toward the park. Another call came in saying they heard screams near the creek.”
The search led to a gardener’s shack at Julius Kahn Park, a strip of city-owned playground adjacent to the Presidio, behind the housing area. “We heard noises coming from inside,” Albanoski recalls. “We kicked the door open and here’s this nice little bedroom. In a corner was a mannequin with a gun aimed at the door. On the left side there was a bunk against the wall. There was a pentagram on the floor, a huge one. There were dolls’ heads all over the ceiling, just off-the-wall stuff.” Music was blaring from a radio.
Albanoski and another MP were given approval to set up surveillance of the shack. After a while, the investigation was called off. “We were sitting there, we’ve got a cult on the Presidio of San Francisco and nobody cares about it,” Albanoski says. “We were told by the provost marshall to just forget about it”. Though Albanoski’s investigation went nowhere, the child abuse cases would raise the specter of Satanism again.
Larry and Michelle Adams-Thompson had noticed changes in their daughter’s behavior after placing her in Gary Hambright’s class four or five times in September and October of 1986. The girl, who turned 3 in October, had begun having nightmares and would wet herself when frightened. Her parents believed it was just “a bad stage” she was going through until they heard about the Tobin boy in January. The girl was taken to a therapist at Letterman Army Medical Center in February. In therapy, the girl talked about being sexually abused by Hambright and by a man named “Mikey” and a woman named “Shamby” whose identities were unknown. On Aug. 12, 1987, the Adams-Thompsons were shopping at the PX at the Presidio. Suddenly the girl ran to Larry Adams-Thompson and clutched his leg. He looked up and saw a man whom he knew as Lt Col. Michael Aquino.
“Yes, that’s Mikey,” the 3-year-old told Adams-Thompson. After being taken outside, the girl added, “he’s a bad man and I’m afraid.” As they were leaving the parking lot, the Adams-Thompsons saw Aquino’s wife, Lilith. Larry asked the child if she knew the woman.
“Yes, that’s Shamby,” the girl said.
The family went home and called the FBI.
When interviewed by authorities the next day, the girl identified Gary Hambright from a photo lineup and said she had been driven to Mikey and Shamby’s home by Hambright. There, she said, she was abused by Hambright, Mikey and Shamby in a room with black walls. She said that she had been photographed. She said Hambright and Mikey were dressed in women’s clothes and Shamby was dressed in man’s clothes.
The investigators drove her to Leavenworth Street in San Francisco. The girl was asked to identify any of the houses that she had been to before. While walking past 2430 Leavenworth, the girl identified the house as the one where she met “Mikey” and “Shamby.” It was the Aquino’s’ house.
A search warrant was served on the Aquino home on Aug. 14. In attendance were agents from the FBI and the San Francisco Police. Because the abuse allegedly occurred on city property, it was to be a city case.
Among the items seized were video tapes, cassette tapes, notebooks with names and addresses, two photo albums one paper plate and two plastic gloves from the kitchen garbage, four plastic cases of negatives and 29 photos of costumes and masks. With his widow’s peak and arching eyebrows, Lt Col. Michael Aquino looks more like a pudgy Dracula than a high ranking Army officer with top security clearance. He is the founder and high priest of a satanic church, the Temple of Set. His wife, Lilith, a gaunt woman with long, dark hair, is a priestess in the temple’s Order of the Vampyre. The couple refer to the search as a “raid” and have branded the investigation a witch hunt.
“The Army has known about my religion for the last 18 years and has no problem,” Aquino told me in a telephone interview late last year. “Not one single person in the US. Army, with the exception of the chaplain, would have the remotest notion that I would be involved in anything like this.”
Indeed, Army spokesmen at the Pentagon label his military career as “extraordinary” and say he is entitled to his religious beliefs. As for his top security clearance, they say his openness about being a Satanist makes him much less of a security risk than a homosexual or someone with drug or money problems would be.
The Army did not suspend his clearance when he joined the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey, in 1969. Nor when Aquino founded his own satanic church in 1975. Nor when Aquino while on a NATO tour of Europe in 1982 performed a satanic ritual in the Westphalian castle that had been used as an occult sanctuary by Heinrich Himmler’s SS elite in Nazi Germany. Nor did the Army move to suspend Aquino’s top security clearance during the sex abuse investigation. “The nature of the investigation that prompted the search of his house, and I understand some of his belongings were taken by police, really is a question for the San Francisco Police Department,” Maj. Greg Rixon, spokesman at the Pentagon said Aquino, who now works as a program analyst at the Army Reserve Personnel Center in St Louis, has vehemently denied ever meeting or having in his house the young girl who has alleged he abused her. He unsuccessfully tried to have court martial proceedings initiated against Adams-Thompson.
In a Temple of Set newsletter sent out two months after the search of his home, Aquino accused Adams-Thompson, who is an assistant chaplain for the Army, of trumping up the allegations as some sort of Christian vendetta “Also relevant is his profession as a Christian clergyman; I certainly doubt that he would have made such an outrageous accusation against any Lieutenant Colonel who was not known to be a prominent Satanist”
In April, Aquino wrote a four-page letter to the head of a children’s advocates group in Southern California warning that “we do not intend to see a replay of what happened in Nazi Germany, when the reluctance of the Jews to challenge those who systematically and falsely accused Judaism of heinous crimes-including the sexual abuse and ritual murder of Christian children- led to violence against them.”
Aquino said that the Temple of Set neither prescribes nor tolerates any form of harm, sexual or otherwise, to children or animals. “It is made clear in our membership publications that, should we have any reason to think that a member is engaged in any such activity, he or she will be immediately expelled and reported to the appropriate law enforcement or animal-protection authorities.”
In a February appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show this year, Aquino said that Satanists “are not servants of some God; we are our own gods; we are our own decision makers. And people naturally fear this.” Their beliefs, he said, are “most closely aligned to that of Plato.”
Neither Aquino nor his wife were charged in connection with the case. San Francisco Police completed their investigation of the Aquinos in June and submitted their findings to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. A decision on whether any charges would be filed was pending when this story went to press.
Now stationed at another post, the Adams-Thompsons say their daughter’s nightmares and bed wetting have stopped. And they say their daughter has not given up.
“She still believes that some day some judge will hear all the facts and do right by her,” Michelle Adams-Thompson said “A lot of people were not as brave as her.”
AT 4:45 A.M. ON SEPT. 22 1987, A CALL came in to the Presidio Fire Department. A building in the complex of structures at the Presidio that houses the day care center was on fire. By the time parents started dropping their children off at 7 a m, the $500,000 blaze had been extinguished. The Army Community Services Building adjacent to the day care center, which housed some of the center’s records, had been demolished. Perhaps only coincidentally, the fire occurred on the autumnal equinox, a major event on the satanic calendar. An investigation of the fire by the Army blamed the blaze on a faulty wire outlet.
Three weeks later, fire struck again, this time at the day care center itself. The fire was reported at 4:30 am. It caused $50,000 damage to a day care center building that housed four classrooms, including Hambright’s.
Now faced with two fires, the Army called in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for help. Investigators found that both fires, contrary to the Army’s finding, had been arson. They also found cinders under a building, evidence of a third attempted but unsuccessful fire at the center. The Army later offered a $5,000 reward for information on the fires. There have been no takers.
On Sept. 30, eight days after the first fire, and six months after the original charges had been dropped, Gary Hambright was reindicted on molestation charges involving 10 children. He was charged with 10 counts of lewd and lascivious conduct on a child and two count of oral copulation. The indictment included the Tobin boy but did not include the original charge of sodomy.
That day there was much backslapping at a press conference called by US Attorney Joseph Russoniello to announce the charges. A press release said the maximum penalty that might be imposed in this case is 96 yeas in prison and a $3 million fine.
Surrounded by Army brass from the Presidio and several FBI agents, Russoniello said there would be no more arrests; despite the children’s allegations, there were no other suspects. Russoniello would later be implicated in efforts to cover up the links between the Nicaraguan Contras and South American cocaine-trafficking organizations, raising deeper questions about whether the decision not to prosecute Hambright and Aquino had “national security implications.” But even Gary Hambright appeared to suggest that others had been involved. At a press conference Oct. 2 after he was arraigned, Hambright, reading from a prepared statement, said he was innocent of all the charges and added, “I cannot understand why these allegations and falsehoods have been, directed solely at me.”
Geoff Hansen, the assistant federal public defender who represented Hambright, refused to allow his client to answer any questions, a policy unbroken throughout the long months after the indictment Hansen denied, however, that Hambright was referring to anyone else.
The parents had many questions about the new indictment. Why only those children? Why only one child on the indictment who had medical evidence? Why did the indictment not include the children with such medical evidence as missing hymens and rectal lesions? And why were the charges so vague?
Rather than specifying the actual crimes allegedly committed on the children, 10 of the 12 charges were committing lewd and lascivious acts. The other two charges, involving the Tobin boy and the boy who was abused on his birthday, were oral copulation. Hambright no longer was charged with raping the Tobin boy.
The Tobin boy, the only child with medical evidence on the indictment, was included because he had been examined by CASARC, by a non-Army doctor off post. Cooperation between the Army and the U. S. Attorney had been weak from the beginning. The cases of chlamydia could not be used as evidence because the right kind of culture, had not been taken at Letterman Army Medical Center. When one couple called the US Attorney’s Office to ask if they should take their children for another culture, the answer was no.
Assistant U. S Attorney Peter Robinson, who had been brought in by then to assist Susan Gray, said those 10 children had been chosen from the more than 60 victims because they would make the best witness.
In February, Assistant US Attorney Gray, now teamed with Assistant US Attorney Eb Luckel, asked that charges involving four of the children be dismissed because of problems with the children’s testimony. Later in the month, Judge Schwarzer dismissed all but one of the remaining counts because the charges were too vague. Gray and Robinson had submitted a two page document listing a series of dates on which the abuse allegedly occurred for each child but did nothing further to spell out the accusations.
The only remaining witness on the indictment, the Tobin boy, was removed from the case a short time later on the advice of the boy’s therapist.
Gary Hambright was a free man – again.
THE STRATEGY FOR A SIMPLE pedophile case had failed again. Gray, the daughter of a district court judge, had never before handled a child sexual abuse case. The Presidio case, in fact, was believed to be the first such case handled by the US Attorneys Office in San Francisco. Gray had worked long and hard on the case but confined her efforts to the law library. Nether Gray nor anyone else in the U. S. Attorney’s Office saw the need to hire experts on child abuse cases until about two months before the end. There had been a telephone consultation with Dr. Roland Summit, an associate clinical psychiatrist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and a consultant in major sex abuse cases around the country.
“I reviewed some early documents in the case,” Summit said “On the basis of the documents, they didn’t want to go to court. There were too many allegations of weirdness and ritual without enough corroborating evidence. It is that kind of thing so far that is fatal to effective prosecution.”
Summit, who has consulted on a number of ritual abuse cases, said the failure in such cases is “a scandal … that we have to see some sort of material proof to get any sincere concern to what 300 to 500 children have sworn in the midst of terror was real. If you had 300 adults in any circumstance, wherever they were assembled, who would describe this same phenomenon, nobody would want to believe it, but I don’t think the justice system could possibly be that indifferent…..
“The smart money for any attorney is to stay away from it and try to sneak through by selecting witnesses who don’t talk about it. Are you going to put somebody in jail on the word of a little kid?”
Failure to consult with abuse experts haunted the case. By the time the children had been in therapy long enough and felt comfortable enough to talk about some of the more bizarre aspects of the case, Gray was adamant that she could not take such things before a jury. “She sat right here on that couch and said she couldn’t take that before a jury,” said one mother.
Gray has refused to discuss the case.
Her colleague, Assistant U.S. Attorney Luckel, said the case fell apart at the end because “in the final analysis, when we reviewed the cases we had where there was a child who was prepared to go to court and was prepared to tell us what happened and describe something that actually occurred at the Presidio, as opposed to off-base, there was not much to consider.”
According to Luckel, the US. Attorney’s Office had decided that federal jurisdiction in the case ended at the boundaries of the Presidio. That meant that even though some of the allegations involved children being taken off post by Hambright, they were not to be part of the federal case. “When we got right down to it, there were just a couple of possible cases where federal jurisdiction existed,” Luckel said. “Our decision was that we could only prosecute for acts that occurred at the Presidio.”
Since San Francisco Police concentrated their efforts on investigating Aquino, that meant that many of the children’s allegations fell through the legal cracks. More than 60 children were sexually abused but not at the right location.
ON APRIL 19, 1988 THE ARMY HELD AN OPEN house for a new $2.3 million day care center at the Presidio. That same day, several parents held a press conference to protest the closing of the federal case.
“We feel that it is vitally important that parents everywhere realize these things really happen.,” they said in a prepared statement, “Cases such as this are being successfully prosecuted across the country at the state level. Why have Mr. Russoniello and the entire federal system failed to learn from these successes?” Referring to the victims, the parents said, “All have made statements that they were abused, they have psychological evidence of abuse and many have documented medical evidence of sexual abuse, including rape, sodomy and venereal disease.”
The criminal case is closed, but by June, the parents of 23 children had filed $55 million in claims against the Army, the first step toward filing a civil suit against the government alleging negligence that led to the abuse.
In December of 1987, the Army reassigned several people connected with the case, including Lt. Col. Walter Meyer, the director of personnel and community activities and John Gunnarson the director of child development services responsible for supervising the day-to-day operations of the center. Diana Curl, the day care center director, resigned. In late June ’88, Gary Hambright was “still trying to decide where he wants to settle,” said assistant federal public defender Nanci Clarence, one of Hambright’s attorneys Clarence said he is “in and out” of San Francisco.
The case that so many did not want to believe is still very much alive in the nightmares and sexual acting out that continue for many children, in the jarring statements that come suddenly out of nowhere, such as the 4 year old girl who sat at her kitchen table a few months ago and told her mother she wanted to kill herself with a knife. Others say they hate themselves. One 6-year-old girl was playing with modeling clay at school one day when she suddenly started stabbing it. “Mr. Gary is bad and I’m bad because I let him do it,” she told her teacher.
“People keep telling us we’ve got to let it go just forget about it and go on,” said parent Gretchen Runyan. Two of the Runyans’ four daughters were among the victims, both had confirmed cases of chlamydia.
“Three weeks ago, our youngest daughter was having nightmares and our other daughter was closing out the whole world, going to her room and sitting there, with no radio, no TV, no nothing. Tell me it’s over.”
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