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THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP -- CHILD ABUSE, SATANISM, AND MURDER IN NEBRASKA |
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CHAPTER 1: "NEBRASKA IS DEATH-LACED" "If even half of what I have heard is true, this is the biggest thing to ever hit Nebraska," Gary Caradori told his wife, Sandie, late one night in August 1989. Although he was exhausted, the new chief investigator for the Nebraska Legislature's Franklin committee did not sleep that night. There was more cause for sleeplessness in the weeks that followed. On September 14, 1989 someone broke into the Caradoris' home. By January 1990, Caradori was writing to Nebraska Secretary of State Alan Beennan, "We -- my employees and myself -- have been followed and questionable situations have arisen during this investigation. Threatening situations have resulted numerous times. Why? Am I too close to something they do not want to become public?" On April 13, 1990, a repairman from the Executone company reported to Caradori that his phone was tapped, a finding confirmed to him by sources inside the phone company. The investigator continued to work, with a growing sense of the importance of his task. On May 29, 1990 Caradori wrote to Franklin committee chairman Loran Schmit. "To be frank," he told the senator, "it is my opinion that we are the only ones who are seriously working to get this case 'out in the open,' so to speak. I honestly feel that should we terminate this investigation that no further work will be done on it." On June 23, 1990, Caradori took a few hours off to attend a barbecue at the Omaha home of Mary Lyons-Barrett. Most of those present were members of the Concerned Parents, a group of citizens who were outraged about the lack of a serious investigation of child abuse by state or federal authorities, and the campaign in Nebraska's major newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, to discredit young victim-witnesses. Arriving in a 1980 white Corvette, Caradori told Concerned Parents president Trish Lanphier he had taken the car out of storage for the day's drive, because his other vehicles had been tampered with, and he was "sure that no one had ever seen that car." He was planning to sell his boat for the same reason, but what he most feared, he told Lanphier, was that someone would tamper with the private plane he often flew. "It would be so easy to tamper with a plane." In early July 1990, Caradori phoned Senator Schmit. "We've got them!" he exclaimed about some new evidence he had just developed. "There's no way they can get out of it now!" He and his son Andrew ("A.J.") would be flying to Chicago for the All-Star Game the weekend of July 7-8, he told Schmit. Caradori was going to do a little investigating on the side and would review the new evidence with the senator, upon his return the following Wednesday. On that Wednesday morning, July 11, 1990, Senator Schmit was in his office, talking with a journalist about the Franklin investigation. He related the numerous threats received by himself and Caradori, and Caradori's evaluation of those threats. "It's unlikely that they would kill you or me, Loran, because that would be too obvious," Gary had said once, "But then again, you never know." At about 10:30 a.m., Senator Schmit took a phone call. He listened for a moment, appeared shaken, and said, "Oh, my God, no!" After asking a few questions, he hung up, tears in his eyes. "Gary's dead." It happened at 2:30 a.m. on July 11, when Gary and A.J. were flying back to Lincoln, Nebraska from Chicago. A farmer in Lee County, Illinois reported that he saw a flash of light, heard an explosion, and saw a plane plunge to the ground. The Caradoris were killed, the plane's wreckage scattered over three-quarters of a mile. The eyewitness account of a flash of light and an explosion was on the early edition of television news in Nebraska, but got pulled from subsequent reports, which said that the plane exploded on impact. At the Nebraska statehouse that morning, Senator Schmit talked to reporters, who soon filled his office. "There were a lot of people in this state who wanted to see Gary dead," he charged. "They got their wish. The question to be answered is whether it was a coincidence." Gary's brother Dick Caradori was interviewed by the Lincoln Journal about the many threats Gary had received. "I know that it weighed a lot on his mind," Dick said. "He always hoped that they just didn't cover it up. He said there was a lot to it and a lot of big names involved and hoped their money wouldn't sweep it under the rug." Gary's mother, Mary, told the paper that Gary "cared dearly about the people involved in the Franklin case. He worked day and night for them." Sandie Caradori never received official notification of her husband's and son's deaths. She heard the news from friends, who heard it on the radio. Early the next day, before the bodies were even home from Illinois, the FBI descended on Caradori's office with a subpoena for all his records. What evidence had Caradori turned up? According to the Lincoln Journal the day after Caradori' s death, "Schmit confirmed that Gary Caradori had been trying to obtain pictures that some alleged victims said were taken of them during the period when they were being abused. He also confirmed that Caradori had been told that some of those allegedly involved in child sexual abuse 'had exposed some of the victims to satanic cultism. He was working on places and times.'" He was also working on leads into Washington, D.C. Mystery surrounded not only the crash of the airplane, but Caradori's whole trip. Gary and A.J. had stayed at the Days Inn Lakefront Motel in Chicago, where both his wife and his associate Karen J. Ormiston had telephoned, asked for him by name, and spoken with him (their phone bills showed the calls), but motel management would tell Caradori's investigative firm there was no record of his ever having stayed there. And if there was no record that Caradori had registered at the motel, there was also no record of what phone calls he might have made from Chicago. After months of investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board had not come up with the cause of the crash. My friend Bill Colby, former director of the CIA, commented after he looked into the matter, that the cause would probably never be known. Mary Caradori rendered her own verdict on the deaths of Gary and A.J.: "My son and grandson were murdered." Many Nebraskans echoed her opinion. They have growing grounds for suspicion. From late 1988, when the Franklin case first broke into public view, until mid-1991, at least 15 people associated with the case as investigators, alleged perpetrators, or potential witnesses, died sudden deaths, many of them violent. In December 1990, as Dr. Densen-Gerber prepared to travel to Nebraska at the request of the Legislature's Franklin committee, she consulted several friends with relevant expertise. One of them was a member of the New York State Police, who warned her, "Don't go. Nebraska is death-laced." Caradori's death cast a pall of terror over the state. Civil rights leader Rev. James Bevel, who visited Nebraska in October 1990 as part of a fact-finding commission, said that he had never seen such terror on people's faces, "not even on the faces of Mississippi Negroes in the 1950s and 1960s," who lived under the threat of lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan. In this atmosphere, Douglas County and federal grand juries indicted victim-witnesses Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci. The Senate Franklin committee went out of existence on January 9, 1991. On June 21, 1991, Alisha Owen was found guilty, and Douglas County prosecutors dropped the charges against Paul Bonacci. As far as the Nebraska political establishment was concerned, the door on the Franklin case was slammed shut for good. Thousands of Nebraska citizens are concerned that what Gary Caradori uncovered not go with him to the grave. The story of the Franklin Credit Union investigation is intertwined with the systematic cover-up that investigation confronted, from the time of the first cries for help from children six years ago.
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