Pierre d'Achoppement wrote:Could this not be town hysteria about a swingers club: people get worried about morals, use children as leverage to demonize people with a different attitude to sex. My guess: no actual children were involved. Is there any actual proof (movies, pictures, bruises)?
So you didn’t bother to read the coverage of the trials, then. Jeff and Annie posted links to the
Tyler Morning Telegraph, which has covered the case extensively. Typing “Mineola Swingers” into the newspaper’s searchbar will bring up more articles covering the case, which are my sources for the following facts:
When taken into foster care, the children showed clear signs of disturbance and highly sexualized behavior. The boy indicated to an adult that he had a secret to share but was silenced by the oldest girl, who insisted that he’d make things worse if he told.
The story emerged only several months later, after the children had passed through three foster families because their behavior was so disturbed that no one could handle them (one placement ended after the girl performed a pole dance at ballet class). Their fourth foster mother took the girl along with her to view the by-then-vacant club premises when she was considering buying it for a day care center. They looked at the property from the outside, and the girl then told the woman of what had gone on there and described the inside of the premises in great detail.
The girl later drew a diagram of the inside of the premises during a police interview and described the adults who worked there and their various job duties (door security, ticket seller, etc.).
The girl described how some of the defendants burned the children’s costumes and the tapes of their performances in a trash pile behind one of their homes. Police found the trash pile where she said it would be; it contained ashes, fragments of videotapes, and remains of children’s clothing.
The children described attending “kindergarten” in defendants’ homes and gave details of classes that consisted of a classic pedophile “grooming” process: first learning to touch dolls’ genitals, then their own, then each other’s, and so on. Erotic dance lessons were also on the curriculum.
An older child, now in her mid-teens, came forward and independently corroborated the foster children’s stories. She described being raped at the age of eleven by one of the defendants and confirmed in court that these children were some of the ones she’d been forced to have sex with in club performances.
The defendants haven’t offered much in the way of a defense against the charges. The best they’ve come up with so far is that a
Tyler Morning Telegraph reporter on the case has in the past dated one of the Smith County assistant district attorneys prosecuting the case. So far the judge has rebuffed defense attorney attempts to suppress the paper’s coverage.
No wonder the jury took only minutes to reach verdicts in the first two trials.
AhabsOtherLeg wrote:Am I reading this wrong, as usual? Why would anyone leave their kids at daycare in a building if they believed it was also playing host to swingers' parties?
The premises had been operated as a day-care center previously by the owner, who put the building up for sale when her husband died, and in the meantime rented it in early 2004 to one Russ Adams, who hasn’t been charged. He told her he would be running it as a community center for families with Down syndrome children. After the rumors of swingers nights hit the local paper, the landlady revoked the lease in mid-2004. The victims were the children of people involved in the swingers club.
Only one of the defendants was from Mineola. Those charged in the case are Jamie Pittman, 36, Shauntel Loraine Mayo, 29, Patrick Stephen Kelly, 41, and Dennis Boyd Pittman, 45, all from Tyler; Shelia Darlene Sones, 48, from Mineola; and Jimmy Dale Sones, 33, from Brownsboro. Tyler, population over 100,000, is twenty-five miles from Mineola—just down the road in Texas terms.
A seventh defendant, Rebecca Lynn Pittman, 32, was extradited in May from Wenatchee, Washington, in the case of the rape of the fifteen-year-old (she allegedly held the child down while her husband, defendant Dennis Boyd Pittman, carried out the rape).
Other children were involved but haven’t been identified. The foster children described a total of eight performers, but police have identified only the three siblings, who at the time the investigation began were a seven-year-old girl, a six-year-old boy, and a five-year-old girl, the siblings' aunt, who was six, and the fifteen-year-old girl, who isn’t mentioned at all in some of the reports. Attempts to protect the children’s identities seem to be causing some vagueness in the reporting.
The wife of John Cantrell, the foster father arrested on an allegations of sexual abuse in 1991, believes the charges are in retaliation for the couple’s work in helping to build the case against the swingers club. Given that the charges were laid in Solano County, California, whereas there is little evidence so far that the Mineola Swingers Club was anything other than a local East Texas group, it remains to be seen how valid her claim is.
On the other hand, Dennis Pittman was captured in Sevierville, Tennessee, and his wife in Washington state, so there may be connections outside Texas. And today the Cantrell charge has won defendant Patrick Kelly a postponement, his attorney claiming that if Cantrell is indicted, it would eliminate him as a credible witness in the state’s case against Kelly, although it was his wife, not Cantrell himself, who testified in the first two trials. Kelly’s trial resumes on June 30.
One fact arguing for a local and relatively unsophisticated operation, despite the elaborate planning and grooming, is that they used videotape instead of recording digitally and made money from ticket sales without, apparently, exploiting the far greater income stream to be had from the Internet.
And then again, there’s this (from
the trial of Jamie Pittman):
The girl described a night at "Booger Red's" [defendant Patrick Kelly] house when she was 4 or 5 when she said he choked a lady until she collapsed, while her kids were present, then he pulled her body off somewhere and she never saw her again.
It’s possible the other children haven’t been found because they and their mother are dead.
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