He Fled Michigan. He Never Disappeared: The Federal Court Record of Francis Shelden in Amsterdam

For fifty years the story has been that Francis Shelden fled Michigan and vanished. The federal court record says something else. He left, and then he kept signing his name, in Amsterdam, in front of notaries, with American consular seals attached.

Content note: this series concerns the sexual abuse of children on North Fox Island and the Oakland County Child Killer investigation. Details of the crimes are kept to what the record requires.

I have written about North Fox Island for years, and like everyone who has, I accepted one sentence as settled. Francis Shelden fled the country in 1976 and was never brought back. The sentence is true. It is also incomplete in a way that matters.

A reader, Michigan writer Jacob Bielecki, sent me a federal appeals decision I had never seen. It is a dispute between bankers about who controlled Shelden’s money. Reading it, and the two related decisions it led to, I found something the standard account leaves out. Shelden did not drop off the map. For at least six years after Michigan charged him, his location was written into federal court records, his signature was notarized in Amsterdam, and American consular officers put their seals on the paperwork.

This series asks how all of that can be true at once. Part I lays out the paper trail and the law that governed whether anyone could have acted on it.

How He Left

Shelden told the story himself, under oath. In July 1976 he got a phone call from Dyer Grossman, who said that a mutual acquaintance, Gerald Richards, was in serious trouble and might drag Shelden into it. Richards, a Port Huron teacher, was arrested that summer and later pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct. According to Shelden’s testimony, Grossman suggested he leave the country for a while and referred him to Adam Starchild, an investment counselor who specialized in offshore money.

Shelden took his stock certificates out of his safe deposit box and took them to New Jersey. Starchild talked him into an offshore trust. Shelden then flew to Europe by way of Canada and the Bahamas, calling his family from Canada to say there might be a problem and he would be away for a while.

The trust was signed on September 28, 1976, at a house Shelden owned in Antigua. His brother, Alger Shelden Jr., was there. So was L. Bennett Young, a Birmingham, Michigan lawyer who managed Shelden’s land companies. Both men signed as witnesses. Two weeks later Shelden named Young the trust’s protector, with power to remove and replace trustees. The trust’s assets included roughly two million dollars in blue-chip stock and every share of three closely held companies, among them 40,000 shares of North Fox Island Company.

Two Boys in the Trust

The Sixth Circuit reproduced parts of the trust instrument in its 1984 decision and summarized the rest. On Shelden’s death, section 2.2 sends gifts to Yale, the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. The court’s summary of the next two sections is one line long.

A man who had left Michigan ahead of child sexual abuse charges sat in the Caribbean with his brother and his lawyer and set aside money for two boys from the town nearest his island. Nobody at that table has ever been asked publicly why.

Joe Moore was about 16. According to an FBI case summary, he died by suicide in Charlevoix in December 1976, two or three days before news of the Shelden investigation broke. Charlevoix Police Chief Jack Mol told the FBI that Moore had been a close friend of Shelden and that the two had traveled together. Mol suspected Moore had been warned that the publicity was coming. In the spring of 1977, the Shelden family sent the Moore family a condolence letter.

Gerald Richards drew a map of the network for investigators in 1977. In its Charlevoix corner, beside the town’s airport, he identified a boy’s father as the man who “built” North Fox Island, and a notation dated June 1976 sits beside it. That father’s surname matches the second boy in the trust. Richards drew his map seven years before the trust’s terms appeared in a published court opinion. The second boy may be alive, and Clutch Justice is not naming him until someone has reached him.

The Cranbrook gift sits in the same document. Shelden was a trustee of the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, and FBI records show he resigned by letter that December. In September he was still writing it into his estate.

In December 1976, according to the same testimony, Starchild called to tell Shelden that Michigan had issued warrants for his arrest and that the FBI was looking at Starchild. On February 24, 1977, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit issued federal fugitive warrants for Shelden and Grossman, the Michigan Daily reported the next day. State police told the paper both men had disappeared the previous November.

A French Citizen Living in Holland

The detail I did not expect came from a federal court in Puerto Rico. In 1982, ruling on whether Shelden could keep suing there, the court found that he had acquired French nationality on March 9, 1978, that he had married a French citizen before filing his lawsuit, and that he had lived in Holland or France since leaving Michigan. The court also found he had openly said he would not appear anywhere in the United States, where he faced prosecution, and that he had refused every request to be deposed on American soil.

Shelden’s lawyer argued that taking French nationality did not mean he had renounced his American citizenship. The court did not decide that question. It held that Shelden was domiciled in Europe and dropped him from the case.

French nationality matters for a reason that becomes clear later in this piece. France did not extradite its own citizens. The Netherlands, where he was living, had no such bar for a French national.

April 13, 1978: Amsterdam, With a Consular Seal

By 1977 Shelden was living in the Netherlands and paying a Dutch international tax lawyer, Antoon Kasdorp. Starchild had promised quarterly accountings and produced almost nothing. In the spring of 1978, with an American tax deadline approaching, Shelden decided to fire him.

On April 13, 1978, Shelden signed a one-page instrument removing the Virgin Islands trust company and appointing Edward Brongersma of Tetterodeweg 1, Overveen, as successor trustee. Brongersma signed his acceptance the same day. Amsterdam notary L.J.W.M. Schroeder legalized Shelden’s signature. A British vice-consul in Amsterdam legalized the notary’s seal. Then the paper went to the United States Consulate General.

Consul Melvin M. Tano signed a certificate, under the consulate’s seal, that Schroeder was a notary in Amsterdam whose official acts were entitled to faith and credit. That is what a consul does when a document signed abroad needs to be usable in an American court. The consul authenticated the notary. Nothing in the record shows Shelden appeared at the consulate himself, and the certificate does not vouch for him. But the document Tano certified recited, on its face, that Francis D. Shelden had signed it in Amsterdam that day.

Brongersma was a lawyer and former member of the Dutch Senate who had chaired its justice committee until he resigned in September 1977, seven months before Shelden appointed him. He had been convicted in 1950 under the Dutch law against sexual acts with minors and served eleven months. Part II of this series is about him.

Kasdorp flew to New York and served Starchild with the removal papers on April 20, 1978. Starchild kept the money anyway. A federal court later found he had already begun moving about $1.7 million in trust securities into companies he controlled, beginning December 15, 1977, and entered judgment against him for nearly $3 million.

The Fugitive Who Sued

On July 21, 1978, Shelden and Young filed suit against Starchild and his trust company in the U.S. District Court for Puerto Rico, where Starchild was living. Shelden was the lead plaintiff. The complaint described him as a citizen of Michigan. The court’s later findings recorded that Starchild had written Shelden 26 letters and aerograms from San Juan and that Shelden had written 27 back to Starchild’s San Juan address.

The following year National Bank of Detroit, caught between rival claimants to two corporate bank accounts, filed an interpleader action in federal court in Detroit. Its complaint said, on information and belief, that Shelden was wanted by the FBI on a fugitive warrant and that his whereabouts were unknown to the bank. In the spring of 1979, Young testified, he saw Shelden in Holland.

On October 16, 1979, Young used his power as protector to remove Brongersma and appoint himself and Detroit Bank and Trust as trustees. In November 1979, Shelden and Brongersma signed acknowledgments in Amsterdam before the same notary, Schroeder. A second American official, U.S. Vice Consul Robert E. Sorenson, verified the notary’s signature and seal.

March 31, 1982: A Noticed Address

In the Detroit case, Young and Detroit Bank and Trust asked to preserve Shelden’s testimony. Over the objection of Starchild’s side, U.S. District Judge Charles W. Joiner ordered on November 24, 1981 that Shelden be deposed in the Netherlands. When the lawyers could not agree on a date, the judge set it himself.

Written notice went out on December 17, 1981. The deposition would take place at the office of notary L.J.W.M. Schroeder, J.W. Brouwersplein 10, Amsterdam, on January 27, 1982. Starchild’s lawyers sought a delay because their client was in the Passaic County Jail in New Jersey. Judge Joiner moved the deposition but required it before April 1. A second notice, dated March 5, 1982, set it for 9 a.m. on March 31 at the same address.

Lawyers for Young and the bank waited an hour for the other side, who never came, then began at 10 a.m. Shelden walked through the trust, Starchild, and the trustees. Near the end, counsel asked him directly.

He went on to agree that his trustees would give him nothing while he remained a fugitive, and that he wanted them as trustees anyway. On July 9, 1982, he signed the transcript and affirmed it before Schroeder. Judge Joiner relied on the deposition to award the trust’s Michigan assets to Young and the bank. The Sixth Circuit affirmed in 1984, reproducing the Amsterdam instruments, the consular certificates, and the deposition excerpt in a published opinion.

Why He Was Never Returned: The Treaty

It is common to read that the Netherlands had no extradition treaty with the United States. That is wrong. A convention signed in Washington on June 2, 1887 governed extradition between the two countries until September 15, 1983. What matters is what it covered.

The 1887 convention listed sixteen crimes, from murder and rape to forgery and the kidnapping of minors. It had no category for indecent assault, sexual contact with a child, or child pornography, and extradition required the act to be a listed crime under both countries’ laws.

The only listed category that could have reached sexual abuse of boys was rape. Under the Dutch criminal code in force from 1886 until a 1991 revision, rape was defined as a crime against a woman. Contemporaneous reporting describes Shelden’s charges as criminal sexual misconduct involving young boys. On that description, the treaty in force from 1976 to 1983 had no category that obligated the Netherlands to surrender him.

That changed. The United States and the Netherlands signed a modern treaty at The Hague on June 24, 1980. President Reagan sent it to the Senate in May 1981, noting that it expanded the list of extraditable crimes. It took effect on September 15, 1983. Its schedule listed rape and indecent assault, and separately unlawful sexual acts with children under the age set by both countries. Article 20 made it apply to offenses committed before it took effect. Article 11 allowed the Justice Department to ask the Dutch Ministry of Justice directly for a provisional arrest in urgent cases. Court records describe Shelden as a French national. A 1988 State Police memo says he later obtained Dutch citizenship, which, if true, would have given him the protection the treaty allowed each country for its own citizens.

Two limits apply to the post-1983 years, and both point to records that have not been released. The new treaty barred extradition if prosecution had become time-barred under Dutch law, and how Dutch limitation periods applied to offenses from 1975 and 1976 needs a Dutch lawyer’s analysis. And an extradition request had to carry enough evidence to justify committal for trial under Dutch law, which depended on what Michigan prosecutors could prove.

What Michigan Police Wrote Down

The State Police file shows investigators knew where Shelden was. Progress reports from the St. Clair Post record that the Netherlands had “no provision” to extradite him in August 1978, that he was “living in Holland” and applying for citizenship in January 1979, and that he had married a French citizen a month later. A memo dated March 10, 1988, says police were told he could not be extradited from Holland, “where he is a citizen,” that “Prior to 1983 we had no extradition treaty with Holland,” and that St. Clair County had “Missed the window of opportunity.” The same memo records that the county prosecutor “WILL EXTRADITE.”

The memo’s premise was wrong. A treaty had been in force since 1889, and the one that replaced it in September 1983 covered his alleged crimes and reached back to them. Four and a half years into that treaty, Michigan’s own file described the window as closed.

When Shelden’s mother died in 1991, her Detroit Free Press obituary listed him as “Francis D. Shelden of Holland, Netherlands.” When he died in 1996, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported he had been found dead in his Amsterdam apartment on July 1, and that the death was confirmed by L. Bennett Young, the same lawyer who had witnessed his trust in Antigua twenty years earlier.

The other North Fox principals were no harder to find. Gerald Richards served his sentence at Jackson and came home to Port Huron, where the Times Herald featured his father-son magic act in 1985 without mentioning his conviction. A postal inspector arrested him again in 1988 for trafficking in child pornography, and he died in Port Huron in 1994. Dyer Grossman, charged with Shelden, has never been arrested. Law enforcement told WXYZ in September 2026 that he is 85 and was most recently in the Netherlands, and that St. Clair County has sought his extradition since 2018.

What the Record Leaves Open

The consular certificates are routine authentications, and nothing shows the Amsterdam consulate checked document signers against fugitive lists or had any procedure telling it to in 1978. The federal judges and private lawyers who knew where Shelden was had no legal duty to report him to police, and no record shows any of them did. Prosecutors in the 1970s may have doubted they could win a case resting on child witnesses and a cooperating co-defendant. For the seven years Shelden was most visible, the treaty itself may have made the question academic.

Those explanations account for the years before September 1983. They do not account for the thirteen years after it. From that date a treaty covered his alleged crimes, his residence in the Netherlands was in published federal opinions, and the Justice Department could ask Dutch authorities for an arrest directly. The question I am putting to the FBI, the Justice Department, and Michigan is whether anyone did.

The Records I Am Requesting

Why It Matters Beyond This Case

“Extradition failed” is a phrase that ends conversations. It suggests someone tried, met a wall, and stopped. In this case no document yet shows the attempt. What the record does show is a gap between two systems. The civil courts had Shelden’s address, his signature, and his sworn testimony. The criminal system, as far as the public can see, had a warrant and nothing else.

That gap is not unique to 1982. Courts, banks, consulates, and prosecutors still run on separate files. A fugitive who manages money across borders still leaves a paper trail that nobody is assigned to read. For the boys who were taken to North Fox Island, the question was never only where Shelden went. It was whether anyone with the power to bring him back ever asked for him.

A note on spelling: earlier Clutch Justice reporting, like most broadcast coverage, spelled the name “Sheldon.” The court records, the trust instrument, and his own signature blocks spell it Shelden, and this series follows the record.

Part II follows the man Shelden chose to hold his fortune, a former Dutch senator, and a pen name that went on to publish him. In 1977, Gerald Richards had already written one word beside Shelden’s initials: author.