Children Say They Witnessed Child Murders

Children Say They Witnessed Child Murders

By Jennifer Kerr  Associated Press Writer  Sacramento, CA (AP)

January 18, 1985  Paper: Mobile Register (Mobile, AL)  Page: 37 

Three children say men accused of running a child sex ring were present when three other youngsters were hit on the head with a pipe and cut up while cameras recorded the scene, a prosecutor said Thursday. Municipal Court Judge John Stroud refused to reduce the $500,000 bail for two of the five defendants, Alan Arbuckle and Veryl Baker of Sacramento.

Stroud agreed to delay until January 25 the bail reduction motions by attorneys for the other defendants, Arthur Gary Dill and John Holman of Campbell and Rolando Cuevas of Sacramento. All five are charged with a total of 169 felony counts of child molestation. Documents released by the court this week claim Dill, a former restaurant manager, and the four waiters who worked for him forced Dill’s four children and five other children – all between 4 and 10 years old- to have sex with adults, who paid up to $85, in 1982. 

Attorneys for Arbuckle and Baker said the charges were fabricated by Dill’s estranged wife and her mother, who they said let the Dill children read books about incest and satanic cults. They argued that their bail was too high.

Deputy District Attorney Rick Lewkowitz said the charges were serious enough and could result in a prison term of 480 years for Dill, who is charged with 64 counts, the largest number.

“It is hard to imagine a more serious case than this. We have nine alleged victims, traumatized victims, six are in therapy, two are in locked facilities (because of) … the trauma inflicted on them.”

In addition, Lewkowitz said, “there is a pending homicide investigation. We do not feel we have sufficient evidence at this point to file charges.”

He said three children told investigators they were taken to a basement and “there were three children there and those three children were given drugs and put to sleep and Mr. Baker took a metal pipe to the head of each of these children.”

He said the children said the nine children present were placed around the three beds where the unconscious children lay “and they were given cutting instruments, knives, while cameras and film was going… and they indicated very vivid details as to placing instruments into the bodies … the cutting up of the bodies.”

Lewkowitz said the three children “indicated all five of these defendants were present.”

Police have been unable to find any bodies or film. 

Tom Roehr, a public defender representing Baker, said the charges resulted from the anger of Dill’s estranged wife, Claudia, and her mother, Doris Bell, over the breakup of the marriage in 1983. 

Roehr said Mrs. Bell “has been obsessed with sexual molestation” because another daughter was molested by her husband as a teen-ager.

“She loaded herself up with some guilt. After she failed to see molestation where there was some, she is seeing it where it is not,” he said. 

He said Mrs. Bell has several books about incest, child molestation and satanic cults involving children and admitted to investigators that the Dill children had access to them. He said Mrs. Bell was writing a book about the molestation of her daughter, titled “The Terrible Thing That Happened to Dolly.”

Roehr said there is no basement in the Dill house, where the activities were alleged to have occurred.