EYE OF THE CHICKENHAWK - SIMON DOVEY

This is the book that PROGRAMMED TO KILL wants to be. While PTK is interesting and the thesis itself is quite intriguing, that book, as I noted in my review from a few years ago, just throws all sorts of shit on the wall and makes pretty wild leaps and insinuations (along with its habit of mentioning anytime something falls on a “pagan holiday” like Walpurgisnacht). EOTCH is much more grounded in reality and, at least, equally dark. Dovey attempts to map a network that stretches across decades and continents and centers around child-sex trafficking but also branches into blackmail, hardcore porno, snuff videos, and murder. He literally maps the network in the sense that the cover itself resembles one of those conspiracy string boards with names of people and organizations connected in a vast web. The book is basically an explanation of how and why he drew the various connections. As you might imagine, this thing is as bleak as it gets, so there’s obviously a content warning for the rest of this review. It starts with the more “basic” stuff, the John Wayne Gacy/Dean Corll connection through John David Norman, who is something of a Forrest Gump figure in the child-porn world. The book stretches out from these two networks to groups involved in similar activities in places as far apart as Michigan and New Orleans. Again and again, Dovey shows a pattern where a part of these networks, which traffic young boys, create child porn and shade into extreme S&M and murder (as in the aforementioned Gacy/Corll cases) are uncovered but then the police don’t pursue the connections or the suggestions that others were involved (some of the Gacy crimes were committed when Gacy was out of town and he always maintained he had accomplices, some of the Corll victims were found in the porn JDN produced and he also claimed to be part of a network ). For example, Norman kept copious records of who was ordering his porn and boys in a rolodex that was sent to the State Department ostensibly to check for any employees who would be quite vulnerable to blackmail. They, the State Department, claimed that this didn’t concern them but then destroyed the cards and that angle of the investigation was never pursued. It backs up the central thesis of the book, that these child-sex networks exist and are protected since they involve high-level people who are able to keep these things quiet and, in the case that they are discovered, keep investigations/prosecutions at the lowest level possible. This book really goes crazy in the final couple parts when Dovey traces the network over to Europe and explores the networks around the Dutroux affair. I’ve always wanted to know more about this particular case, it’s a sort of even darker (given the many murders) version of the Epstein thing that is pretty unknown in the USA and this was the best explanation I’ve ever seen. I did not know that Wikileaks published the whole police dossier which includes the full victim statements which get pretty insane and baroque. Real DeSade shit. I’ve always felt the Belgians punch above their weight, in terms of evil, and this book confirms that. Overall, a deeply troubling and upsetting book, a pretty good retort to people who think this sort of speculation is total fantasy, satanic-panic nonsense.