The death of any child is tragic, but when dozens of children die while in care of the county there are a lot of questions that should be answered.

The Child Death Review panel is taking a closer look at the suspicious cases of 79 children who were part of the Clark County child welfare system when they died between the years of 2001 and 2004.

Eyewitness News was the first to make public documents censored by Clark County, eight pages of a report containing information about endangered children.

After failing to follow-up on those children months ago, the Department of Family Services is now working to account for their safety.

During a meeting of the Blue Ribbon Panel-Child Death Review in Clark County, DFS Director Tom Morton revealed he had no knowledge of 55 cases flagged last November.

Faced with pressure from county, state and federal officials, DFS now says it's working to identify the 55 cases, though the consultant who wrote the report insists he has provided that information on numerous occasions.

The county has said it could take up to two weeks to complete its review. Those results, Eyewitness News was told, will be made public.

The county also concealed a report related to the disappearance of Everlyse Cabrera. She is the 2-year-old who went missing from her foster home last June.

The Channel 8 I-Team first reported its contents last week. Now, a state lawmaker is calling for the county to make it public.

The state's blue ribbon panel on child death requested the report several months ago. Members hoped to include it in their final review of Clark County's child welfare system.

They didn't get it, but some members believe they can and should add it now. And that's exactly what they plan to do.

State Assemblywoman Susan Gerhardt sits on the Blue Ribbon Panel reviewing child death in Clark County. "It's really disturbing information. What particularly bothers me is we weren't able to see it."

For the last year, Gerhardt has participated in lengthy meetings, fought to learn more about specific child deaths, and has been denied access to key information. The situation came to head last week when it was revealed the county censored a report it provided to the panel.

Insult to injury was added a few days later when the I-Team exposed the contents of the "Carrascal Foster Home Case Review" -- an examination of the foster home where 2-year-old Everlyse Cabrera disappeared.

Gerhardt continued, "I think in light of the fact that we still have a little girl missing out there, I don't understand the reluctance to disclose."

The review outlines system failures.

Consultant Ed Cotton found that no caseworkers ever visited the home, though the Carrascal's had seven foster children.

A 3-year-old in their care suffered second and third degree burns, allegedly from hot soup. Though a Child Protective Services investigation was ordered, it never happened. And in the aftermath the county renewed the Carrascal's foster license, despite the family's failure to complete the required training.

"If there's any information at all that can be gleaned from looking at Ed Cotton's observations, we should take a look and learn from that," Assemblywomen Susan Gerhardt said.

The county claims the review -- paid for with taxpayer dollars -- was conducted in quote, "anticipation of litigation." In other words, they expected Everlyse Cabrera's parents would sue.

They did. And though the case is in the discovery phase, the family's attorney claims the county has denied the report's very existence.

Attorney David Gibson said, "We were asking for an Ed Cotton report. They're telling us there isn't an Ed Cotton report. We find out from your report that it was a file review or something like that. They knew what we were asking for, I don't know why they didn't give it to us."

Gibson says he has since requested the review by its formal title and still been denied a copy. He plans to file a motion with the court to force the county to release it.

Gerhardt plans to insist the review be included as part of the Blue Ribbon Panel's final report. From her seat in Carson City, she hopes to channel her frustration into positive change for children."

Director of troubled Family Services resigns

Exit comes as agency addresses review of child deaths

Not even a heartbeat separated Susan Klein-Rothschild's abrupt resignation on Wednesday from the announcement of her successor at Clark County's beleaguered Family Services Department.

Klein-Rothschild -- who just this week learned that Clark County Manager Thom Reilly was courting a Georgia candidate to reorganize the department she led -- said her resignation is effective immediately.

Advertisement

In recent weeks, Klein-Rothschild has shouldered the brunt of public criticism stemming from an independent review of 79 suspicious child deaths that occurred between 2001 and 2004. The expert panel assembled by the state uncovered serious problems with how those fatalities were investigated within the system.

"The focus needs to be on the kids and families in Clark County," said Klein-Rothschild, who believes the controversy surrounding her is detracting from that goal. "My feeling was that if I pulled myself out of this process, the focus would stay on the children and families."

Klein-Rothschild said she was not forced out of the director's job, a position she took in December 2001. Reilly said he tried to persuade Klein-Rothschild to remain on staff, but she declined.

Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, by David McGowan (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2004) is not just another sensationalized book about serial killers. McGowan, author of Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don't Want You to See, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion, ties serial murders, programmed assassins, satanic cults and child pornography and prostitution to a fascist political and military conspiracy of frightening scope.

I normally hate reading about this type of material. Too sickening. But McGowan, unlike most authors who treat this stuff, is not interested in sensationalized accounts that appeal to dark prurient interests. Rather, he wants to sound the alarm about the real methods used in fascist takeovers of societies.

McGowan begins by reviewing the evidence for government sponsored mind control experiments dating back to the Nazis and the OSS (forerunner of the CIA). According to McGowan, these shadowy intelligence agencies, along with the military intelligence units, founded, encouraged, and covered up for Satanic cults, whose systematic abuse of children from very young ages provided a contnuing supply of potential mind-controlled programmed assassins. They supplied not only assassins but also child prostitutes, pornography subects and even sacrificial victims. The more susceptible to dissociated states, the easier to program. Mind control in this context refers to "the process of first enhancing an unwitting subject's natural ability to dissociate (creating, in essence, the condition of Multiple Personality Disorder), and then controlling that subject's dissociative states (by creating one or more alter personalities that are effectively under the control of others, and that are unknown to the `core' personality)." (p. xv)

Part I of the book is titled "The Pedophocracy." Here McGowan takes the reader on a tour of child sex, child porn and child murder rings around the world whose members include many high-ranking political figures. One of the things that tie all these scandals together is the cover-up of participants, destruction of evidence, and lenient sentences to those who have to take the fall by authorities around the world. From the Marc Dutroux scandal in Belgium, to one in Latvia involving the Prime Minister and Justice Minister, to another in Portugal, to the scandal in the United Kingdom that reportedly reached into Tony Blair's cabinet, to those of Larry King, Michael Aquino and Craig Spence in the United States with many circumstantial connections to high-ranking political and media figures, McGowan shows how the damage control operations, including numerous "suicides" by potential witnesses, work.

McGowan then details the CIA connections of some of the Satanic groups that have been linked to ritual abuse and killing of children, in particular the Finders, described in an article in the Washington Post from 1987 as "a 1960's style commune ... described in a court document as a `cult' that allegedly conducted `brainwashing' and used children in `rituals (p. 59). After some members of the group were arrested for possible kidnapping when found in the possession of several children who they were keeping in a van and who showed signs of neglect, abuse and sexual abuse, homes and warehouses belonging to group members were searched. U.S. Customs found "photos showing children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and one photograph of a child in chains" (pp. 59-60). While memos written by one of the U.S. Customs investigators detailed evidence of much worse actions, nothing was written in the press about the matter until seven years later when the US News and World Report attempted to put it to rest by downplaying the accusations as "rumors" even though they were in the possession of the memos.

McGowan goes on to note that "the firm that supplied training to CIA officers didn't just employ several members of the Finders, but appears to have in fact been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Finders organization. It should also be noted that the CIA does not, as a general rule-of-thumb, assign the training of its officers to outside contractors, unless, that is, the `private' firm utilized in such a capacity is a CIA front." (p. 61) The leader of the Finders group, Marion Pettie, in a 1998 interview explained that "Going back to World War II, I kept open house mainly to intelligence people in Washington. OSS people passing through, things like that." (p. 65) Regarding evidence found regarding international trafficking of children, the US Custom Service investigator in his memo stated that he was advised by a member of the Washington D.C. police that "the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD [D.C. police] report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review." (p. 66). No one was indicted.

McGowan concludes Part I by suggesting that "it is certainly in the realm of possibility that the high profile child pornography raids in recent years, which invariably result in relatively few arrests and even fewer prosecutions and convictions, are not intended to punish the victimizers, but to identify and compromise them. And it is not inconceivable that the databases being compiled will be utilized as something of a recruitment list to identify those persons who have been `preconditioned,' so to speak, for future mind control operations." (p. 68)

McGowan begins Part II with the story of Henry Lee Lucas, a serial killer who confessed to nearly 600 murders, committed "rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism and pedophilia" (p. 71) and who, oddly enough, was the only death-row inmate in the State of Texas spared death by Governor George Bush. McGowan suggests the reason for this and other odd leniencies enjoyed by Lucas lies in the possibility that he was an MK-Ultra programmed assassin.

By perpetuating the myth of the lone serial killer, authorities can deflect attention away from organized groups, cults or intelligence services. McGowan shows that in nearly all cases, the serial killers most likely had accomplices. The close ties of serial killers, child pimps and pornographers to people in position of authority in politics and law enforcement has also been covered up. Lucas himself is quoted as saying: "No one wants to believe the cult story. The TV people cut it out. The writers don't write about it." (p. 88)

Part III looks at some recent scandals as well as historical precedents from the past. Along the way we get a lucid exposition of why the parents of Jon-Benet Ramsey probably killed her and why Charles Lindbergh probably killed his "kidnapped" son.

McGowan concludes that the wave of sensationalized serial killings beginning around 1966 were a domestication of Operation Phoenix, the U.S. program of mass political assassination in Vietnam. The goal was to shock and frighten the public into acceptance of police state measures in the United States and to create a climate of right-wing reaction.