“6 INDICTED IN CHILD SEX RING,” screamed the Tyler Morning Telegraph’s front page. The salacious charges shocked East Texas. Once again, no physical evidence or adult witnesses were discovered, but in July 2007, arrest warrants were issued for six people, including Mayo, Pittman, Sones, and Booger Red, a red-haired body shop sandblaster whose real name, Patrick Kelly, is rarely used, even by family. Investigators followed the case for a year and a half. Though the swingers club was in Mineola, Smith County officials claimed jurisdiction because the alleged perpetrators lived there. Many of the accused had drug or alcohol problems and lived in rural Tyler.
According to the allegations, there were half a dozen adults involved in the sordid operation, including Shauntel Mayo, Sheryl and Harlan’s birth mother Jamie Pittman, her boyfriend and Sheila Sones, the kids’ maternal grandmother. The shows were videotaped, and in order to break down the kids’ inhibitions, they were drugged with Vicodin. And the stories got uglier: The kids had been taught “sexual dancing,” and they had been forced to have sex with each other at a “sex kindergarten” run by a guy named “Booger Red” after “graduating,” they were made to dance, strip, play doctor, and have sex with each other at the club.
This time the Texas Rangers were called in. (The names of all the children in this story have been changed.) The police couldn’t find any evidence or other witnesses, though, and the investigation was dropped.įive months later, the case resurfaced in Smith County, Wood County’s neighbor to the south. As Margie explained to the on-duty officer, one of her new foster daughters, eight-year-old Sheryl, had told her that she and Harlan, her six-year-old brother, had been forced to perform sex shows at the swingers club. Margie and her husband, John, were career foster parents who, after arriving in Mineola, had taken in four new kids. Then, on June 22, 2005, a woman named Margie Cantrell, who had moved to Mineola from California the previous year, showed up at the police station with a shocking story about the Retreat. Things returned to normal, for about nine months. “There are probably two hundred swingers within fifty miles of here,” Russ said. “If we didn’t know them,” Russ told me, “they had to be known by other couples before they were invited to party.” Sherry would provide a snack buffet in the evening and then make breakfast burritos Saturday and Sunday mornings. On an average Friday they would host anywhere from fifteen to thirty swingers, most of whom the couple knew (the Adamses insist that the Retreat was not a club but an “on-premises party house”).
The proprietors, Russ and Sherry Adams, lived just up the road in Quitman. It was located next door to the Monitor offices, in the former Mineola General Hospital, and its membership included locals as well as people from Tyler, Dallas, and Louisiana. Swingers clubs are legal in Texas as long as no one is soliciting or paying for sex, and until Edwards’s column, the Retreat had been something of an open secret. we’ll try and forget they’ve infiltrated our town with their set of moral standards.” “If they just move quietly out into the country. “We’ll do the operators of the facility a favor and we won’t say where it’s located for now,” Edwards wrote. There were twelve rooms, two hot tubs, a karaoke machine, a stereo, a big-screen TV, a sex swing-and a lot of beds. Above the Community Calendar and next to the letters to the editor, they came to a story titled “Sex in the City,” in which regular columnist Gary Edwards revealed that a club for “swingers and swappers” was operating in town. “They braved the heat to enjoy music and good old-fashioned neighborly conversation,” read the caption. A photograph showed locals eating hot dogs at the Humble Baptist Church. “Area schools begin ’04 year next week,” one headline announced “28th Annual Hay Show samples to be collected,” declared another. On August 11, 2004, readers of the Mineola Monitor, a weekly newspaper that serves much of Wood County, in East Texas, sat down to a familiar front page.