Girl, 10, Claims Father Filmed Murders of 3 Children

The 10-year- old daughter of a man accused of leading a child molestation ring told detectives that she witnessed the Satanic ritual killing of three other children while her father and friends filmed them, according to court records released Monday.

Sacramento Municipal Judge John V. Stroud ordered 146 pages of investigators’ reports and interviews with nine children, aged 4 to 10, released and then delayed pleas and other motions involving the five suspects in the case until Thursday.

Alleged ringleader Arthur Dill, 33, of Campbell, a former Sacramento area restaurant manager, and four people who worked for him at the time of the alleged crimes in 1982 are charged with a total of 169 counts of felony child molestation. No murder charges have been filed.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Rick Lewkowitz asked Stroud to retain bail at $500,000 each for the five defendants because of “the amount of counts against them, the number of years imprisonment they face, the amount of abuse inflicted . . . and a pending homicide investigation.”

The reports included statements by Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Robert Humphrey that Dill’s oldest daughter, who was 8 at the time of the alleged crimes, told him that “in addition to being molested, (the children) were forced to participate in the ritual killing of three other small children” and that a “video or movie camera was utilized to film the killings.”

“The children were forced to participate in satanic worship in which animals were sacrificed and ‘chopped up’ with the children being told that the same thing would happen to them if they ‘told our secret,’ ” one report said. The report said one man wore a black robe and a mask during the rituals, which took place in a basement of a Sacramento area house.

Dill emphatically denied the charges when first arrested last June and asked for “a polygraph, hypnosis, truth serum, whatever was necessary,” to prove his innocence, according to the reports.

Officers released him at that time because of conflicting evidence and rearrested him last week after further interviews with his four children, now aged 4 to 10, and five other alleged victims.

Dill said at that time that he believed the charges were the result of a plot by his estranged wife and mother-in-law to get even with him after he separated from his wife and children last year.

“My mother-in-law said she’d see to it that I never got to see my kids if I fought (for custody). It’s a nightmare, a living nightmare,” Dill said in an interview published Monday in the San Jose Mercury-News, adding that he “would never do anything to hurt a child. Never. Especially my own.”

But the reports by Humphrey and other detectives say Dill’s three daughters, now 10, 8 and 6, all described sexual incidents involving their father and his friends. His other child, a son, was 2 at the time of the alleged incidents.

The reports also said three of the other five children gave similar accounts; one was too young to recall and one child denied the accounts.

Humphrey said Dill’s children told him that, in addition to molesting them, their father invited friends to his home and charged them between $55 and $85 each to molest them while he took pictures.

The detective said the girls also said their father made them “recruit” five neighborhood girls, then ages 4 to 8, for sex “parties.”

Detectives quoted one of Dill’s daughters as saying her father made her dress up in her mother’s wedding gown for a “wedding,” after which her father directed her to participate in a variety of sex acts involving himself, his friends and other children while photos were taken.

The Dill children said that when their mother quit a night job, their father quit the sex parties “because Mom was always home.”

Dill and his wife, Claudia, separated about a year later. Claudia Dill told detectives that several months after that, her eldest daughter told her that her father “had been doing bad things to her.”

The girls said their father told them, “If you tell, I will show the pictures to the police, and they will come and put you in jail,” and that he either paid or threatened to expose the other children if they did not continue. They said he also threatened “to put them in the ocean with the sharks” or “cut her in half” with a kitchen knife or “stab me in the heart.”

Humphrey also said the oldest girl said “a Barbie doll was placed in a container of water, blood was poured into the water and a toy shark was place in the container.” The detective said the children were told that “if they told what had been happening, they would be thrown to real sharks and eaten like Barbie dolls.”

In addition to Dill, others in custody are Roland Cuevas, 36; Veryl Baker, 56, and Alan Arbuckle, 29, all of the Sacramento area, and John Holman, 36, Dill’s roommate.