Screams From House of Sex Abuse Suspect Told

Neighbors of a suburban restaurant manager accused of running a child molestation ring that may have filmed “snuff movies” say the family’s strange behavior included bloodcurdling late-night screams.

Arthur Gary Dill, 33, and four people who worked for him at his restaurant at the time of the alleged crimes in 1982 have been charged with a combined total of 169 counts of felony child molestation.

The alleged victims include Dill’s four children and five other youngsters, all between 4 and 10 years old. The children were allegedly drugged and warned not to tell anyone.

Authorities are investigating claims by Dill’s 10-year-old daughter that she witnessed the killing of three other children during satanic rituals while her father and friends filmed the acts. No murder charges have been filed.

Nighttime Screams Court documents show that a next-door neighbor, Jacquelynne Dee Eskridge, said that during the summer of 1982 she heard children in the Dill house in suburban Carmichael screaming every night for weeks.

“The screaming, in my opinion, was fear. It was much too high-pitched and too intense to be nightmares,” Eskridge, a preschool teacher, said. “I knew that something wasn’t right. Kids just don’t have nightmares like that night after night.”

Eskridge alerted authorities, who talked with Dill and his family. But she was told that investigators had found no evidence that the children were being abused and that the case had been dropped.

She also told authorities that, because of the Dills’ life style, she discouraged her children from playing with the Dill youngsters.

Eskridge and others said the children never complained that they had been molested. Once, however, one of the Dill daughters allegedly told a friend something that later became a focus of the investigation.

“She said she was going to be in a wedding, that she would be in her sisters’ wedding and they would be in hers,” the friend recalled.

Dill has denied the molestation charges, saying that he believes they are the result of his estranged wife and mother-in-law seeking revenge for separating from his family in 1983.