John DeCamp Biography: The Nebraska Lawyer Who Litigated Franklin for Twenty-Five Years

Four Documents

The biographical record of John William DeCamp is anchored in four documents, each of which can be retrieved from a public archive.

The first is the certified election return from November 1970, on file with the Nebraska Secretary of State, recording his election to the Unicameral from District 40 at age twenty-nine. The second is the Library of Congress catalog entry for The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, registered to AWT Publishers in 1992 with DeCamp listed as sole author. The third is Bonacci v. King, U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Case No. 4:CV 91-3037, with a default judgment entered by Judge Warren K. Urbom on February 19, 1999. The fourth is the obituary published in the Lincoln Journal Star on July 28, 2017, recording his death the previous day.

Between the first document and the fourth, forty-seven years of public life produced a record that is unusually retrievable for an attorney in private practice. DeCamp’s career generated court filings, legislative debate transcripts, signed books, broadcast interviews, and a substantial volume of correspondence preserved in the Nebraska State Historical Society’s legislative collections. The biographical reconstruction that follows works from those documents.

Neligh, Lincoln, and the Officer Class

DeCamp was born June 8, 1941, in Neligh, Nebraska, a town of approximately 1,800 in Antelope County. He attended public schools there before enrolling at the University of Nebraska, completing an undergraduate degree, and continuing through the University of Nebraska College of Law. His admission to the Nebraska bar was recorded in 1965.

In 1967 he commissioned into the United States Army as an officer and was deployed to South Vietnam. The decorations record, on file with the Department of the Army, lists the Silver Star and additional unit and personal awards. DeCamp himself, in interviews and in his 1978 book Last Plane Out, described intelligence-adjacent assignments during this period and a working relationship with William E. Colby, the Central Intelligence Agency officer who at the time directed the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program and who became Director of Central Intelligence under President Ford in 1973. The Colby connection is asserted in DeCamp’s own writing rather than independently documented in declassified CIA personnel records, which is the standard caveat for that period of intelligence service.

In April 1975, as the South Vietnamese government collapsed, DeCamp participated in Operation Babylift, the airlift evacuation of approximately 3,300 children from Saigon to the United States, Australia, France, Canada, and West Germany. The evacuation is documented in State Department cables, Air Force flight logs, and contemporaneous reporting from Saigon. Last Plane Out, his 1978 memoir, is the longest first-person account by an American organizer of the airlift. The book was adapted into a 1983 feature film of the same title.

The biographical pattern across this period is consistent: Nebraska public-school graduate, state-university attorney, decorated officer, evacuation organizer. By the time he returned to Nebraska in 1971, he had a service record, a law license, and an organized political base in District 40.

The Unicameral, 1971 to 1987

DeCamp won election to the Nebraska Unicameral in November 1970, taking his seat in January 1971 at twenty-nine. Nebraska is the only U.S. state with a single-chamber, officially nonpartisan legislature, though party affiliation is publicly known and structures coalition behavior. DeCamp served as a Republican across four terms representing the Antelope County region, a span of sixteen years documented in legislative journals and Nebraska Blue Book entries through 1986.

His committee assignments across that period covered banking, judiciary, government oversight, and revenue. He authored or co-sponsored legislation on banking regulation, criminal procedure, juvenile justice, and veterans’ affairs. The legislative record does not show committee work that placed him directly on the bodies that would later examine Franklin Credit Union, but his banking-committee tenure overlapped with the regulatory environment in which Franklin operated as a federally chartered credit union under National Credit Union Administration supervision.

DeCamp left the legislature at the end of his fourth term in January 1987 and returned to full-time private practice in Lincoln, operating out of an office on the city’s south side. The transition from sixteen years of legislative service to private legal work shaped the next decade in a way that is visible in retrospect: he carried into private practice a working knowledge of Nebraska’s regulatory institutions, an established network within the state political class, and a credentialed public profile that would matter when he began representing clients whose accounts were rejected by formal investigative channels.

How Franklin Reached His Office

The Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Omaha and managed by Lawrence E. “Larry” King Jr., was placed into conservatorship by the National Credit Union Administration on November 4, 1988, after auditors identified approximately $40 million in missing funds. The institutional facts are documented in NCUA records, federal court filings, and Senate Banking Committee testimony. King was indicted on federal embezzlement charges in 1989 and ultimately convicted and sentenced to fifteen years.

In parallel with the federal financial investigation, allegations surfaced that the credit union’s collapse concealed a child sexual abuse network involving prominent figures. The Nebraska Legislature established a special investigative committee, the Franklin Committee, chaired by Senator Loran Schmit. The committee hired Gary Caradori, a former Nebraska state trooper and licensed private investigator, as its chief investigator. Between May and June 1990, Caradori conducted videotaped depositions of accusers including Paul Bonacci, Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King. The depositions are described in detail in the Paul Bonacci deposition record.

DeCamp was not a member of the Franklin Committee. His involvement began as a private attorney consulted by individuals connected to the witnesses, and it expanded after Caradori was killed on July 11, 1990, when his small aircraft crashed near Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Caradori was returning from Chicago with documents and his eight-year-old son, who also died in the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded the crash was caused by in-flight structural failure. The case file is summarized in the Gary Caradori plane crash article.

Within ten days of Caradori’s death, the federal grand jury supervised by Judge Warren Urbom returned its findings. The grand jury declined to indict on the abuse allegations and characterized them as “a carefully crafted hoax.” The full text of those findings is the subject of the Franklin grand jury report article. The state grand jury that followed indicted accuser Alisha Owen on perjury charges, and she was convicted in 1991. The procedural posture left the witnesses without a formal investigative venue.

DeCamp’s first major Franklin-related document, the November 1990 memorandum addressed to Senator Schmit, was drafted into that gap.

The 1990 Memorandum

The DeCamp memo is a typed memorandum, dated November 1990, on DeCamp’s law office letterhead, addressed to Senator Loran Schmit, and titled in some leaked copies as a confidential report on the Franklin matter. The document names several individuals whom DeCamp alleged were involved in the abuse described by Franklin Committee witnesses. Among those named were figures with state and national profiles, including a former Nebraska state attorney general candidate, an Omaha business executive, and an out-of-state political consultant.

The memo was leaked to news media in late 1990 and circulated in successive copies, some annotated, some not, in the years that followed. The fact of the memo is established. Multiple Nebraska news outlets reported on its contents at the time, and DeCamp later acknowledged authorship in interviews and incorporated portions of the material into The Franklin Cover-Up. The accuracy of the specific allegations is the contested question. None of the individuals named in the memo were criminally charged on the basis of its contents. Several initiated civil defamation actions in subsequent years.

The memo functions, in the documentary record, as a hinge. Before November 1990, DeCamp’s involvement in the Franklin matter was that of a private attorney consulted by witnesses and family members. After November 1990, he was a public actor whose own statements were the source of the most specific allegations in circulation outside the legislative record. That shift, from attorney to documentarian, is the biographical inflection point that determines the rest of the case.

The 1992 Book

The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska was self-published in 1992 through AWT Publishers, an imprint DeCamp registered for the purpose. The book runs approximately 350 pages across multiple printings, with revised and expanded editions issued in 1996 and 2006. It remains in continuous trade-paperback availability through online retailers and used-book channels.

The book divides structurally into three parts. The first reconstructs the Franklin Committee investigation, the Caradori depositions, the federal and state grand juries, and the legal proceedings against Lawrence King. The second presents witness accounts in extended quotation, including material from Bonacci, Owen, Boner, and others. The third section, which produced the most external dispute, draws connections between the Franklin allegations and a broader claim of national-scale networks involving political, intelligence, and media institutions.

The first two sections are largely traceable to public-record sources: court filings, legislative committee transcripts, and the Caradori depositions. The third section relies on DeCamp’s interpretive synthesis. The published companion analysis at Senator John DeCamp and the Franklin Cover-Up applies MHEES classification to the book’s claims and finds the documentary tier and the analytical tier scoring at very different evidentiary positions, P1 versus P6, with corresponding differences across the corroboration and inference dimensions.

The book’s commercial trajectory has been steady rather than dramatic. It has not appeared on national bestseller lists. It has been cited in academic literature on conspiracy belief, in journalistic coverage of the Franklin case, and in subsequent investigative work, including Nick Bryant’s 2009 book The Franklin Scandal, which both drew on and departed from DeCamp’s framework.

The Civil Cases

DeCamp filed multiple civil actions during the 1990s on behalf of Franklin accusers. The most consequential is Bonacci v. King, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska in 1991 as Case No. 4:CV 91-3037.

The civil suit alleged that Lawrence E. King Jr. had subjected Paul Bonacci to abuse over a period of years, and it sought damages under federal civil-rights provisions and state tort claims. King, who was at the time incarcerated on the federal embezzlement conviction, did not appear to contest the case. After King’s failure to appear, the matter proceeded to a default-judgment hearing.

On February 19, 1999, Judge Warren K. Urbom entered judgment for Bonacci in the amount of $1 million. The opinion records that Urbom found Bonacci’s testimony credible under the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard that governs civil cases. The opinion also notes the default posture and the absence of an adversarial test.

The structure of the judgment matters for any responsible reading. A default judgment is not equivalent to a contested verdict. It reflects the uncontested weight of the plaintiff’s evidence as evaluated by a federal judge. Bonacci v. King is therefore both a documented federal court finding and a procedurally limited one. Both characterizations belong in the record.

DeCamp filed additional civil actions naming individuals identified by Franklin Committee witnesses. Several were dismissed on procedural grounds, including statute-of-limitations defenses. Others produced settlements with confidentiality terms that prevent independent assessment. The full docket history is searchable in PACER under DeCamp’s name as counsel of record.

A reverse-direction defamation matter also belongs in the record. Civil claims against DeCamp arising from allegations published in The Franklin Cover-Up were filed during the 1990s and 2000s. The dispositions of these matters varied. The existence of the litigation is part of the public record; the specific outcomes are documented in court files and merit individual review rather than summary characterization.

The Process Church Suit and the Wider Defamation Record

Among the civil matters arising from the book, the most frequently cited is the action initiated by individuals associated with the Process Church of the Final Judgment, an organization founded in the 1960s that DeCamp’s book described in connection with broader theories about ritual abuse and political violence. Court records indicate that defamation litigation was filed and pursued; the docket histories are public and merit review on a case-by-case basis. The biographical fact relevant here is that the legal defense of The Franklin Cover-Up occupied a substantial portion of DeCamp’s working hours during the late 1990s and 2000s, alongside his ongoing civil-plaintiff work for Franklin witnesses.

The Final Years

DeCamp continued to practice law in Lincoln through the 2000s and into the early 2010s. He published a revised edition of The Franklin Cover-Up in 2006 and continued to give interviews about the case. His public statements during this period included claims connecting the Franklin allegations to subsequent investigations, including the Catholic Church abuse revelations of the early 2000s and emerging cases involving institutional cover-ups. These analytical statements remain in the same evidentiary tier as the book’s third-section claims: documented as DeCamp’s own assertions, not independently corroborated against the cases he named.

DeCamp died on July 27, 2017, at age 76, in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Lincoln Journal Star published an obituary the following day. He was survived by his wife, Mary Lyn DeCamp, and four children. His professional papers, including portions of his Franklin-related correspondence, were placed with the Nebraska State Historical Society. The collection is open to researchers under the standard archival access protocols.

What the Documents Establish

The biographical case profile that the documents support is narrower than the case profile that DeCamp’s advocates have promoted and broader than the case profile his critics have allowed. The documents establish a Nebraska state senator with sixteen years of legislative service, a Vietnam veteran with a Silver Star, an Operation Babylift organizer, a private attorney whose docket from 1990 onward was substantially Franklin-related, an author whose 1992 book preserves witness accounts and primary materials that would otherwise be inaccessible, and a federal civil litigant whose default judgment in Bonacci v. King produced a federal court finding of credibility under the civil burden of proof.

The documents do not establish, and cannot establish, the truth or falsity of the analytical claims in the third section of The Franklin Cover-Up, the truth or falsity of the specific names in the November 1990 memorandum, or the truth or falsity of the broader networks DeCamp described in interviews after the book’s publication. Those questions remain in the same evidentiary posture they occupied during DeCamp’s lifetime: contested, partially documented, structurally underinvestigated by the institutions that were positioned to test them, and surviving in the public record principally because DeCamp wrote them down and signed his name to the document.

That last function, the archival function of an attorney who refused to let a contested record dissolve into rumor, is the function the documents most clearly support. Whether the underlying allegations are true, partially true, or false is a question the documents alone cannot resolve. The biographical record can establish only that the documents exist, that DeCamp produced them, and that he spent the last twenty-five years of his life litigating their consequences.

The full Franklin record, including the institutional context that shaped DeCamp’s career, is collected at the Franklin cover-up hub.

Sources & Primary Documents

• Nebraska Legislature — Senator Records, John W. DeCamp, District 40, 1971–1987 — Continuous service record across four terms
• Library of Congress — The Franklin Cover-Up (AWT Publishers, 1992) — Catalog entry confirming authorship and publication date
• Bonacci v. King, U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Case No. 4:CV 91-3037 — Federal court records and Judge Urbom’s opinion
• Nebraska State Historical Society — DeCamp Papers — Professional papers and Franklin correspondence
• Lincoln Journal Star — DeCamp obituary, July 28, 2017 — Death notice and biographical summary
• John DeCamp, Last Plane Out (Hawthorn Books, 1978) — First-person account of Operation Babylift
• National Credit Union Administration — Franklin Community Federal Credit Union conservatorship records, November 1988 — Institutional record of the credit-union collapse
• Nick Bryant, The Franklin Scandal (TrineDay, 2009) — Independent investigation that both corroborates and departs from DeCamp’s account
• PACER — Federal court docket searches under “John W. DeCamp” — Comprehensive civil-litigation history