For decades, Ronald William Brown was Professor Ron, a Christian ventriloquist who taught children about sin, prayer and bad words through a wide-eyed puppet named Marty. In July 2012, federal agents arrested him at his mobile home in Largo, Florida. What they found on his computers, in his online chats and in journals going back more than thirty years showed that the man behind the puppet had been hunting the children in his audiences.
Puppets have always done two jobs at once. They make us laugh, and they give a face to the things people don't dare say out loud. Brown used them for both.
Sticks, string, and the divine
Puppetry is ancient. The evidence points to China or India as far back as 1000 BCE, and the first puppets belonged to sacred ritual, not to children. The ancient Egyptians built the first puppet theater. Their wooden figures, worked by strings, acted out chores like cooking and carrying water, and over time they got finer: wire instead of string, jointed clay or ivory limbs. Puppets were even buried with pharaohs. At the Osiris feasts, which celebrated death and rebirth, women carried two-foot figures fitted with a two-foot phallus. According to the historian Herodotus, the women tugged a rope to make it waggle while the guests ate. The Greeks carried similar figures while singing to Dionysus.
Even then, a grown man playing with puppets could raise eyebrows. The Syrian king Antiochus Cyzicenus, who ruled from 115 to 95 BCE, was faulted for drunkenness and for pursuits utterly inappropriate to a king, such as working gilded animal puppets five cubits high. A cubit is the length from your shoulder to your fingertip, so these were enormous puppets. Ancient people loved puppets and feared them too, because puppets seemed to live somewhere between dreams and reality, and between the living and the dead. A puppet can get away with the unspeakable.
Professor Ron and Marty
Puppets still have a place in the church. Puppet ministry, the use of puppet shows to preach to children, calls itself a team dedicated to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ through stories, songs and humor. It had a boom in the 1990s and came back during the COVID lockdowns, when fidgety kids had to sit through church online.
In the mid-1980s, Joy Junction was a Christian TV show for kids, set in a make-believe village and hosted by Sheriff Don. It came back in syndication from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. Its resident ventriloquist was Professor Ron, and his dummy Marty handled the wisecracks: going to McDonald's every week must make me a hamburger. Brown also ran his own business, Puppets Plus, which he started in 1992. He performed at shopping centers, summer camps and Pinellas County schools, and he volunteered at the Gulf Coast Church. He gave neighborhood kids free pizza and rides in the church van.
In one Joy Junction sketch, Marty tells Ron that some kids asked him to look at dirty pictures. He refused, explaining, "I know someone who will see, and that's God." After Brown's arrest, the show vanished from the internet.
Red flags in plain sight
Brown had no criminal record, but the warning signs were there. During a 1998 traffic stop, a sheriff's deputy spotted a pair of boys' briefs partly stuffed into the driver's seat. Brown said the underpants belonged to one of his puppets, and the deputy let it go. In 2010, someone called Largo police about a young boy riding in Brown's car. That turned out to be a false alarm, since the parents were fine with it. One neighbor later called him "an antisocial, strange person" who would never speak to adults.
The arrest came from Operation Holitna, an international child pornography investigation run by the Department of Homeland Security. The trail ran through Boston and the Netherlands to a Kansas man named Michael Arnett. Arnett's computers held chats about kidnapping, abusing, murdering and eating children with a Yahoo user called ULIME. The account belonged to Brown. His was one of 40 arrests in six countries. In his home, agents found hundreds of images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM, the current term for what used to be called child pornography), including children who were bound. They also found hundreds of images of dead children and a blow-up doll dressed in children's clothing. In one chat, Brown wrote that "the tied up ones are best."
On Christian children's TV, Professor Ron's puppet Marty told kids not to look at dirty pictures because God would see. Off camera, the same man was collecting child sexual abuse images and chatting online about killing and eating children.
Journals going back to 1979
Brown turned down a plea deal that would have meant six years in prison because he wanted a jury trial. A month later, prosecutors hit him with a new indictment on eight felony charges, which carried 20 years to life. His defense came down to this: he did what he did, but killing and eating children was only a fantasy. His own lawyer said, in effect, that no one can defend a fantasy. But Brown had singled out one boy at his church as a candidate. Prosecutor Amanda Kaiser said he had contacted a local funeral home looking for a way to be near dead bodies.
Then there were the journals, handwritten and going back to 1979. They tracked one boy after another, many of them met through his puppet ministry. In 1993 he drove past Dunedin Middle School again and again, hoping to see one particular child. He raged at another boy for losing interest in the puppets. Kaiser said the journals showed "a pattern of obsession, infatuation and resentment with constant references to puppets." On July 15, 2013, Judge James D. Whittemore sentenced Brown to 20 years in federal prison and lifetime probation, telling him, "Perverted is not a strong enough word to describe what you have been engaging in." A jury convicted Brown of possessing child pornography but acquitted him of conspiracy to kidnap. He appealed in 2020 and lost.
Where the wolves go
For Sheri Lynch, the case is personal. She lives in an ordinary, medium-sized city, and she has run into four men accused of sexually abusing children. Two were teachers at her children's school. The third was the father of her older daughter's friend. He called her himself to say he'd been caught in the same Homeland Security sting that caught Brown, and he went to prison for 10 years. The fourth was a teacher she watched walk out of court with a slap on the wrist. A detective told her many families decline to prosecute because forensic interviews and testifying in court traumatize their children all over again.
"The wolves go where the sheep are," she says: to schools, camps and Sunday services. Her advice is to read Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear and trust the inner voice that says something is wrong, even when there's a friendly puppet in the way. "The only thing special about Ronald William Brown is that he got caught. Most don't."