No last names, and not much is exchanged in the way of personal information – at least among newcomers. Posted on 05/06/2002 6:03:08 AM PDT by FresnoDA
By Jeff McDonald
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 5, 2002
No last names, and not much is exchanged in the way of personal information – at least among newcomers.
In the closely guarded circles of swingers clubs, "no" means "no" and guests who behave disrespectfully are shown the door. Sex is plentiful. So are food, dancing, conversation and other garden-variety forms of recreation.
People who have been swapping partners for years say the sex can be a small part of the experience. They liken the parties to social clubs, and point out that the vast majority of swingers are highly educated and happily married.
Others, not surprisingly, are far less certain.
Local debate over the practice of consenting adults trading sexual partners in group settings has never been louder than in the three months since 7-year-old Danielle van Dam disappeared from her Sabre Springs home.
During a preliminary hearing, attorneys defending the man accused of killing the girl tried to raise the issue that her parents may have engaged in a swinging lifestyle. The couple's activities are likely to be called into question at the upcoming trial of David Westerfield, who could face the death penalty if he is convicted of the girl's kidnapping and slaying.
There are numerous swing groups in the area. With names like Club Exchange, La Villa and Club CB, they host parties almost every weekend in Oceanside, San Diego, Encinitas, Escondido, Fallbrook and elsewhere. There are two clubs in Temecula, a tract-home community of 67,000 people.
Some have operated for years; others come and go. Sometimes they lure dozens of couples to large, private estates. Many parties are smaller, with three or four couples meeting inside someone's home.
"Swinging is not just sex," said Robert McGinley, president of The Lifestyles Organization, an Orange County company that offers travel and other services to swingers.
"Obviously, it's sexual interest that brings people together, but it is a social activity," McGinley said. "People feel free in what they say ... They are accepted as a person, rather than an occupation."
The practice of sharing sex partners dates back centuries and crosses dozens of cultures, swingers say. In the 1960s and '70s, it was called wife-swapping. Today it is better known as swinging. Practitioners simply refer to it as The Lifestyle.
A handful of sex clubs, like Thad's east of downtown San Diego, have been targeted by police and politicians, even though courts have repeatedly upheld the rights of adults to meet in groups for sexual purposes.
More often than not, attorneys who defend club operators say, cities and local governments lose the cases based on constitutionally protected freedoms. San Diego, for example, agreed in 1998 to pay $148,000 to settle a years-long legal dispute with Elbert "Thad" Poppell.
"The Lifestyle community makes an easy target," said Paul Murray, a San Diego lawyer who counts the club owner among his clients.
"If you get a politician who decides to bring a campaign against indecency, he's going to get air time and, in his mind, he's going to get votes," Murray said.
A trade group called the North American Swing Club Association said 15 percent of couples in the United States have experimented with swinging at one time or another. More conservative estimates hover between 2 percent and 4 percent.
Several researchers concluded that about 90 percent of swingers are white; three-quarters hold college degrees and almost half regularly attend services in a traditional church.
Three out of four swingers are married and half of the others say they are in committed relationships, according to sociologists at Bellarmine University, a Catholic liberal-arts college in Louisville, Ky.
Nine out of 10 respondents in unhappy marriages said their relationships were happier after swapping partners. Less than 1 percent of the couples said the experience made their marriage less happy.
"Swinging may be one creative solution to the problem of habituation – it provides sexual variety, adventure, and the opportunity to live out one's fantasies as a couple without secrecy and deceit," their survey of more than 1,000 swingers concluded.
However, the same poll found that swingers are far more likely than non-swingers to approve of children 14 to 16 having sex.
Investigative journalist Terry Gould spent years researching swing clubs, then wrote a book on the subject. He estimated that 4 million Americans swing – most of them middle-and upper-middle-class professionals.
"Essentially, what they were doing is trying to eroticize their own relationships," Gould said from his home in Vancouver, Canada. "There was less sex going on there than you would think."
Each of the 400 or so clubs across the United States operates under different rules, but many of the protocols are familiar.
Reservations are required, and participants usually go through an interview or screening process a day or more before the weekend parties. Some clubs, like Thad's, act more like a business and allow single men but charge for membership and individual visits; others only invite couples and request donations strictly to cover the cost of food and other expenses.
No alcohol is served, although guests are welcome to bring their own. Drugs are not permitted or tolerated. Condoms are encouraged, often mandatory. Some clubs require men to undress before entering and allow women to wear lingerie or nothing at all.
Once inside, members generally socialize like they might at any other club or party. They congregate, exchange banter and, eventually, may seek to interest one another in sex.
"It works the same way it works anywhere else," said Murray, who said he does not engage in the practice himself. "You usually try to start up a conversation, enjoying each other's company."
Many couples attend parties for weeks or months before choosing to have sex with someone other than their partner, swingers say. Sometimes groups engage in sex at the same time; others pair off in couples.
"These are sunny suburbanites," said Gould, whose book, "The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers," is in its fourth printing. "There's not that dark side to it you might expect."
Even so, the practice worries some experts. San Diego State University sociologist Phillip Gay said swingers may tend to dehumanize their partners.
"It's a way of divorcing sex and love," he said. "People can have sex with each other without becoming emotionally involved . . . It's the ultimate in reducing a person down to a sex object."
Clairemont marriage counselor Karen Gless said many couples who wed at an early age grow curious, as years pass, about expanding their sexual history history. Experimenting with others can enhance relationships, build trust and deepen friendships, she said.
"The negative side is that people who have been swinging for a lot of years tend to get kind of hard to the world," Gless said. "They have more trouble with intimacy because their focus becomes more sexual."
The Lifestyles Organization hosts conventions that attract thousands of couples every year. An event this summer has sold out every one of the 2,001 rooms at the Reno Hilton, hotel officials said.
Besides running that Orange County company, McGinley is president of a national swing trade group. He said his members' economic might is only now being tapped by mainstream businesses such as travel and cruise industries.
"Once a person or organization starts making their income off that lifestyle, all of the sudden that lifestyle becomes acceptable," he said.
At many of the all-inclusive tropical resorts advertised on the Web, thousands of couples swim, dine, play water sports and swap partners for a week at a time or longer.
"When they went to Jamaica, the tourist bureau met them at the airport and rolled out the red carpet," author Gould said.
—Thomas K. Arnold
Talk show host Rick Roberts made headlines with his KFMB-AM radio show about Damon and Brenda van Dam’s allegedly swinging lifestyle. But he wasn’t the only radio personality—or media outlet—to cast a critical eye on the backstory of the Danielle van Dam kidnapping case.
John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, whose John and Ken Show airs weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on Los Angeles station KFI-AM, devoted three shows to the case, even traveling to San Diego to broadcast from the van Dams’ Sabre Springs neighborhood. The week before that, they were the first to cast aspersions on the van Dams, a full day before the Roberts broadcast.
The Millennium Children’s Fund had just announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the safe return of Danielle. Fund administrator Douglas Pierce had visited with the van Dams, and the next day he called a press conference in Los Angeles at which he voiced suspicions about the couple’s behavior. For an hour, Pierce blasted the van Dams for their apparent lack of emotion and general rudeness to him.
“I don’t know how much was true and how much was hysterical, but that’s what made it fascinating. We tried to unravel it on the air,” Kobylt says. “In retrospect, I think he did peg their personalities very well—the lack of emotion, the detachment, the obsession with the media message—and perhaps he got the vibe that they live a different life than most people.”
As soon as Pierce finished on-air, John and Ken introduced their next guests: an angry Damon and Brenda van Dam, who lambasted Pierce as a nut case. “We had scheduled them in advance, but when they heard Doug was on the show, they canceled, only to change their minds right before show time,” Kobylt says.
After the interview, John and Ken picked apart the conversation and spoke critically about the van Dams’ lack of emotion and their defensiveness about questions pertaining to their own behavior and actions the last night Danielle was seen. The next day, the swinger story broke in The San Diego Union-Tribune—furthered that evening on San Diego radio by Rick Roberts.
“It’s a very dramatic story,” says Kobylt. “Everybody got obsessed with it pretty quickly... We have a pretty fair audience in San Diego—we’ve even made it into the top 10 on occasion—and we started getting calls from people who live in the neighborhood and know the van Dams. As a result, it might as well have been in L.A. I tend to look at the whole [Southern California] area as the same, anyway.”
(By press deadline, the van Dams could not be reached for comment by San Diego Magazine.)
Quoting the proverbial unnamed sources “close to the probe,” the Star reported that later-arrested suspect David Westerfield “was aware of the van Dams’ sexual activities and had approached Brenda about hosting a sex-swap party in his house.” The Star said Brenda had admitted to police “that the couple belonged to a swingers’ club called Club CB” and that sources say she “flirted outrageously and danced with Westerfield” the Friday night Danielle disappeared. “He [Westerfield] knew that Brenda and her friends were sexually involved, and he wanted to be part of the action, but for whatever reason, he was not invited by Brenda to accompany her and her four friends back to her home that night for more partying and sex,” the Star says it was told by a source.
Danielle’s Death - Child abductions do not, for the most part, occur at random.By Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based national pro-family coalition of Jews and Christians. |
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On March 1, a day after the body of Danielle Van Dam was identified, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a heart-rending account of parents and school counselors trying to explain to children how it could happen that seven-year-old Danielle was kidnapped and killed. "Mommy," a boy was quoted as saying, "I don't want anyone to steal me." Counselors advised parents "to listen to their children's fears and acknowledge them." The unstated assumption of much of the press coverage of the tragedy has been just this: Children are afraid, counselors and parents are stumbling to find something comforting to say, for what happened to Danielle could as easily happen to any of our children. Since the grim discovery was made, the nation has absorbed the message that Danielle's death was an event without explanation or reason. Or was it? On the morning of February 2, Danielle was found to be missing from her bed. The man who has been arrested for her murder is 50-year-old David Westerfield. Reportedly a child-porn enthusiast, he is a neighbor of Danielle's parents, Damon and Brenda van Dam. That night, says the accused kidnapper, he and Mrs. Van Dam had been dancing at a local bar. Mrs. Van Dam denies dancing with Westerfield, but she does admit being out till 2 A.M. without her husband. Nor do the Van Dams deny the stories reported in Newsweek, stories that say they are active "swingers" with a taste for wife swapping. The Van Dams say their lifestyle has "nothing to do" with Danielle's abduction. Let us be clear. This horrible death can be blamed only on the man who kidnapped Danielle. But if the Van Dams are indeed "swingers," if Mrs. Van Dam was carousing without her husband until rather late, then these parents — who deserve our sympathy no matter what their follies and vices may be — will have something in common with the parents of many other abducted children, beyond the bare fact that they have lost a child. For these terrible events do not, for the most part, occur at random. The National Institute for Missing and Exploited Children supplies the figures. In 1997, 24 percent of abducted children were abducted by strangers. About half, 49 percent, were kidnapped by family members, typically a divorced parent. Another 27 percent were kidnapped by an acquaintance. This same notion — that a certain kind of misfortune, in choosing victims, makes no distinction between wholesome and unwholesome — animated the AIDS scare of the late 1980s. Back then, the media and AIDS activists asserted that the disease was about to erupt among the population of heterosexuals who are not abusers of intravenous drugs. It never did. AIDS, it's now acknowledged, is a killer with a marked preference for people who engage in particular activities: anal sex and needle sharing. It does occasionally happen that an unknown drifter will invade the life of an upstanding family and steal and murder their child. That is what happened to 12-year-old Polly Klaas, abducted from a slumber party in Petaluma, California, in 1993. It is what happened in 1981 to six-year-old Adam Walsh, whose father, TV host John Walsh of America's Most Wanted, initiated a campaign to place photos of missing children on milk cartons and junk mail. That well-intended campaign has supported the misconception that children go missing by chance. The brief biographical sketch of the missing child never indicates the family dysfunction that likely contributed to making the abduction possible. Random kidnapping is not what happened to Danielle van Dam, and the fact is worth considering. For our actions have consequences — often unintended, often for future generations, often tragic — and parents would do well to remember this. (Long...uninterrupted...applause...FDA) |
Information is current as of last update: 05/06/2002
The data contained in these files is updated only once a day and should not be relied upon for any type of legal action.
| PERSONAL | ARREST | |||
| Last: | WESTERFIELD | Agency: | ||
| First: | DAVID | Location: | ||
| Middle: | A | Hold Codes: | ||
| Sex: | M | Bail Amount: | $ 0 | |
| Race: | W | Facility: | 1 | |
| Date of Birth: | 02/25/1952 | Cell: | 05 | |
| Age: | 50 | Booking Date: | 02/22/2002 | |
| Height: | 6'02" | Booking Time: | 15:24 | |
| Weight: | 210 lbs | Booking Nbr: | 02109697 | |
| ReBook Code: | 2 | |||
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| CHARGES: | Description | Code | Statute | Warrant Nbr |
| Primary: | MRDR:1ST DEG:S | PC | 187(A) PC | |
| Second: | ||||
| Third: | ||||
| Fourth: | ||||
| Fifth: | ||||
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| COURT: | Destination Court | Date | Time | |
| Appearance 1: | SD40 | 04/18/2002 | 08:30 | |
| Appearance 2: | SD40 | 05/07/2002 | 09:30 | |
So what do they do in church, anyway? Sleep through the sermon? Sit in the pews tearing out or blacking out the portions of the Bible that refer to the sanctity of marriage?
RICK ROBERTS’ SOURCE, HIGH-PLACED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL’ TOLD RICKThe comments of Rick Roberts source (a high placed law enforcement official) are in bold type. Additional information from other sources (press, etc.) are in italics.
David Westerfield has been quoted in the press as saying that he was a friend of the van Dams.
The van Dams have denied this, stating that their only contact with him was when Brenda and Danielle came to his home to sell girl scout cookies, and when they exchanged greeting as they passed by.
The bar has been identified in the press as "Dad’s Café and Steak House."
David Westerfield openly admitted that he was at the bar that night. He claims that he danced with Brenda van Dam. Brenda denies this.
Topics covered are the HOWS and HOW-NOTS of swinging. What to expect - before, during and after your first experience, your first party and longer. Also, a list of pertinent questions to ask yourself and your partner before your first experience.
COMMENTS ABOUT SWINGING 101:
"This book is a must for all couples and singles who have questions about the swinging lifestyle!"
Texas Connection Magazine
Price List
SWINGING 101: A Beginner's Guide to Recreational Sex
$12.95
Postage & Handling Included for Snail Mail
OPEN SWINGING
Swinging (having sex) in the same room (possibly in the same bed) with your primary partner and another couple. The male will be with the female of the other couple and the female will be with the male of the other couple. There may or may not be any sexual contact between the females (depending on their choice of bisexuality). This is the choice of couples who prefer to be together at all times. In Open situations, there can be no question of what is said or done, because everything is done together for all the parties concerned. This is also the choice of voyeurs/exhibitionists who enjoy watching their mate while experiencing sexual enjoyment themselves. This situation can quite possibly lead to some variations of group sex and techniques that are not available with the closed swinging.
CLOSED SWINGING
This involves participating in swinging (again having sex) in a separate room from your primary partner. The male will be with the female of the other couple in one room and the female with the other male in a different room or at a different time (but still together - not swinging "separately). This allows the freedom (or the privacy) to ‘discover’ the person in a deeper way without the distractions of another couple in the same room. Closed swinging also allows the freedom to act out various fantasies without feeling you are being watched.
SOFT SWINGING
Soft swinging involves teasing and foreplay with another couple prior to returning to your own partner for actual intercourse. Soft swingers prefer to keep actual intercourse between themselves and their primary partner, rather than sharing it with other people.
HOW TO CHOOSE
Neither style is right or wrong, it is just a matter of whatever is preferable to each couple. A complication can arise when couples are attracted to each other and one couple prefers open, one couple prefers closed and one is a soft swing couple. In this case, either the couples must compromise or decide to seek other more compatible partners.
Each couple has the right to choose the style of swinging that is right for them. Some want open and will only swing together and some will only swing closed and soft swingers generally don’t allow anything else. However most swingers are willing to compromise and work around another couple’s choices. If what you and the other couple want coincides, that’s terrific! If not and a compromise can’t be reached, keep looking for a match. We would suggest that you never make an iron clad rule about not doing one or the other and that you at least give it a try before discounting something you’ve never tried before - it might have some superb benefits!
http://www.clubcb.com/
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Club CB ..... A Couples Affair
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We would like to welcome you to the ClubCB website! ClubCB is a "Couples Only" online club providing a safe meeting place for sensuous consenting adults. It is our sincere desire to provide interested couples with information about this lifestyle and host some of the most exciting private parties you have ever been to. ClubCB is a class act, offering you a simple media for meeting other exciting San Diego County couples. Our "members only" parties are the best in the county, bringing together high quality dedicated and erotic couples of all ages and experiences.
New to the lifestyle, or experienced swinger, you'll find ClubCB the place to be. We have the hottest couples, the best facilities, VERY tasty buffet dinners, scrumptious deserts and a staff dedicated to ensuring your experience is clean, fun and safe. Our private parties are fun; stirring up erotic sensations and placing our members in the ideal environment to meet and expand friendships with the most exciting people in San Diego county ... all while raising funds for local charity foundations contributing to the research for Multiple Sclerosis and other debilitating diseases. Each party has a different theme, bringing fun and fantasy to the forefront. Come on out and play!
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| Upcoming Events |  |
 New Couples ... Welcome to CB's!! The staff and members of CB's would like to take this opportunity to welcome you and explain a few of our conditions. It is our biggest desire to ensure your first visit to CB's is a POSITIVE experience and insure the security of our members. In accordance with our membership guidlines, you must be sponsored by a ClubCB Member and agree agree to the conditions outlined below:
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Hmmm. And I wonder what they think of children aged 7? This exactly proves the point I've often made that when you decide to embark on a "lifestyle" like this, you open the door to not only having sex with other "couples" but deviancy of all kinds. Including pedophilia.
Knowing what they obviously know, why aren't they looking into the vDs more closely, along with their deviant friends?
SAN DIEGO / ESCONDIDO, CA - CLUB CB
John, Cindy, Dan & Sheri would like to invite everyone to the Club CB. Club CB is another year older and 500 members stronger. Club CB can only attribute this great success to the diverse cast of members that consistently support the club and special fund raising events.
Club CB is one of the nicest Swing Clubs you will find on the west coast. Located about 40 minutes north of San Diego in a secluded, rural mountainous area, Club CB boasts of great looking, sexy couples, friendly attitudes and non stop fun to be had by all!
CB's presents a super buffet every other Saturday night, complete with salads, main courses and superb desserts. The walk-up bar is manned by the sexiest, friendliest bartenders helping you with your drinks and mixers. Of course Club CB's is a BYOB club and you must mix your own drinks. The bar is there to store your booze and provide mixers.
A great hardwood dance floor, professional DJ (Dan) rocks the night away, pool, hot tub, smoking room, and cubby holes to play in and the erotic group room make for an exciting evening at CB's. There is no pressure to do anything at this club, presenting itself as a great place to meet new couples interested in this exciting lifestyle.
Club CB is the first club in the world to offer an online automated reservations system designed by Right Connection Transaction Services. Just like making online airline reservations, you can go to the club website, sign-up to become a member and make reservations for current or future parties with an advanced reservations system using your CREDIT CARD! Pretty cool. If you are in San Diego for the weekend, check with the club's website to see it there is a party happening and how to join in on the fun. http://www.ClubCB.com
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little girl is dead, left under a clump of oak trees in the backcountry east of San Diego. Many have seen her murder as a warning, applicable equally to all mothers and fathers, that child abduction occurs by random chance.
