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By Kay Ebeling
Around mid-July the tone of this blog changed as I began reading a new book “Sacrilege” by former federal investigator Leon Podles. A few chapters in and I began to see obvious patterns in pedophile priest rape crime across the country. The more I read the more I realized, in city after city for the last half century kids in Catholic churches were raped, perpetrators were enabled to continue raping, victims and victims’ families were shut up. And most astonishing, bishops and other hierarchy lied many times under oath, or conveniently forgot, and documents disappeared.
The way the pattern of crime is laid out in “Sacrilege” the logical next step from here should be federal indictments and Senate hearings to expose the true reasons these crimes were able to continue for more than 50 years in the United States.
“Sacrilege” came out September 1st (for more information see the left column of this blog). Reading the book you get blatant proof that these crimes are not just about “a little fondling.” In case after case priests whispered to children that the sex acts they were doing were a kind of religious rite of passage. In more than one case children's murders go unsolved.
Podles is on the board of Bishop Accountability and as such is probably the first author to really dive in and make use of the bisohopaccountability.com databank. The book is 676 pages and every few paragraphs you feel like you’ve watched a full length feature film. The volumes and volumes of stories all documented at bishop accountability will provide endless material for writers in the next few centuries and Podles’ book is almost an invitation to go document diving and find out more.
But as one of the crime victims myself, this book also makes me angry, really angry (and my anger management class recently got canceled!) as I see how also in city after city, these “men of the cloth” ran roughshod on the law and the law let them.
Getting Away with Murder as Well. . .
The autopsy found wads of chewing gum in the stomach
There was plenty of evidence that registered sex offender the Rev. Richard R. Lavigne murdered one of his victims Danny Croteau in Springfield, Mass, in 1972. “The police went to the rectory to examine Lavigne’s clothes but the priest at the rectory would not let them in and the police did not try to get a search warrant,” writes Podles. “The district attorney at the time, Matthew Ryan, a close friend of Bishop Weldon, decided not to prosecute Lavigne.”
The murder of Danny Croteau is still unsolved but since Lavigne was raping Croteau’s brothers and many other boys as well, we know part of his MO was to give boys liquor and then chewing gum to cover the smell on their breath. In the autopsy “Danny’s stomach was full of wads of chewing gum.”
In Davenport, Iowa, as Bishop Gerald Francis O’Keefe “continued to receive complaints about abuse by priests, he knew that a paper trail creates liability, so he kept few records. However the day after O'Keefe received a letter about Rev. James M. Jenssen’s masturbating boys at a card game, Jenssen became the new Director of Vocations for the diocese.
In the 1980s ex-priest Rudolph "Rudy" Kos lived openly in Dallas with his young unschooled Filipono priest friend and they regularly had little boys stay overnight in the rectory with them. Stories about Kos dated back to the 1970s and one letter written in 1992 describing little boys running around the rectory survived long enough to become evidence.
“Bishop Grahmann claimed never to have read the letter,” Podels writes in “Sacrilege.” “Monsignor Rehkemper later testified that he didn't remember reading Williams’ eyewitness account of Kos in bed under the covers with a boy.”
Why wasn’t any evidence produced?
From testimony under oath:
“‘That's the most important piece of evidence in the case,’ Turley said. ‘You were waiting for someone to see him (Kos) sleeping in the bed with someone and you just let it get by you?’
“Rehkemper did not think the matter of alleged child molestation important enough to read carefully a letter from an eyewitness.
“Or the monsignor lied under oath.”
Here in my copy of “Sacrilege” I wrote my first note in the margin.
I circled "Or the monsignor lied under oath"
And wrote “Why?” and then started writing "Why" in the margin on page after page where it showed bishops and monsignors lying under oath, lying to the investigators, hiding evidence.
Why was it so important to cover up the pedophile crimes?
What other crimes are they hiding?
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I CAN’T TAKE THIS!!
There are scrawlings throughout my copy of Sacrilege now. On Page 213 is “Numbers!” with this phrase circled:
“At least 42 of the 88 parishes of the Phoenix diocese had abusive priests in them.”
On that same page I scrawled, “Write this as a scene” and circled:
Rev. Charles T. Fatooh, vicar general of Monterey, after Trupia retired “gave Trupia work and rented him a condo in Maryland, where according to neighbors Truia’s young male friends visited him.
“Trupia drove a Mercedes C320 with a rosary dangling from the rearview mirror.”
In Arizona
“bishops and priests passed boys around as party favors.” (P. 211)
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In Baltimore:
“The City prosecutor failed to charge Blackwell.”
In Baltimore a 1993 police report includes a doctors’ report showing “the suspect has been touching and fondling the complainant over the past three years.
“the City Prosecutor failed to charge Blackwell.”
I Scrawled the words “A whole scene” on page 198 and circled this paragraph:
“The Rev. William Q. Simms, who came to St. Andrew-by-the-Bay with a boy in tow was into sadomasochistic sacrilege. Two boys filed suits in 1980 saying that when they were 13-year-old altar boys at his parish he had them dress up as saints and martyrs before they had sex. They engaged in ‘ritualistic sexual fantasies’ that included ‘initiations of torture inflicted on Christ and certain saints.’ The lawsuits were settled out of court but not until after the Baltimore archdiocese tried to make the boys’ name public.”
Tell me that one paragraph alone couldn't be developed into a full length feature film?
Page after page, paragraph after paragraph, one story after another. To be honest I’m overwhelmed by “Sacrilege” by Leon Podles. My copy is folded and mutilated with pages falling out, I’ve circled paragraphs and tried to set up a kind of index for myself with the scrawlings in the margins.
** Sacrament abuse
** Bishops obviously lying under oath
** Law enforcement cooperating in covering up the crimes
Astonishing also in city after city is that no one in the church ever seemed to wonder what these crimes were doing to the children and the families of the children.
Where Do We Go From Here?????
Through August there was a notice here about a meeting and we did hold a meeting Sunday September 9th and a few people did show up. But I have come down off my delusion of grandeur cloud for last month. How can I produce a TV series when I don't even have a camera?
So I know what I’m going to do from here.
I know from reading Leon Podles’ book “Sacrilege.”
As Podles’ book shows there are volumes and volumes of documents about these crimes and almost every case is a full length feature film worthy story.
So I hope to be the Dominic Dunne of priest pedophile stories.
Dunne’s daughter Dominique Dunne was murdered in the early 1980s and her ex-boyfriend only served seven months for the crime. That motivated Dominic Dunne and he spent the rest of his life writing about rich people getting away with murder and became the world’s foremost authority on the subject.
I too am motivated by "Justice Interruptus" so I may spend the next 40 years document diving here in LA becoming to pedophile priest rape what Dominic Dunne it to rich people getting away with murder. I can only work with the resources I have at hand, and that's a blog and my laptop. Eventually I’ll get a digital camera and start interviewing people and doing b-roll and posting the videos.
But for now one step at a time. I am not a person with organizational skills to form a group, so let’s just drop that idea, okay?
RE THE ADS:
I just found out that every time someone visits this blog it registers with Google and I make some formula that comes out to a fraction of a cent. Then when people actually visit one of the ad sites I get another fraction of a cent. As more people read the blog the fractions of a penny get larger.
So the goal from here is to keep writing lots of stories and just posting them on the blog. Then try to increase the readership.
In the near future there will also be a second blog with more in depth articles on priest pedophile crimes, and more ads -- as I develop my Google blogger empire (next grand delusion?).
Why haven’t there been any posts in so long?
Every summer in late August I go through this lull. I was born August 29th but I was born three and a half weeks late, supposed to have a birthday in early August. Instead I just languished there in the heat of the womb and Chicago’s summer, not moving. I seem to still come to a stop at the end of August to this day. Around August 20th my life just comes to a stop. It doesn't help that in LA every time you step out the door you face a wall of heat. Then in early September the heat lifts and I just start getting energized again.
So -- More to Come. . .
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