Pictured above: “Father X”
I didn’t know what to
expect when Crash Barry (pictured below), an editor-at-large and an investigative journalist for
an alternative monthly print magazine and website in Portland, Maine called Mainer
News, first contacted me in 2017 about my blog series on the Danny Croteau
murder. Crash grew up in Indian Orchard, attended St. Matthew’s in The Orchard,
and Cathedral High School—five years after I graduated from CHS. I knew his
brother, who was in my class, but not him.
He wanted to know
more about a man he called Father X, a pedophile priest I had mentioned
in my blog. When Crash was a teenager, he knew him fairly well, because then
man was St. Matthew’s pastor and Crash’s family was very involved with the
parish—Crash was a lector for the Saturday evening late Mass and was the
church’s master of ceremonies. He even “babysat” (slept in) the rectory (the building next to St. Matthew’s below) for
Father X while he vacationed in Barbados.
I wished I had more
information to give Crash about Father X. I didn’t really know much, other than assorted rumors and the fact that he gave me my first communion (pictured below). The scuttlebutt over the years was that Father X had
been abused by a relative as a child and may have fathered a kid with his
niece. Crash was beginning to work on an investigative podcast on Father X, but I had little to offer on the priest back then.
A year later, Crash
emailed me informed me that had driven 250 miles to the nondescript New England
city where Father X lives. He was armed with a bottle of 100-proof bourbon for
truth serum to get him to confess his sins. The defrocked priest (pictured by Crash below) did spill the
beans, to some extent—and Crash secretly recorded the whole dang thing! Father
X downplayed his crimes, but he did, after a few drinks, finally get to the roots
of his perversion: his father had molested him from age four to 14. The bastard
had also sexually abused Father X’s two sisters, and eight out of 10 of his own
grandchildren—both boys and girls.
But Father X’s dad received
some instant karma one night in 1987, when one of his granddaughter victims
called him ranting and raving and saying she was going to the district
attorney. So he went out to his yard and put a bullet in his head.
The climax of this
conversation is one of 13 podcast episodes of Crash’s Devils and Dirtbags series on the Springfield Diocese clergy abuse
scandal. As for the niece impregnation
rumor, at the time Crash thought that if it were true, it seemed as if Father
X’s sex addict dad must have been the one who knocked her up, because the
ex-priest claimed he is “as gay as a three-dollar bill.”
But then, on the web,
I happened to find this weird connection between one of Father X’s late nieces and a priest Crash calls Father
Zee—a notorious pedophile and a member of the Springfield clergy sex abuse
ring. I told Crash about what I had stumbled
upon, he did a little digging, made a few calls, and sure enough it was Zee who
was the father of the love child.
By the way, Crash
credits me for “editorial assistance” on the podcasts. It’s too kind of a term,
because it was Crash who did the heavy lifting, superb writing narrating, and
producing, and had the balls to visit and interview not only Father X, but also
the chief suspect in Danny’s murder, Richard Lavigne.
Richard Lavigne's latest mandated sex offender photo
Crash’s plan of
attack was to tell Lavigne that he was writing an investigative piece on FATHER
X and to ask him if he knew anything about him.
“Would you like to
come in?” Lavigne asked.
Were you friends with
Father X?” Crash asked him in his living room.
“We weren’t friends,”
said Lavigne, frowning. “More like acquaintances.”
Crash explained
Father X’s background to Lavigne because a recently published true crime book (one
I had also given editorial assistance to) had briefly hypothesized that if
Lavigne hadn’t killed Danny, then perhaps Father X did. There’s zero proof
behind this conspiracy theory, but Crash wanted to know if Lavigne thought
Father X could have been a killer.
When Crash earlier
had asked Father X if he knew Danny, he said no—that the boy went to school at
OLSH, but was a parishioner at St. Catherine, not OLSH, the church where Father
X was stationed. Father X said he didn’t really know Lavigne (they were
acquaintances) but nonetheless doesn’t think that the man killed Danny.
Our Lady of the
Sacred Heart Church
Lavigne said he
didn’t know Father X was still alive or had gotten into trouble and had been
laicized. Either he didn’t read the papers or he was feigning ignorance.
“How do you remember
[Father X]?” Crash asked. “When you hear the name [Father X], what do you think
of?
“A person I really
wasn’t fond of,” he said. “I always found him to be kind of prissy. We were
never friends.”
“How much contact
would you have with him? Were there gatherings of priests?”
“That’s it. You know,
when you have a big lunch with the Diocese and I might be sitting across from
him. And that’s really the only contact with him,”
“Did you ever have
any argument with him?”
“No.”
“What about this
theory of him being a murderer?” Crash asked. “Any thoughts on that?”
Lavigne stared at
Crash blankly. Crash again mentioned the true crime book he had just told him
about minutes earlier, and explained the conspiracy theory that Father X could
have been Danny’s murderer.
“Really?” he said,
sounding surprised.
Crash babbled a
little more about the book and how the author also pondered the possibility of
Danny’s Boy Scout leaders or other men might have murdered Danny.
“So,” Crash said, “do
you remember [Father X], at all, as a violent man?”
“No,” Lavigne said.
“You called him
prissy. That’s sort of opposite of violent.”
“Yeah, right. I was
uncomfortable with him,” Lavigne paused. “I found him like I said: prissy.”
“Did you know he was
gay?”
“No,” Lavigne said.
“Though I assumed that he was.”
In Crash’s riveting podcast, Lavigne went on to
give an account—for the first time to a journalist—of his side of the story in
his 1991 molestation conviction, as well has his opinion of the dozens of sex
abuse allegations against him over the years.
In another exclusive,
Lavigne explained to Crash why he showed up at the murder scene (pictured below)
a day after Croteau’s body was found—an act that ultimately led police to
consider him the prime suspect.
Lavigne also
described peeking through the window of a fellow priest in the act of molesting
boys, and telling Bishop Christopher Weldon about it…but the Bishop covered it
up. Yes, Lavigne names the priest, who had been unaccused. Until now.
I’m not going to
reveal any more here! Listen to Crash Barry's podcast series yourself!
Becky Miller Snider, who is Richard Lavigne’s cousin, sent Hell’s Acres the above photo of Lavigne, in the psychedelic frock, marrying her parents in 1971, and the photo of him below at her christening party in 1973.
She first wrote a comment at the end of this blog post in March of 2021. She followed that comment with family lore of Lavigne's mother often walking around the house topless, and Lavigne having younger friends over his house playing poker—as his mother served them food and alcohol.
It’s not the first revelation of his mother’s strange behavior. A true crime book about the Croteau murder details a description by Lavigne’s friend of her topless and sunbathing with Lavigne, his hand on his mother’s breast. He also used to grab her breasts through her clothing and ask, in front of his friends, “Are these real?” She was sexually provocative in the presence of Lavigne’s friends, often wearing skimpy bikinis.
Snider fears that Lavigne may have also gotten “too close” to one of her relatives.
Read the entire series: