The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 10: Devils and Dirtbags…and Another Suspect?

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

I met Crash last February during one of his breaks he was taking during a marathon session of going through case files for the podcasts at the Hampden County Superior Court. He said that before his return to Maine he planned to show up at Lavigne’s door and try to talk with him. “It’s extremely unlikely he’ll say ANYTHING to you,” I said. “The only thing he’s said to a reporter in all these years is, ‘My silence has been my salvation.’ But what the hell. Go for it.”

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.

And it worked.

“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:

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 1

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 2

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 3

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 4

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 5

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 6

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 7

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 8

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 9

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 10

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 11

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 12

The Daniel Croteau Murder, Part 13