“Death of an Altar Boy” Author E.J. Fleming was “as certain as I can be” that Boy Scoutmaster Dick Brown (pictured) was involved in the murder of Danny Croteau. So I looked into Brown, a really suspicious character.
Then came the bombshell press conference on May 24, 2021, when it was revealed that longtime suspect Richard Lavigne’s statements to police in the preceding months didn’t point to any other culprit—except himself.
Nonetheless, Brown, a cohort of Lavigne and a member of his boy-swapping sex ring, is an "interesting" rogue to say the least, and this pedophile and police impersonator may have played a role in intimidating one of Lavigne's molestation victims to keep quiet right after the murder. This is Brown’s sad story.
“Hey Jacob, you want a ride home?” It was Dick Brown—he had pulled over on Wilbraham Road.
Jacob (not his real name) was walking only a few streets away from his house. Brown, driving his white panel Ford van, had always skeeved him out.
“No thanks,” said the 13-year-old, taking note of the fact that the beat-up van was windowless—the stereotypical rape-mobile. “I’ll walk.”
Brown was steaming. “You are going to get into this van!” he yelled.
“Fuck off!”
Brown burned rubber and was gone.
Jacob was one of the lucky ones. He didn’t get into the van.
This account was provided by Jacob’s mother, who believes her son may well have been spared some kind of trauma by disobeying Brown. Jacob didn’t know exactly what weirded him out about the man. He was certainly strange. It could have been Brown’s constant eyebrow twitching—a facial tic you couldn’t ignore—or his two rotted front teeth. It could have been the horns on his head. Yes, horns. In later years, Brown developed several cysts on his scalp, which swelled into large protrusions that leaked blood and pus every time he accidentally whacked his noggin on the van door frame—which happened a lot because he was a humongous man.
“You should have a doctor look at those bumps,” a female acquaintance once said to him. “He should be able to drain them. Or surgically remove them.”
“Uh, yeah,” Brown said with a shrug, looking away. He was a man of few words when he talked to women. “If you were a female, he had nothing to say to you,” said his friend. But when it came to males, especially teens and boys, he opened right up and gabbed away.
Having horns like the devil himself—you simply can’t make this stuff up.
A big, scary dude. A creep. An “oddball.” A molester of children. A cop impersonator. A compulsive hoarder. A person of interest in a homicide. But was Dick Brown a killer?
The late E.J. Fleming, the author of the 2018 book Death of an Altar Boy, was sure of it. Fleming had consulted with me while he was writing his manuscript and was convinced that Brown was intimately involved in the murder of 13-year old Danny Croteau, who was beaten to death and thrown into the Chicopee River on the night of April 14, 1972. Fleming thought that Brown probably teamed with Lavigne to kill Danny partly because Danny was too strong and tough for Lavigne to kill alone. To no avail, I reminded Fleming that Danny was dead drunk that night, and an intoxicated 13-year old is no match for a weightlifting and boxing priest with a large rock in his hand. Besides, there were only two sets of footprints found at the scene—Danny’s and his assailant’s.
Still, Fleming insisted Brown was there.
Then, in a dramatic series of developments in the spring of 2021, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni announced that Lavigne had made self-incriminating statements about Danny’s death. In 11 hours of interviews on April 15-17 and on May 4, 2021, Lavigne never admitted to killing Danny, but acknowledged being with the boy at the crime scene on the night of the homicide. Lavigne said he gave Danny “a good shove,” slapped him, hit him with an object, tossed the object in the water, and left the area.
Lavigne claimed he returned to the riverbank a short time later, saw Danny floating face down in the water, and left without telling anyone because “If I shared this with the public, they really wouldn’t believe it,” Lavigne told Trooper Michael McNally.
Richard Roger Lavigne, 80, died on May 21, 2021, the day police detectives were going to present their case to a magistrate to get an arrest warrant charging him with murder.
The disgraced former priest was right about one thing: no one would have believed him. If he knew about anyone else, aside from Danny, being at the riverbank under the I-291 bridge that night, he didn’t volunteer this information to Trooper McNally. According to Lavigne, Danny somehow ended up in the river after he had left the kid on dry land. This is just plain bizarre. Being nearly on his deathbed was an opportune time for Lavigne to pin the murder on Brown, who was a “person of interest” and part of his child sex predator ring. But he didn’t.
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I use the term “person of interest” in describing Richard W. Brown because he was never publicly identified as a suspect in the murder of Croteau. But in 1972, the police had looked into Brown.
Although Father Richard Lavigne quickly emerged as the prime suspect because of his presumed illicit relationship with Danny—and because of others coming forward with child molestation reports about Lavigne—police also questioned Sixteen Acres Boy Scout leaders Ed Veroneau and Dick Brown because of neighborhood residents’ rumors and statements about their sexual attraction to boys and teens.
Pictured above: Ed Veroneau
Both Veroneau and Brown were in a child sex abuse ring that consisted of Lavigne and 10 other priests and several sketchy civilians. Both were as fond of pretending to be police as they were of pre-teen boys, buying old police cars at auctions and decking them out with searchlights, two-way radios, and antennas.
“Dick Brown collected police badges and shield patches,” said a neighbor. “I saw them in his house.”
At the time, neighborhood kids assumed the two worked as parole officers, truant officers or auxiliary police officers, the latter of which was kind of a volunteer squad for the Springfield Police in the 1970s. In 1971, Veroneau was arrested by Troy, NY police for impersonating a police official after he bought a gun with a badge and a firearms ID card that had been issued to him by the Rensselaer County Sherriff’s Office. He had worked as a temp in the office, but was fired after a background investigation uncovered something troubling in his past that was reported by the Springfield Police. So he fled Troy for his native Springfield to start a security and alarms company.
And, in 1977, Veroneau was charged with raping a 15-year-old Springfield boy. After he was sentenced in 1979 to three-and-a-half years in jail for that crime, Brown took over his buddy’s business, moving the security command center—all of the TV monitors, cables, and wires—to the house he lived in with his mother on Burns Avenue, right around the corner from the Croteaus.
The police impersonation angle is important because an East Springfield woman named Sandra Tessier had told police in 1991 that several weeks after the 1972 Danny Croteau murder she was contacted by her friend, Lavigne, on the phone at 4:00 a.m. He wanted to talk to her in person, so she let him pick her up and take her to the International House of Pancakes on Boston Road (below).
“I want to prove to you that I didn’t murder Danny Croteau,” Lavigne told her in the restaurant.
“Father, why would I think that?” she replied.
Lavigne then guided her toward a man in civilian clothes who flashed a badge and told Tessier that the priest didn’t kill Danny Croteau.
“See,” said Lavigne to Tessier. “I told you I didn’t do it.”
“I kept saying, ‘I never thought you did do it.’ But as time went on, I kept thinking, ‘Doth protest too much,” she said in a Boston Globe interview.
In 2017, I wondered in a blog post, “Who was this mystery man and what was his motivation? Who in his right mind would go way out on a limb to impersonate an officer and assert Lavigne’s innocence, unless the “fake cop” were somehow involved in the murder? Or one could theorize that Lavigne knew something about his seamy past and put him up to the encounter—or that this mysterious figure was fearful that a Lavigne indictment would uncover a wider sex scandal that would expose himself and others. One can imagine Lavigne asking badge-man, “You know what they do in prison to people convicted of child molestation, don’t you? They stab them with shanks and burn them with cigarettes.” Or maybe Lavigne asked (or implied), “Who’s to say I don’t pin this on YOU? Who are they going to believe, a priest or YOU? You better tell her I didn’t do it.”
Because Sandra Tessier was very involved in St. Mary’s Church, it has been postulated that Lavigne set up the meeting so she would tell other parishioners that Lavigne didn't do it: police were looking for somebody else.
Over the years, Danny’s father, Carl Croteau Sr., became friends with Tessier, whose son Andre was also being sexually abused by Lavigne in 1972. Andre settled a sex abuse lawsuit against Lavigne in 2004. Carl and Sandra Tessier had a theory. They believed Lavigne “brought this guy along to tell her that he was innocent so she would tell her son,” Carl told me in 2009. “That way, the boy might be reluctant about reporting the abuse.” If this mysterious restaurant meeting was such a ploy, the tactic worked. Her son didn’t file suit until 2002, when he said that Lavigne would sometimes get forceful and violent with him, grabbing his shoulders and elbows and squeezing them to the point of pain.
Carl told me that Sandra didn’t really describe “badge-man,” except to say he was a “big man.”
Fleming, while doing research for his book, had talked to Sandra Tessier, who said to him (according to E.J.) that the fake cop was “big, way over six feet tall”—a “stocky” man who “towered over us.” However, in her original report to police, she said the man “was about six feet tall, light brown hair, average looking, maybe in his forties.”
Tessier’s actual statement to police was obtained from court records by Crash Barry, who wrote and produced the Devils and Dirtbags podcasts on the murder. The statement in its entirety (below) appears in public here for the first time. It describes a man in his forties flashing a badge, identifying himself as a detective, and saying they were looking for a suspect with “either a green van or a green pickup truck with Connecticut plates.” He said they were going to find the vehicle “and prove that you (meaning Lavigne) had nothing to do with the murder,” according to Tessier. “Father Lavigne said to me, ‘See, I told you.’…I never told anyone about this for years because the detective asked me not to before he left.”
The problem is that this statement differs with Fleming’s 2018 account of Sandra Tessier describing a man “about six feet tall.” She supposedly told Fleming that the fake cop was “way over six feet tall.” Indeed, from these photos in the Springfield Technical High School yearbook, Brown is much, much taller than his classmates, looking to be six-foot-four or six-foot-five and possibly still growing:
In my conversations and emails with Fleming, back when he was still writing the book, I emailed him the 1964 Tech yearbook photo of Brown and the 1964 Cathedral yearbook photo of Veroneau, and told him it would be a good idea for him to show them to Sandra Tessier for possible identification, and he agreed, although “she doesn’t do email,” he said. “I’ll have to print them out and show them to her.”
In April of 2020, in a phone conversation, I asked Fleming if he had shown Tessier the photos. He said he never got the chance.
Sandra Tessier died on July 4, 2019. I wonder if she had eventually seen the Brown photo I had provided Fleming because he did put it in the book. Fleming’s Death of an Altar Boy was published in April of 2018, more than a year before Tessier died. But I guess we’ll never know whether or not she saw the photo, which is a pity, because she had told police in her statement, “I might recognize him if I saw a picture from back then.”
Brown was 27 in 1972—not in his forties, which is how old badge-man was, according to Tessier. But Brown looked middle aged—much older than a man in his twenties—because of his heavy drinking. “His backyard was littered with beer cans,” said a neighbor. Budweiser was his beer of choice. “It’s as if he chucked the cans out the windows,” he said.
Veroneau was also 27, although he was described in this blog by a Boy Scout as “a large man, about six-foot-two and 260 pounds.” In 1972, “he looked to be in his early forties, but was actually in his late twenties.”
Could Veroneau have passed himself off as a police detective to Tessier that early morning? Several people have noted, including the above Boy Scout, that Veroneau was “always sweaty,” so an overweight sweating man might not have been so convincing up close. It’s hard to say.
Likewise, Brown liked to play policeman, but he didn’t look like a stereotypical cop, with his two rotted front teeth—denuded to mere slivers—his lack of eye contact when he talked to someone (except for boys, of course), and his eyebrows always bouncing up and down. He had the classic military crew cut, but he usually didn’t speak to people with confidence.
But maybe either man got it together enough to fool Sandra Tessier, who probably wasn’t fully awake at 4:00 a.m.
Richard Brown was a peculiar man—like Veroneau, of course, he was obsessed with law enforcement. His extracurricular activities from his 1964 yearbook: “student patrol,” “corridor patrol,” and “lunch room patrol.” He was a guy large enough to be the biggest linebacker on the football team, but he didn’t play sports.
Brown’s Family
Brown’s father, a firefighter named Reginald Brown, wasn’t very present in Richard’s life, according to a neighbor, and he died in 1976. His house at 36 Burns Avenue, where he lived with his mother, Florence, was right out of an episode of the TV show Hoarders. Then neighbor said it was difficult for any visitor to bear staying in the house for long because of the clutter and the overwhelming smell of mothballs. There was an underlying sour smell, so apparently he used mothballs to cover up the stink.
“Every room in the house was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes and paper, and that smell of mothballs would permeate your nose and you would smell it for days after just a 15-minute visit,” he said. “Cobwebs were everywhere. In the kitchen, rotten food laid there all the time, and there were swarms of fruit flies so thick you couldn't be in there without them getting all over you—going up your nose and in your hair. It was dark in there too: no light came in, because of the boxes and crap blocking the windows. There was no working shower in the house there was no toilet working either. And Dick Brown always smelled like mothballs. I don’t know where they went to the bathroom, especially after Florence broke her hip. I assumed they used buckets.”
They could have used the garage, which was built in 1971, as kind of a makeshift outhouse, but this source also said Brown’s garage was similarly cluttered. “So much junk—and dead cars in the driveway,” he said. “It was just nasty.”
Richard Brown always tried to give children on the street candy—with wrappers that had accumulated a layer of grease and dust because the candy had sat around the house for years—and he often offered to watch or babysit the Burns Avenue kids, but he was politely refused. One parent took him up on the offer, and Brown molested the child, waking him out of a sound sleep. However, he was never prosecuted for that crime.
There are rumored to be more sex abuse victims of his, and I guess that’s one of the purposes of this post—to encourage them to come forward.
36 Burns Avenue
After Brown took over Veroneau’s security alarm business, his mother Florence was often stuck with dealing with alarm notifications and calls all day and night. Florence herself had a sad history, being raped as a teenager by a much, much older relative. She had married a man named Roger Woodhead, but the union didn’t last. Was Dick Brown actually the son of Roger Woodhead? Dick is listed as Reginald’s son in Reginald’s obituary, but Florence and Roger Woodhead were married when Dick was born in 1945, and a month after Dick’s birth, Roger was furloughed for 30 days and was back home in Springfield after being wounded as an Army private in Germany during World War II. Or was Dick the product of an affair or an incestuous rape? Dick had “crystal clear” blue eyes and light hair, but his mother had brown eyes and dark hair. So who knows the answer in this sordid, sorry tale?
“No one was sure who his father was,” said a person familiar with the family. Indeed, there was some talk that his mother was impregnated by a relative, “and Dick Brown was the result.” That kind of talk increased the more people were exposed to his odd personality—and when they saw his “horns” and his facial tic.
“His weirdness knew no bounds,” said an acquaintance. “He would say things that were just plain inappropriate for the situation.”
Another source informed me that Richard Brown once showed up at a wake in a funeral parlor, even though one of his abuse victims—by then a grown man—was due to attend, but hadn’t arrived yet. A relative got in Brown’s face, screamed at him, and told him to get out of the funeral home, but Brown merely walked across the room and sat down. It took the funeral director to approach Brown and politely ask him to leave to defuse the situation—Dick just didn’t get the hint of getting told off, and everyone giving him dirty looks. The funeral director had to follow him to his van to make sure he didn’t walk back in.
I’m no clinician, but I’m wondering if Brown had some degree of Asperger’s Syndrome if he couldn’t take heed of verbal and visual cues in a scene like that. As for Florence Brown, a traumatic event like a rape could trigger an obsessive-compulsive disorder like hoarding. A neighbor said that their house was clean before Reginald’s death, and then the junk accumulated quickly. “Because of all the stuff in the living room, Florence was kind of boxed into a corner, where sat in a chair, smoked cigarettes, and watched TV,” he said. Once in a while, neighbors brought food over for Florence because they pitied her. But Dick didn’t want the food and he railed at Florence for accepting it. “You have plenty of food here!” Dick screamed at his mother. “You just leave it to rot on the kitchen table!”
Dick had a flat affect when his mom died at 75 in 1995. “He had no reaction,” he said. “None whatsoever. The man was flaccid.” Unable to make mortgage payments, Dick had his house was foreclosed on and he became homeless, living in a shelter for a while and visiting Burns Avenue now and then because he had left his two poodles with neighbors. But the dogs were untrained and vicious, so they were brought to the animal shelter and Dick wasn’t seen there again.
The witness to the funeral parlor incident said Brown pretty much had the psyche of Norman Bates in the movie Psycho. But it’s also evident that you can include a bit of the personality of Karl Childers in the film Sling Blade—minus Childers’ likability, of course.
Dick Brown died on January 10, 2020, at the Chapin Center, a skilled nursing facility in Springfield, at age 74, taking God knows what secrets to his grave. There was one condolence printed on his online obituary: “I knew Dick for many years. He was a good friend. I volunteered with him at the Motocross Races in Southwick. He was extremely dedicated to the Boy Scouts. He will be missed.” Had she befriended the man with the Lucifer-like horns on his head out of pity? Sympathy for the devil. Did Dick volunteer for Motocross and the Boy Scouts because he was a nice guy—or because he’d have access to teenage and pre-teen boys? You decide.
Fleming felt strongly that Dick Brown was at least PRESENT when Danny was killed. On January 17, 2020, after I informed him of Brown’s death, Fleming related to me about another account that wasn’t in his book: a woman told him that in the early evening of April 14, 1972, her 12-year-old brother and his friend were planning to go fishing and looking for worms at what would the murder scene that night. There they saw Lavigne in his Ford Mustang with a man who was “tall, big, with a brown crewcut.” Both boys knew what Lavigne looked like because they were St. Mary’s parishioners. The 12-year-old’s family supposedly told authorities what the boys saw, but apparently this was never investigated.
Fleming was certain this tall man was Dick Brown. He wrote in an email to me:
Fleming also wrote about a psychic who had contacted D.A. Matty Ryan’s investigators about her vision of “a big man and a shorter man” attacking Croteau. The “big man” killed him, threw him in the river, and lost a piece of jewelry:
For the record, I don’t really believe in psychics. I would like to see real evidence that Brown was somehow at the scene of the homicide that day or night. We certainly didn’t get this evidence from Lavigne, who, as far as we know from the 2021 interviews with State Trooper McNally, mentions no one else at the riverbank but Danny. In fact, he stated to McNally that he and Danny were there alone:
As you can see, Lavigne clumsily explains why his type B blood was found there, forgetting that a DNA analysis found that the blood wasn't his. I guess this was going to be his explanation if the DNA had proven to be a match.
It bears repeating: this would have been the perfect time for Lavigne to blame Brown for murder. Brown had been dead for more than a year and wouldn't have been able to defend himself. But Lavigne likely hadn't known that Brown had passed—in Crash Barry's 2019 interview with Lavigne (Crash secretly took his photo below), the man hadn't even realized that child molesting bishop Thomas Dupre had died.
As for the worm-digging boys, I told Fleming that I wouldn’t ask him for the sister’s contact information, but I did ask him to provide her with my email address and cell phone number and explain to her that I was working on a post about Richard Brown and the Danny Croteau murder and I was interested in communicating with her. But she has yet to contact me.
Unfortunately, E.J. Fleming died on August 31, 2020. To this woman: you’re reading this, my email address is hellsacres@gmail.com.
What Croteau Family Members Think
I had asked two of Danny’s siblings what they knew about Dick Brown. Their answer: not much. Catherine, Danny’s sister, said her father told her when she was growing up not to walk by the man’s house. That’s about it. After the book was published, she thought Fleming theory’s that Brown was the killer was preposterous. She said Fleming never contacted her when writing the book. If he had, she said that she would have tried to have him correct numerous sloppy errors in the manuscript.
On July 24, 2020, I played nine holes of golf with Danny’s brother, Joe, in a foursome at Wilbraham Country Club. His brother’s murder wasn’t exactly the ideal subject for a friendly golf outing, but I did get the chance to speak with him privately a couple of times about the homicide. He had read my Hell’s Acres series on the murder. I asked if he thought that Dick Brown might have been at the scene. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he replied.
However, after Lavigne’s 2021 interrogation, I would think Joe Croteau believes Lavigne—and Lavigne alone—is the killer. The former priest offered up no other suspects.
Carl Croteau Sr. was generally dismissive of the possibility that Veroneau or Brown killed his son. In our conversations, he always steered his suspicions toward Lavigne when I brought up the two scout leaders. Brown was “an oddball and a packrat” who had “so much junk crammed into his van there was barely enough room for him to drive,” said Carl. But he always thought that it was Lavigne who bludgeoned his boy under the I-291 bridge and threw him in the river.
Brown was a shadowy figure, to be sure. Fleming said he couldn’t find him to interview. R.C. Stevens, the private investigator hired by The Republican newspaper, and another private investigator couldn’t locate him when Fleming was writing the book, according to Fleming. Brown “went dark” in 1995, when they were testing Lavigne’s blood against blood found at the murder scene. It’s not known where he went after his mother died and his house was foreclosed on in 1995. “He’d gone underground,” wrote Fleming in an email. Finding person with a name as common as Dick Brown “is hard enough—even harder when he wants to be gone,” wrote Fleming.
According to someone who knew the Brown family, we see now that Dick Brown probably didn’t commit the murder, “but with his personality, I could see him being easily manipulated by Lavigne to flash his badge” to Sandra Tessier and declare the priest’s innocence.
Even though Lavigne stated no one else but Danny and him were at the murder scene, a DNA test done on blood found on a drinking straw found there (pictured above) failed to match Lavigne’s DNA. Lavigne’s attorneys said the blood test shows another person besides Danny—and not Lavigne—bled at the scene. But in 1996, DNA Edward Blake, who conducted the first DNA analysis, said that simply meant Lavigne didn’t bleed on the straw. “If that’s a place where people fish, one thing you frequently do when fishing is, because you’re working with knives and hooks, is cut yourself,” he said. “I don’t mean to say that you don’t investigate. But there’s no reason to believe (the straw) is relevant.”
Dick Brown was E.J. Fleming’s great white whale. Because the tire tracks at the crime scene didn’t match Lavigne’s tires, and because some DNA there didn’t match Lavigne’s, Fleming focused on other suspects, especially after R.C. Stevens wasn't totally convinced in the early stages of his probe in 2005 that Lavigne did the deed. Fleming felt badge-man was the most likely alternative suspect. And to Fleming, Brown was badge-man beyond a doubt.
In a way, I became Captain Ahab's first mate in this quest. In 2017 I became the first writer to zero in on other persons of interest in this case, building profiles on Veroneau, Brown, and a man who was arrested in October of 1971 for showing porno magazines to kids in Sixteen Acres—a guy referenced in the original Croteau homicide police report. I didn't name names and I obscured their faces in the photos. But I thought it was probably Brown who had flashed the badge to Sandra Tessier and tried to intimidate her son through this meeting. Fleming took it a step further in his book the following spring and suggested that Brown was the murderer. For the record, Fleming told me on the phone that R.C. disagreed with his assessment.
At first, many who read Fleming’s book might have come away feeling the same way as Fleming: Brown was likely at the murder scene. After all, he was part of the sex ring that met at a home of an old seminary classmate and pal of Lavigne who lived less than 2,000 feet from the site where Danny was killed, and the group had met in the house days before the homicide. But then came the surreal press conference on May 24, 2021, where we heard Lavigne, in his own voice, come as close to a confession as the true sociopath could allow himself to do without taking full ownership of the act.
