Hey readers, listen to my recent appearance on Crash Barry’s Devils and Dirtbags podcast. We discuss Richard Lavigne’s “confession,” and listen to some audio from his interrogation—as well as clips from Crash’s never-heard-before interview with Lavigne in 2019.
To actually hear recordings of Richard Lavigne’s admissions that he brought 13-year-old Danny Croteau to the murder scene on April 14, 1972—and assaulted him there—was the most unusual part of a surreal press conference held by District Attorney Anthony Gulluni on May 21, 2021.
He wouldn’t admit to the actual killing—that would have required owning up to what he did—and the psycho just didn’t have that kind of honesty or repentance in his “character.” But he certainly didn’t have to talk to State Trooper Michael McNally at all without a lawyer. No, he didn’t have to say anything and could have just stuck to his old story that he was running errands that night and not getting Danny drunk and bashing his head in with a rock.
Lavigne could have kept his mouth shut, but the true narcissist within wouldn’t let him. With an audience hanging on his every word, he was just where he wanted to be: on his own pulpit, where he hadn’t been in decades.
Which brings us to one of the oddest developments on a strange day: Gulluni using a surprise “witness” who had come forward 27 years ago. Weirder still, the witness’s statement about what he saw in 1972 in effect supports Lavigne’s claim that the former priest left the murder scene with Danny injured, but alive.
The witness’s account was recently surfaced in its entirety by Crash Barry, whose Devils and Dirtbags podcasts cover the Springfield Diocese sex abuse scandal and the Croteau murder in particular.
The mystery man’s statement, first mentioned when the Croteau case records were released in 2004, is from late September of 1993, when he described an incident on a weekend night—he insists most likely a Friday night—in April of 1972 after he and two friends were drinking after work. Their driving adventure would begin and end at the Windsor Café in Chicopee Falls. It was actually 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. on Saturday morning when they all were heading to a grinder shop in Indian Orchard, but stopped for a urination break under the I-291 bridge.
Entering the access road under the bridge, the witness claimed his GTO faced a black Cadillac driven by a man in his thirties wearing a priest’s collar. They made eye contact as the Cadillac was leaving the road. “He looked at me with a very intense and angry expression,” according to the witness. “He looked at me like I wasn’t supposed to be there. He looked very angry about something. He looked at me for a couple of seconds. He had a clean shaven face and dark eyes. He floored his car and turned right.”
After that encounter, the witness’s friend got out to take a whizz about 100 feet from the river, came back to the car and said he heard “a moaning sound.” The witness got out of the car, listened intently for about 30 seconds, looked around but stayed put, didn’t hear or see anything, and they headed back to the Windsor.
The unidentified witness said he heard about the murder about a week after having seen the priest that night, and knew the homicide was near Chicopee Falls, but at the time didn’t connect it to what he saw.
The man’s entire statement appears here for the first time:
Fast forward to 1991, when Lavigne was publicly named as a suspect in the murder. “I recognized his face in the news and newspapers,” claimed the witness. “But I never knew his name. It’s hard for me to believe that I really saw this guy’s face. It’s the same face as the priest who is a suspect I the case. I have come to learn that his name is Father Lavigne.” After some soul searching, he finally came forward.
Curiously, Gulluni never mentioned the “moaning” part of the witness’s account, and his 15-page statement of facts doesn’t either. In 2004, The Republican newspaper referred to a witness describing a sound he thought was similar to an “animal moaning.” The “animal” reference isn’t in this witness statement, so is there an additional statement from him or others in his car? We don’t know.
What we do know is that there were two attacks on Danny that night—the first near the bridge’s cement piers. Then Danny was dragged 85 feet toward the river, where a second, more violent attack occurred. After that, he was thrown in the river. A moaning sound couldn’t have come from Danny after the second attack, which killed him—it caused severe brain injuries and spattered blood as far as 15 feet away. And he certainly couldn’t make any sounds face down in the river because he was dead when he hit the water.
Gulluni also used a 1991 witness statement from Stephen Burnett, Danny’s best friend, who said Lavigne used to drive not only a convertible sports car (presumably his signature maroon Mustang) but also a “funeral-like car, either dark blue or black, with four doors.” Again, curiously, Gulluni left out Burnett adding that the car “could have been a Cadillac.” That would have matched (in a way) the other witness’s description of Lavigne’s vehicle:
The DA’s office certainly did its homework, renewing the long dormant investigation in March of 2020, but the investigators’ final draft of the statement of facts might have been put together rather quickly—given those omissions—probably because Lavigne was dying and they wanted to charge him when he was alive to possibly get more answers.
In the 11 hours of interviews from April and May of 2021, Lavigne admitted that things “got out of hand” with Danny (the trooper’s words that Lavigne agreed to), and he “gave him a good shove” (Lavigne’s words). But he insisted he didn’t shove the boy to the ground. Lavigne said he “slapped him a little bit,” hit him with an object, and then “tossed it in the water.” He was asked how far he threw the object in the water, and Lavigne replied, “six feet.” That would have placed Lavigne at the site of the second beating—the fatal one—at the river’s edge.
Lavigne was then asked, “Do you think it could have had Danny’s blood on it?” He replied, “It may have, by the time it got in the water for any length of time it would have been rinsed off.”
At one point, Lavigne seems to walk back on admitting to any kind of assault, saying he did not shove Danny, but PULLED him “away from the river bank” because the boy was too close to the water.
So, with Lavigne’s bifurcation of what his actions were that night, in one version he HELPED Danny by preventing him from falling into the river. In another version, he strikes him with an object hard enough to possibly make him bleed. It was as if Lavigne was recalling memories by blathering away on a psychiatrist’s couch. But that babbling gave Gulluni enough ammo to charge him with murder.
Then Lavigne claimed to have left the scene, went home, and returned an hour later to find Danny floating face down in the river. “I just remember being heartbroken when I saw his body going down the river knowing I was responsible for giving him a good shove,” he said. It seemed like Lavigne had put the rest of his violent assault out of his mind, but in a way was he acknowledging that the shove set off a chain of events that he preferred not to not talk about?
Yes, Lavigne’s ramblings are shocking and confusing and contradictory. At one point he mentions taking Danny to the Chicopee River’s waterfall, which is NOWHERE near the murder site. Was this an example of Lavigne being “cagey and evasive,” in Gulluni’s words? Then again, the man definitely had some memory issues in recent years: he told investigative journalist Crash Barry in 2019 that he passed a polygraph test in the early 1990s regarding the sex assault charges against him in the Joseph Shattuck case—even though in reality he took the polygraphs in the Croteau case in 1972, and passed the second test after “erratic and inconsistent” responses in the first.
At one point in the McNally interviews, Lavigne explained that they had found his blood type B (one of the least common types) at the scene because he fell and cut his knee. He had totally forgotten that DNA testing had eliminated him as a potential source of blood (other than Danny's) they had detected on a drinking straw there.
In another memory lapse, Lavigne told Crash Barry in 2019 that he had no idea what he was doing the night Danny was killed, even though in 1972 he had a very detailed alibi of visiting stores and then coming home to his parents. That’s why I have so much trouble with Lavigne’s admissions in those 11 hours of talks with McNally: the man lied so much about the murder he couldn’t even keep his lies straight.
So Lavigne’s story is that Danny somehow ended up in the river after the priest had left the area. It’s pretty preposterous. He said he and Danny had been alone there. I mean, REALLY. He left and came back? And yet, the first witness’s urination story—if accurate—does suggest that Lavigne left a moaning Croteau there. If that were true, Lavigne must have returned to the scene to finish Danny off. That would have been an incredibly pre-meditated act—to have had the chance to think about it for a while and still go through with the murder because Danny would have told on him. Did he start dragging Danny to the river and the boy awoke, only to be silenced forever?
We are supposed to deduce by Lavigne’s explanation that someone else threw Danny in the water, or Danny went in the river by himself. “If I shared this with the public, they really wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “When I say they wouldn’t belief it, they would probably build conjecture around the revelation that I make.”
We’ll never know the full details, because Lavigne died on the day they were going to charge him. I’d really like to hear the entire 11 hours of McNally’s interviews with Lavigne—to listen to everything in context. Maybe they got him to talk because they told him they had an eyewitness who placed him at the murder scene. It’s hard to imagine Lavigne volunteering this information out of the blue, even if he knew he were dying.
Is this witness—who took a detour on a munchies run in the wee hours of April 15, 1972—even alive today? He is no joke: in 1993, former DA William Bennett used his statement in a 28-page affidavit that the state used to gain court permission to obtain Lavigne’s blood for testing. And it was used by DA Gulluni in 2021 to help charge Lavigne with murder.
Wouldn’t it be something if investigators had gotten Lavigne to talk because someone had to take a wicked piss on the night of the murder and brought a witness face-to-face with the panicked priest?
Maybe we’ll find out: Crash Barry is filing a Freedom of Information Act request to make those 11 hours of recordings public.
nice work as usual, was waiting for you to comment on this.
ReplyDeleteHe is dead but there was no justice for his victims. I am sickened at the injustice of all of it.
ReplyDelete