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	Parents of Boy Slain in '72 Seek Answers Associated Press, carried in Bellingham Herald March 7, 2008 http://www.bellinghamherald.com/354/story/344663.html SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- When 13-year-old Danny Croteau was found bludgeoned to death in 1972, the boy's father asked a priest to go with him to identify the body. The slaying went unsolved for lack of evidence, but it was continually surrounded by rumors and innuendo about the priest's relationship with the teen, who served as an altar boy when he was killed. That speculation only intensified when the Rev. Richard Lavigne was convicted of molesting other altar boys and later defrocked. Now Danny's aging parents have asked the state's attorney general to review hundreds of new documents recently made public in the case to settle whether Lavigne was their son's killer. "I'll keep on this as long as I have a breath left in me," said Bernice "Bunny" Croteau, 71. Lavigne, 67, was the only named suspect but has never been charged. "If a jury of 12 people exonerate him, we'll accept that. If 12 people find him guilty, we'll accept that, too," said Danny's father, 77-year-old Carl Croteau. "We just finally want answers." Lavigne's lawyers insist he was not involved in the killing. They declined to make him available for comment, and no one answered the door at Lavigne's home in neighboring Chicopee. "The real evidence in this case conclusively establishes his innocence," Boston-based attorneys Max Stern and Patricia Garin said in a statement. Danny vanished sometime on the afternoon of April 14, 1972, which was Good Friday. When his parents realized that he was not at a Boy Scout meeting, they frantically called family and friends. The first was Lavigne, who was then a regular guest at the Croteau family dinner table. The charismatic priest knew Danny well: He'd hosted the boy on overnight visits and road trips, supervised him as an altar boy, and often dropped off food to help the large, cash-strapped family make ends meet while Carl Croteau worked two jobs. Years later, Lavigne would be accused by more than 20 men of molesting them as minors - including a few of Danny's older brothers. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to two counts of molesting young male parishioners. He was sentenced to 10 years of probation and seven months of mandatory sex-offender counseling at a psychiatric hospital. He was defrocked in 2003. But that was not the Father Lavigne known by Danny and his friends in the early 1970s, when being an altar boy was both a service to God and a coveted chance to skip school to help at funerals. The Lavigne they knew was a "cool guy," one friend told police - a "playboy" whose disconcerting tendency to watch them undress was offset by his generosity with chewing gum, wine from the church chalice and the Playboy magazines hidden in his red Mustang. On the night Danny disappeared, Lavigne told police, he was at his parents' home and never saw the boy until the next morning, when he accompanied Carl Croteau to a funeral home to identify the body. An autopsy determined Danny had been bludgeoned with a rock. Police say his killer dumped the body in the Chicopee River miles from the family's Springfield home and sped away, leaving tire tracks that were partly damaged by rain. The case quickly went cold and remained dormant until the allegations against Lavigne became public in the early 1990s. Lavigne's attorneys said he passed a polygraph in 1972 and that the tire tracks did not match those on his car. They also said that DNA testing in 1995 showed blood found on a drinking straw at the scene did not match Lavigne's. Police also corroborated his statement that he was with his parents the evening of the murder, according to his lawyers, who insisted that much of the information said to implicate Lavigne "is obviously false" and contradictory. The case went cold again after the 1995 DNA testing. Occasional publicity followed, particularly in 2004, when the Springfield Diocese agreed to a $7.7 million settlement with 46 victims of clergy sexual abuse. A Springfield judge recently ordered the release of documents in the diocese's lawsuit against its six insurance carriers over whether they should have to pay the settlement. The documents included original police reports from Danny's death, his autopsy and widely varying statements from friends, family and strangers. In January, the Croteaus asked Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley to order an independent review of the case. They also want the FBI involved since Danny's body was found under a federally controlled highway bridge. A spokesman for Coakley's office declined to comment on whether she was considering an independent review. Hampden District Attorney William Bennett said there is not enough physical evidence to prosecute anyone, but the case remains open. Danny, who would have been 50 this year, remains a presence in the family home he last saw after helping his mother put down a rug and heading out with his parochial school tie stuffed in his jacket pocket. One wall of the home features Danny's portrait, not far from a picture of his four brothers and two sisters, all of whom are now adults. A needlepoint wall hanging reads, "When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure." "We'll never give up until we go to our graves," Carl Croteau said. "We live with this every day. Our other kids live with it every day, and we're not going to let anyone keep us in the dark anymore about what happened to Danny."
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