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	Taped Confessions Argued By Debra Lemoine The Advocate August 26, 2008 http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/27419769.html Defense says Lamonica coerced AMITE — Louis D. Lamonica told detectives in two taped statements played in court Monday that he voluntarily confessed to raping his sons because he felt guilty and he wanted to get the boys away from their mother and a satanic child-sex cult. The defense, however, claims the former Hosanna Church pastor was psychologically coerced by church members to confess to crimes the defense says never happened. Lamonica, 49, of Hammond, is on trial in state 21st Judicial District Court on four counts of aggravated rape of his sons when they were ages 11 or younger. Lamonica is the second of seven members of the now-defunct Ponchatoula church indicted in 2005 to stand trial in the child sex scandal. Lamonica kicked off the string of arrests after he walked into the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office on May 16, 2005, and made the two confessions. On Monday, Assistant District Attorney Don Wall focused on the two taped statements Lamonica made the day of his arrest and his 260-page journal, a copy of which was provided to the jury. “My boys got to get out of that house because Robbin (Lamonica) is still doing stuff,” Louis Lamonica told detectives in the second confession. “She’s still in that cult,” he said of his then-estranged wife. Louis Lamonica asked deputies several times for immunity in exchange for names of other suspected child abusers. Defense attorney Michael Thiel directed his questions to Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Detective Bonita Sanger, emphasizing those portions of Lamonica’s confessions that correlated with the defense assertion that Lamonica was coerced into making false confessions and was told by other church members he would have immunity from prosecution if he talked to law enforcement. Sanger testified she received two phone calls before Lamonica arrived at the Sheriff’s Office in May 2005. One was from Nicole Bernard, the mother of an infant girl Lamonica was later arrested for abusing, asking about immunity for Lamonica. Bernard had previously taken her daughter to state authorities when she suspected the girl was raped. Robbin Lamonica had done the same with her sons. According to testimony in the other trial, Bernard pressured Robbin Lamonica to get information from her sons about the abuse of her daughter. The case involving the girl was severed from the case involving the two boys. The second call Sanger received was from an unidentified man who told her he had information on a case she was working on. When asked if such calls are unusual, Sanger testified: “It’s quite different. I was surprised.” In the first confession, Lamonica spoke for 30 minutes about how he gradually acclimated his young sons to being fondled, and eventually groomed them to have anal and oral sex in their Springfield home. The abuse stopped sometime in 2002, he said. The bulk of his journal focuses on his abuse of his sons and his troubled marriage and childhood. The occult activities at the church was the focus of Lamonica’s hour-long second confession. The cult began in 2000, he told deputies, with the dedication of Nicole Bernard’s infant daughter to Satan by placing the child inside a pentagram, sacrificing a cat and sprinkling the girl with its blood. “And, then, (we) stopped worshipping God, and worshipped Satan,” Lamonica said. He told deputies Hosanna had two churches: one for God, in the sanctuary, and the other for Satan, in the youth room. Lamonica said he and other church members in the cult periodically selected children, including his sons, for sex. “Everybody got a turn,” Lamonica said in the confession. “It was like, nobody missed out, including the women.” Lamonica told deputies he stopped participating in the cult sometime in 2003, but said others might still be involved. Lamonica, in the taped statements, also pointed to other church members as the leader of the cult and complained they were trying to say he recruited them into the cult. “Everybody had their own mind and they took their own part,” Lamonica said. “Nobody brainwashed nobody. I didn’t have that kind of influence.” The state will resume presenting witnesses at 9 a.m. today in Judge Zoey Waguespack’s courtroom.
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