By Susan Campbell
Hartford Courant
June 30, 2011
http://blogs.courant.com/susan_campbell/2011/06/today-in-courtroom-3b-15.html
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Testimony continued today in the second of the St. Francis Hospital child sex abuse trials with testimony from retired Dr. Thomas Godar, who sat on St. Francis' research committee in the late '60s and '70s, and Beverly Faulds, former medical secretary for George Reardon.
The trial is held in Courtroom 3B at Waterbury Superior Court.
Reardon, who died in '98, was head of St. Francis' endocrinology section, and for decades he conducted a bogus growth study with which he lured countless children and adolescents into his office, where he sexually abused and exploited them. In 2007, when the then-owners were renovating Reardon's former West Hartford home, they stumbled upon a cache of 50,000-60,000 pornographic slides and photos of Reardon's former patients.
Both Godar and Faulds testified in the first trial, which ended in a settlement during jury deliberations in early June.
Faulds is retired and living in Massachusetts. She talked Wednesday about how she set up Reardon's office, and was responsible for filing, purchasing, scheduling patients, answering the phone -- everything you'd expect from one of a two-person section (Reardon was the other one).
At one point, plaintiff attorney Douglas Mahoney was showing on a large white screen a series of disbursement forms and purchase orders, and requests for purchases. He mentioned some of the books that Reardon charged to the hospital. The titles included "Erotica Judaica" (more on that here, perhaps?) and "Juvenile Homosexual Experience."
Defense attorney Paul Williams strenuously objected to admitting those titles as evidence because, he said, the content was unknown, and admitting those books would place undue pressure on St. Francis' attorneys to find them. At that point, Mahoney pulled a copy of the juvenile experiences book from his case and presented it to the court. Williams continued his objections, and said that Reardon was a popular teacher and may have had books with salacious titles to use in his lectures. The book was admitted as evidence. Reardon bought it in August 1967 with hospital funds.
The financial records look to be fairly extensive, yet no one at the hospital suspected anything was amiss with Reardon?
Testimony recommences at 10 a.m. Thursday.
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