Runaway Priest That Dallas News Found Faces New Charges

By Reese Dunklin
Dallas Morning News
February 8, 2013

http://watchdogblog.dallasnews.com/2013/02/runaway-priest-that-dallas-news-found-faces-new-charges.html/

In 2004, I found the Rev. Frank Klep handing out candy to young Samoan children after Mass. (File photo)

More legal trouble faces one of the most notorious priests whom we profiled in our landmark 2004-2005 series on the Catholic Church’s international transfers of sex abusers.

The Rev. Frank Klep appeared in a Melbourne, Australia, court this week after his arrest on six new criminal charges. Those date to the 1970s, when he worked at a boys boarding school operated by his religious order, the Salesians of Don Bosco.

Klep’s arrest is one of the first made by a police task force pursuing leads from a state parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse. In the early stages of that inquiry last fall, police had cited Klep’s criminal past and many of the details I first reported in 2004.

The Salesians transferred Klep to the Pacific island of Samoa in 1998 while police were investigating him. Klep already had one molestation conviction, and more charges were filed subsequently in the ongoing probe.

Samoa and Australia, however, lacked an extradition treaty. Samoan government officials told me no one alerted them to Klep’s fugitive status. Because of my reporting, Samoan officials discovered he failed to disclose his conviction on immigration papers and used that as grounds to deport him.

Upon arrival in Australia, Klep was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

You can read my original coverage from 2004 and 2005 at the bottom of this post.