PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philly.com
JANUARY 13, 2017
by Joseph A. Slobodzian, STAFF WRITER
It was January 2012, a month before the start of the child endangerment trial of Msgr. William J. Lynn, and retired Philadelphia Police Detective Joseph Walsh was called back to work by the District Attorney’s Office to prep a key prosecution witness.
Instead, Walsh told a Philadelphia judge Friday, the veteran detective found himself unable to get the 23-year-old witness to explain numerous inconsistencies in his story of being molested by two priests and a parochial schoolteacher in a Northeast parish in 1998 and 1999.
“You’ve got to have an answer,” Walsh said he told the accuser. “He would just stare down at the table.”
Walsh said the accuser said he was sexually molested by two priests at St. Jerome’s parish. One of the alleged assaults lasted five hours after he was an altar server at the 6:15 a.m. Mass.
But Walsh said there was no record of the accuser serving those Masses, including on his mother’s home calendar where she recorded her sons’ various church assignments.
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