ALTOONA (PA)
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
December 9, 2018
By Deb Erdley
Mary Hutchison was desperate.
It was 1987 when the devout Catholic mother of three knocked on the door of Richard Serbin’s Altoona law office.
Hutchison had learned her troubled son Michael, then 19 and locked in a forensic psychiatric ward, had been raped repeatedly over seven of his then 19 years of life. The perpetrator: Father Francis Luddy, their beloved parish priest at St. Therese’s Catholic Church. The priest abused him between the time he was 11 and 17.
Two years later, he had become a male prostitute and petty criminal. He suffered addiction. He attempted suicide.
The desperate mother’s pleas for the church to help her son slammed headlong into a brick wall.
Serbin was Hutchison’s last hope. Michael was fast approaching his 2oth birthday, and the statute of limitations for civil cases was about to expire.
A Pittsburgh native, Serbin, who is Jewish, was the only personal injury lawyer in town who might take such a case, Hutchison was told. He agreed to interview Michael.
That interview launched a 20-year legal battle that pierced a veil of secrecy that protected predator priests for decades. It set down a trail of bread crumbs that eventually led to a statewide grand jury investigation and damning report. The odyssey took 30 years.
Details of that first meeting have not been dimmed by the decades that have passed.
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