NEW ORLEANS (LA)
The Guardian [London, England]
December 27, 2024
By Ramon Antonio Vargas and David Hammer of WWL Louisiana in New Orleans
Former Roman Catholic clergyman dies a little more than a week after beginning life sentence, according to officials
Admitted child rapist and retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker has died a little more than a week after he began serving a sentence of life imprisonment, officials said on Friday.
Hecker, 93, had pleaded guilty on 3 December to charges that he had kidnapped and raped a teenager at a New Orleans church in 1975. He had received a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment on 18 December and, four days later, had been transferred to a Louisiana prison known as Elayn Hunt, according to the state’s department of corrections spokesperson Ken Pastorick.
Pastorick said Hecker died at about 3am on 26 December, at Elayn Hunt, of what were described as natural causes.
Hecker’s attorney Robert Hjortsberg said Hecker was meant to eventually be sent to Louisiana’s maximum-security state penitentiary, which is nicknamed Angola, before his death.
Hjortsberg’s co-counsel, Eugene Redmann, said Hecker’s health had been deteriorating.
The child rape survivor who successfully pursued criminal charges against Hecker said on Friday that he felt “vindicated and free” upon learning of his abuser’s death, which occurred about 15 months after the priest was indicted in the 1975 assault and arrested.
“I can’t find any words of kindness for his passing,” the survivor said. “The words ‘may he rest in peace’ are so hollow.
Citing an empty feeling that he had been harboring since Hecker’s sentencing, the survivor added: “He received man’s justice, had his freedom taken away for 15 months, now the only prayer I can come up with: I hope he spends eternity in hell after God’s judgment of him.”
Hecker came to be one of the faces of the New Orleans Catholic church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal – and had been protected from justice by his religious superiors for most of his life.
The survivor who proved to be Hecker’s downfall reported being a student at New Orleans’ St John Vianney high school – named after a patron saint of Catholic parochial priests – when the abusive cleric befriended him.
The survivor had a habit of working out in a weight room fashioned from a space in the bell tower of an adjacent church known to locals as Little Flower, which has since closed alongside St John Vianney, a school that primarily catered to boys interested in joining the Catholic priesthood.
One day, Hecker showed up in the weight room and engaged in small talk with the boy about his dream of joining a St John sports team. Hecker suddenly put the boy – then aged 16 – in a wrestling-style headlock, rendered him unconscious and raped him, according to court filings.
The survivor later recounted telling his mother and school principal about his rape at the hands of Hecker. But, he said, the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police and instead threatened to expel him if he did not undergo psychological treatment for what the school leader characterized as “anger issues and fantasy stories”.
Hecker at first denied those specific allegations. But in 1999, he admitted in writing to Catholic church bureaucrats in New Orleans that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he had met through his work as a priest.https://a80e77bfde2f68f5bb6fe05ead64fa80.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html
The church nonetheless allowed Hecker to return to work a few years before allowing him to retire with full employment benefits. The church then waited until 2018 to finally notify the public that Hecker, Calamari and dozens of their fellow clergymen had been faced with substantial child sexual abuse allegations – all of which collectively prompted New Orleans’ Catholic archdiocese to file for bankruptcy protection less than two years later.
After the church revealed Hecker to be a child predator, the former St John Vianney student teamed up with a civil attorney, Richard Trahant, to lodge a formal complaint with law enforcement about the survivor’s rape. The case progressed slowly until the summer of 2023, when the Guardian and then New Orleans’ CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana began publishing a series of reports on Hecker’s 1999 confession – as well as actions that the church had taken to hide that disclosure for more than two decades.
The outlets managed to publish those reports despite the fact that the church bankruptcy hid most archdiocesan matters behind a court-mandated seal of confidentiality.
Finally, in September 2023, Louisiana state police and the office of the New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, obtained a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape, kidnapping and other crimes in connection with the 1975 attack at St John Vianney.
The case was delayed more than a year amid questions about whether Hecker, as a nonagenarian who had been grappling with dementia, had the competence required to legally stand trial. He was deemed competent in the end, setting the stage for a trial that was supposed to start on 3 December.
Hecker, though, averted the trial by pleading guilty as charged and receiving a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment 15 days later. It marked the first time at least in recent memory that a Catholic clergyman in the city of New Orleans – whose archdiocese counts on hundreds of thousands of congregants – had been convicted of child rape, one of Louisiana’s most harshly punished crimes.
The sentencing hearing left the judge presiding over the case, Nandi Campbell, in tears of sympathy for Hecker’s victims.
One, Aaron Hebert, who had been prepared to testify in support of the former St John Vianney student had the trial proceeded called Hecker “Satan in priest clothing”, someone who stole his childhood from him. Another survivor called Hecker “an animal” and thanked God his day of justice had at last arrived.
The former St John Vianney student testified that his being raped by Hecker had doomed him to a lifetime of disjointed personal relationships – including with his wife and children. “I have zero friends,” he said as Hecker wept and wiped at his eyes. “I pushed everyone away.”
That survivor has since expressed a wish for some of Hecker’s enablers to be prosecuted eventually. It remained to be seen whether that was possible, though a broader investigation spurred by the case against Hecker remains active and ongoing.
Statements sworn under oath in April by the state police investigator who primarily built the case against Hecker, Scott Rodrigue, as part of the wider probe explicitly allege that authorities have probable cause to suspect that the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades”. That abuse was “covered up and not reported” to authorities, Rodrigue’s sworn statements said.
Nonetheless, at the time of his death, no one other than Hecker had been charged.
After news of Hecker’s death circulated Friday, Williams said, “We had no time to waste.”
Williams also issued a statement that read in part: “Hecker’s measure of earthly justice was certainly not enough for his crimes. It seems his maker was anxious to meet him after there was no longer any question about his guilt here.”
- This article was amended on 27 December 2024 to reflect updated information from the Louisiana department of public safety and corrections about where Lawrence Hecker died.