CINCINNATI (OH)
Cincinnati Enquirer / cincinnati.com
July 30, 2024
By Dan Horn
The pastor of St. Susanna Parish in Mason resigned Monday after admitting he ordered the destruction of material connected to an investigation into images possibly showing child sexual abuse while working at another church years earlier.
The Rev. Barry Stechschulte apologized to parishioners more than two weeks ago for his role in the matter and said at the time he remained committed to “maintaining a safe environment here at St. Susanna,” a large Catholic parish that also is home to a school. But on Monday, after hundreds of parishioners signed a petition seeking his removal as pastor, Stechschulte announced on the parish website he was leaving his post.
“The last couple of weeks have been difficult ones for all of us at St. Susanna,” Stechschulte wrote. “It has become evident to me, after much prayer and discernment, that, for the good of our parish and school, I should step down as pastor, effective immediately.”
Priest authorized destruction of hard drive
His decision to leave St. Susanna follows several weeks of turmoil over Stechschulte’s admission that he authorized the destruction of a computer hard drive in 2012 after learning it contained sexually explicit images of adults and, in a separate file, images of boys.
A police report said the material was discovered on an old computer that had been used by his predecessor, the Rev. Tony Cutcher, at Holy Rosary Church in St. Marys, Ohio. When the discovery was brought to Stechschulte’s attention, the report said, he told a church deacon to destroy it.
The deacon told police he used a blow torch to burn the hard drive.
In his July 12 letter apologizing to St. Susanna parishioners, Stechschulte wrote that he was so “shocked and filled with disgust” by what he saw that his immediate response was to ensure no one else would be subjected to the material on the hard drive.
“So I instructed that the hard drive be destroyed,” Stechschulte said. “I realize that not reporting it was a terrible mistake, which I regret.”
What was on the destroyed hard drive
Six years later, in September 2018, Stechschulte reported the discovery to the police and acknowledged that he had destroyed potential evidence. The police report described the investigation in 2018 as a “child pornography case,” but after interviewing Stechschulte, Cutcher and others, the investigators filed no criminal charges.
According to the report, the images in question were discovered when an old computer was being refurbished. Witnesses interviewed by police described finding sexually explicit images of adult men in one file and images of boys in another, though it was unclear whether the images of boys involved sexual abuse.
St. Marys Police Chief Jacob Sutton, whose office investigated the matter in 2018, said Tuesday the destruction of the computer hard drive complicated the investigation. Without the computer files and a clear description of the images of boys from witnesses, Sutton said, it was impossible to determine whether the material was illegal.
“Any potential evidence will never be found since, obviously, it was destroyed,” Sutton said. “The investigation would have been much easier and much clearer had we had the evidence to analyze, because then we would have had the truth.”
The police report and Stechschulte’s role in the destruction of the material were disclosed earlier this month by WCPO-Channel 9. A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, which oversees both St. Susanna and Holy Rosary parishes, confirmed Stechschulte resigned Monday but would not comment further.
She said a retired priest, the Rev. Jeff Kemper, had been appointed as the temporary administrator at St. Susanna.
Did the diocese alert prosecutors?
Neither Cutcher nor Stechschulte could be reached to comment. But in his July 12 apology letter, Stechschulte said he regretted his decision to destroy the hard drive and to wait six years before calling the police. “I wish that I could redo my initial decision from 2012,” he wrote. “I am deeply sorry for the distress this has caused all of you.”
In a statement posted on St. Susanna’s Facebook page, archdiocese officials said that while Stechschulte did not call the police in 2012, he did alert officials at the archdiocese about three weeks after discovering the material, in November 2012.
Church officials said they immediately referred the matter to the Auglaize County prosecutor’s office, which did not file criminal charges.
But Auglaize County Prosecutor Edwin Pierce said Tuesday he did not receive information from the archdiocese about Cutcher or Holy Rosary in 2012 or at any time prior to June of this year.
Pierce, who has been the elected prosecutor in Auglaize County for 28 years, said he first learned of the issues at Holy Rosary in June, when the Dinsmore & Shohl law firm, which has represented the archdiocese in previous legal matters, sent his office a public records request seeking any records related to Holy Rosary.
‘It’s certainly something you would recall’
Pierce said the law firm’s request included a written statement from Deacon Marty Brown, dated November 2012, explaining the discovery and destruction of the computer hard drive, as well as a statement from archdiocese officials, also dated November 2012, explaining what was found on the hard drive. The problem, Pierce said, is that he did not see either of those documents until the law firm sent them as part of its records request in June of this year.
“We have no record, no recollection of receiving either of those documents,” Pierce said Tuesday. “It’s certainly something you would recall.”
If he had received the documents in 2012, Pierce said, he would have referred them immediately to the St. Marys Police Department.
Although Cutcher was not charged with a crime, the archdiocese removed him from ministry in 2018 after he was accused of sending inappropriate texts to a boy. Cutcher resigned as pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Huber Heights, north of Dayton, in February of 2021 because of that accusation, archdiocese officials told The Enquirer at the time.
They said local authorities investigated the accusation and “found no evidence of illegal activity on the part of Fr. Cutcher.”
‘Parents stood up and did the right thing’
The texting accusation against Cutcher in 2018 arose around the same time church officials removed another priest, the Rev. Geoff Drew, for texting a boy at St. Ignatius Parish. Drew, who now is in prison, later pleaded guilty to raping a Catholic school student years earlier.
At the time, parishioners complained that the archdiocese did not disclose previous concerns about Drew’s behavior to them before allowing him to join their parish. Similar concerns about the actions of church officials were raised in the past few weeks by parishioners at St. Susanna, culminating in the petition seeking Stechschulte’s removal.
“Parents stood up and did the right thing,” said Teresa Dinwiddie-Herrmann, a St. Ignatius parishioner who founded Concerned Catholics of Cincinnati after the allegations against Drew arose. She said several parents at St. Susanna reached out to her when the reports about Stechschulte’s handling of the computer hard drive arose earlier this month.
“They decided to take the kids’ safety first, instead of the church’s image,” Dinwiddie-Herrmann said of the parents at St. Susanna.
In his post on the parish website Monday, Stechschulte did not say whether he had received a new parish assignment, only that he would be “reassigned elsewhere in the archdiocese” after leaving St. Susanna.