Betrayal (10 page)

Distraught, McGee paid a visit to Rev. John B. McCormack, who was then serving as regional director of Catholic Charities in Salem, and who later became bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire. McCormack acknowledges that parents complained to him that Birmingham was molesting children and says he referred them to “the pastor of the parish who was responsible for Father Birmingham's ministry.” But Birmingham remained a priest in Lowell and continued to victimize young boys such as David Lyko, who says he was fondled by Birmingham about a dozen times when he was nine or ten, and Olan Horne, who said he received a beating from Birmingham when he was fourteen or fifteen after resisting his advances.

In the spring of 2002, within weeks after Birmingham's abuse was revealed in Boston newspapers, more than forty of his alleged victims had come forward.

In March a former Salem man, James Hogan, filed a lawsuit against the Boston archdiocese and New Hampshire Bishop McCormack, alleging that in the 1960s McCormack — who was assigned to St. James's in Salem at the same time Birmingham was —saw Birmingham taking him to his rectory bedroom and did nothing to stop it. That lawsuit was later amended to include an additional thirty-nine alleged victims. McCormack has acknowledged that in about 1970 he was warned that Birmingham was molesting children. But he has denied that he ever saw Birmingham take boys into his rectory bedroom. Separately, Thomas Blanchette, formerly of Sudbury, alleged that Birmingham molested him and his four brothers — attacks that included attempted rape — at Our Lady of Fatima in the 1960s. And Paul Cultrera, a former altar boy who says Birmingham began molesting him in Salem when he was a high school freshman in 1963 or 1964, disclosed publicly that he had received a $60,000 settlement from the archdiocese in 1996.

After Birmingham was transferred to Lowell, he was brought into police headquarters in neighboring Chelmsford for questioning in a rape case. He was let go, but not before admitting he had molested children in the past, according to retired Chelmsford police chief Raymond P. McKeon. At the lime, Birmingham insisted he was “cured,” McKeon said. Birmingham also told him he had never been treated for abusing children and said his pastor in Lowell had not been told about his history of molestation.

The total number of children Birmingham abused is unknown. But during his three decades as a priest, Birmingham made a grand tour of parishes in the Boston archdiocese. After serving in Sudbury, Salem, and Lowell, he had yet another assignment at St. Columbkille's in Brighton — where he established a youth drop-in center — before he was promoted to pastor of St. Ann's in Gloucester in 1985. His last assignment before his death was at St. Brigid's in Lexington. He also served as juvenile-court chaplain at Brighton Municipal Court, and he frequently took teenage parishioners on out-of-state held trips; in his suit, Hogan alleges that Birmingham abused him during ski trips to Vermont and an eighth-grade trip to Arizona, Nevada, and California.

“What I know now is that I should have gone to the police,” said McGee. “But I thought I'd go to the Church and I thought the Church would take care of it.”

The air snapped with the chilly bite of late fall and the sun had barely begun to rise when Rev. Ronald H. Paquin roused the four teenage boys from their alcohol-soaked sleep and piled them in his Lincoln Continental for the long drive home.

The thirty-nine-year-old priest and his young companions, who ranged from thirteen to sixteen, were still drowsy, and they could feel the groggy aftereffects of the previous night. All five had stayed up drinking until one or two in the morning, so the predawn wakeup that cold morning on November 28, 1981, was an unwelcome jolt to their systems. Nevertheless, they wanted to get an early start back to Haverhill, a blue-collar community north of Boston, where Paquin was a curate at St. John the Baptist, the same parish where the four teenagers — James Francis, Joseph Bresnahan, Joseph Vaillancourt, and Christopher Hatch — served as altar boys.

Paquin had arranged the weekend outing at a private chalet in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, supposedly to reward the boys for their work launching a parish youth group. They originally planned to spend only one evening at the house, but because the boys had enjoyed the trip so much, Paquin later told a reporter, they decided to slay Friday night as well. More than two decades later, it remains unclear what Paquin had in mind when he crawled into Jimmy Francis's sleeping bag on one of those evenings, as one of the other boys saw him do, and how Jimmy reacted when he found the priest next to him in his bedding.

They are questions Francis never had a chance to answer. Tired from the night of drinking, Paquin fell asleep at the wheel twice on the ride home. The second time Paquin nodded off, on a stretch of highway on Interstate 93 in Tilton, New Hampshire, Francis grabbed the wheel in a futile attempt to keep the car from going off the road, according to one of the other boys. The heavy car rolled over, throwing Francis out of the vehicle and pinning him beneath the wreckage. Another of the four boys was seriously injured. Paquin and the remaining two escaped with minor injuries. Trapped under the car, Francis — a junior at Haverhill High School, an honor student, and an athlete — died of asphyxiation.

The fatal auto accident, which cost Harold and Sheila Francis their only son, resulted in no criminal charges. And twenty-one years later, Paquin insists he was sober when he lost control of the car, despite the account of one of the other boys, now a grown man, who described the night of drinking.

Had the archdiocese removed Paquin from the priesthood the first time it received a complaint about his behavior, it is unlikely that jimmy Francis would have died on that New Hampshire highway.

Three years earlier, Robert P. Bartlett had complained to the pastor at St. Monica's in nearby Methuen, where Paquin was then assigned, that the priest had molested him and two other teenage boys. But Paquin was transferred to Haverhill in 1981 anyway, and it took the Boston archdiocese nine more years to remove him from there, a decision that came only after Church officials were told he had molested more children in Haverhill.

Sheila and Harold Francis filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Boston archdiocese in April 2002 after learning from newspaper accounts that the archdiocese had known that Paquin had allegedly molested children before transferring the priest to the parish where he met their son. In the suit, they charged that the archdiocese had breached its duty to them by allowing Paquin, “a known pedophile who had engaged in predatory sex with minors in his parish, to remain a priest where he could continue to prey upon children to satisfy his unbridled sexual desires.”

Paquin, who has admitted in interviews to molesting children, left a tragic imprint in each of the parishes to which he was assigned. Ordained in 1973, Paquin started his career at St. Monica's, where he was in charge of the altar boys, Boy Scouts, and Catholic Youth Organization, Church directories show. He began abusing young boys almost immediately. When he was transferred to Haverhill in 1981, Church officials were aware of his sexual compulsions.

In one distinct way, Paquin stands out from most other abusive priests: he acknowledges a long history of sexually deviant behavior. In an interview with a
Globe
reporter, he admitted abusing boys in Methuen and Haverhill for over fifteen years, until the Boston archdiocese removed him from active ministry in 1990. In what he offered as an explanation of sorts for his abusive behavior, Paquin said he was raped by a Catholic priest when he was growing up in Salem. “Sure, I fooled around. But I never raped anyone and I never felt gratified myself,” Paquin said. His own psychiatrist, he said, told him he “had the sexuality of a thirteen-year-old. I was stuck as a thirteen-year-old. Whenever I felt pressure, I would hang around with the thirteen-year-old kids.” From 1990 to 1998, Church directories list him as “un-assigned,” “awaiting assignment,” or on “sick leave.” He was assigned to Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1999 and 2000, the same year he was laicized, which meant he could no longer perform any priestly duties.

To date, at least seven of Paquin's victims have won financial settlements from the Boston archdiocese. One of them is Bartlett, who said he was molested by Paquin numerous times over six years during the 1970s. Paquin insisted that lie stopped abusing minors after he was removed from parish work in 1990, an assertion contradicted by one of his alleged victims, now in his midtwenties, who asked that he not be identified. That man, now married, filed a lawsuit against Paquin in March 2002 claiming that Paquin began to sexually abuse him soon after he became an altar boy at age eleven or twelve. It continued until 1993 or 1994, when he was seventeen or eighteen, he said.

The abuse had begun when the man was a young altar boy at St. John's in Haverhill, where he met Paquin, who was assigned there, “He immediately wanted to start being my friend,” the man said of Paquin, who often took him shopping, bought him gifts, gave him money, and invited him to visit the church, where they would talk about religion. His father and stepmother were grateful that the priest had taken an interest in their son. A friendship blossomed, and the man came to regard Paquin as a father figure. “I really became an active part of church and his life,” he said.

After about seven months, the man said, Paquin began to invite him on day trips to shopping outlets in Maine and, eventually, overnight trips to a camp in Kennebunkport. “We'd drink Corona, make lobster, eat ice cream,” he recalled. Before long, their conversations during the ride up Interstate 95 took a sexual turn, as Paquin steered the topics to psychology, then Freud, then sex. Had he ever masturbated? Paquin would ask him. Had he ever had an erection? “He just started making this a part of our normal conversation,” he said. “It was embarrassing at first, but he'd say, ‘I know this is weird and embarrassing, but it's normal to talk about this, and it's good to feel comfortable with your sexuality,’ and I'd listen to what he'd say. He'd say some good stuff, too — he'd talk about religion and faith and morals and being a good person. You couldn't dislike him.”

During one visit to the camp, Paquin began talking about massage therapy, and then began massaging the boy's back and legs. “Next thing you know he's fondling me,” the man said, “then physically bringing me to ejaculation. He was very gentle about it, and if he noticed me getting tense he'd back off. He'd say, ‘Are you okay? This is completely normal.’ He said it was just a good feeling. And that's how he pitched it: it's good to have an ejaculation, it's good to be comfortable with him.” It was the man's first sexual experience.

Eventually, Paquin was regularly performing oral sex on him, often in a car in a Haverhill cemetery. Their sexual encounters also took place on numerous trips to Vermont, Maine, and other states, as well as Canada. Years later, when the man visited Paquin at Baldpate — a psychiatric facility in Georgetown, a rural community north of Boston — Paquin also tried to fondle him there. And the sexual activity continued when Paquin was sent to Our Lady's Hall, a well-maintained, sprawling brick mansion in Milton (an affluent suburb south of Boston) used by the Boston archdiocese to house depressed, alcoholic, and abusive priests. While claiming to offer treatment and rehabilitation, the facility provided Paquin with additional opportunities to continue his abuse, giving him a private, unsupervised place to spend time with the young man.

The man estimated he visited the facility several dozen times during the two to three years Paquin lived there, sometimes entering through the front door, sometimes through a less visible side or basement door. Once they were in Paquin's room, Paquin often masturbated him and performed oral sex on him there, the man said. On two occasions, the man spent the night.

On one of the mornings after he slept over, he said, Paquin offered to make him breakfast — but asked him to stay in the bedroom while he prepared food downstairs, The facility did not require visitors to check in or out, or have any apparent supervision, the man said, and his presence there was never challenged by other priests. “No one questioned me,” he said. “No one said, ‘Who are you?’” The man was not aware at the time why Paquin was staying at either Baldpate or Our Lady's Hall because the priest told him only that he was living there until he received a new assignment.

It wasn't until he turned seventeen and began dating that he became “increasingly, increasingly uncomfortable” with Paquin's sexual interest in him. Before that point, he said of the sexual activity, “I was made to believe it was normal and natural, so it seemed normal and natural.”

“I remember driving down 95 from a ski trip one time, and I flipped out, basically,” the man recalled. “I said, ‘Either you and I are going to stop doing this or I'm out of here.’ He said, ‘You're right, it will stop, give me time.’ But a little while later, maybe a few months down the line, he said, ‘Let's go away again.’ And I had developed a trust in him, and I thought it was over, but somehow it ended up happening again.” Finally, after meeting the woman who would eventually become his wife, “That's when I told him, ‘I can't do this anymore,’” he said.

In January 2002 stories in the
Globe
and other papers disclosed Paquin's long history of sexual abuse. “I was just in shock,” said the man, who said he was unaware that Paquin had molested other children. He confronted Paquin, who said he could not recall the number of children he had abused. “That was the turning point for me,” the man said, and he retained a lawyer.

Looking back, he says he is embarrassed and ashamed that he lacked the emotional maturity to end the relationship sooner. He struggles to explain — to those who struggle to understand — why he maintained contact with a priest who initiated a sexual relationship with him. Paquin, he said, steered the relationship in a sexual direction gradually and carefully, cultivating an emotional relationship with him along the way. The boy was a sexual neophyte when he met the priest, and he believed the older man's assurances that sex was a natural evolution of their relationship. And, he explained simply, Paquin had become a close and trusted companion. “He was my best adult friend. I can safely say that I loved this guy — I really did. I said to myself, ‘You know, he did teach me a lot about patience and kindness and religion and faith.’ But you've got to weigh his good and his bad, and the bad is just too heavy. He's got this issue, this psychological problem, and it's the Church's responsibility.” In May 2002, Paquin was arrested on one count of child rape in connection with the boy's complaint. He pleaded not guilty to the charge and was later indicted on three counts of child rape.