‘They covered up child rape’: how the New Orleans archdiocese protected a priest who preyed on children | New Orleans clergy abuse

In the case of serial child molester and retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker, the cover-up failed.

But it wasn’t for lack of trying by a coalition of high-ranking church officials and sympathetic judges, who prioritized the predator’s comfort above justice for his innumerable victims until the evidence against him was so overwhelming that – rather than stand the humiliation of a public trial – he pleaded guilty last Tuesday.

The 93-year-old’s decision not only saddled him with an automatic life sentence. It also exposed how Catholic bureaucrats in Hecker’s home town of New Orleans, one of the church’s strongholds in the US, repeated the same sins that produced an eerily similar scandal in Boston two decades earlier – events later immortalized in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.

This is the only conclusion to draw from years of reporting and studying the church files, court records, legal proceedings and and law enforcement documents outlining the campaign of terror to which Hecker subjected so many children raised in one of the most reliably Catholic regions remaining in the US.

Files held by New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese establish that Hecker was molesting children virtually immediately upon his ordination in 1958. Chronologically speaking, one of Hecker’s earliest victims was a preteen altar boy who described attending nude swimming parties with the priest – gatherings that would culminate in sexual assaults by the attacker.

Hecker eventually instructed that boy to bring a box containing a feather to a particular fellow priest at another nearby Catholic school and church. In short order, the second priest sexually attacked the boy – and the victim said he came to realize Hecker had used the feather to mark him as vulnerable to molestation.

Unsurprisingly, Hecker’s superiors became more than aware of his crimes. Accusations against him piled up at each of the major milestones in the US church’s reckoning with Catholic clergy sexual abuse, which began in the 1980s when Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty in criminal court to molesting several boys.

Around that time, then New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan received a child molestation complaint against Hecker. Hannan’s response – carried out in private – was to fly Hecker to a sabbatical in New York City before letting him return to work once things back home cooled off.

More such claims against Hecker came in the 1990s, when another Louisiana priest – Robert Melancon – was convicted of raping an altar boy. The ensuing pressure prompted Hecker to confess in writing to church officials that he had sexually molested or otherwise harassed several children whom he had met through his ministry.

Retiring under duress

This time, Hannan’s successor as archbishop, Francis Schulte, was in charge of responding. Schulte sent Hecker to an out-of-state psychiatric care facility that diagnosed him as an incurable pedophile who should not work with young people. Upon Hecker’s return, Schulte assigned him to work at a church with a grammar school attached to it.

Hecker retired under duress in 2002. As Spotlight famously chronicled, the Boston Globe had just exposed its local Catholic archdiocese for having covered up the widespread sexual abuse of children by its clerics, and it ignited a scandal that saw the worldwide church promise reform, such as by no longer tolerating the likes of Hecker.

But, despite pledges of transparency, New Orleans’ archbishop at the time, Alfred Hughes, chose to hide from congregants the fact that Hecker had retired in hopes of keeping secret his career as a serial child molester.

Archdiocesan attorneys back then did send a confidential memorandum to police notifying them that there had been an accusation naming Hecker as an abuser. But the note mentioned only a single case while failing to mention Hecker’s 1999 confessions. And Hughes ignored his advisers’ recommendation to oust Hecker altogether from the priesthood instead of merely letting him retire, a break that allowed the clergyman to collect lucrative retirement benefits.

Such maneuvers were on brand for Hughes, who had worked as an administrator in Boston’s archdiocese in the 1990s and sought to “perpetuate a practice of utmost secrecy and confidentiality with respect to the problem” of clerical abuse in that city, a report from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office ultimately found.

That scheming was effective in further suppressing the truth about Hecker – who would spend decades more free, even while Hughes’ successor as New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, continued dealing with the priest’s crimes after being appointed in 2009.

For instance, in 2012, Aymond authorized a $37,000 payment to settle out of court with a former altar boy who alleged having been molested by Hecker.

Nonetheless, Aymond would not publicly unmask Hecker as a child molester for years. In fact, in April 2018, the archdiocese touted the looming 60th anniversary of Hecker’s ordination into the priesthood in its newspaper.

About seven months after that celebratory announcement, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania established that clergy abuse within the state’s Catholic institutions was more widespread than ever thought previously. Aymond at last accepted that he could no longer completely suppress Hecker’s past.

The archbishop outed him in a list of dozens of local clergymen who had been the subject of substantial, credible child sexual abuse allegations – though the roster lacked any details about the sheer volume of molestation cases facing Hecker or how far back they dated.

Hundreds of abuse claims against the New Orleans archdiocese’s personnel – both on the clergy molester list and not – eventually drove the organization to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.

In theory, the bankruptcy filing should have metaphorically locked the truth about Hecker away because most information associated with the case was automatically placed under a confidentiality order.

The federal judge presiding over the church’s bankruptcy, Meredith Grabill, at one point ruled that the seal on case-related information was so sacrosanct that it could not be lifted even with respect to Hecker and his potential crimes. In reaching that decision, Grabill said she intended to “destroy any [sealed] information that this court received” while litigating the issue about whether Hecker deserved to benefit from the bankruptcy’s secrecy.

Still, the truth got out.

‘They covered up child rape’

One reason for that: the Guardian obtained a copy of Hecker’s 1999 admissions and reported them publicly for the first time despite the bankruptcy’s confidentiality. The Guardian then provided the confession to WWL-TV Louisiana in August 2023, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera.

Hecker remarkably stood by his written confession about illicit and “overtly sexual acts” with multiple underage boys. The outlets, furthermore, later secured a copy of a video deposition that Hecker gave privately in 2020 during civil litigation stemming from one of the complaints against him. The deposition explored – in Hecker’s own words – how New Orleans’ last four archbishops had helped him avoid accountability over the course of decades.

Hannan and Schulte are dead. Hughes and Aymond are still alive, though they have not commented in detail about their management of Hecker.

In the end, the serial molester’s downfall resulted from law enforcement’s speaking with a man who told investigators that he had been an underage student at a New Orleans Catholic high school in 1975 when Hecker choked him to the point of unconsciousness at a neighboring church and then raped him. The victim recalled reporting the rape to his principal at the time, Paul Calamari.

However, Calamari – later named in Aymond’s 2018 list of clergy molesters – failed to report Hecker to police, according to the victim. The victim said Calamari instead threatened to expel him and compelled him to go to psychiatric treatment for “anger issues and fantasy stories”.

(Coincidentally, Aymond joined the clergy the same year as the rape. And at the time, he was a young member of the faculty of the school where Calamari was the principal.)

Authorities knew Louisiana allowed instances of child rape to be criminally prosecuted no matter how old the cases were. And, given Hecker’s prior admissions as well as the number of accusations against him, they also knew building a strong case was viable.

With the help of Louisiana state police investigator Scott Rodrigue, the office of New Orleans’ district attorney, Jason Williams, secured a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape, kidnapping and other crimes in September 2023. Rodrigue as well as assistant district attorneys Ned McGowan and Andre Gaudin lined up nearly a dozen witnesses who alleged a range of sexually abusive acts by Hecker from the 1960s to the 1980s – and who would bolster the credibility of the victim pressing the charges in question.

Even then, it seemed evident some cogs in the justice system preferred for Hecker to die without meeting justice. New Orleans criminal court judge Benedict Willard delayed the case more than a year amid questions about whether Hecker – at his advanced age – retained the mental competence required to withstand trial.

Doctors eventually determined that Hecker had dementia – specifically, Alzheimer’s disease – but fit the criteria to stand trial. Then, on the morning of a trial date tentatively scheduled for late September, Willard suddenly recused himself from handling the case, citing nothing more than a clash of personalities with McGowan.

The abrupt move delayed the case by a couple more months, which was not insignificant given Hecker’s age. Willard has declined to publicly discuss his recusal with the news media. Yet it prompted questions in some quarters about whether Willard – a lifelong New Orleanian and graduate of one of the city’s influential Catholic high schools – had done the church a last-ditch favor to see whether a declining Hecker would die while his case remained unresolved, sparing the archdiocese the painful spectacle of a trial.

Soon enough, the judge who took over Hecker’s case – Brooklyn-born Nandi Campbell – ensured Hecker’s trial would begin on Tuesday with jury selection unless otherwise resolved. Hecker preferred the latter option, pleading guilty as charged to crimes including child rape, guaranteeing him life imprisonment at a sentencing date tentatively scheduled for 18 December.

All eyes now turn to whether any of Hecker’s enablers will be prosecuted.

Though none had been charged at the time of the guilty plea, it’s well-known that the Hecker case birthed a broader, ongoing inquiry into whether the archdiocese ran a child-sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to authorities, as a statement sworn under oath by Rodrigue in April put it.

Asked whether any of his client’s former superiors put pressure on him into pleading guilty to avert a trial that would embarrass the church, Hecker’s attorney, Robert Hjortsberg, denied that happened.

“It was his decision, and he made it on his own free will,” Hjortsberg said as Hecker was taken out of Campbell’s courtroom in a wheelchair. He later added at a news conference: “He’s taking responsibility for his actions, and everyone will have an opportunity to move forward in any way they can.”

Williams alluded to how steep the odds of convicting Hecker had been. The last clergyman to be charged with child rape in New Orleans’ criminal courthouse – deacon George Brignac – had died four years earlier after the coronavirus pandemic delayed his trial, marking the last of four attempts to try him on counts of clerical molestation.

“It should not be this difficult to investigate and prosecute an admitted rapist,” Williams said. “And [yet] it was.

“The press pushed this. The press pressed something that it seemed like the system and institutions wanted to look away from and forget about – and that also feels criminal.”

Overcome with emotion about the role he played in bringing Hecker to justice, the case’s star witness declined comment. But his attorney, Richard Trahant, met with journalists documenting Hecker’s guilty plea and aptly summarized the legacy of the case.

“These men who wear pointy hats and carry staffs and wear robes and wear fancy jewelry and gold chalices – they covered up child rape,” Trahant said.