They took a drive to visit the Sisters of Charity in Dallas. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for a child to travel alone in the company of a Catholic priest.
Father Richard Thomas Brown had other designs for the outing, according to police. He parked down the street from the nuns, the girl told detectives, and then raped her in the back of his station wagon.
It wasn’t an isolated episode, according to police, but part of his alleged continual sexual abuse of the girl from July 1989 to December 1996, when she was between the ages of 6 and 14 and he was between 47 and 55 years old.
Brown was not formally charged until 2021. He faces one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child for allegedly sexually abusing the girl, whom he met after befriending her family. Police suspect Brown sexually assaulted as many as 50 children in the Dallas Diocese, beginning in 1980, court records show.
The diocese included Brown in its list — released in January 2019 — of 31 clergy members “credibly accused” of the sexual abuse of children since 1950.
The now-85-year-old former priest was arrested in 2020 after Dallas police used church records to track him to a remote New Mexico monastery where he had been living under the name “Father Peter,” according to police reports. Brown later pleaded not guilty to the charge in a Dallas courtroom, posted $100,000 bail and was released, court records show.
Then nothing — until The Dallas Morning News began making inquiries.
The criminal case remains pending, yet the last filing in the case had been in February 2022.
After The News began reaching out to authorities, a court hearing was scheduled for Oct. 15. At that hearing, another hearing was "reset" 12 months down the road, for October 2027. There is no trial date scheduled, according to the docket.
Alleged victims of Brown's abuse told The News they are unhappy with the handling of the case and they want justice.
The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office declined to answer questions about its case. A spokeswoman said the office cannot comment on pending cases.
A spokesman for the Dallas Diocese released a statement Monday that acknowledged actions it has taken, including placing Brown on its "credibly accused" list, and stated it does not provide Brown any financial support and has no continuing connection to him.
Brown’s attorney, Patrick McLain, said the District Attorney’s Office has remained in contact with him. He said many reasons could explain the delay in pursuing prosecution.
“Father Brown is very infirm, and he has been in treatment since his arrest,” he said in an email to The News. “He is very elderly, and his hearing and most of his faculties are severely impaired.”
The attorney for the victim of the alleged sexual assault said her client did not want to comment on the case. The victim’s sister, who also accused Brown of abuse and settled a lawsuit against the Dallas Diocese, told The News during a recent interview she is frustrated with the prosecution’s lack of progress. The News does not identify victims of sexual assault.
“It’s not being pushed,” she said. The lead detective, she said, initially was very helpful to the victims. “Then he kind of disappeared, just like the case.”
The allegations against Brown are detailed in court records and police reports. Among the allegations: Brown’s befriending of the family allowed him multiple opportunities to sexually abuse the girls when they were alone. He was accused of luring one sister into the bedroom closet of her room, ostensibly to hear her confession, then forced her to perform oral sex on him, according to a Dallas police report.
Those reports also contain allegations, detailed in a police report, that Brown asked the girl to perform readings at Mass and would bring her to the rectory, the priest's residence, at St. Mark the Evangelist in Plano, to memorize her lines. During these encounters, the victim alleged that Brown would force her to perform oral sex on him.
“He chose our family because he knew he could prey on us,” said the named complainant’s sister, who is now 42 with two daughters of her own. “Those predators, that’s what they do. They hook themselves in. He found a lot of those families. We weren’t the only ones.”
The church said it stripped Brown of his authority to act publicly as a priest in 2002. He was laicized, or defrocked, in September 2019, according to the diocese.
“We pray that the legal process will serve the cause of justice and bring truth and healing to all those affected,” diocese spokesman Michael Gresham said in the written statement. “The Diocese of Dallas continues to pray for healing for all victims and remains vigilant in efforts to create a safe environment within our churches, schools, and other entities."
"A strong case"
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot leaves office at the end of the year, having lost the Democratic primary to former judge Amber Givens.
The News tried to contact Givens, who defeated a write-in candidate in the Nov. 3 election, to ask how she will handle the Brown case. There was no repsonse to an email sent to her campaign.
For now, the sisters wait.
“I would love to see him be brought to justice,” said the sister of the named victim.
She is not the only one.
In addition to the criminal charge in Dallas County, three alleged victims of Brown, including the sister of the victim in the criminal complaint, have filed civil suits against him and the diocese in state court, alleging diocesan officials failed to protect them and hid Brown’s history of abuse. All three have been settled for undisclosed amounts, according to court records.
The victim named in the criminal complaint reached an out-of-court settlement with the diocese, also for an undisclosed amount, her attorney said.
Dallas attorney Tahira Khan Merritt represented the victim named in the criminal complaint as well as one of the other survivors who settled a civil suit.
“My clients want to see Brown held accountable for his crimes,” she said, “but so far criminal authorities … have not moved forward with trials many years after Brown’s arrest.
“It is our hope that Father Brown will be prosecuted so that his victims will finally achieve some measure of justice. His victims stand ready to assist in any way.”
Law enforcement, Merritt said, “put together a very strong case.”
Police reports in the Brown case mention at least four “credible” witnesses who knew the victim and provided police with corroborating evidence.
Merritt, who has successfully sued other Texas dioceses on behalf of abuse survivors, served as special prosecutor in the case against a Texas priest who was convicted in 2009 of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to prison.
Merritt said she thinks the decisions by various Catholic dioceses to publish their lists of credibly accused priests have left a public perception that the “crisis is over.”
The lack of criminal prosecutions against priests accused of child sexual abuse is not unique to Dallas. Very few such cases from Brown’s era have resulted in criminal indictments against living priests anywhere in the U.S. — mostly due to expired statutes of limitations. The legal time limits to prosecute often ran out because bishops and other clerical officials did not report the abuse to police when they first learned of it. Rather, following a nationwide pattern, bishops transferred offending priests to different parishes without notifying the public.
“The Dallas Diocese, St. Mark, and Brown engaged in a massive, fraudulent cover-up of sexual abuse of minors,” according to one of three lawsuits filed against the diocese by alleged victims of Brown’s sexual assaults.
How exactly prosecutors were able to indict Brown for decades-old allegations is not entirely clear. At the time of most of Brown’s alleged sexual assaults, Texas’ statute of limitations was 10 years. However, a provision of Texas law allows the clock to suspend that time limit if the accused leaves the state. It does not resume ticking until they return.
When the Dallas Diocese learned of accusations against Brown around 1994, it sent him to a treatment center in Connecticut for therapy and counseling, according to the Dallas police arrest warrant. Brown later ended up in several other states, including New York, Michigan and Illinois, but never returned to Texas as a resident, according to Dallas court records.
New York prosecutors used a similar provision of their state law to prosecute film producer Harvey Weinstein for sexual assaults against women years earlier. An appeals court in 2024 ruled the clock stopped on the statute of limitations because he was “continuously outside New York State,” allowing him to be charged.
Court records indicate that since his arrest, Brown has been living with other men in a residential “faith community” in Missouri run by a Catholic order for priests and brothers “who are facing particular challenges,” according to the community's website. Among the residents are several priests who are registered sex offenders, having been convicted of child molestation crimes, according to public records.
“I would like to see him rotting in a cell,” said the sister of the victim in the criminal complaint. “Not having a cushy life.”
In her 2022 lawsuit, she said Brown molested her when she was roughly between the ages of 5 and 9 — at the church, at IHOP restaurants and in her own home.
Brown would pull her out of Sunday religious classes at St. Mark and sexually assault her in an empty, dark classroom, the lawsuit alleged. He also did it in the church’s confessional booths, according to the suit.
Brown ingratiated himself with her parents by, among other things, telling them he would bless their house, her lawsuit said. He was sometimes invited to spend the night.
“While babysitting and on other occasions, Brown would read [the victim] bedtime stories in her own bed and sexually assault her after she appeared to fall asleep,” the lawsuit alleged. “This happened many times.”
The diocese knew of Brown’s sexual crimes before it transferred him to St Mark, the lawsuit contends, alleging a “massive cover-up” of Brown’s “monstrous” sexual crimes.
“But rather than take any meaningful, preventative action against Brown, the Dallas Diocese in the 1980s and into the 1990s merely moved Brown from parish to parish within the Dallas Diocese, hoping he would stop sexually abusing children," the lawsuit said. "He did not stop.”
As a result of what Brown did to the alleged victim who spoke to The News, she endured “periodic substance abuse, depression, severe anxiety, eating disorders, and self-cutting” while growing up, according to the lawsuit. And she has struggled to maintain employment, the lawsuit said.
“He got away with it for so many years,” she told The News. “He did a good job of brainwashing a lot of people.”
The settlement, she said, was healing because she received recognition from the church for the first time that what happened to her was real. It was an acknowledgement, finally, that “yes, this happened to you. You’re not making it up. You’re not lying about it,” she said.
The inaction in the criminal case, she said, sends the wrong message.
David Crowe, a Dallas attorney, represented her in the lawsuit against the diocese, as well as another alleged Brown victim.
Crowe said both of his clients have called the Dallas DA’s office multiple times to express concern the case wasn’t going anywhere. They never received a satisfactory answer, he said.
“They think the guy should be put in jail,” he said. “They were both minors at the time they were abused by him.”
Allegations and transfers
Brown, a former airline pilot, was ordained in 1980, according to diocese records.
In 1980 or 1981, Brown touched a child in Washington, D.C., where he befriended her family and “convinced them to allow their minor children to stay with him in his apartment,” according to Dallas police reports. Brown was in Washington on a summer study leave.
David Clark, a Dallas police detective, wrote that the diocese file on Brown indicated the priest admitted to the assault. In 1987, Brown also admitted to multiple diocese psychologists that he had sexually assaulted two juveniles after becoming friendly with their families, including a girl in Irving in 1987, police and court records show.
In 1993, the diocese transferred Brown from St. Mark the Evangelist in Plano to Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Rockwall, “despite knowing Brown was a pedophile,” court records say.
At the time, Brown had served at five different North Texas parishes — from 1981 to 1993, according to diocese records. The following timeline of Brown's service is based on Dallas court records and Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota attorney who has been representing victims of clergy abuse since the 1980s:
1981: St. Thomas Aquinas, Dallas.
1982-1987: Holy Family of Nazareth, Irving.
1988-1989: St. Philip, Pleasant Grove.
1990-1993: St. Mark the Evangelist, Plano.
1993-1994: Our Lady of the Lake, Rockwall.
The diocese sent Brown to Connecticut around 1994 to receive psychological examination and therapy. A psychologist there wrote in his report that Brown admitted to sexually abusing multiple children between the ages of 8 and 10, and the psychologist offered his opinion that Brown had a “long history of pedophilic behavior,” according to a Dallas police report.
When the allegations against Brown first became public, no criminal proceedings were initiated. The News reported in 1997 that Brown was allowed to continue serving as a priest despite being forced out as pastor of Our Lady of the Lake when the 1981 molestation allegation surfaced.
Brown was serving in adults-only, non-parish ministries in Detroit and New York, a church official told the reporter in 1997.
In 2002, the Dallas Diocese told The News Brown was living “as a hermit in a New York monastery.”
Also in 2002, Brown was confronted by an Illinois family of a girl who said he assaulted her. According to a Dallas police search warrant, family members told police Brown admitted to them he had sexually abused up to 50 children.
Between 1996 and 2001, Brown had befriended the family, which had four daughters, ages 5 to 14, according to court records.
The warrant also noted the family had notified the Dallas Diocese by letter of various concerns.
Texas law requires church officials to report clergy sexual abuse to police or other authorities. That did not appear to happen.
“I could not locate any documentation revealing a referral to a law enforcement agency or Child Protective Services was generated because of these allegations,” wrote Clark, the Dallas police detective, in the search warrant.
The Illinois family also reported that Brown continued to hear the confessions of children during this time, police said. Clark noted in his report that Brown had previously molested children during confession.
The News reported in 2003 that Brown was based in Detroit, where he was helping another priest lead conferences and spiritual retreats for adults.
Public records do not shed light on where Brown might have been after that.
Brown’s name resurfaced in early 2019 when the Dallas Diocese included him in its list of credibly accused clergy. Seventeen of those on the list were dead. Five had been convicted of a crime.
After that, events unfolded briskly.
In May 2019, Clark and another Dallas police detective interviewed Brown at the New Mexico monastery where he had been living — a property that sits on 1,000 acres in “a beautiful valley at an altitude of 7,000 feet,” as described by the Abbey’s website.
Brown “continued to blame his cognitive decline” and “onset of dementia” for not being able to recall the names of other victims, Clark wrote.
The detective said that while the diocese had given him some records on Brown and other priests, it continued to withhold other materials deemed “privileged” and had “thwarted” his investigation.
Clark compiled his findings on Brown and four other priests in a search warrant, concluding there was evidence the men sexually assaulted children. Police then raided two diocese offices and its storage facility in May 2019 — an event that produced national headlines.
Dallas Bishop Edward Burns condemned the raid, which involved dozens of law enforcement officers, as “unnecessary and sensational.”
The first lawsuit against Brown and the diocese by an alleged victim of his was filed in Dallas state court in January 2020, shortly before his arrest.
Brown was taken into custody in Dittmer, Mo., about 30 miles southwest of St. Louis, on property owned by the Servants of the Paraclete, according to published reports. He appeared in court in Dallas in February 2020 for his arraignment on the child sexual assault charge.
Survivor advocates at the time expressed hope justice would be done on behalf of Brown’s victims, now all adults. They also hoped to see action taken against the other four priests whom police had accused of molesting children.
The investigation produced two indictments, including the one against Brown. The other accused priest, Edmundo Paredes, disappeared before he could be arrested and remains a fugitive. Paredes, the longtime pastor at St. Cecilia Catholic Church in Oak Cliff, is accused of molesting three teenage boys more than a decade ago and stealing money from the parish.
The two Dallas bishops accused of protecting Brown by covering up the abuse allegations died in 2009 and 2018.
The Brown case could be the last chance Dallas County prosecutors have to hold a priest from that era accountable for alleged abuse.
Mary Leary, a former Massachusetts child abuse prosecutor, said most ethics manuals for prosecutors instruct them to go forward with a case if they have probable cause that a crime was committed and there is a likelihood of winning at trial based on the admissible evidence.
Leary, a law professor at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus law school in Washington, D.C., said the wishes of the victims must be respected.
If someone is no longer a threat to children and prosecutors are fearful they will appear sympathetic to a jury, those are factors to consider, she said. But in her experience, the public’s outrage toward clergy abuse is “appropriately strong.”
“If you have a victim survivor who is eager to go forward and you have a strong case,” Leary said, “it’s worth going forward.”
Angela Walker, executive director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, said the fact that a priest is elderly and unwell is not a valid reason for declining or postponing a prosecution.
“It doesn’t matter how old he is. He must be held to account as well as those who protected him,” she said. “The survivors are paramount.”
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