Such shocking testimony was set to be delivered in a criminal trial against the retired priest, 93-year-old Lawrence Hecker, that was scheduled to begin Tuesday in New Orleans. But it was upended when the clergyman unexpectedly pleaded guilty to charges of child rape and kidnapping, a decision that guarantees him a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
The most complete account yet of the case that state prosecutors in New Orleans were prepared to present against Hecker – after he had long benefited from a complex cover-up largely engineered by his church superiors – is contained in court documents obtained by the Guardian and WWL-TV upon the sudden conclusion of the case.
According to a 13-page filing from the office of the New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, the victim who pursued the case against Hecker was about 16 when the priest raped him in 1975.
Hecker at the time had hired the teen to help set up masses at New Orleans’ St Theresa the Little Flower church to satisfy a pastoral service requirement at his school next door, St John Vianney Prep. Hecker would also encounter the teen at weekly pool parties for students at the local seminary.
One Sunday after mass, as was his habit, the teen was working out in a weight room in St Theresa’s bell tower. Hecker showed up unannounced in the weight room that day and spoke with him about the teen’s hopes of making one of St John’s sports teams.
The priest told the child that he had heard St John would soon be starting a wrestling team. He purported to teach the teen some moves to help him make the squad. The ruse allowed Hecker to position himself behind the boy and put him in a chokehold.
Authorities would later assert that the teen felt Hecker rape him before he lost consciousness as he tried to fight his attacker off. When the teen woke up, he realized the back of his shorts were wet, so he discarded them as he went home. He said he then noticed it was much later in the day because of the way the sunlight was hitting the bell tower – and that he was alone.
The teen later told his mother about the rape – as well as his principal, Paul Calamari, who summoned the boy to his office after he had gotten into a fight with a friend.
“Calamari immediately became angry and asked … who he told about the incident,” prosecutors later wrote in court filings. The boy described telling his mother, prompting Calamari to set up a meeting with the child’s parents.
“Calamari told [his] parents that [he] needed to see a psychiatrist due to his ‘anger issues and fantasy stories’ or he would be expelled,” prosecutors would later write. “The thought of expulsion scared [him], so he agreed to go to a therapist for the next several months.”
The boy suspected the Catholic church must have paid for the therapist because he knew his parents could not afford it.
Much later, long after St John Vianney and St Theresa both were shuttered, it would become clear to the victim – now 65 – that he was far from the only boy Hecker had preyed on.
In 1999, Hecker admitted in writing to Catholic church leaders in New Orleans that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met in prior decades through his ministry – work that also saw him involved with the Boy Scouts, another organization plagued with a history of child abuse.
The New Orleans archdiocese nonetheless allowed Hecker to return to work before he retired with lucrative benefits a few years later. The local church then waited until 2018 to notify its congregants that Hecker – along with Calamari and dozens of their fellow clergymen – had been the subject of substantial, credible child sexual abuse allegations. But even then, it only acknowledged receiving a complaint against Hecker documented in 1996, long after the rape at St Theresa and almost a decade after the archdiocese had called Hecker in to address another molestation complaint.
Hundreds of abuse claims against its clergy eventually drove the institution with a half-million followers in its region to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.
Two years after Hecker’s unmasking as a child predator, the former St John Vianney student spoke to law enforcement about his rape. But his case was slow to progress.
Eventually, in June 2023, the Guardian managed to get a copy of Hecker’s 1999 admissions and exposed them to the public for the first time despite a seal of confidentiality on information associated with the church bankruptcy.
The Guardian provided the confession to WWL-TV Louisiana in August 2023, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera. Hecker told the outlets that his written confession about “overtly sexual acts” with underage boys who were “100% willing” was accurate and authentic, but he denied ever choking anyone or raping anyone.
A couple of weeks later, with the help of Louisiana state police investigator Scott Rodrigue, Williams – the New Orleans district attorney – secured a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape and kidnapping.
The case was delayed for more than a year over questions about whether Hecker had the mental competence needed to withstand trial. The judge who had the case for a year, Benedict Willard, suddenly recused himself on an earlier trial date in September, ensuring another delay.
But as it became clear that the trial in front of Judge Nandi Campbell would proceed on Tuesday, at least 10 witnesses who alleged a range of sexually abusive acts by Hecker from the 1960s to the 1980s stood prepared to testify against him.
Many had served Hecker as altar boys and accused him of fondling them, including while swimming.
One described taking a walk with Hecker in some woods outside New Orleans when the priest put him in a wrestling hold, began trying to rape him and then sauntered off as if nothing happened when another child approached upon hearing the commotion. After that boy grew up, Hecker officiated his wedding because the bride’s family was close to him – a shocking turn of events to which Williams alluded on Tuesday while speaking with reporters outside the courthouse.
“Lawrence Hecker married him and his fiancee because his bride’s family was that close to Lawrence Hecker,” Williams said. “Understand the complexities of this thing.”
Hecker on Tuesday pleaded guilty as charged while the first set of prospective jurors who might have been chosen to hear about some of those acts gathered outside Campbell’s courtroom.
None of Hecker’s superiors were charged alongside him. Rodrigue interviewed Calamari, though it was never clear whether Williams’ office intended to call him as a witness.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether Hecker factors into a broader, pending state police investigation aiming to determine 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 law enforcement, as Rodrigue put it in April in a sworn statement.
Yet Tuesday still marked a stunning outcome because it has been rare for Catholic clergymen in New Orleans to be charged – much less convicted – in connection with the worldwide church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal.
“There is no better result the district attorney could have gotten,” said Richard Trahant, the attorney for the star witness in the case against Hecker. “There just isn’t.”