BALTIMORE — In 1974, Father Francis LeFevre fondled a boy through his clothes at St. Anthony of Padua in Baltimore, one of several children LeFevre would be accused of molesting over the years.
The boy, either 11 or 12 at the time, did not report the abuse until 2008, 34 years later. The Archdiocese of Baltimore, well aware of LeFevre’s history, settled with the victim in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.
Despite accusations of fondling and raping young boys, LeFevre, whom the Catholic Church listed as credibly accused in 2002, has never faced criminal charges. Reached by phone at his home in New Jersey, LeFevre told a reporter he was “not interested” in being interviewed for this story.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office released a report earlier this month revealing the totality of the accusations against LeFevre, and at least two dozen other living Catholic priests who were never criminally charged.
The report, which chronicles instances of abuse by 156 priests and laypeople dating to the 1930s, raises the question about whether living abusers could face criminal charges now for their conduct. Despite hundreds of pages of admissions of abuses by priests and others associated with the church, the feasibility of bringing criminal cases for abuse that happened nearly a half-century ago is unlikely at worst and complex at best, according to some of the state’s most prominent prosecutors.
The laws that recognize a spectrum of sexual abuse, from inappropriate touching to various types of rape, did not exist decades ago, said Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess.
“We’re looking at a lot of these things through 2023′s eyes, but 10, 20, 30 years ago the law wasn’t up to date the way we are now. It’s very challenging,” said Leitess, who led the Special Victims Unit in the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office for four years in between stints as Anne Arundel’s top prosecutor.
Despite the legal hurdles, Leitess and her counterparts in the city of Baltimore and Baltimore and Howard counties told The Baltimore Sun they were reviewing the attorney general’s report with an eye toward allegations in their jurisdictions where further investigation and possibly prosecution might be feasible.
State investigators spent roughly four years poring over more than 100,000 internal diocesan records, identifying 156 clergy and laypeople who abused children, including 10 people who have not been accused publicly of abuse and whose identities are shielded from public view. Yet investigators brought only one criminal indictment: Former Mount Saint Joseph wrestling coach Neil Adleberg is charged with second-degree rape and is scheduled to stand trial in June.
Attorney General Anthony Brown is committed to prosecuting any abuse case where the law permits, said office spokesperson Jennifer Donelan. However, Brown is unlikely to pursue other prosecutions from the report.
“Prosecutions of the abusive conduct documented in the report are not viable at this time for reasons that vary from case to case,” Donelan said. “For instance, in several cases, at the time the abusive conduct was committed, the abuse was classified as a misdemeanor, and the statute of limitations on those cases has expired.”
LeFevre’s conduct in 1974 at St. Anthony of Padua is one such example. The over-the-clothes fondling likely would be charged today as a fourth-degree sex offense, a misdemeanor with a one-year statute of limitation. Maryland had no such law for a fourth-degree sex offense when the abuse occurred — the General Assembly did not create that statute until 1976. And while a general child abuse charge could apply, it is unclear whether the situation around the abuse would meet the factors under the law as written when the molestation happened.
“When we get these very old complaints of sexual assault, we look at them, but more times than not we find that we are shut out because, unless it’s a rape, or something of that nature, we were just shut out by the statute of limitations,” Leitess said.
Felonies have no statute of limitation. But for the case to be brought today it must have been a law when the abuse occurred. The Maryland General Assembly revised the state’s child abuse laws and sexual assault statutes several times in the 1970s.
Between 1969 and 1971, LeFevre anally raped a boy from when he was 11 to 13 behind the altar at St. Anthony’s, according to the report. However, it is unclear whether he could be charged. The child abuse statute did not include sexual abuse until 1974. The General Assembly did not create the charge of first-degree sexual offense, which includes anal rape, until 1976.
Asked about the possibility of bringing charges against living abusers whose transgressions took place within city borders, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said through a spokesperson that his office will “thoroughly review” the report “to determine the viability of prosecution for any of the alleged offenses.”
The spokesman declined to comment on the allegations against LeFevre.
Attorney Kurt Wolfgang, the executive director of the nonprofit Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center, represents a group of clergy abuse victims who are lobbying for more criminal referrals from the report. He said he understands why attempting to bring an old case may be unappealing, but he thinks prosecutors ought to do it in the interest of justice for the victims.
”These are horrific rapes and tortures, and no one who commits them should ever be able to lay their head on the pillow at night and be thinking I’m beyond prosecution because it’s 50 years later,” Wolfgang said.
Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger said he still is reading the report, but cautioned that any case his office would consider bringing from the report will face its fair share of challenges.
Shellenberger said juries struggle to wrap their heads around why victims are often delayed in coming forward, not understanding why a person might not want to bring an accusation against someone they know or who is well respected in their community. The delay in any possible cases arising from the attorney general’s report would be even greater.
According to CHILD USA, a national think tank focusing on child protection and civil statute reform, victims are, on average, 52 years old when they report their abuse.
“The older cases are tough for a number of reasons,” Shellenberger said. “One, are your witnesses still around? Two, how are folks’ memories about incidents?”
In old cases like these, victims may die or be unwilling to subject themselves to the labor of a criminal prosecution where they are likely to have their memories challenged by a defense attorney during cross-examination.
Over time, victims’ accounts of their abuse, and circumstances surrounding it, can change, however slightly, providing an opportunity for the defense to raise doubts about the accuracy of their recollection, said Natalie Finegar, a Baltimore-based defense attorney.
“You’re looking at discrepancies in stories over time,” Finegar said. “How the details got reported over time … Details that they just don’t have. If they have details about the act that happened but no other details about what was going on, you’re looking at that.”
Finegar said a consistent story is difficult to overcome for the defense, and defense attorneys need to approach their cross-examination of sexual abuse victims with sensitivity to avoid making the jury overly sympathetic.
The attorney general’s report includes numerous examples, citing diocesan memorandums, of priests owning up to their abuse. Such admissions could be helpful for a prosecution, but they’re not automatically admissible in court.
“If it was an oral statement of the defendant, you would need the person he made it to to testify,” Shellenberger said.
If the person who the abuser confessed to is still alive, their memory may have faded, Shellenberger said, and prosecutors may have to confront the witness with the memorandum and ask them to refresh their memory.
Like Shellenberger, Howard County State’s Attorney Rich Gibson said his office won’t shy away from the challenge of pursuing an old sex abuse case, so long as the evidence supports it.
Sex abuse cases often boil down to the victim’s word against their abuser’s, leaving juries to analyze which story is more credible, Gibson said.
Given the proliferation of reports of widespread child sex abuse by Catholic clergy around the globe, Gibson wondered whether a jury would hold that against an accused priest.
“If you were a plumber, you might be better off being accused of something like that than a priest, at this current moment, given the current views of society of the church,” Gibson said.
LeFevre’s case fits a pattern repeated often in the report: allegation of abuse after allegation of abuse reported to the archdiocese, with little action from higher-ups, and delayed notification of authorities.
In LeFevre’s case, the highest levels of the Archdiocese of Baltimore knew of his abuse in March 1987 when he told his superiors he “feels he has a problem with” touching kids. He was sent to therapy in Connecticut and was able to return to Baltimore with then-Archbishop William Borders’ blessing by November.
It would be eight more years until the church placed LeFevre on a leave of absence and informed law enforcement about any of the children he molested.
