Siegfried - Part Eight
From Immigrant to International Fugitive, the Life and Death of a Man of God
By the time Siegfried Widera arrived in the foothills of the Santa Fe National Forest on October 16, 1985, the country’s fears were focused elsewhere. That year in Washington D.C., Tipper Gore and a handful of other senators’ wives created the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC wanted to save the minds and souls of America’s youth from heavy metal. On the West Coast the McMartin Preschool Trial was in the midst of what would prove to be the longest and most expensive criminal case in American history. And in Spencer Township, Ohio, a town of less than 2,000 people, sheriff’s deputies swarmed the house of Pat Litton. They arrived with backhoes and forensic scientists, looking for 60 bodies they believed had been buried in the tiny backyard after Satanic cult sacrifices. (Instead they found nothing in the yard; the house itself lent only a Bible, a poster for the movie Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, two Black Sabbath records, and some blank cassettes.) From coast to coast, America was in the grips of Satanic Panic. Geraldo Rivera’s special, Exposing Satan’s Underground, claimed that one in every 250 U.S. citizens practiced Satanism. Mothers were warned to avoid daycare centers, babysitters, neighbors. Children were being lured from their homes. Children were being sexually assaulted. Children were being sacrificed in secret rituals, and it was at the hands of the Devil.
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Some of which was true, though Satan was not involved.
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In 1983, a priest in the tiny Louisiana town of Henry, was accused of sexual predation with a number of young boys. Unlike previous instances, one family decided not to settle out of court with the Archdiocese. The Gastal’s instead pressed for a criminal investigation, and by 1985 Gilbert Gauthe’s arrest and the subsequent trial had finally caught the attention of the national media—though far less imaginatively than Satanic Panic. Father Gauthe was the first American priest to face charges on child sexual assault. Ultimately Gauthe admitted to sodomizing 37 children, and two days before Siegfried Widera arrived in Jemez Springs, Gauthe was sentenced to forty years to life in prison.
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Beginning in 1984, attorney F. Ray Mouton, who had represented Gauthe and had learned, through the course of the investigation and trial that Church higher-ups knew about Gauthe’s behavior, Father Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer, and Father Michael Peterson, a priest and psychiatrist, met at a hotel in Chicago to draft what was known formally as “The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy: Meeting the Problem in a Comprehensive and Responsible Manner” and what became known, colloquially, as The Manual.
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The 95-page document detailed the potential threat the Catholic body faced from charges of sexual predation. By their estimation, if what had occurred in Louisiana was to spread to parishes nationwide, the Church could expect to lose over ten billion dollars in court fees and restitution. Mouton, Doyle, and Peterson were also highly aware of the public image damage these cases presented. Those who were afforded copies of The Manual were given the following instructions: “The national press has an active interest in items discussed herein, and therefore, an abundance of caution is required. It is requested that each reader return the document to the person from whom they received the same, without copying.” The paranoia stemmed from an increasing interest by the press. “Presently all three major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and subdivisions of same…as well as CNN News have reporters assigned to developing stories. Some have had crews on location shooting second unit (background) footage for inclusion in segments to be shown later. All national radio networks, as well as CBS Evening News and NBC Evening News have shot filmed reports.” The Manual’s preface also notes coverage from six national print reports and nonfiction proposals from two writers. “For well over a decade the news media of this country has exhibited a tendency to attack institutions presently or previously held in high esteem by the public, including the Presidency. The tendency is every escalating, particularly in stances where the press can characterize a situation as scandalous.” Mouton, Doyle, and Peterson went on to state that the press liked to go after institutions with deep pockets—and the Church was perceived as one.
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The Manual provided parishes with thorough details and advice should a parish face accusations. It was a step-by-step guide: how to handle accusations, how to discuss these circumstances with the accused clerics, how to make smart decisions as court proceedings began. They covered psychiatry, secular and canonical law, and public image.
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In May of 1985, The Manual was praised by some of the highest-ranking bishops in the United States. A month later, at the annual Meeting of the U.S. Bishops at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, it was categorically rejected for implementation.
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By 1985, the Via Coeli Monastery was now called Villa Louis Martin, and Fitzgerald’s wholly spiritual outlook on rehabilitation had given way to more modern and scientific approaches. Indeed, Fitzgerald had been cast aside from his own life’s work. Alcoholics Anonymous and psychiatric counseling were prevalent, as were classes in sexuality, programs with the University of New Mexico’s sexual disorder clinics, and drug therapy using Depo-Provera—ironically, a contraceptive device for women.
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As a new patient, Siegfried was asked to fill out a fourteen-page Personal History Sheet. He admits to his crimes in Wisconsin, but skirts the matter of what had happened in California. What happened in California came out later, in police reports and lawsuits. Specifically, the incident that landed him in the treatment center took place on July 31, 1985 in Yorba Linda. Fr. Siegfried had presided over a funeral. The man had left behind a wife and a ten year old son, Daniel Garza. After the funeral, Siegfried began turning up at the Garza home. Garza was an altar boy, and as his home life was filled with grief and pain Daniel found himself spending more time with the priest. The incident in July occurred at a party. Widera and four or five of the altar boys, Daniel included, went swimming at a party held at a wealthy attorney and parishioner’s home. Unbeknownst to Widera, a Child Protective Services caseworker was present at the party and witnessed Widera sticking his hands down the front of Garza’s swimming trunks. The caseworker claimed to see Widera do this to all of the boys. It was reported to the Diocese. “Shortly after that,” said the then-Director of Human Resources for the Diocese of Orange, “we got a second but anonymous complaint of the same nature.”
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Widera had not simply been outed by an overzealous therapist in Yorba Linda as he claimed in his Personal History sheet at Jemez Springs. No sooner had he dropped Randall Glendenning off at John Wayne Airport than his actions with children began again. Accusations sprouted at every post Widera held on the West Coast. Looking back over his file, the Director of Human Resources admitted that it was “definitely not the norm—very unusual” for a priest to be assigned to five churches in four years. Widera’s bishop in California, Father Michael Driscoll, died in Idaho in the autumn of 2017, plagued by criticism. In the early 2000s, dozens of investigations would prove that Driscoll was perhaps the most enabling administrator of the sex abuse scandal on the West Coast. An article written by Gustavo Arellano and appearing in May 2005 in the Boise Weekly, Boise being the ultimate stopping-ground for Driscoll, presents itself with the acerbic title, “Take the Bishop Michael Driscoll Pedo-Quiz!” The article notes that twenty priests in the Diocese of Orange classified as having credible molestation allegations worked under Fr. Driscoll’s watch. Six known lawsuits were settled, with more potentially settled off-record. That same month and year, an article in the Los Angeles Times reports that “Driscoll moved priests accused of molesting minors from parish to parish in Orange County. He helped others relocate to other dioceses and countries to avoid prosecution, ignored or delayed acting on parents’ complaints, and accepted a convicted molester [Widera] into a local parish.”
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“My feelings about all of this,” Siegfried wrote on his Personal History Sheet, “[is] how could I do this so often, knowing the consequences?" I would suffer, but still…the words of St. Paul: ‘I do the things I do not want to, and the things I do want to do, I do not do.’ Why? I feel so terrible. I know better. I know it is not being a stubborn German. Hope there is an answer?” … “Of the twenty-seven years of my life, there is an impression of good years in the priesthood and of duties well-performed. However, my impression of my personal life ls one of being “troubled”—a dark force behind me. It is a search for "personal peace" that was never achieved because of the hounding of the passions.”
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The form ends with a list of emotions and asks its signer to underline any that relate to them at present. Widera underlined the following:
disturbed
alive
accepted
capable
problems with sex
helpless
fearful
depressed
scared
obsessive thoughts
trapped
seek information
weight gain
skeptical
ambivalent
inferior
pleasant
miserable
rejected
abandoned
excessive sweating
exhausted
alienated
understood
inadequate
hard to concentrate
defeated
foolish
afraid
anxious
lonely
thoughts of death / suicide
degraded
hurt
vulnerable
empty
hated
disoriented
panicky
vocation conflict
distracted
bitter
angry
guilty
seek advice
confused
trusting
tense
hopeless
sympathetic
crisis of faith
spiritual problems
threatened
trouble falling asleep
early morning awakening
condemned
sad
depressed
unstable
identity crisis
persecuted
cooperative
frustrated
embarrassed
aware
intimidated
tired
anxious
stomach trouble
indecisive
changed value system
friendly
hate to get up
restless
worried
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“I have lived almost forty-five years,” Siegfried concluded. “In general, I would say that I have performed well as a priest. But it is my personal life that has destroyed almost all the work that I have accomplished. I have wondered if forty-five years is enough. That is why I feel that it is good for me to be here at Villa Louis Martin—to try to get some sense into my life, wherever life is taking me in this conflict, and that I might truly learn the responsibility for this life—that there is hope.”
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He would not wait to find out. Siegfried Widera’s stay at Via Coeli was meant to last a year. Seven months into his stay, in April of 1986 when the snow had thawed and Jemez Springs was bathed in the sunshine and the pure mountain air Gerald Fitzgerald had so believed could return priests to grace, he walked off the campus and disappeared.
XVIII.
On April 24, 2002, a thin man with a goatee and glasses and a horseshoe of dark hair around the steeple of a bald crown walked into the West Allis Police Department clutching a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in his hands. He went to the receptionist’s desk and, with a shaky but determined voice, said that, as a boy, he had been sexually assaulted by a Roman Catholic priest. The desk officer’s eyes grew wide. He didn’t know what to do. He sent out a page over the intercom: “Any detective available, please come to the front desk.” While they waited, the officer asked the man his name. “Randall Glendenning,” he said.
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He was forty-two years old. At thirty-eight, Randall had graduated from a technical college and now collected vintage muscle cars. He was married to a woman from Slovakia, and the two of them shared a burgeoning interest in horse breeding. They were thinking of leaving Wisconsin soon to begin a breeding farm. For decades Randall had tried to tough it out, but the weight of shame was becoming too much to bear. His health had suffered, and he no longer spoke to his younger brother, Chris. He’d seen the article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 2002 had been a year in which articles about priests were general throughout the country. The first of the Boston Globe’s Team Spotlight investigations had appeared soon after the new year and continued for months. On the West Coast, the Orange County Register reported that “up and down the state [the Church] grappled with new cases or developments involving priest-abuse allegations.” One of these allegations was made on April 6 by Daniel Garza against Siegfried Widera. The Associate Press report, titled “Two counties launching criminal investigations of priests accused of abuse” appeared on April 12. Randall Glendenning read the article, which described Daniel Garza’s lawsuit against the Diocese of Orange. The article had brought upon Randall a flood of memories. That evening, he told his wife for the first time what’d happened to him as a child. Together they decided Randall ought to alert authorities. Randall had waited another twelve days. Finally he couldn’t wait any longer.
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Twelve-year veteran detective Ann Phillippi responded to the intercom page. “I went up there to see what was happening,” she told me, “and I met the victim and he explained what had happened.” Phillippi knew immediately that the statute of limitations had expired on these allegations. Phillippi decided to give her full attention to Randall Glendenning’s report anyway.
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“My dad had been an alderman in St. Francis for twenty-five years,” Phillippi told me. “His pet department was the police. Often, Mom would have dinner ready; she’d ask me to run down to the station to fetch my dad.” She spent a lot of time hanging around the precinct house in St. Francis. One afternoon she saw a flyer posted for auxiliary police officers. Ann immediately signed up. “On my first ride along, I knew this was the ideal job for me. I liked the challenge. I like helping people, but I also like not knowing what you were going to do day-to-day. With law enforcement, you never know.” She was a young teenager; soon her nights were spent not with friends or pouring over books, but on ride-alongs. She was immediately hooked.
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She joined the force in West Allis in January of 1990. For the first decade, she worked patrol—everything from barking dogs to deadly traffic accidents. She was promoted to detective in 2000. By the afternoon Randall Glendenning arrived at the station, Phillippi had had experience working some of West Allis’s more gruesome cases. Fifteen years later, however, Ann Phillippi says this case separates itself in the devastation. “Though I had handled sexual assaults before,” Phillippi said, “none of the victims I had interviewed appeared so visibly devastated as Randall Glendenning appeared. In my experience, I have only seen that amount of pain and sadness on the faces, as well as in the voices and tears, of parents when I’ve had to notify them that their child was dead.”
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Phillippi: “I’ve dealt with child sexual assault victims, but I always wondered what happened years down the line, particularly if they try to compartmentalize and not get any therapy, what happened to them. How does it affect their lives. And I found out.”
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She arranged for a tour of St. Mary Help of Christians, the Holiday Inn where once stood the Tyrolean Towne House Inn, the Eagles Club (now called The Rave), and other areas in West Allis where Randall said the incidences occurred. On May 15, they toured these facilities together, along with Assistant District Attorney Chris Liegel. Ann asked Randall to recall, as specifically as he could, what occurred and where. His memory was clear, though on a number of occasions Randall found himself unable to speak.
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When they returned to the station, Detective Phillippi told Glendenning, “There’s a statute of limitations. I’m not sure that we’ll be able to prosecute, but you’ve come all this way and I’ll take the report and see what happens.” She just had one question for him. Why now?
As she told me, “I wanted to make sure he understood the realities of reporting. I may not be able to do anything with it. I’d try, but I didn’t know. I wanted to figure out where he wanted to go with this.”
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He told Phillippi he knew that Wisconsin case law made it virtually impossible to successfully sue the Church for abuse. “He did not care about that,” Ann later wrote in her report. “He just wanted to finally tell someone about the abuse that he and Chris had suffered at the hands of Father Siegfried Widera.”
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Glendenning was referring to a 1997 Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruling, LLN v. Clauder. The case involved J. Gibbs Clauder, who served as a chaplain at Meriter Hospital in the 1980s. While there, Clauder began counseling a young married woman who was suffering from “medical and emotional problems.” Soon the relationship strayed beyond therapy, and the woman, known as L.L.N., began seeing Clauder privately. In 1990, on a trip to the priest’s family cottage in northern Wisconsin, the two began a sexual affair. Eventually the woman stopped seeing Fr. Clauder and sued him. On May 23, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuit would necessitate “excessive entanglement of church and state.”The court wrote: “The clause does not grant religious organizations blanket immunity from the suit, but it does prohibit civil courts from adjudicating controversies that would require them to interpret or decide matters of religious doctrine or faith.” And: “the determination of the standard of care owed by the Diocese in supervising one of its priests would directly involve the court in religious matters.” The ramifications of LLN v. Clauder were such that individuals could not sue, in civil court, an Archdiocese for the behavior of their priests. This was a windfall for the Church, and a massive blow to men like Randall Glendenning, who had no recourse.
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Though LLN v. Clauder was unique to Wisconsin, the impasse was not. As the Globe reported, “The First Amendment, guaranteeing a separation of church and state, had always served as a deterrent to secular authorities probing too deeply into Church affairs.” Phillippi was aware of this thorny legal area, and it angered her. She’d told Glendenning on their first meeting together that she couldn’t promise him any legal closure but that she would do everything possible to try. She was a compassionate person, but as an officer she was as determined as they come. In every way, Ann Phillippi was the perfect detective to handle the case. Almost immediately, Detective Phillippi decided to find a way to bring criminal charges against Widera. She and ADA Liegel began to brainstorm ways to make the case criminal despite the lapse in time. “The norm for that time [for a statute of limitations] on a felony was five years.” Together they found the loophole. “Actually,” she told me, “it was Lieutenant Greg Blaskowski, who was in charge of our the Sensitive Crimes Unit at the time. The following day or just a few days after I took the case, Greg told me this was prosecutable.” The statute of limitations on a crime freezes once a suspect leaves the state. Because Siegfried Widera had left Wisconsin for California in 1976 and had not returned for an amount of time that could be considered as establishing residence, the accusations raised by Randall Glendenning lay within the five-year statute. “It became a two-pronged investigation after that. First, was the case of sexual assault and misconduct. The second was proving where he lived and that he hadn’t returned to Wisconsin.”
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Glendenning told Phillippi that there were dozens of other men, still around Milwaukee. “He named some other possible victims and witnesses.” The department expected perhaps one other man. They didn’t expect the floodgates to open.
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Three days after Glendenning and Phillippi toured the major sites of abuse, Michael Haas came into the West Allis Police Department. Unlike Glendenning, who’d become an animal lover and a man of great empathy, Haas had grown a tough-skin. He told Detective Phillippi—who was now joined by Lieutenant Greg Blaskowski, Detective Steven Fabry, and Detective Thomas Kulinski—that he’d done what he could to put the abuse behind him. “I don’t want people to look at me and wonder about it.” Most of the initial interview was an attempt to assure Haas that his testimony would remain anonymous. As Phillippi recalls, “He had told his mother, and his mother didn’t believe him. And that was devastating. He never told his wife. He said, ‘After my mother didn’t believe, I didn’t tell anybody.” His reluctance continued for some time. Finally, he agreed to speak.
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Like Randall Glendenning, Michael Haas led the detectives to each of the places where the incidences had occurred. He said that once word had come that Widera was leaving West Allis for good, many of the boys were upset. They wished it were old Father Setnicar. But soon it became rumor that Widera had been touching boys. Phillippi wrote:
One boy, (Haas does not remember his name) came out and said that Father Widera had touched him inappropriately or molested him and that’s why Father Widera had to leave. Once that got around, other students remembered that Haas would go on lots of trips with Father Widera. The other students asked Haas if Widera had molested him as well. Haas publicly denied that Widera had molested him. Inside he wondered what would happen if he told the truth; even his own mother didn’t listen to him.
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At the end of their day together, Haas echoed Glendenning. He told the team that there were more victims—possibly dozens.
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Within days of Haas’s interview a man came forward and added to the portrait of what occurred at the Tyrolean Towne House Inn. He told detectives that Widera would sometimes rent a room there. He’d have six or eight boys load up in the VW and take them to swim at the Inn. Afterwards, everybody would undress in the rented room while Widera watched. “I didn’t think much of it at the time.” But soon enough the tickling started. The man recalled being in the process of changing, naked, and Widera began tickling his ribs. He then moved the boy over to the bed and pinned him there and tickled his genitals.
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Another man said he’d heard about Siegfried Widera on the radio. He told them he’d been a student at St. Mary Help of Christian and that Widera ran around the playground, tickling the boys. When the detectives told the man that the kind of tickling Widera had engaged in—tickling of the genitals and the anus—was sexual assault, the man demurred. “Well then you have a whole school full of victims,” he said.
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A few days later, this same man returned to the Police Department and talked to Phillippi and Fabry. He said he was angry when they’d first mentioned sexual assault, but now he wanted to report something. One day in the summer of 1973, he found himself inside the parked VW van with Father Widera. Widera was tickling the boy. At some point, Widera’s penis came out of his pants. The priest moved the boy’s hand onto it and said, “It gets bigger!” The boy fled the van.
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As the case against the priest grew, one problem remained: nobody knew where Siegfried Widera was. The team at West Allis tracked down old files held by the individual churches and by the Archdiocese. Phillippi reached out to the Diocese of Orange and received what they had on Widera. They chased down leads, leads that led them to the Servants of the Paraclete but no further.
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In late May, Detectives Phillippi and Fabry rang the doorbell of Charles and Miriam Loew. They wanted to speak to Miriam, who’d played Bridge with Gertrude Widera for decades. Over coffee and cakes, Miriam told the detectives that, indeed, they had kept in contact with Sig. Otto and Gertrude were both dead now, but Sig often called or wrote to the Loew’s. In 1986, around the time that Siegfried had disappeared from New Mexico, he was in South Milwaukee to officiate the Loew’s son’s wedding. This was the last time they’d seen him in person. He was supposed to have attended their daughter’s wedding in 2002, but never showed. When he came to town all those years ago, he stayed with his sister Kristel and borrowed one of Ernst’s cars to get around. Where did Ernst live now? the detectives asked. He was still in Brookfield. And what about Kristel? She had moved to Tucson, Miriam told them. And where was Siegfried? “Tucson,” Miriam said.