Siegfried - Part Nine
From Immigrant to International Fugitive, the Life and Death of a Man of God
XIX.
“He looked like Howard Hughes,” Richard de la Cerva told detectives. “He looked like a biker: long hair, beard, leather jacket and dirty nails.” Siegfried arrived in Tucson sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1986. He hadn’t been seen or heard from by anybody since walking away from Villa Louis Martin. His life for the year of 1985 is undocumented. In all likelihood, he spent it on the minor highways of the country’s interior. In California he’d purchased a motorcycle—something his parents had never let him own—and he pulled up to Tucson Container Corp., a subsidiary of John Widera’s Action Box and California Box Company, road-weary and drunk and overweight. His 5’10” frame now supported well over 250lbs. He was balding, and what remained of his platinum blond hair had turned a jaundiced yellow with strands of gray at his temples and in his beard. De la Cerva was John’s business partner for the new venture in Tucson. By 2002, when Detective Phillippi reached out to him, having found the businessman’s contact information through the Pima County Sheriff’s Department Fugitive Task Force, de la Cerva was operating a competing business; John Widera had forced him out of Tucson Container Corp. not long after it’d become operational. De la Cerva couldn’t have been happy about this. He remembered Siegfried well.
*
According to de la Cerva, John thought he could straighten his brother out, and Siegfried needed it. He drank all the time. He forgot to bathe. He had to be reminded to brush his teeth. By now, John Widera was worth millions. Kristel worked for him in Tucson. John gave Sig a job and money. Kristel owned trailer homes in Drexel Heights, an isolated part of town just north of the San Xavier Indian Reservation. De la Cerva told authorities it was “a rough part” of Tucson. Kristel let Sig live in one of the mobile homes. They gave Richard de la Cerva the job of bringing Sig into the fold.
*
His entire life had been a failure to relate to people his age, opting instead for the company of children. In Tucson he found another demographic: widows. Siegfried inundated these lonely women with his attention. In return they dressed him in the clothes of their dead husbands. De la Cerva told authorities Sig was in the habit of wearing $1,000 suits—Hugo Boss, Yves Saint Laurent—that did not fit him. Elderly ladies loaned him their Cadillacs and Mercedes. He drove around town in dead men’s suits, drinking from a flask.
*
On his first day of work, Siegfried showed up drunk. He passed out in John’s office.
*
Richard described the job orientation with Siegfried in frustrating terms. Widera was “kind of slow—not quick on the job.” He was usually either drunk or so hungover as to be rendered useless. Richard told detectives that, one morning, when he’d arrived at the trailer in Drexel Heights to pick Siegfried up, he noticed a box filled with prescription drug bottles with labels addressed for “Mabel and other names that were obviously not his.” Siegfried told Richard “his friends” i.e., the widows, gave him the medications.
*
Siegfried was generally frustrating, but two specific instances struck de la Cerva as alarming.
*
On another morning when it fell to Richard to wake a hungover Siegfried and get him to the container business, he noticed another box inside the trailer. This one was filled with stuffed animals. “New but cheap,” Richard said, “like the kind you get in that machine game with the claw.” He asked Siegfried about this. Siegfried told him he liked to give them out to local children.
*
The second instance that bothered Richard was at a dinner. A potential client had come to Arizona to discuss business, and Richard planned for dinner at a nice steakhouse. John insisted Siegfried go with them. Siegfried, dressed in one of his expensive but ill-fitting suits, drank glass after glass of wine. Richard did his best to ignore this, to make sure the dinner was a success. Toward the end of the night a manager brought them their check. The manager was an attractive woman, and Richard and the client made a comment about her. Siegfried agreed with them. Then he said, “She’s got the butt of a thirteen-year-old boy!” Richard and the client stared at him.
*
In 1989, on his forty-ninth birthday, Siegfried was arrested on suspicion of molesting a child. The charges were dropped. Nevertheless, Kristel had Siegfried move out of the trailer in Drexel Heights. Siegfried found a place in Green Valley, halfway between Tucson and Nogales, Mexico. His new home was on a golf course. It was Siegfried’s desperate attempt to reclaim something of his childhood—the last time his life had been serene. He remained on the books as an employee for Tucson Container Corp., his life supplemented by John, despite Siegfried’s chronic absenteeism.
*
Detective Phillippi’s dragnet expanded from West Allis to Brookfield, Wisconsin, where the eldest Widera child now lived. Ernst was the most like Otto. He’d followed Otto into engineering, though he opted to stay on the theoretical side of it, working for universities. By 2002 he had a heart condition, and he and his wife weren’t happy to see a Brookfield officer at their house. They were upset about the coverage Siegfried had gotten recently. They told the police they had no idea where he was; they hadn’t spoken to him in a while. Ernst said he’d not known until recently that Siegfried had ever been in trouble. He told them Siegfried had said that he simply didn’t want to be a priest anymore—he’d never wanted to be a priest; he’d done it for their mother’s sake. That was all Ernst claimed to know.
*
Ann Phillippi called the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and had them search for a phone number. There was nothing in the system for Siegfried Widera, but an employee for the Department found a number for a Kristel Widera. In her Report, Phillippi writes, “As the Widera family had once resided one block away from a member of my family, I knew that Kristel was Siegfried Widera’s sister.” Ann had grown up in St. Francis, perhaps twelve miles from the Widera’s. “Siegfried Widera went to school with my uncle, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church,” she told me. “His mother played cards with my grandmother. It was all a little odd for me.”
*
On May 1, 2002, Detective Phillippi met with ADA Chris Liegel. They looked over the file Phillippi had created. Liegel noted that because Siegfried Widera had left Wisconsin in 1976 and had not established residency since then, the six-year statute of limitations for sexual crimes that had occurred in Wisconsin had not expired. It was a legal roundabout, one that could possibly fall apart in court. But Liegel was willing to take the risk. Exactly one month after Randall Glendenning had walked into the West Allis Police Station, the Milwaukee District Attorney’s Office charged Siegfried Widera with nine felony counts of Enticing a Child for Immoral Purposes and Indecent Behavior with a Child. An arrest warrant was issued. The charges were in relation to Siegfried’s involvement with Randall, Chris Glendenning, and Michael Haas. Each charge presented a nine-year prison sentence. Five months later, authorities in Orange County issued their own charges: 33-felony counts. Seven agencies—local, state, and federal—joined the manhunt for Siegfried. If he could be found, he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
*
That same week, Phillippi contacted the Social Security Administration and inquired about Siegfried Widera’s employment history. The Administration had Tucson Container Corp. listed as his employer since 1986.
*
Phillippi called the number listed for the corporation. The call went to voicemail. “Siegfried Widera’s name [was] listed in the voicemail directory. I called those numbers again [two weeks later] and found that Siegfried Widera’s name had been removed from the voicemail directory.”
XX.
On the same morning Randall Glendenning walked into the West Allis Police Department to report sexual assault, Judith Waters was busy opening Bon Voyage! Travel Agency 1,800 miles away, in a strip mall in Tucson. This was one of stucco and terracotta tiles, and Bon Voyage! shared a storefront next to a Coldwell Banker and a McDonald’s. It was eight in the morning, the OPEN sign still flickering to life, when a man walked in and said he wanted to book a cruise. He didn’t care how much it cost, only that it be as soon as possible—tomorrow, ideally. “He was a very strange individual,” Waters recalled. “He kept going out to his car during the time I was dealing with him. He would go out, open the trunk to his car and kept making phone calls on his cell phone from the trunk.”
*
The next day, April 25, Judith received a call from Kristel Widera on behalf of her brother. She wanted to know the details concerning the parking at the pier in Florida where the two-week cruise Siegfried had booked departed. Kristel said Siegfried wanted to know if he should take his Lincoln or his van. By 2002, Siegfried had five cars registered to him: a 2000 Chevrolet S10 pickup truck, a 2000 Lincoln Town Car Executive Series, a 1999 Chevrolet SV1 van, a 2001 Chevrolet Impala, and a golf cart—a 2002 Gem E825. There were warrants out for the van and the Towne Car. The call’s intentions and its auspices clearly differed, though the intentions remain unclear. It might have been that Kristel wanted to feel out Judith Waters. Whatever the case, it was clear to Ann Phillippi, after talking to Judith Waters a month after the cruise booking, that the Widera siblings were aware of Siegfried’s plans to leave Arizona.
*
It was a two-week cruise of the Eastern and Western Caribbean on Holland America Cruise Lines’ MS Maasdam. The cruise departed Fort Lauderdale on May 5th; the same week Chris Liegel brought formal charges against the former priest. The cruise included daily art auctions, bingo, a Sherlock Holmes Musical Mystery, Who Wants to Feel Like a Millionaire and the Not So Newly Wed Game, as well as the standard poolside luxuries, the bars and the buffets and the dance clubs. A review of the MS Maasdam from the same time period reports the following:
Never were there stacks of dirty dishes in the public area, everyone immediately learned my name and preferences, there were tablecloths on the tables in the Lido restaurant, String Quartets were always around, Bathing suits must be covered in the public areas unless appropriate (like at the pool or sunbathing) and respect and great manners are always afforded to the guests. Holland America's Private Island is the most perfect, tranquil, lovely Island I've ever seen. It was a relaxing, great value for the money. This is not a "party Hardy" ship. It is elegant and made me feel special for 7 days. I want to go again, and again.
*
Disembarkation ports included Cozumel, Georgetown in Grand Cayman Island, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and Half Moon Cay.
*
Learning this, Detective Phillippi worried that Widera had boarded the cruise in Florida, sipping Mai Tais and making use of the all-you-can-eat buffets, before disembarking at one of the Caribbean ports with the crowd and slipping into South America. She called Holland’s corporate branch. “I tried to ascertain when they got the passenger count if it were possible that he could have disembarked without them knowing.” After that, Ann says, she contacted the State Department and asked them to note him in their system. Her biggest concern was that Widera would hop from a Caribbean nation to Germany, where the Widera’s still had distant relatives. He would not have been the first accused priest to have gone on the lam.
*
According to the Chicago Tribune, since 1985—the year Widera entered the Servants of the Paraclete— “at least 32 Roman Catholic priests have left the United States for foreign countries while facing criminal charges…The number of fugitive priests grows by more than two dozen if it includes those who left the country while facing internal church probes or civil allegations of child sex misconduct.”
*
According to data compiled by Professor Ross Klein of St. John’s College in Newfoundland, over 302 people have gone overboard during cruises in the last two decades. Klein asserts that roughly ten percent of these incidences are suicides. This, too, concerned Ann Phillippi. By now she was dogged in her mindset. It’d taken enormous courage for these grown men to have broken their silence. In fact, soon after telling the West Allis Police about Widera, one of the priests’ victims jumped from a bridge. The pain was too much. “We wanted to do the best we could on the case. We wanted to give [the victims] the chance to have some control because a lot of them never had control over how things had gone; now they could. They would be able to go on the witness stand, tell what had happened to them, and see Widera pay for it.”
*
Two weeks at sea. Two weeks away from the mainland United States, where all that awaited him was fear, hiding, wreckage. The country his parents had escaped to was now an emotional version of the Dortmund of his childhood. The ruins, this time, could not be blamed on the machinations of nation-states or the gears of imperialism. It was all his doing. He had bombed and strafed the interior lives of so many children and families. Alone in his cabin after the open bar and the buffets, after the dancing, the shows, the poolside lounges, Siegfried Widera must have known he had only two options remaining. Neither Leo Graham nor the Villa Louis Martin staff found the troubled priest to be suicidal, but it’s easy to picture him there on the MS Maasdam, late at night or in the first hours of the morning, drunk once again, his hands on the railing. Siegfried looks out onto stars as bright as flak tracers in a burned-out sky and the dark serenity of the sea beneath him. He’d always been such a talented swimmer. How ironic it must’ve seemed to him now.