Retired New Orleans priest pleads guilty to kidnapping and raping boy in 1970s
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Shortly before a jury was supposed to be chosen for his trial on criminal charges of kidnapping and raping a boy in the mid-1970s, the self-acknowledged serial child molester and retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker pleaded guilty on Tuesday morning.
The 93-year-old is scheduled to receive a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment on 18 December in New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse, where it has been rare for a Catholic clergyman to be charged – much less convicted – in connection with the church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal.
Hecker’s attorney, Robert Hjortsberg, said on Tuesday that his client “took responsibility for the charges … and now everyone involved will have the opportunity to move forward”.
“It was his decision, and he made it of his own free will,” Hjortsberg said.
The victim in the trial Hecker avoided maintained that he was an underage student at a Catholic high school to which Hecker had ties when the priest choked him unconscious and raped him in about 1975.
The accuser reported telling his school principal about the rape, which unfolded in a space in a church bell tower that had been converted into a weightlifting room. But the accuser has said the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police and instead arranged for him to undergo psychological treatment.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/03/lawrence-hecker-retired-new-orleans-priest-pleads-guilty-child-kidnapping-rape-boy.
