mozartpc27
11-23-2008, 11:52 PM
So, I was poking around on the doenetwork, and saw a man whose face made me think of the case about the man who, in 1982, entered a Church in Idaho, said a prayer, and swallowed cyanide. When he was found, he had an amount of cash on him with instruction for the Church to use it to defray the expenses of his burial. Well, the guy who I thought it might be wasn't it, but in poking around trying to find more information, I found this web site (http://www.metafilter.com/42963/Who-Killed-Father-Ryan), which leads to a discussion of a case involving the murder of a Catholic priest. According to an article on the murder (http://www.truthinjustice.org/reyos.htm), a Father Patrick Ryan was murdered inside a hotel room in Odessa, Texas, a crime for which one James Harry Reyos was convicted in 1983 (Father Ryan was attempting to have a liaison with someone, and was apparently homosexual). Reyos had confessed to the murder while drunk; though he quickly recanted upon sobering up, there was no physical evidence otherwise tying him to the crime scene or the murder itself, and he had a nearly air-tight alibi for the night of the murder, he was convicted on the strength of his drunken confession. Evidently, a former county prosecutor from where Reyos was tried and a Catholic Bishop who presided over the funeral of the murdered priest both believe that Reyos is innocent. He is now out of prison, but wants to clear his name.
Anyway, this same page links to another article about our "suntanned man" going by the name of "Wm. L. Toomey" (http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A275319) and its possible connection to this case. I don't believe the UM segment mentions that this man apparently asked to have his confession heard before taking the cyanide, but, according to this article, he did:
On Dec. 4, 1982, a deeply suntanned man, about 40 years old, walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, and readied himself for confession. He never got a chance to recount his sins to the priest. As he waited – perhaps not realizing it would be several minutes before the confessional was available, or perhaps despairing of the condition of his soul – the man swallowed a cyanide capsule. A few minutes later, he was dead.
Fair warning: if you follow the linked article, it actually contains a picture, about halfway down, of the man who died in the church, taken, apparently, at the scene. He is, of course, dead.
More importantly, here is how the case is believed to be connected:
There was a further coincidence. In 1993, Boise Police Detective Frank Richardson happened to see a story on Reyos' case on the television program A Current Affair. The story nudged Richardson's intuition. Although he didn't have any hard evidence to support his instinct, Richardson suspected that there was a connection between Ryan's death and an 11-year-old cold case that still nagged at him. On Dec. 4, 1982, just three weeks after Reyos was arrested, a suntanned man walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, for confession. In his pocket was a folded note and $1,900. But as he waited his turn in the confessional, the man swallowed a cyanide capsule and died. The note in his pocket said only that the money he carried should be used for his burial, and the rest donated to the church. The note was signed with a pseudonym, "Wm. L. Toomey," which Richardson said he later discovered was the name of a company that manufactured priest and nun garb. There was no doubt in Richardson's mind that his Boise John Doe was intimately connected to the Catholic Church; for that reason, the story of the Ryan murder aroused his suspicions.
Richardson contacted Reyos' lawyers, and word of the Boise John Doe soon reached reporters Swindle and Wyatt. Additional clues from the Boise case solidified Swindle, Wyatt, and Richardson's now shared belief that the man was connected to the murders of Ryan and Carrier. Specifically, Richardson was intrigued by the man's suntan – hard to come by in December in Idaho – and by the unique bolo tie and belt buckle that he wore. "We traced the belt back to one gift shop in Phoenix," Richardson recalled recently. Yet Richardson and the BPD were unable to find a positive ID for their John Doe. They ran his fingerprints through several databases without results. Swindle and Wyatt also tried and failed. "We got a cop to run them in certain places, and this was kind of off-the-books," Wyatt recalls. "He didn't find much."
The absence of a match meant that the researchers could rule out several possibilities: John Doe was never charged with a crime, he never served in the military, and he was not a member of a licensed profession. That left few possibilities, and the one that nagged at the men was that John Doe was a priest. "Catholic priests move in circles and travel gratis and can literally pop up in places," says Wyatt. "For example, Father Ryan never had a driver's license, [and] we never found any [other] documentary evidence."
Indeed, exactly how Father Ryan popped up in West Texas isn't entirely clear. According to reports in the Odessa American at the time of his death, Ryan was born in Ireland and entered the seminary there in 1949. Reportedly he traveled with the Pallottine Society of priests for several years, before heading to Africa to do missionary work. He then reportedly took a furlough back to Ireland before he was reassigned to Denver City – although no official record appears to exist concerning how, under what circumstances, or even when Ryan came to Texas. Efforts by the Chronicle to trace Ryan's movements from Ireland were unsuccessful, despite several communications with church officials in Dublin. Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, now Bishop Emeritus in Amarillo, oversaw Ryan's work in Denver City, but is also vague about Ryan's past. "He came from Ireland," he said. "They sent missionaries to South America and then they came up here." When asked how it was that Ryan ended up in West Texas, Matthiesen said he couldn't remember. (Prior to 1979, neither the U.S. Catholic directory nor any other publicly available diocesan record makes mention of Father Ryan, who is then listed until his death in 1981.)
Matthiesen's memory loss doesn't surprise Richardson or Wyatt, who say that the Church offered very little help to them as they tried, along with Swindle (who died of cancer last year), to get information that could point to the identity of the Boise John Doe or to help determine who killed Ryan and Carrier. "[Swindle] came from Dallas, and we went to the ... [Boise] church and questioned the priest," Richardson recalled. "All we got out of him when we confronted him with our suspicions was a big, old grin." Richardson has since retired from the force, and the John Doe case remains unsolved. "It's ironic that the cyanide kicked in before he could get into the confessional. He was about to make a huge gesture, to croak in the confessional," said Wyatt, who said the dead man had apparently miscalculated the time he would spend waiting for confession. "He died without absolution."
Nonetheless, Richardson, Wyatt, and Swindle all agreed on the basics of what they believed happened to Fathers Ryan and Carrier. "What I can prove and what my gut feeling is are different," Richardson said. They believe Ryan knew his attacker – maybe the Boise John Doe – with whom he had planned a rendezvous for sex. Inside the Sand and Sage motel room, something went very wrong, erupting into a violent, sexually charged killing. That scenario is also plausible to retired prosecutor Cadra and trial attorney Cliff, neither of whom believes that Ryan's death was a random event. Perhaps, Cliff posits, Ryan met his attacker through the church, possibly at Jemez Springs in New Mexico, the infamous, and now bankrupt, Catholic facility for alcoholic and pedophile priests.
That's also what Cliff's trial partner John Smith, the current Ector Co. DA, thought. "He had a theory that Father Ryan [was at a] ... retreat hidden [in New Mexico] where they would send wayward priests, and then send them to small counties," Cliff said. Indeed, Swindle and Wyatt considered the same theory, and that perhaps John Doe also spent time at Jemez Springs. In November 1993, Swindle wrote a letter to one of the Paraclete fathers, who minister to their wayward brethren and who worked in Eastern New Mexico, asking him to look at a sketch of the Boise John Doe, to see if he could identify the man, but he never got a response.
Pretty interesting. It also makes me wonder about the murders of the two Catholic priests murdered in New Mexico and Montana. I never thought those two murders were connected, despite UM's attempts to link them. In one, the murder of Father Renaldo Rivera, the priest's body was found, and although the UM segment doesn't expressly state it, I've always gotten the strong sense that he was left in a perhaps explicit pose of kind. The detective in that case makes it a point to tell UM viewers that Father Reynaldo was "meant to be found": I've always thought that the amount of emphasis he put on that suggested that Father Reynaldo was left in a way meant to embarrass or degrade him or something out of the ordinary. In the other, the priest in question, Father John Kerrigan, was never found. The murders were separated by two years, and the only things connecting them, apparently, were the fact that both victims were priests and a coat hanger was apparently involved in both murders (the latter detail is, perhaps, nothing to sneeze at). However, as wiseguy pointed out in this thread (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=209420&highlight=priest+murders), the differences do much to outweigh the similarities.
However, I think it is interestingto note that Father Patrick Ryan was murdered on December 21, 1981 (and, to give credit where credit is due, kadrmas15 raised the possibility that Father Ryan's murder was connected to the murders of Fathers Reynaldo and Kerrigan in this thread (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=209420&highlight=priest+murders)); Father Reynaldo Rivera was murdered on August 7, 1982; and the man found in the Boise, ID Church died on December 4, 1982, just weeks after James Harry Reyos was arrested for the murder of Father Ryan. If the man in the Church was from the southwest, and was connected to the murder of Father Ryan, perhaps he could also have been connected to the murder of Father Rivera (Father Kerrigan disappeared in August of 1984, a year and a half after the man in the Church killed himself). The article about the murder of Father Patrick Ryan and its connection to the suicide in Idaho also mentions the murder of a third priest during the time period - Father Benjamin Carrier, who was found dead and naked in a hotel room in November of 1982, under circumstances eerily similar to Father Patrick Ryan.
It's hard to imagine that Father Ryan and Father Carrier aren't connected, and it's not much of a leap to think the Father Rivera also fits into this timeline: priests from the Southwest, all murdered within a year of one another.
Thought this was interesting stuff.
Anyway, this same page links to another article about our "suntanned man" going by the name of "Wm. L. Toomey" (http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A275319) and its possible connection to this case. I don't believe the UM segment mentions that this man apparently asked to have his confession heard before taking the cyanide, but, according to this article, he did:
On Dec. 4, 1982, a deeply suntanned man, about 40 years old, walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, and readied himself for confession. He never got a chance to recount his sins to the priest. As he waited – perhaps not realizing it would be several minutes before the confessional was available, or perhaps despairing of the condition of his soul – the man swallowed a cyanide capsule. A few minutes later, he was dead.
Fair warning: if you follow the linked article, it actually contains a picture, about halfway down, of the man who died in the church, taken, apparently, at the scene. He is, of course, dead.
More importantly, here is how the case is believed to be connected:
There was a further coincidence. In 1993, Boise Police Detective Frank Richardson happened to see a story on Reyos' case on the television program A Current Affair. The story nudged Richardson's intuition. Although he didn't have any hard evidence to support his instinct, Richardson suspected that there was a connection between Ryan's death and an 11-year-old cold case that still nagged at him. On Dec. 4, 1982, just three weeks after Reyos was arrested, a suntanned man walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, for confession. In his pocket was a folded note and $1,900. But as he waited his turn in the confessional, the man swallowed a cyanide capsule and died. The note in his pocket said only that the money he carried should be used for his burial, and the rest donated to the church. The note was signed with a pseudonym, "Wm. L. Toomey," which Richardson said he later discovered was the name of a company that manufactured priest and nun garb. There was no doubt in Richardson's mind that his Boise John Doe was intimately connected to the Catholic Church; for that reason, the story of the Ryan murder aroused his suspicions.
Richardson contacted Reyos' lawyers, and word of the Boise John Doe soon reached reporters Swindle and Wyatt. Additional clues from the Boise case solidified Swindle, Wyatt, and Richardson's now shared belief that the man was connected to the murders of Ryan and Carrier. Specifically, Richardson was intrigued by the man's suntan – hard to come by in December in Idaho – and by the unique bolo tie and belt buckle that he wore. "We traced the belt back to one gift shop in Phoenix," Richardson recalled recently. Yet Richardson and the BPD were unable to find a positive ID for their John Doe. They ran his fingerprints through several databases without results. Swindle and Wyatt also tried and failed. "We got a cop to run them in certain places, and this was kind of off-the-books," Wyatt recalls. "He didn't find much."
The absence of a match meant that the researchers could rule out several possibilities: John Doe was never charged with a crime, he never served in the military, and he was not a member of a licensed profession. That left few possibilities, and the one that nagged at the men was that John Doe was a priest. "Catholic priests move in circles and travel gratis and can literally pop up in places," says Wyatt. "For example, Father Ryan never had a driver's license, [and] we never found any [other] documentary evidence."
Indeed, exactly how Father Ryan popped up in West Texas isn't entirely clear. According to reports in the Odessa American at the time of his death, Ryan was born in Ireland and entered the seminary there in 1949. Reportedly he traveled with the Pallottine Society of priests for several years, before heading to Africa to do missionary work. He then reportedly took a furlough back to Ireland before he was reassigned to Denver City – although no official record appears to exist concerning how, under what circumstances, or even when Ryan came to Texas. Efforts by the Chronicle to trace Ryan's movements from Ireland were unsuccessful, despite several communications with church officials in Dublin. Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, now Bishop Emeritus in Amarillo, oversaw Ryan's work in Denver City, but is also vague about Ryan's past. "He came from Ireland," he said. "They sent missionaries to South America and then they came up here." When asked how it was that Ryan ended up in West Texas, Matthiesen said he couldn't remember. (Prior to 1979, neither the U.S. Catholic directory nor any other publicly available diocesan record makes mention of Father Ryan, who is then listed until his death in 1981.)
Matthiesen's memory loss doesn't surprise Richardson or Wyatt, who say that the Church offered very little help to them as they tried, along with Swindle (who died of cancer last year), to get information that could point to the identity of the Boise John Doe or to help determine who killed Ryan and Carrier. "[Swindle] came from Dallas, and we went to the ... [Boise] church and questioned the priest," Richardson recalled. "All we got out of him when we confronted him with our suspicions was a big, old grin." Richardson has since retired from the force, and the John Doe case remains unsolved. "It's ironic that the cyanide kicked in before he could get into the confessional. He was about to make a huge gesture, to croak in the confessional," said Wyatt, who said the dead man had apparently miscalculated the time he would spend waiting for confession. "He died without absolution."
Nonetheless, Richardson, Wyatt, and Swindle all agreed on the basics of what they believed happened to Fathers Ryan and Carrier. "What I can prove and what my gut feeling is are different," Richardson said. They believe Ryan knew his attacker – maybe the Boise John Doe – with whom he had planned a rendezvous for sex. Inside the Sand and Sage motel room, something went very wrong, erupting into a violent, sexually charged killing. That scenario is also plausible to retired prosecutor Cadra and trial attorney Cliff, neither of whom believes that Ryan's death was a random event. Perhaps, Cliff posits, Ryan met his attacker through the church, possibly at Jemez Springs in New Mexico, the infamous, and now bankrupt, Catholic facility for alcoholic and pedophile priests.
That's also what Cliff's trial partner John Smith, the current Ector Co. DA, thought. "He had a theory that Father Ryan [was at a] ... retreat hidden [in New Mexico] where they would send wayward priests, and then send them to small counties," Cliff said. Indeed, Swindle and Wyatt considered the same theory, and that perhaps John Doe also spent time at Jemez Springs. In November 1993, Swindle wrote a letter to one of the Paraclete fathers, who minister to their wayward brethren and who worked in Eastern New Mexico, asking him to look at a sketch of the Boise John Doe, to see if he could identify the man, but he never got a response.
Pretty interesting. It also makes me wonder about the murders of the two Catholic priests murdered in New Mexico and Montana. I never thought those two murders were connected, despite UM's attempts to link them. In one, the murder of Father Renaldo Rivera, the priest's body was found, and although the UM segment doesn't expressly state it, I've always gotten the strong sense that he was left in a perhaps explicit pose of kind. The detective in that case makes it a point to tell UM viewers that Father Reynaldo was "meant to be found": I've always thought that the amount of emphasis he put on that suggested that Father Reynaldo was left in a way meant to embarrass or degrade him or something out of the ordinary. In the other, the priest in question, Father John Kerrigan, was never found. The murders were separated by two years, and the only things connecting them, apparently, were the fact that both victims were priests and a coat hanger was apparently involved in both murders (the latter detail is, perhaps, nothing to sneeze at). However, as wiseguy pointed out in this thread (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=209420&highlight=priest+murders), the differences do much to outweigh the similarities.
However, I think it is interestingto note that Father Patrick Ryan was murdered on December 21, 1981 (and, to give credit where credit is due, kadrmas15 raised the possibility that Father Ryan's murder was connected to the murders of Fathers Reynaldo and Kerrigan in this thread (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=209420&highlight=priest+murders)); Father Reynaldo Rivera was murdered on August 7, 1982; and the man found in the Boise, ID Church died on December 4, 1982, just weeks after James Harry Reyos was arrested for the murder of Father Ryan. If the man in the Church was from the southwest, and was connected to the murder of Father Ryan, perhaps he could also have been connected to the murder of Father Rivera (Father Kerrigan disappeared in August of 1984, a year and a half after the man in the Church killed himself). The article about the murder of Father Patrick Ryan and its connection to the suicide in Idaho also mentions the murder of a third priest during the time period - Father Benjamin Carrier, who was found dead and naked in a hotel room in November of 1982, under circumstances eerily similar to Father Patrick Ryan.
It's hard to imagine that Father Ryan and Father Carrier aren't connected, and it's not much of a leap to think the Father Rivera also fits into this timeline: priests from the Southwest, all murdered within a year of one another.
Thought this was interesting stuff.