Too Obvious

Tonight I stopped in at a certain office to use the phone. This newspaper was there because one friend remembers the murder case as "the worst weekend of [his] life." He was one of the other Boy Scouts on a sleep-over outing when 11-year old Terry Bowers was murdered in 1970. I left a post-it note before I left.

The cover article states that at the time, "Murder theories abounded: Was it a random killer who wandered onto the field before dawn? One of the Scouts? The janitor at the church? A pedophile priest? Was there a sexual relationship within the group that Terry found out about? Was it pre-planned? Was his body moved? Why wouldn't he yell?"

What bothers me, aside from the unsolved murder itself, is what is not included in the article.

A few people have been researching the case for 42 years. I've done more than my share of historical research, and I think they may know the names of all the priests working at either of the parishes in question, and exactly where the paper trail stops. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia was investigated thoroughly several years ago, and while the known culprits were all either dead or protected by statutes of limitations, a report was issued by the District Attorney for disclosure's sake, and it was quite damning. It absolutely ruined the by then-retired Cardinal Anthony Bevilaqua, who was never seen again in public. A huge part of the scandal was the fact that the police had a standard procedure that removed priests from the investigation of molestation cases.

There is no way in Hell that the reporter interviewed those people without hearing the names of suspected priests. If the reporter did not look for information on the priests, the reporter just might be an idiot. Much more likely, though, is that the Daily News did not want to step too far into the priest angle.

Again, from the article: When the Catholic sex-abuse scandal broke in 2002, Chris Bowers immediately thought of his brother's death. Could it have been a priest?

"If they wanted to find out where a bunch of young boys were hanging out, they were privy to that information," said Bowers, 52, who has a tattoo of his brother's face on his bicep. "These are some of the biggest organizations in the world," he said of the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts. "If they wanted this thing shut down, they'd shut it down real fast. I think they did. But if this happened today, it would have been solved."

One of these blip-days I'll tell the story of what Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) had in common with Louis Goaziou (1864-1937). Here's a teaser: both were educated by Jesuit priests at Vannes in Brittany. Both became anarchists and atheists for the rest of their long lives, although the two men did not know each other. I helped an author to connect a few of the dirty dots.