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She remembers first meeting the priest, Richard Thomas Brown, on a church outing called “Hike for Life.”
He seemed fun and friendly and let her sit on his shoulders during the walk. Her parents liked him, too, and soon she was spending more time with him than with her own father, who traveled a lot for work.
She was a preteen at the time, but her family trusted him enough to allow her to accompany him when he visited nursing homes or the priest’s father. But then, he began doing things that made her uncomfortable.
She later realized it was sexual abuse, according to David Clark, a Dallas police detective, who interviewed the now 37-year-old victim.
Brown, 78, was arrested late Wednesday after he was charged with one count of sexual assault of a child.
The detective’s arrest warrant affidavit, obtained by The Dallas Morning News on Thursday, sets out the allegations against Brown, who worked as a priest for the Dallas Catholic Diocese from 1980 to 1994 and admitted as far back as the early 1990s that he had abused children.
The criminal case against the former Dallas-area priest came together after Clark investigated for more than a year, using decades-old files stored in a diocesan office and recent interviews with the suspect and the victim.
Personnel files that the Dallas Catholic Diocese turned over to police in December 2018 showed that a 1994 psychiatric evaluation of Brown indicated the priest “had a long history of pedophilic behavior,” the affidavit says.
In May 2019, Clark tracked down the former priest to an abbey in New Mexico, where Brown admitted to befriending the girl’s family and sexually molesting her, the affidavit says.
The Dallas Morning News does not typically name victims of sex crimes.
Brown was taken into custody Wednesday night in Dittmer, Mo., about 30 miles southwest of St. Louis, on property owned by the Servants of the Paraclete. The group operates a center at the site whose mission is to “provide a safe and supportive environment for the rehabilitation and reconciliation of priests and religious brothers.”
His arrest comes eight months after Dallas police conducted a highly publicized raid on the diocese as part of its investigation into five priests for sexual abuse of minors.
All five are on the diocese’s list of 31 “credibly accused” priests, which the church released in January 2019. That list included only accusations against priests that the diocese concluded were credible after a review by former law enforcement officials and the Diocesan Review Board.
After the May raid, Dallas Bishop Edward J. Burns said the diocese had been cooperating with police and condemned the action as unnecessary.
But police officials called the search “wholly appropriate.”
In January 2019, Dallas police issued an arrest warrant for Edmundo Paredes, the former pastor of St. Cecilia’s in Oak Cliff, who is accused of sexually assaulting three teenage boys. His whereabouts are unknown, though diocese officials said they think he fled to the Philippines.
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Missouri’s sex-offender registry shows that six convicted sex offenders live at the facility where Brown was taken into custody and awaiting extradition.
The diocese, through a spokeswoman, said it wasn’t aware that Brown was at the facility. Brown could not be reached for comment, and it wasn’t clear if he had a lawyer.
Here is a look at how police developed the case against Brown, according to the affidavit:
In December 2018, Clark requested and received from the diocese Brown’s personnel files, which contained nearly 600 pages.
In the files, Clark saw that Brown had been accused of sexually assaulting two juveniles in 1981 and 1987.
Immediately after the 1987 allegation, the diocese, headed by then-Bishop Thomas Tschoepe, moved Brown to a different parish in the diocese, the affidavit says.
The 1981 allegation didn’t come to the attention of the diocese until 1993. Brown was then sent for testing at a residential psychiatric facility in Hartford, Conn., the affidavit says.
In the opinion of the psychiatrist who assessed Brown that year, the priest “had a long history of pedophilic behavior,” according to the affidavit.
In the doctor’s report, Brown “admitted to sexually abusing multiple children between 8-10 years old,” the affidavit says.
The doctor’s report further noted that Brown played down his actions. “The exact frequency and content of the behavior is difficult to ascertain due to the suspect’s wish to minimize and portray himself in the best light possible,” the psychiatrist wrote, according to the affidavit.
While talking to the psychiatrist, Brown tried “to cover up the extent of his activity,” the affidavit says, “even blaming his last victim for his behavior towards her.”
In May of 2019, using notes in the diocese’s files, Clark determined Brown was living at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Pecos, N.M., an Olivetan Benedictine monastery 25 miles east of Santa Fe. The monastery offers both group and individual retreats.
Clark, accompanied by another detective, traveled to the abbey, where they learned that Brown was known as “Father Peter.” Brown agreed to speak to the detectives about his time as a priest in the Dallas diocese from 1980 to 1994.
Brown told the detectives that between 1991 and ’92, when he was assigned to St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church in Plano, he became friends with the family of the girl named in the arrest warrant.
Brown said he would see the girl at Mass with her family and then would “show her around the rectory” — the priests’ residence. He also said he frequently visited the victim’s family home, where he admitted to touching the complainant’s groin over her clothing.
“The suspect stated he only abused the complainant on one occasion,” the affidavit says.
Letter from the Catholic Di… by Tom Steele on Scribd
After Brown moved to another parish, the girl’s family came to visit him and said they wanted to go to Mass at his new church — but he discouraged them. “I kind of stopped going to their house to visit them at all,” Brown told the detectives, according to the affidavit.
The suspect blamed his deteriorating memory as to why he couldn’t remember other victims, the affidavit says. But he said that he never abused a minor after he went to therapy in 1994, the affidavit says.
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The two Dallas detectives also spoke to the victim, who said the priest befriended her family in the early 1990s, visited her home on multiple occasions and took her to places where he ministered, including a nursing home. She said when she and the priest were alone in his car, he would molest her. She also recalled being alone with him multiple times in the rectory, including a time when the suspect attempted oral sex with her, the affidavit says.
The woman told detectives she was between 12 and 14 years old when Brown left the state.
The detectives also interviewed a witness who recalled that at one point, the girl’s mother became upset with the suspect and the Catholic Church, and then the family stopped going to church. Two witnesses told the detectives that the child’s personality changed about that time “and she became more reserved and had problems in school.”
In a letter to Clark last September, the diocese said that Brown had been stripped of his authority “to act publicly as a priest many years ago.”
Brown was laicized, or defrocked, in September 2019, said spokeswoman Annette Gonzales Taylor.
“We had cut off all financial support from him. He was getting nothing from us financially,” she said. “Hasn’t for a very long time.”
Also Thursday, the FBI said it is seeking to identify victims of clergy sex abuse in the North Texas region since 1985. The FBI Dallas Field office has established a dedicated tip line and website for victims to report abuse. FBI-Dallas spokeswoman Melinda Urbina said the effort wasn’t focused on any specific religion or church. Also, anyone with information to share related to this investigation may call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip online at tips.fbi.gov.