“Yes,” replied the priest.
Adamson said he was once confronted by a fellow priest named Fr. Jansen who worked in a different parish and was aware of a specific incident that occurred at a pool in the city of Rochester. Jansen, who had since died, was upset because he had heard rumors about what occurred.
“Did you, Father, acknowledge to Fr. Jansen that you had touched a boy inappropriately?” asked Anderson.
“Yes.”
This confession, along with Jansen’s name and the location of the incident, gave Anderson a new line of evidence to pursue as he sought to establish that the Church was negligent in supervising priests. It was a gift, really, and when no one objected to the line of questioning he pressed for more details. To his surprise, Adamson was forthcoming.
“When did you touch this boy inappropriately?
“In the fall of 1973.”
“And it’s your recollection that Fr. Jansen got this information from another priest, whose identity you don’t know?”
“That’s what I think, yes.”
“Without describing the boy, who you choose to not identify, would you describe what happened in terms of the inappropriate touching?”
“Yes. It was that I grabbed him and touched him in the groin at a swimming pool.”
As Adamson filled in more details, the only interruption came from an attorney for the Diocese of Winona who asked him to raise his voice because a fan in the room was making it hard for him to hear.
The priest recalled that the swimming pool complaint was among several items he had discussed with Bishop Watters in 1974. Another revolved around a series of sexual crimes he had perpetrated over the course of a decade. Adamson said he had met this particular young man when he was still a student in a school where he worked. He pursued him and began having sex with him when he was a teenager. In 1974 the man’s relatives went to Bishop Watters to demand that Adamson be disciplined. “I think one of his brothers may have called or contacted Bishop Watters.”
“And did Bishop Watters then contact you?”
“Yes.”
“What did Bishop Watters tell you that he had learned?”
“He told me that this man was making threats on me, threats of public exposure, that he was angry; those types of things.”
“Did Bishop Watters make it clear to you in that conversation that the information that he received was that you had engaged in inappropriate sexual contact?”
“Yes.”
“And there is no doubt in your mind that he was talking about inappropriate sexual contact and not chemical dependency or something else?”
“Yes.”
The family who had come to Watters to complain was from Adrian, a town of 1,200 in the corner of Minnesota where the state bumps up against Iowa and South Dakota. Adamson said he didn’t deny the accusation. Like the others, it was true.
Watching the priest answer as directly as he could, while confessing to behavior that was both criminal and, in the eyes of the Church, profoundly sinful, Jeffrey Anderson couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity. For the record, he asked how Adamson had felt when Watters confronted him.
“It was just a feeling of embarrassment and guilt and sadness.”
“Did you cry at that point?”
“I don’t know if—during—I don’t know if during the conversation I did, but many times I did.”
A moment later, Anderson sought the same information, in a different way. “When you had that initial discussion with Bishop Watters did you weep at that point or cry in his presence, do you remember?”
“Probably.”
A weeping priest who confesses to seducing a tenth grader is not something anyone would likely forget, which is precisely the point Adamson helped to make. This memory would help attorney Anderson challenge Bishop Watters’s testimony and in offering it, Adamson seemed to make common cause with the lawyer who was suing him.
The priest’s intent was clear. By recalling what the bishop knew and when, Adamson shifted blame away from himself. Indeed, much of what Adamson said on that stormy day in St. Paul described a bureaucracy that was more concerned with preventing a scandal than protecting children, and wholly inadequate when it came to dealing with a priest who was a sexual predator. Time and again Adamson’s behavior would lead to complaints, admonitions, a promise to stop, and a transfer to a new parish where he was free to manipulate and exploit a new batch of boys.
The psychological treatment, as Adamson described it, was haphazard and ill focused. One therapist asked him to interpret ink blots and gave him the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which is supposed to identify various pathologies. However, he was never told that he suffered from a specific syndrome or mental illness and the treatment that followed was not on any consistent schedule. He might attend a session or two and then take several weeks off. And when he did work with his therapist, they didn’t focus on his attraction to boys. The same was true for his in-patient treatment at a clinic in Hartford, Connecticut, where all the other patients seemed to be receiving care for drug or alcohol addiction. Adamson said that sex wasn’t ever discussed in the group therapy sessions there, and he departed feeling like he had made little or no progress toward controlling his compulsion.
Compulsion was the word that came to Jeff Anderson’s mind as Adamson spilled out his sexual history. No matter how often he pledged to be celibate and resolved to stay away from adolescent boys, he couldn’t stop. Since he couldn’t stop, he began to justify it to himself in various ways. Eventually he came to regard his practice of pursuing, grooming, and then raping adolescents as no more serious than any other priest’s struggle with chastity, even though his transgressions involved minors and an obvious imbalance of power. According to this logic, since all sex was sinful, the particular kind of sex a priest enjoyed—from masturbation to adult affairs to violating boys—didn’t matter. Sex was sex was sex.
As he listened to the testimony, Jeffrey Anderson refused to make in-the-moment judgments about Adamson. Shock, disgust, or disapproval would likely register on his face and the last thing he wanted to do was send any signal that might make Adamson feel like he wasn’t being understood. He needed this witness to feel as relaxed as possible. Anderson looked at the priest with a steady, interested gaze and often nodded as if he accepted and appreciated what the man had to say. At times, to his own surprise, he actually did empathize with Adamson. Immature and isolated, Fr. Adamson had been so knotted up by rules, prohibitions, obsessions, and shame that he couldn’t even consider the damage he was doing. His fear of what might happen if he took responsibility—a fear his bosses seemed to share—drained the truth right out of his life, leaving him a hollow and inadequate man.
Anderson reached the limit of his compassion for Fr. Adamson at the end of the day, when he finally turned to address his behavior with his client Gregory Lyman. As he brought up the young man’s name, Anderson could picture Lyman locked up in St. Cloud at age twenty-one. As far as Anderson was concerned, this priest had all but guaranteed that Lyman would have a troubled life when he proved to him that no one, not even a consecrated man, could be trusted. How could he not wind up in serious trouble?
It turned out that Adamson agreed with most of what Gregory Lyman had said in his complaint. Adamson began to groom him on an overnight trip to the St. Paul Seminary where he and other boys from the parish were free to use the gym and other facilities.
“What I remember is his aloneness,” said Adamson, as he reflected on the trip.
Adamson recalled that he had focused his attention on the lonesome boy, earned his trust, and was soon training him to be an altar server and giving him rides to church or to the St. Paul YMCA for swimming or basketball. Before the boy turned fourteen Adamson raped him for the first time. Lyman had said he was deeply conflicted by these experiences. He both dreaded and welcomed the attention, and afterward he kept quiet about what happened. The priest didn’t dispute any of these facts, and confirmed that as these
sexual contacts continued over the course of years, so did Lyman’s discomfort.
To hear Adamson tell the story, Greg Lyman never wanted to go public with what had happened and was upset that his parents had pushed the lawsuit forward. When Anderson asked him about the last time he “saw or had sex” with Gregory Lyman, the priest’s lawyer made one of his rare objections, noting that it was a “double” question.
“That’s a good objection,” replied Anderson, positioning himself as both a reasonable man and the voice of authority in the room.
Adamson then revealed that on several occasions Lyman had visited him to ask for cash because he was living on the street and was hungry. All told he gave him about $250. At their very last meeting in prison, “he was terrifically happy to see me,” said Adamson. They talked about their shared hope that the uproar would simply die away. Adamson felt “kind of a healing” as they parted and the young man returned to his cell. Within days another prisoner would call Gregory Lyman a “baby raper” and hit him hard enough to break his jaw.
* * *
The fact that Lyman was, himself, a sex offender, might trouble jurors if they ever learned of his record, but Anderson knew that most judges would bar this evidence from trial because Lyman was not the one subject to a complaint. And in his own heart and mind, Anderson found it relatively easy to separate his client’s acts from Adamson’s. Greg had committed his crimes when he was still a juvenile fresh from being victimized by an adult who was his most trusted friend. The criminal justice system had taken these facts into account when dealing with him and, like Anderson, cut him a significant amount of slack. Indeed, the mess that was Gregory Lyman’s life—his crimes, his dismal education and employment record, his sporadic homelessness—was all evidence of the harm done to him by Thomas Adamson.
The real challenge Anderson faced revolved around proving that Adamson was not solely responsible for his acts. This was necessary for two reasons. First, Anderson wanted to expose and change the practices that allowed higher-ups to obscure and enable Adamson’s crimes. Second, he wanted to get at the resources held by the two dioceses, which were capable of compensating the Lymans at a much higher rate than any single parish priest. In lawyer’s parlance, the dioceses had the “deep pockets.”
Reaching into those pockets would require evidence that bishops knew what Adamson was doing and failed to take appropriate action. The priest’s own account, offered in the deposition, would be helpful but could also be dismissed as self-serving. What Anderson needed were the names of witnesses who had firsthand knowledge of earlier cases. The groping incident at the Rochester pool was one avenue to explore, but with Fr. Jansen dead, Anderson faced the daunting task of trying to locate and interview dozens, if not hundreds of men who had been boys at the school where Adamson worked at the time of the incident. As he contemplated this task Anderson heard, in his mind, complaints from his partner Reinhardt, who saw the time and expenses eaten up by the case that, given the status enjoyed by the Catholic Church, was a long shot at best.
* * *
Jeffrey Anderson had time to think about his next move against the Church as he flew to London—his first trip across the Atlantic—to meet with two clients. The men had been passengers in a car that had been in a head-on collision with a wrong-way driver named Henry Ebert, whose blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Henry Ebert died of his injuries. Anderson’s clients were hospitalized. One, Paul Cook, suffered minor injuries and was released in three days. The other, Ray McVeigh, spent three weeks in a hospital bed recovering from a broken arm and multiple internal injuries.
The case might not have gained much attention if Cook was not the former drummer of the Sex Pistols—“the world’s most notorious punk rock band” (Rolling Stone)—and he wasn’t touring with guitarist McVeigh to promote the first album released by their new band The Professionals. The two musicians had just finished playing a concert and were riding in a limousine when the collision occurred. The album, which was titled, ironically enough, I Didn’t See It Coming, subsequently bombed in record stores. Anderson reasoned that The Professionals had lost sales because the crash interrupted their promotion campaign. To make up for this loss he added a premium to the demands they made from the driver’s estate and commenced a negotiation that, due to the distance separating the lawyer and his clients and the novelty of the claim, dragged on for five years.
By the spring of 1986 the case was finally placed on the docket at Hennepin County District Court and Anderson needed to meet with his clients and depose people in the British music business. He took Julie with him. She went sightseeing while Jeff and a defense lawyer named Mark Condon visited with music executives who testified that indeed The Professionals would have sold many more copies of their record if they had been able to promote it.
Condon, who had been at William Mitchell School of Law with Anderson, had also brought his wife to London and they turned out to be fine company at restaurants and nightclubs. On one evening spent with McVeigh at his favorite spot Anderson got, as Julie would say, “ripping drunk.” He enjoyed himself so much that he couldn’t be roused in the morning. Four years into their relationship Julie took note of Anderson’s condition but didn’t give it much thought. Although he would always deny he suffered any ill effects from a big night of drinking, Julie considered sleep-late hangovers part of his routine. She dressed, left their hotel room alone, and walked to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard at 11:30 A.M..
When they returned to St. Paul, whatever bonding Anderson and Condon may have done over drinks didn’t make things any easier for Anderson at the negotiating table. On the eve of the trial Condon rejected Anderson’s offer to settle for $130,000. Cook and McVeigh told him to withdraw the offer and prepare for battle. They weren’t worried about losing. In fact, the closer they got to trial the more determined they became. When, at the last minute, the defense finally offered the full $130,000, they turned it down, saying it was too late.
As court was convened, Anderson saw that Judge Peter Lindberg was in no mood to proceed. He seemed open to the defense lawyers’ complaint that they had met the plaintiffs’ demands but were rebuffed. Anderson said the offer came too late and his clients turned it down. Lindberg didn’t care. He said that if $130,000 had been enough to settle the case at some earlier point, it was enough to settle it now. It was, after all, more money than The Professionals had ever received for a single concert appearance, and in this case they didn’t even perform.
Anderson, whose appeal of Lindberg’s ruling failed, would always believe his clients had been cheated. He would be grateful, however, for the diversion The Professionals had provided from the frustrating pursuit of Thomas Adamson. Almost two years had passed since Anderson had agreed to represent the Lyman family and he had yet to find a path through the maze of secrecy that was the Church. Anderson needed a break.
7. FIVE BROTHERS; THREE VICTIMS
“I know what you are trying to do about Fr. Adamson. You will want to talk to Jay Klein. He’s a parole officer in Worthington.”
“Who is this?”
Jeff Anderson thought he heard the man on the other end of the line take a breath. He asked again, “Who is this?”
“Talk to Jay Klein. In Worthington.”
The man hung up.
The lawsuit Anderson had filed naming Thomas Adamson and two Minnesota dioceses had not been publicized. Anderson had purposefully filed it according to the rules of so-called “hip pocket service,” which, in a quirk of local custom, put the proceedings under the auspices of the county court while it remained a private matter. This status allowed Anderson to depose witnesses and request documents with the full power of a judge backing him up. It also allowed the Church a chance to avoid scandal by cooperating.
Since no one outside the parties themselves knew about the suit, the man on the phone had to be a Church insider—Anderson guessed he was a priest—or someone so close to Catholic officials that he had been
trusted with powerful secrets. Either way, this Deep Throat source was specific enough that Anderson paid a private investigator named Bob Bosse to locate Klein. Bosse, a former police officer, discovered that Klein was indeed a probation officer. He worked for Noble County, in the southwest corner of Minnesota. Both his office and his home were in Worthington.
On a sunny June morning Anderson settled into the driver’s seat of his sleek Datsun 280ZX—silver exterior, black leather interior—and drove a hundred miles south on I-35 to Albert Lea, and then turned west on I-90. Bob Bosse occupied the passenger seat beside him. At six feet four inches tall and well over two hundred pounds, Bosse had a way of keeping things calm. Since Anderson was going to Worthington unannounced, he thought a calming influence just might be necessary. As the two men passed through towns named Blue Earth, Welcome, and Alpha, they discussed how to approach a man who was a law enforcement professional and might be wary about their intentions.
Klein wasn’t just a probation officer, he was director of corrections for the entire county and he occupied a big office in an old courthouse a few blocks from Lake Okabena. An old hand at dealing with inmates and parolees, Klein was accustomed to hearing all sorts of strange stories. He also knew how cops and lawyers operated. When Anderson suddenly appeared at his office, Klein didn’t believe that this lawyer from St. Paul had been meeting with someone in the neighborhood. But this was the kind of well-mannered lie Klein almost welcomed because it gave him the option to decline Anderson’s request for a visit without feeling the least bit guilty. However, with the mention of Fr. Adamson, Klein knew immediately that he wanted to talk.
“My dad and I ran him out of Rochester,” he told Anderson.
Immediately agreeing to a formal interview, Klein waited patiently while Bob Bosse fussed with a tape recorder. Anderson took a moment to gauge the man in front of him. Forty years old, Klein was about five foot ten, with a medium build, and blondish-brown hair. Solid Norwegian farmer stock, thought Anderson, the kind of guy who would drop everything to help a neighbor in need. When it became clear that Bosse couldn’t make the recorder work, Klein volunteered the one he used to tape his sessions with parolees. With the technical issues resolved, they turned to the subject of the Klein family and Thomas Adamson.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 10