Retired New Orleans priest gets life in prison after pleading guilty to child rape

A serial child molester and retired Roman Catholic priest on Wednesday declined an opportunity to apologize to his victims after pleading guilty to child rape earlier in December.

Lawrence Hecker’s silence came on Wednesday in New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse as a judge handed him a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Earlier in the proceeding, the victim who pressed the case that led to Hecker’s guilty plea described his rape in gut-wrenching detail.

“I don’t forgive him,” said the victim, who was about 16 when the cleric assaulted him in 1975 at a church next to a high school that the then teenager attended.

Alluding to how Hecker’s superiors protected him from law enforcement authorities for decades, he added: “In my opinion, the archdiocese should be sitting there with him – because they are complicit in this as well.”

Other victims who endured sexual abuse at the hands of Hecker, now 93, and were prepared to testify at the trial averted by the cleric’s guilty plea on 3 December also spoke at Wednesday’s sentencing hearing, including one who dismissed him as “an animal”.

The judge Nandi Campbell was weeping out of sympathy for the abuse survivors as she sentenced Hecker, who chose to not make a statement before she imposed the punishment.

“I hope this sentence gives you some closure,” Campbell said to Hecker’s victims while acknowledging how difficult that would be.

Hecker’s attorney, Robert Hjortsberg, later told news reporters that his client’s guilty plea was an expression of remorse.

Wednesday’s emotional hearing at last closed the book on a grueling legal saga made necessary primarily because of a decades-long cover-up engineered by Roman Catholic church officials in New Orleans, whose archdiocese counts on hundreds of thousands of believers and therefore is one of the faith’s most reliable strongholds in the US.

The survivor at the center of the case reported being a student at New Orleans’s St John Vianney high school – named after a patron saint of Catholic parochial priests – when Hecker befriended him. He had a habit of working out in a weight room fashioned out of a space in the bell tower of an adjacent church colloquially known as Little Flower, which has since closed along with St John Vianney, known for how it primarily catered to boys interested in the Catholic priesthood.

One day Hecker showed up unannounced in the weight room and made small talk with the boy about his ambition of joining a St John sports team. He suddenly put the child in a wrestling-style headlock, rendered him unconscious and raped him, according to court filings.

The survivor recounted later telling his mother and school principal about the rape. But he said the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police and instead threatened him with expulsion if he did not undergo psychological treatment for what the school official dismissed as “anger issues and fantasy stories”.

Hecker initially denied those accusations. But in 1999, he did admit in writing to Catholic church leaders in New Orleans that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met through his ministry.

New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese nonetheless allowed Hecker to return to work before he retired a few years later. The archdiocese then waited until 2018 to finally notify the public that Hecker and dozens of his fellow clergymen had been the subject of substantial, credible child sexual abuse allegations that eventually drove the organization to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.

Calamari was placed on that roster as well after admitting to what he minimized as “a sin” with a teenaged student.

After Hecker’s unmasking as a child predator, the former St John Vianney student filed a formal complaint with law enforcement about his rape – but the case progressed slowly despite the best efforts of him and his attorney, Richard Trahant. Things sped up after the Guardian managed to obtain a copy of Hecker’s 1999 admissions and exposed them to the public for the first time in June 2023 despite a court seal on most information pertaining to the bankruptcy.

Weeks later, the Guardian shared the confession with the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera outside his apartment.

Hecker during that conversation confirmed his written confession was authentic. And within 15 days the office of the New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, secured a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with crimes including child rape, kidnapping and theft.

The theft charge stemmed from the theory that steps taken to cover up the rape robbed Hecker’s victim of pursuing the maximum amount of civil damages possible with respect to the abuse he survived.

In civil litigation stemming from his abuse of another victim, Hecker gave a private deposition in which he elaborated on how his church superiors shielded him from being exposed. Video of that deposition obtained exclusively by the Guardian and WWL Louisiana showed him saying – among other things – that clergy abuse just “wasn’t a big deal” to his organization at the time it learned he was an abuser.

Hecker’s case was delayed for more than a year after his indictment over age-related questions about his mental competence. Yet he was repeatedly found competent to constitutionally stand trial, and shortly before jury selection began on 3 December, he pleaded guilty as charged.

That not only guaranteed him a life sentence, it also marked the first time at least in recent memory that a Catholic clergyman in the city of New Orleans had been convicted of child rape, one of the crimes most harshly punished by Louisiana law.

Hecker’s conviction cut a stark contrast with the outcome of the last attempt to prosecute a New Orleans clergyman on charges of child rape. In that case, George Brignac died while awaiting trial in 2020, ensuring failure for what was prosecutors’ fourth time since the late 1970s trying to bring him to justice.

At Hecker’s sentencing on Wednesday, the survivor whose case led to his conviction recalled the lifelong negative effects his rape had on his personal relationships, including with his parents, his children and even his wife when he first started dating her.

“Lawrence Hecker raped me … and … my whole aspect of church changed,” he said.

“I didn’t trust anybody,” said the survivor, who later had a career in one of the US’s military branches. “I have zero friends. I pushed every one away.”

Another Hecker survivor who addressed him on Wednesday was Aaron Hebert. Hebert shares an attorney in Trahant with the victim who successfully pursued Hecker’s rape charges.

And he has previously spoken publicly about being fondled by Hecker under the guise of a hernia exam while serving under him as an altar boy.

Hebert – whose civil litigation set the stage for Hecker’s damaging deposition – said the abuser’s reputation was so well-established that it earned him the derisive nickname “Hecker the pecker checker”.

He also called Hecker “Satan in priest clothing” and recited a Bible verse: “It would be better for them that a millstone be hanged around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea than offend one of these little ones.”

“You don’t qualify as ‘father’ or a man,” a childhood friend of Hebert and fellow Hecker survivor later added. “You are an animal … You did horrible things to every one of us.

“Thank God for this day.”

Hecker watched his victims’ statements in a wheelchair and orange prisoner’s jumpsuit. He occasionally trembled, groaned, wept and wiped at his eyes.

The case built against Hecker by Louisiana state police has since widened into an investigation over whether New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to authorities, according to law enforcement statements sworn under oath.

The assistant district attorney who led the prosecution of Hecker, Ned McGowan, said in court on Wednesday that the clergyman’s “decades-long career … of child rape” was “aided and abetted by the Catholic church”.

The lead state police investigator on both Hecker’s case and the associated broader probe, Scott Rodrigue, questioned Calamari.

In fact, Rodrigue wrote in court records that Calamari acknowledged to “sexually abusing a minor” previously himself.

Yet it wasn’t clear if Calamari was going to be called to testify at Hecker’s trial had it gone forward. And it remained to be seen on Wednesday whether any of Hecker’s enablers may similarly be charged with crimes, though Rodrigue and an FBI agent were both present for Wednesday’s sentencing.

Williams said outside court that legal filing deadlines known as statutes of limitation were impediments to going after at least some of Hecker’s protectors. Child rape does not have any statute of limitation, but something like failing to adequately report Hecker for that crime might, Williams said.

“A lot of people failed a lot of children,” Williams remarked.