NEW ORLEANS — A mental competency hearing has been delayed again for a 92-year-old retired Catholic priest faced with charges of raping a teenager after strangling him unconscious in 1975 in a New Orleans church.
Lawrence Hecker’s trial on state charges of aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft has been delayed several times since January. A psychiatrist and her team evaluated Hecker in the Orleans Parish criminal courthouse on April 4, but prosecutors told Judge Ben Willard they had just received the evaluation report this morning. Hecker’s defense team said they had not yet seen the report.
Testimony from the evaluating doctors is now scheduled for May 23. The standard for competency to stand trial is whether someone can understand the proceedings pending against him and meaningfully assist the attorneys representing him.
Several victims of Hecker – who admitted to church leaders in the late 1990s that he molested and sexually harassed at least seven children but was never punished or removed from ministry – are increasingly frustrated by the multiple delays caused by Hecker’s failing health. An attorney representing Hecker’s accuser in the current rape case said the longer the trial is delayed the less likely the priest is to stand trial.
District Attorney Jason Williams said he, too, is frustrated and went so far as to accuse Hecker of "malingering."
"He's obviously malingering, because he certainly was competent in David's interviews," Williams said, referring to when Hecker stood for 18 minutes in stifling heat last August and admitted to WWL Louisiana and the Guardian that he had engaged in “willing" sex with multiple underage boys in the 1960s and 1970s. "He's been competent in other interviews. And now that he's been charged with a crime, all of a sudden, now he can't tell his left from his right."
He said the court "should not view that as real," and vowed to have his prosecutors return to court in May with "every piece of evidence that is available to us, private and public, to show that this man was competent when he raped children and he's competent now, and he can pay for that."
In his interview with WWL and the Guardian in August, Hecker spoke at length about why he thought he was free to do what he’d done because of the “sexual revolution” and acknowledged that he now knew it was wrong and was “truly repentant.”
Here is the full 18-minute interview of Hecker admitting sexual abuse of teens to WWL:
*Read more of the story below the video
In that same interview, Hecker denied ever choking a boy unconscious and raping him. He quickly and emphatically denied ever having “unwilling” sex with anyone. Confronted with his written statement from 1999, he said he remembered the boys with whom he admitted engaging in “overtly sexual acts.”
Hecker was indicted and arrested in September, just two weeks after that interview. He walked unassisted to a vehicle that took him to jail. But in mid-January, he was rushed to intensive care, and in court hearings since then his defense attorneys said he had experienced mental decline, disorientation and a number of physical ailments. He was later transferred to a long-term care facility while held in custody in lieu of the $800,000 bail.
Court-appointed forensic psychiatrist Dr. Sarah Deland interviewed Hecker in a closed area attached to Willard’s courtroom in early April. It’s unclear when her report was finished but it was not received until Thursday.
Hecker’s lead defense attorney, Bobby Hjortsberg, says he remains in a long-term care facility. He waived his client’s appearance in court Thursday and said he wasn’t sure why he wasn’t transported by jail officials to court, as he was April 4.
Richard Trahant, an attorney for the alleged victim, said his client immediately reported the alleged attack in 1975 to the principal of his high school at the time, Paul Calamari, another priest the archdiocese considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse. But Trahant said Calamari failed to report Hecker’s alleged crime after being informed of it at the school he led, the now-shuttered St John Vianney Prep.
*Read more of the story below the photo
Trahant also said Thursday for the first time that St. John provided his client with psychiatric care after he reported the rape, but he is not aware of law enforcement being notified until the church was forced to turn over Hecker’s file to District Attorney Jason Williams last summer.
After Trahant’s client reported Hecker to law enforcement in June 2022, it took more than a year for charges to be filed in connection with his accusations.
Calamari’s attorney declined to comment on Trahant’s allegations. Reached by phone this week and asked about the time Trahant’s client came to him to report that he had been raped by Hecker, Calamari replied that he could not speak because he was driving and hung up.
Hecker has been a suspected child molester both in and out of the church for much of the time that has passed since his 1958 ordination.
In addition to Trahant’s allegation that the 1975 rape allegation was immediately reported to church officials, sealed clerical files obtained by the Guardian and WWL Louisiana show the parents of another former student at St John Vianney reported Hecker had sex with their son.
The archbishop at the time, the late Philip Hannan, confronted Hecker about that claim in 1988. Hecker told WWL and the Guardian that Hannan did not punish him because the archbishop was convinced Hecker would not do it again.
*Read more of the story below the photo
In 1999, Hecker admitted in a typed statement given to church officials that he had sexually charged relationships with at least seven underage boys and engaged in “overt sexual acts” with three of them. That prompted church officials to send him to a church psychiatric facility which diagnosed him as a pedophile who could not be rehabilitated.
Nonetheless, his superiors let him continue working as a priest full-time for three more years, assigning him to a church with a grammar school attached.
Hecker finally retired in 2002 with full benefits after a clergy abuse and cover-up scandal that ensnared the Catholic archdiocese of Boston attracted worldwide headlines. The New Orleans archdiocese kept paying Hecker’s benefits until the organization filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and was ordered to stop by a judge.
The church reported one of Hecker’s alleged crimes to New Orleans in 2002 but made no mention of his confession to other instances of abuse three years earlier. It also did not publicly acknowledge that Hecker was a credibly accused child molester until 2018. And New Orleans’ archdiocese – which has been led by archbishop Gregory Aymond since 2009 – did not turn over Hecker’s church personnel file to law enforcement until this past June, when the organization received a subpoena threatening penalties if it did not hand the documents over.
Hecker would receive mandatory life imprisonment if ever convicted as charged.
Regardless of that individual case’s outcome, New Orleans district attorney Jason Williams has said his office would consider criminal charges against anyone who participated in covering up child sexual abuse, including, with respect to Hecker.
Watch the original reports on WWL & The Guardian's exclusive interview with Hecker: