By Damien Fisher, InDepthNH.org
Gordon MacRae, the Catholic priest jailed for child sexual abuse, plans to seek a new trial after InDepthNH.org uncovered records showing lead investigator, former Keene Police Lt. James McLaughlin, has a history of lying.
“It is the kind of new evidence that writs of habeas corpus were made for,” said Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate. “This is certainly a ground for a motion for a new trial.”
MacRae is serving a 33 1/2- to 67-year state prison sentence after his 1994 trial in which he pleaded guilty to abusing three minors and was found guilty of abusing the fourth. He also pleaded guilty in 1988 to a misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child.
Silverglate, a criminal defense, and civil rights attorney, is a longtime friend of MacRae’s. He said the jailed priest plans to bring an appeal soon based on InDepthNH.org’s reporting on McLaughlin’s record. Silverglate is not acting as MacRae’s lawyer for the planned appeal.
“He is now looking for representation,” Silverglate said.
InDepthNH.org recently uncovered internal police reports that show McLaughlin lied to supervisors in at least two incidents. One in which he improperly fired his service pistol and another in which an audio recording that could have proved misconduct by McLaughlin was destroyed.
“Once the cop is found to have lied, this opens up a whole different avenue for Gordon MacRae,” Silverglate said.
McLaughlin was named on the Laurie List, or Exculpatory Evidence Schedule, in December 2021, but was quickly taken off as he has a pending lawsuit to challenge his placement. The EES is a formerly secret list of police officers with known credibility problems. McLaughlin was listed for allegedly falsifying evidence. The incident that placed him on the list happened in 1985.
MacRae has long maintained his innocence despite pleading guilty to felonies for abusing three minors and a misdemeanor for an incident involving a fourth. Silverglate said MacRae was pressured into the guilty pleas thinking he could escape a more severe prison sentence. MacRae is a victim of a Church hierarchy looking to deflect blame and of a media environment seeking to destroy suspect abusers, according to Silverglate.
“He got swept up in this moral panic,” Silverglate said. “The innocent, as well as the guilty, get swept up in these moral panics.”
Criminal defendants are constitutionally guaranteed to be told before trial of all evidence that is favorable to them, known as exculpatory evidence. If no such disclosure is made, even years later, they can petition for a new trial and in egregious cases charges may be dismissed and prosecutors sanctioned.
The Laurie List or EES is kept to alert prosecutors when they must disclose such evidence to the defense, including information about police officers whose confidential personnel files include sustained discipline for dishonesty or use of excessive force.
Boston attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who sued the Catholic Church on behalf of victims of priest sexual abuse, said Church leaders have long displayed a penchant for covering up abuse by priests.
“One has to look at whether the supervisors of Fr. MacRae, who pleaded guilty to the sexual assault of minors, were also complicit in the sexual abuse and are just trying to further their coverup of the matter,” Garabedian said.
In 2002, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office reached an agreement with then-Bishop John McCormack to forgo criminal charges of child engagement against diocesan officials. The Church in New Hampshire, for its part, agreed to report all future cases of suspected abuse to law enforcement and to undergo annual audits by the Department of Justice.
MacRae’s case was part of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s child endangerment investigation into the diocese, and the state’s report found that Church officials knew about MacRae’s abuse of children yet kept him in his position.
MacRae’s superiors knew as early as 1983 about allegations of sexual abuse. During an internal Church investigation, MacRae admitted to some of the abuse, according to the Attorney General’s report.
According to a Church psychological evaluation following the guilty 1988 plea, MacRae admitted to abusing numerous boys in his time as a priest.
“Father MacRae reported several inappropriate sexual encounters with adolescents. Although he experiences intense shame and guilt for the behavior, he indicated that he does not feel in control of such behavior. Father MacRae is in the early stages of understanding and arresting the inappropriate sexual encounters with minors,” the evaluation states.
A second therapist reported to Church officials in 1989 that MacRae fit the description of a sexual predator.
“Mr. MacRae appears to fit the description of a fixated sexual offender, a man who has a primary sexual interest in children, usually males, though with the possibility of attraction to and sexual activity with adults, who identifies with his child victims and who relates to children as peers, scaling his behavior to the child’s level or acting in a “pseudo-parental role,” that report states.
After that evaluation, MacRae was sent to treatment at the Catholic clinic, Servants of the Paraclete, in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.
McLaughlin was the lead investigator into the abuse for which MacRae was convicted in the 1990s, and MacRae at one point accused the detective of destroying audio recordings of interviews. MacRae did not know about McLaughlin’s history when he made those allegations about the officer. InDepthNH.org reported last month that McLaughlin was reprimanded in one incident during which an audio recording was destroyed.
In the spring of 1988, McLaughlin received a letter of reprimand from then-Chief Thomas Powers after McLaughlin was involved in a December 1987 heated verbal confrontation with a civilian on the phone and later inside the station. It was during this incident that the audio recording of the phone call was destroyed under suspicious circumstances, according to Powers.
“In the subsequent interview concerning the incident, no reasonable reason for the blank tape was found, and an electronic examination of the tape revealed unintelligible voices,” Powers wrote. “You provided statements that you had ‘words’ with the complainant and had rewound the tape to get his name yet did not purposefully erase any part thereof. You could not explain the misfiling of the tape, nor why the log did not indicate the tape cleaning or changing at 2400 hours.”
Powers indicates that McLaughlin already in 1988 had a record of bad behavior as a police officer.
“I reviewed your personnel files and several internal affairs investigations. While you have accumulated a number of praises in your career, a disproportionate number of serious accusations and violations have significantly detracted from your record, including a one-week suspension,” Powers wrote.
McLaughlin was also reprimanded a year earlier after he was caught lying about firing his service pistol. That happened when McLaughlin was rousting a teen drinking party, and he reportedly tried to shoot holes in the beer kegs. McLaughlin explained the noise to other officers by saying that some of the teens set off fireworks, according to the records obtained by InDepthNH.org. He was suspended when the truth came to light.