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Arch Nemesis
A Former ADA Offers Insight into the Clergy Abuse Probe
By Mike Newall
Philadelphia City Paper
October 13, 2005
The suicide call came in on a Sunday morning. It was 2002 and the grand
jury investigation into Philadelphia clergy abuse was a few months old.
Will Spade and another assistant district attorney headed to the home
of a witness who had been raped by a priest as a child and was now threatening
to kill himself. They spent all afternoon and into the early evening at
the man's home, talking, listening, keeping him company.
"It really brought home the emotional turmoil these victims were
suffering," recalls Spade, "and gave me a sense of the gravity
of the situation."
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pope and faith: "It reaffirmed that
general idea that power corrupts," Spade says of how working
on the clergy abuse investigation affected him.
Photo By: Michael T. Regan |
Spade had seven years of experience at the District Attorney's office
when he was assigned to the archdiocese investigation. But nothing, he
says, could have prepared him for the two years he would spend on the
church probe. Along with four other members of the DA's Special Investigations
Unit, Spade often worked up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, interviewing
hundreds of victims, church officials — including former Cardinal
Anthony Bevilacqua — and slowly uncovering the shocking scale to
which the archdiocese protected pedophile priests.
"There were times when I would come home after a particularly bad
day," says Spade, 43, "and I would lay down on the couch with
my head in my wife's lap and cry, uncontrollably cry."
Exhausted and emotionally drained, Spade left the DA's office last fall
— a year before the grand jury's final report was issued —
to start his own criminal defense firm. (Earlier this year, he represented
former City Treasurer Corey Kemp.)
With the grand jury's finding now public, Spade sat down to discuss his
own painful experience with the archdiocese investigation.
"It's hard to describe with words," he says. "It is a raw
wound."
Under subpoena, the archdiocese was forced to hand over the bounty of
records kept under lock and key at their Center City headquarters. About
once a month, an archdiocesan attorney would meet Spade or another investigator
at the Suburban Station Dunkin Donuts and hand over a new batch of documents,
including personnel files and internal memos detailing how Bevilacqua
and the late Cardinal John Krol systematically protected abusers.
"It was immediately obvious that the hierarchy were dealing with
this not as religious people but like lawyers," he says of the former
archbishops. Bevilacqua testified in front of the grand jury on dozen
occasions. District Attorney Lynne Abraham has categorized his testimony
as evasive; jurors said they would've indicted him for endangering the
welfare of children if it were not for the statute of limitations.
Spade cross-examined Bevilacqua and agrees with the report's conclusion
that the cardinal "repeatedly claimed to have no memory of incidents
and priests that we [grand jurors] will never forget."
Due to confidentiality provisions, Spade can't discuss the specifics of
Bevilacqua's testimony, but he says there were many crimes documented
in the church files that he will personally never be able to shake.
"I'm sure in 15 years there will be some things I'll forget about
this investigation," he says, "but if somebody shows me pages
of the report having to do with two priests raping an adolescent girl
or a priest inserting a host into an adolescent girl's vagina and telling
her she just "fucked Jesus,' I think those are things that will come
back to me."
Spade grew up in a devotedly religious Lutheran household. There was weekly
mass, Sunday school and the altar boy guild. The investigation had a surprising
effect on Spade's faith.
"It reaffirmed that general idea that power corrupts," he says,
"but in talking to so many Catholic priests and theologians and having
to read Cannon Law, I actually became drawn to Catholicism."
He began attending Catholic mass.
"My wife was raised Catholic," he says, "and I would tell
her about how I really liked the faith and she would say "Are you
out of your mind? You're seeing what this institution has done to these
kids and you're saying you like it?' And I'd say, "No I don't like
the institution but I like the faith, I like the intellectual and spiritual
part of it."
Throughout the investigation, Spade worked closely with a priest who handled
many sexual abuse claims for the archdiocese. The priest cooperated fully
with investigators. Spade found him to be truly remorseful for what he
had done and he and the priest became friends.
"I asked him once, "Father, you're such a nice guy, how could
you have been part of this?'" Spade recalls. "He didn't have
any real answer other than it was his job and that he was trained to be
obedient to his cardinal."
Spade and his wife have since decided to send their children to Waldron
Mercy Academy, a Catholic grade school in Merion that is run by the Sisters
of Mercy and not associated with the archdiocese.
"That was important to us," says Spade. "We did not want
any school that was actually run by archdiocese officials."
The grand jury met twice a week in the top-floor conference room of a
building at 16th Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway, two blocks from
where the spire of the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul rises into the
sky. The victims sat at a long table in front of windows offering a view
of North Philadelphia. It was Spade's job to prepare and examine witnesses.
Victims' testimony often detailed years of depression, alcohol or drug
addiction and marital problems, which they attributed to their abuse.
"Most of the victims were men," says Spade. "It really
shakes you up to see a grown man cry."
Spade led the three McDonnell brothers, who were abused by the same priest
while growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1950s, through their grand
jury experience. The youngest brother, Brian, who had been anally raped
by the priest, spent much of his adult years in mental institutions and
once slit his wrists and throat. Spade remains close with the McDonnells
and last year helped Brian get discharged from Norristown State Hospital
and into assisted housing.
Investigators spent hundreds of hours researching whether criminal charges
could be filed. Restrictive statutes of limitations and narrow legal precedents
seemed to protect church leaders from prosecution. Some prosecutors, including
Spade, felt that indictments should be levied in the slim chance of success.
Others argued that a quashed indictment would tie the process up for years
and prevent the DA from issuing a scathing report exposing the cover-up.
"It became clear early on that state law just wasn't there for an
indictment," he says. Partly out of emotional and physical exhaustion,
and partly out of frustration, Spade quit. He now says he agrees that
issuing a report was the best direction. "I was emotionally raw and
I think my arguments were being driven by my gut," he says.
Victims have told him that the report has helped their healing process.
Still, he says, he wishes state law allowed investigators to have done
more. Spade will join victims groups later this month in Harrisburg to
lobby legislators to ban the statute of limitations in child sexual-abuse
cases.
"When someone is harmed, there should be retribution," he says.
"I thought that's why we had a legal system."
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