Disgraced ex-priest Lawrence Hecker dies days after life sentence for child rape crimes

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NEW ORLEANS — Admitted child rapist and retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker has died a little more than a week after he began serving a sentence of life imprisonment, according to officials.
Hecker, 93, had pleaded guilty on December 3 to charges that he had kidnapped and raped a teenager at a New Orleans church in 1975. He received a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment on December 18 and days later was transferred to a Louisiana state prison known as Elayn Hunt, said his lawyer, Robert Hjortsberg.


Hjortsberg said Hecker was en route to Louisiana’s maximum security state penitentiary, which is nicknamed Angola, but he ultimately did not make it there. Hjortsberg, his co-counsel Eugene Redmann and New Orleans district attorney Jason Williams confirmed Friday that they had been informed Hecker died, though it remained unclear what day his death occurred.
While details about a cause and manner of death weren’t immediately available, Redmann said Hecker’s health had been deteriorating.


Hecker came to be one of the faces of the New Orleans Catholic church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal – and was protected from justice by his religious superiors for most of his life.
The child rape survivor who successfully pursued criminal charges against Hecker reported being a student at New Orleans’s St. John Vianney High School – named after a patron saint of Catholic parochial priests – when the cleric befriended him. The survivor had a habit of working out in a weight room fashioned out of a space in the bell tower of an adjacent church known to locals as Little Flower, which has since closed alongside St. John Vianney, a school that primarily catered to boys interested in joining the Catholic priesthood.


One day Hecker showed up in the weight room and engaged in small talk with the boy about his dream of joining a St. John sports team. Hecker suddenly put the boy – then aged 16 – in a wrestling-style headlock, rendered him unconscious and raped him, according to court filings.
The survivor later recounted telling his mother and school principal about his rape at the hands of Hecker. But he said the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police and instead threatened to expel him if he did not undergo psychological treatment for what the school leader characterized as “anger issues and fantasy stories”.

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