By Lona O'Connor and Stephanie Slater
Palm Beach Post
October 11, 2006
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2006/10/11/s1b_DBPRIESTS_1011.html
Delray Beach — Father John Skehan was in a mood to confess.
He began talking the moment police picked him up at the airport on his return from a vacation in Ireland.
The Irish-born priest had to be shushed twice so his Miranda rights could be read to him first.
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| Former Delray priests Francis Guinan (left) and John A. Skehan are accused of misappropriating $8.6 million from their church. |
Skehan, 79, was charged Sept. 27 with grand theft in the misappropriation of more than $8 million from St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Delray Beach, where he was pastor for 40 years. He is free on $40,000 bond.
Frank Guinan, the priest who succeeded Skehan at St. Vincent when he retired in 2003, is scheduled to turn himself in to authorities Oct. 27 on similar charges.
Once Skehan's confession officially began at 11:30 p.m. in an interview room at Palm Beach International Airport, his rambling narrative including both admissions of guilt and numerous justifications of what he had done. The confession is outlined in a search warrant for his safe deposit box at a Delray Beach branch of SunTrust Bank.
Skehan told detectives he "absolutely misappropriated" a "mountain of money" from the church.
And he confirmed what police and auditors hired by the diocese had already discovered - during his 40 years at St. Vincent, he never deposited any cash from the collection plate into legitimate church bank accounts.
He felt he deserved the money because the diocese was cheap and never paid for his education.
Skehan is alleged to have used hundreds of thousands of dollars on travel, real estate and rare coins. He also gave a woman companion $675 a week and paid for her health insurance, court records show.
He offered to return the $300,000 in rare coins he had secreted in a safe.
He told detectives about the good deeds he had done for his parishioners.
Skehan's confession was riddled with contradictions about what he had done or was planning to do with misappropriated money.
First, he told detectives he planned to will money to the church and had left $4 million in a trust fund for St. Vincent's School.
He later said that he had a second trust fund worth $2.7 million that he was going to give to the church when he retired.
Detectives were quick to remind Skehan that he retired three years ago.
He told detectives he had $5,000 in a safe in his house on Northeast Eighth Avenue that he planned to use for a trip around the world.
When detectives searched the safe, they found $39,196.
They also found platinum, gold and silver coins from all over the world, including a World War II coin set, $5 Indian head coins and commemorative coins for presidents Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, records show.
Skehan said he had help with his scheme to shield money from the diocese.
Renee Wardrip, his bookkeeper, and Colleen Head, who deposited the offertory money, knew that Skehan kept two sets of books, he told detectives. And Wardrip helped him shred financial records.
He admitted telling Head not to cooperate with diocese auditors. Head earlier told detectives that she and her mother, Terry Duffey, received $1,500 in cash, a thank you from Skehan for their silence. The cash was delivered by property manager Chuck Bilthuis, who also helped with the weekly bank deposits.
When Guinan took over as pastor in September 2003, he took over control of the slush funds, Skehan said, adding that what Guinan did with the money was his business.
In another search warrant, for the safe in Skehan's house, Head told detectives that on April 12, 2005, when Guinan gave her a bag of collection envelopes from Easter Masses, all the cash appeared to have been removed.
Guinan held off a scheduled diocesan audit of St. Vincent's finances for eight months.
Guinan's attorney, David Roth, made arrangements with the state attorney's office for the priest to surrender at the end of an extended vacation to Australia and Ireland.
Skehan appeared to operate under a system of greed and generosity. He routinely kept $1,000 to $3,000 a week for himself, depending on the size of the collection. But he also gave $100 cash a week to church employees.
The Rev. Thomas Skindeleski, who took over the parish when Guinan was dismissed in 2005, tried to make sense of the scandal in his weekly message posted to parishioners on the church's Web site.
"I am not trying to minimize any of the wrongdoing that took place, nor cast judgment, either. But so much good was done with the many of 'misappropriated' funds that this cannot nor should not be overlooked. From among these funds, several accounts for the benefit of the parish and its school, totaling several millions of dollars were established. Though diocesan procedures were not followed, those endowments or annuities are very financially secure today. What occurred with the remainder will come forth in due time."
Skindeleski added that the parish established a finance council and a parish pastoral council several months ago.
Parishioners responded to the crisis by giving more money.
From Sept. 24 - the week before the revelations about Skehan and Guinan - to Oct. 1, collections rose from $11,000 to $15,000, according to church bulletins.
Concluding his confession, Skehan told detectives he was only now beginning to realize just how enormous a sum he had misappropriated. He also told them he was proud of the fact that there had never been a parish left in better financial shape.
E-mail: lona_oconnor@pbpost.com
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