By Michele McPhee
Boston Herald [Boston MA]
July 6, 2007
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=1009880
State correction officials are investigating whether the killer convicted of strangling and stomping a pedophile priest posted a security surveillance video on YouTube showing prison guards desperately trying to pry open cell doors as the murder took place.
The Herald was alerted to the posting yesterday in a handwritten note purportedly written by Joseph Druce, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the Aug. 23, 2003, slaying of 68-year-old John Geoghan.
"The truth about officer involvement in John Geogan's (sic) death," the taunting note says, directing the reader to www.youtube.com/Joseph Druce. "The truth about officers allowing J.G. to die through their neglect."
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| Joseph Druce was convicted for murdering John Geoghan in 2003. |
The 10-minute video was posted June 12 under the heading "the first of many." It shows a gaggle of correction officers at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center pulling at the cell doors of Druce's cell.
In 2005, the Herald obtained a security video that showed Druce coldly pantomiming Geoghan's murder - a tape that showed how he used a paperback book to jam the sliding cell doors.
"We have no idea where he got it from. We don't know where the tape came from or how it got on the Internet," DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin said last night. "It is under investigation."
Wiffin said inmates do not have access to the Internet.
Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union, said the state's Executive Office of Public Safety should "immediately use any legal remedy available" to get the security tape off the Web.
"We are deeply concerned that an internal security video was posted by an inmate or an inmate's family," Kenneway said. "It's absolutely a public safety issue, posting emergency response actions of correction officers on the Web.
"State officials need to do everything in their power to get it taken down," Kenneway added.
In 2005, Druce's lawyers sent a subpoena to the Herald after the paper published pictures from a security video shot inside his cell. In the macabre video, Druce re-enacted choking the priest with a pair of gym socks, using Geoghan's own sneaker as a tourniquet to tighten the noose. Then he climbed on top of his cell cot and jumped off repeatedly, showing how he crushed the priest's frail body.
Druce was already serving a life sentence for murder when he beat and strangled the defrocked priest, a convicted child molester.
He is now suing the state, claiming in a hand-scrawled 12-page civil suit that he is a political prisoner who is suffering physical abuse at the hands of correction officers.
Contact: Michele McPhee mmcphee@bostonherald.com
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