Rubén Rosario: Might pope bring peace to grieving Hudson family?

By Rubén Rosario
Pioneer Press
August 29, 2015

http://www.twincities.com/crime/ci_28720037/ruba-n-rosario-might-pope-bring-peace-grieving

Many people would love an audience with Pope Francis, my kind of pope, during his weeklong U.S. trip next month to Washington, D.C., New York City and Philadelphia.

Tom O'Connell of Hudson, Wis., is one of them. Heck, as a humble but still wretched sinner, I also want to hug or shake his Holiness' hand -- I don't kiss rings -- and then bend his ears. But I would gladly have Tom take my place on the long line of remote hopefuls.

"I realize there are hundreds of others who would like to meet you and all have very great need," the funeral home owner wrote in a typed letter he sent the pope at his Vatican address in February.

"I feel my circumstances and situation needs to be heard, not just because my family needs to heal, but also because the tragic chain of events that led to the loss of three lives, damage to other young lives and damaged faith in God is being repeated over and over," the two-page missive continues. "Helping my family to heal will hopefully lead to healing for many other families and the Catholic Church. It would show your healing power to the many who have suffered."

On Feb. 5, 2002, a medical examiner arriving to get signatures on a death certificate found Daniel, 39 -- O'Connell's second-oldest son and the director of the family-run business -- shot to death in his office at the O'Connell Funeral Home in downtown Hudson. Nearby lay the body of James Ellison, 22, a University of Minnesota mortuary sciences intern. For nearly two years, the case remained unsolved and the subject of rumors about who did it. A double homicide is big news in a bucolic place like Hudson.

Cops, after chasing well over 1,000 tips and leads that went nowhere, dug up evidence pointing at the most shocking and unlikeliest of killers: an associate pastor at nearby St. Patrick Church.

How could this be? The Rev. Ryan Erickson was a young, energetic, charismatic, pistol-packing cleric nicknamed "The Monsignor" by fellow St. Paul Seminary colleagues for his ultra-conservative stance, passionate to the point of obsessive rantings on two issues: abortion and homosexuality.

Erickson, who had been reassigned to a church in Hurley, Wis., during the investigation, hanged himself from a rectory fire escape Dec. 19, 2004, days after cops grilled him about the slayings and were about to execute a search warrant on his home and possessions.

The police probe and a post-suicide judicial inquiry in 2005 uncovered troubling details about Erickson's secret life, as well as a strong motive for the murders.

"Erickson professed a love of God, but witnesses described a man who downloaded hardcore pornography -- much of it involving boys," is how a Pioneer Press article described the hearing evidence.

According to investigators' reports, when Erickson was 6 years old, he had sexual contact with a 4-year-old male cousin; when he was 19, he had sexual contact with a 14-year-old boy; when he was 21, he was investigated for allegedly sexually assaulting a boy at a summer resort.

Erickson, according to the evidence, apparently "groomed" one teenage boy for sex during drinking binges and sleepovers at the St. Patrick rectory and was trying to do so with another, but that boy became uncomfortable. Both testified at the court proceeding. In key testimony, one victim from Somerset spoke of molestations while Erickson was assigned to St. Patrick.

From 2000 to 2002, the victim testified, he spent many weekends at the rectory with Erickson, watching horror movies and playing drinking games. He estimated that Erickson had supplied him more than 1,200 cans of beer and the same amount of liquor shots. The victim said he had seen at least two handguns owned by the priest, according to Kevin Harter, the Pioneer Press reporter who covered the case.

Then there was a deacon in the Hurley parish who testified that Erickson confessed to him in November 2004 that he carried out the killings, "I done it and they're gonna catch me." The deacon repeated the conversation to his wife and a church secretary, yet otherwise kept that mea culpa to himself until police contacted him.

While he may not have known about the molestation of the then-teenager, St. Croix County Attorney Eric Johnson said Dan O'Connell -- a one-time Minneapolis ambulance paramedic, married father of three and a well-liked Hudson civic member -- knew something was amiss. Johnson and homicide detectives strongly believe Dan O'Connell's decision to confront Erickson that fateful day would become the motive for the priest to kill him and Ellison, who was killed after apparently responding to the gunshots.

In response to written questions by Twin Cities-area news media outlets at that time, Raphael Fliss, then-bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Superior, acknowledged the diocese was informed of allegations that Erickson was accused of inappropriate sexual behavior in 1992 -- a decade before the double homicide.

Erickson, who then denied the accusation, was sent for counseling. When the allegation was deemed unsubstantiated, he was allowed to enter St. Paul Seminary and became a priest.

Erickson "does not appear to be predatory or exploitative in his overall orientation, and he does not seem to be a high risk for acting in a sexually aggressive or manipulative manner in the future," the probe concluded.

"The diocese did not learn of any improper sexual behavior by Erickson until Dec. 17, 2004, when Hudson police officers, during their investigation, informed the diocese of allegations that Erickson sexually molested a minor while a priest and had pornographic files on his computer," Fliss noted in his written response to reporters.

More than 13 years after his son's slaying, as I sit across from him at a small kitchen table in the funeral home this past week -- the same one where his son was slain -- O'Connell is still very much a father in pain, grappling with an open wound that won't completely close.

But the source of the still-festering angst is not what most would think it might be.

"There's no such thing as closure because once you lose a child, there's nothing like it," O'Connell told me as tears welled in his eyes. "You want to grab somebody and shake them."

He's a man, in his profession, accustomed to dealing with death. He's in the business of consoling people who lose loved ones. On Thursday, for example, that's what he did during four funerals back to back.

But what happened to his son was different. The cause of his son's death was not natural, health-related or a tragic accident. It was, as he told me, executed with malicious intent by an "a representative of God on earth."

But the thing that really hurts him is that no one from the church hierarchy, "nobody, nobody ever contacted us to this day," he said.

He exempts Peter Christiansen, the then-Twin Cities-based priest who baptized Dan O'Connell and administered last rites to a family cousin. Before Christianson succeeded Fliss as bishop in 2007, he visited the O'Connell family following the horrific disclosures.

"He let us know that he was not representing the church but himself, because he knew our family," O'Connell told me. No other church official reached out. Those who did were numerous lawyers who strongly believed the O'Connell family had grounds to sue.

Yet Tom O'Connell resisted internal and external pressures to go that route. He still attends church along with his wife, Janet, who is battling melanoma cancer.

"There are many good priests out there," he said. "The money you get from that, to me, would be blood money. Anyway, it would not bring Dan back. If I did, I would give the money to build something for pedophile priests or the clergy."

I asked him if he had forgiven his son's killer.

"I've forgiven him in the sense that he was a sick, sick priest," O'Connell said.

I then asked him what he really wanted from Pope Francis if O'Connell from Hudson hit the spiritual Powerball and someone at the Vatican relayed his letter to the pontiff.

"I'm just a plain, ordinary, old Irish Catholic," he told me. "I just think that as leader of the church on Earth, if he could just meet with the O'Connells and just give us his blessing. I'm not looking for sympathy. It's just that after all these years, nobody ever came to us, not even a postcard. The local church pastor, now deceased, I swear to God, told me after it all came out that he could not watch him (Erickson) all the time. That's all we ever got from the church so far."