DALLAS (TX)
The Dallas Morning News
By Jennifer Emily/Reporter
jemily@dallasnews.com
1:12 pm on May 16, 2012
Testimony got under way today in the Dallas County trial of a former priest accused of engaging in a murder-for-hire plot to kill a man who accused the priest of molesting him as a boy.
Prosecutors allege that John Fiala was distraught over indictments that accused him of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy in his rural West Texas parish when he asked a neighbor to kill his accuser.
Fiala faces a charge of solicitation of capital murder, which is punishable by up to life in prison. He’s also been indicted on four charges of sexual assault in Edwards County.
The neighbor, Scottie Fisher, testified that Fiala told him about his legal troubles in November 2010 when they were renting rooms at a house in Garland. Fisher said that Fiala was crying and that he tried to comfort the man he had known just three weeks by patting him on the back.
“Can you go out and kill him?” Fisher testified that Fiala asked.
“I said ‘Hell no.’”
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