MASSACHUSETTS
Salem News
BY JULIE MANGANIS STAFF WRITER
IPSWICH — It’s been more than three decades, but the memories still come in what a prosecutor described as sharp little pieces: the sudden, unexpected kiss during a visit to the priest’s office, the nights he was woken and led to an office and forced to sit on the priest’s lap, the physical pain and emotional confusion.
The Rev. Richard McCormick told the boy that it was all an expression of love, his accuser told a Lawrence Superior Court jury Wednesday. The man he knew only as “Father Dick” told him “the church loves you, I love you, we’re one big family,” his accuser, now a 44-year-old man, testified.
McCormick, 73, is charged with five counts of child rape in incidents dating back to the early 1980s, though the timeline has grown muddy, partly due to the way the accuser now recalls the incidents, out of sequence in short vignettes, and partly due to confusion stemming from a therapist’s notes that suggested the abuse started as early as 1979.
It’s that confusion over the timeline — whether the abuse started in 1979, when the accuser was 9, or in 1981, when he was 11 — that McCormick’s lawyer is pointing to when urging a jury to conclude that it was not McCormick who abused the boy.
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