ALBUQUERQUE (NM)
Albuquerque Journal
April 14, 2019
By Colleen Heild
Elaine Montoya was a teenager when she thought she loved the parish priest, the now-convicted child molester Arthur Perrault.
It took years for her realize she was sexually abused, and to discover that her older brother also had been molested.
As young adults living in Denver, the brother and sister decided in 1984 to travel to Albuquerque to try to put a stop to Perrault’s access to kids. But first they had to tell their parents, including their mother, a devout Catholic and former nun.
“Unlike some of the other victims, our parents didn’t question our claim. Instead, they said if we told the archbishop, they never wanted to see us again. Needless to say, that hurt. We left our parents and the home we grew up in – and stayed at a hotel.”
The Montoya siblings, who got nowhere with the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, were among the first of Perrault’s alleged victims to go public in October 1992 after they filed a civil lawsuit.
That same month, Perrault skipped town, putting himself a continent away from the mounting child sexual assault allegations against him by settling in north Africa. He taught at an American language school in Tangier, Morocco, where the FBI arrested him last September to face federal sexual assault charges in New Mexico.
Montoya, 59, was in the audience when a jury in U.S. District Court in Santa Fe convicted Perrault last week of the repeated sexual abuse of an altar boy who was befriended by the charismatic priest nearly 20 years after the Montoya siblings.
The unusual federal prosecution hinged on the testimony of a home-schooled boy named Ken Wolter who served daily Mass at St. Bernadette Parish in the early 1990s.
Wolter, now 38, testified that as a boy he was sad when Perrault, whom he considered his “best friend,” abruptly resigned from St. Bernadette to go on “sabbatical” in October 1992.
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