NEW YORK (NY)
Daily Beast
June 14, 2019
By Pilar Menendez
As a New Jersey priest in the 1970s and 1980s, John Capparelli liked to arrange wrestling matches for parish boys. He gave them skimpy Speedos to wear, took pictures of them grappling, and even joined in—using the rough-housing as an excuse to sadistically grope the kids.
“Capparelli kind of played the role of being that cool adult that you hung out with,” one of his victims, Rich Fitter, told the Daily Beast last week. “I have no doubt in my mind now that he was a sociopath.”
After his sexual abuse came to light in the late 1980s, Capparelli was sent to a rehab for clergy with sexual problems, removed from parish ministry and eventually suspended from performing priestly duties. However, he continued to teach—while secretly running a porn website that featured young wrestlers.
It took two decades and several lawsuits to finally defrock Capparelli and get him ousted from the classroom. By then, he had left New Jersey and moved to a two-bedroom home in a quiet neighborhood in Henderson, Nevada, where neighbors noticed he always had a steady stream of young male visitors.
Then, three months ago, there was a shocking development in the saga of the predator priest: He was found shot dead inside his home by police who were asked to check on the 70-year-old. The motive was initially unclear, raising the obvious question of whether his death could somehow be related to his sordid past.
The answer, it turned out, was no—and yes.
The person police say murdered Capparelli was not one of the teens he molested so many years ago. But the investigation revealed that while Capparelli had left behind New Jersey and his collar, he did not abandon his obsession with wrestling.
According to police, the disgraced clergyman was killed by a young man who answered his online ad seeking out “young and good looking men” willing to wrestle for him.
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