PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net
Detective Joe Walsh wasn’t buying the BS that Danny Gallagher was peddling.
Back in March 2012, Walsh was prepping Danny Gallagher, AKA “Billy Doe,” for his role as the D.A.’s star witness in the child endangerment case against Msgr. William J. Lynn, scheduled to go to trial in just a few weeks. Walsh was quizzing the former altar boy about his claim that he was high on drugs when he told two social workers “graphic details” about violent rapes and beatings he supposedly suffered at the hands of two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher.
But Walsh had interviewed Gallagher’s father, a Philadelphia police sergeant, who said his son wasn’t high on drugs the morning he talked to the two social workers. Because just a few minutes earlier, the father had driven his sober son home from the drug clinic. Danny Gallagher had also told many of those same graphic details the day before to his drug counselor, who told Walsh that Gallagher wasn’t high when he made those same accusations.
“I asked” Gallagher about “all those graphic details,” Walsh wrote in a blockbuster, 12-page affidavit filed Monday in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. Those graphic details included allegations of brutal anal rapes, death threats, getting tied up naked with altar sashes, strangled with a seatbelt and being beaten by his assailants.
In his affidavit, Walsh said he asked the D.A.’s star witness: “Did he just make all that up?” According to the detective, that’s when Gallagher admitted, “He just made up stuff and told them anything.”
The startled detective asked a follow-up question.
“So I asked him did he lie about what happened when he told [the drug counselor] and the two women about what he said occurred,” Walsh wrote. “He said yeah I guess so,” Walsh quoted Gallagher as saying.
“I asked him if he was lying about anything else and he would not answer me,” Walsh wrote. “He just sat there and did not answer me.”
But Walsh came to his own conclusions about the truth of Danny Gallagher’s allegations of abuse. In his affidavit, Walsh states three different times that he concluded that Gallagher wasn’t telling the truth when he claimed he was raped in separate attacks by two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher.
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