The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Fake Priest | 8. Origin Story

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Alex Schuman finally has his showdown with Father Ryan. But things don't go as planned because Father Ryan has something to confess about his past that sheds light on why he wanted to become a "priest" in the first place. A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. It's Millie here.

And it's Liam. And this is our brand new podcast, Liam and Millie. Why Liam and Millie? Because it's just us. So we are going to take you into the reality of our little love story from that very first chat on Love Island. But now we navigate in our long-distance relationship. You may not know, but I live in Wales. And I live in Essex.

So each week we'll be catching up on each other's lives. We also will be answering your relationship questions and tackling your juiciest dilemmas. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full episode on YouTube. Why are the podcasts not called Millie and Liam though? Before we get started, I wanted to let you know this episode includes discussion of sex abuse. It is January 25th, 2020, at about 7 in the morning, and I am just getting in my car to head to finally see what Father Ryan has to say.

Everything I thought about Father Ryan was about to change. He had agreed to meet again, and this time he said he'd go on the record. I was ready to finally get some answers, but there would be something that caught me off guard, and it would alter my whole image of Father Ryan. I'm going to pick up my brother on the way there, and then we have a nice three-hour drive. My brother Dan and I are road tripping to see Father Ryan, And then we'll just see if he actually shows up. Unlike our last meeting, this time I picked the location. I wasn't going to make the drive and end up with nothing again. So I only agreed to come if I could record.

I wasn't sure how the interview would go or how many questions I'd actually get to ask. If the Father Ryan I met months ago showed up today, then this interview wasn't going to last long. At that last meeting, he'd seemed almost scripted. I didn't get any of the answers I wanted. But that wasn't the guy who walked through the door this time. 30 minutes ahead of schedule, Father Ryan walked down the hallway and into the conference room I rented for the interview. This was a different person from the guy I'd met a couple of months

ago. More confident. And he looked like a priest. He had on black shoes, black pants, a jacket, and even the white collar. This was Father Ryan. I'd cleared everything out of the room but a few chairs. We sat down across from each other. And I started recording. All right. Shall we begin? From Neon Hum Media, I'm Alex Schumann, and this is Smokescreen Fake Priest. The moment was finally here. I chose a hotel not too far from his house

for the interview. I'm going into this to get answers. Lots of them. I want to hold Father Ryan's feet to the fire. Ask about the evidence that suggests he's not a legit priest. Ask him about the money he stole from followers. It's a long list of questions. So many people I talked to while investigating Father Ryan would love to be in the spot I was in. A chance to really ask him for an explanation. I think both Father Ryan and I, for different reasons, are feeling

pressure as we get ready in the last few moments before the interview. I want to make sure I cover everything, and he might be worried I'm going to cover everything. I get him mic'd up, and as I'm doing that, we're making conversation, small talk. It's weird. We met once, but we still don't know what to expect from the other once the interview starts. So, for me at least, there is still this tension hanging behind the polite conversation.

I take a seat across from him. I get things started. My first question for you is a basic one. Why did you agree to this interview? I'm not really sure. Every time I've tried to defend myself in the past, quite the opposite has been done. And I can't compete against members of the USCCB, their money, their power, and their influence. The USCCB is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

They knew that from the onset, and that's what was used to their advantage in order to smear me for coming forward. And you say coming forward. What did you come forward about? I testified in Washington, D.C. in November of 2002 about my own sexual abuse from the priest, my rape, and that was a no-no. I'm honestly unsure what to do. Father Ryan is saying he's a rape victim, that he was molested as a child back in Apple River, Illinois. I knew he'd written about this, but I didn't expect it to come up at the start of the interview. So I decide to just listen.

My first abuse took place when I was probably seventh or eighth grade, just going through puberty. And we live in a small farming community. Everybody knows everybody and everything. One of the things that my family did was we took care of the cemetery and the church as far as the lawns and things like that. And I was out at the cemetery mowing and the priest showed up and he asked me if I would mind stopping by the rectory after I got done at the cemetery. Now the cemetery is about,

just about a mile outside of town. So I had to track it in with the riding lawnmower and get that all put away and stuff. When I got to the rectory, father invited me in. And as most farm kids, we don't, didn't spend a lot of time worrying about clothes

or how you were dressed I never wore shoes you know shorts and a t-shirt that was about it well father noticed that I had a lot of mud and grass stains on my feet

and asked me if I wouldn't mind going upstairs in the shower and washing it off so I didn't stain the Persian rug or something. And so I did. And shortly after I got into the shower, he followed and the molestation started. And that went on for close to three years before he was transferred. Ryan doesn't remember if, in all that time, he ever tried to make it stop or fought back. I can't say whether I did or whether I didn't. Knowing what I know now, and most victims go through it.

First of all, you're scared. This is a priest. You know, you just don't say no to a priest. And he was good at talking his way through everything. Had I said anything to anyone at the time, I no doubt would have been called a liar because that was just something that would never, ever happen. You can hear the same reverence in Ryan's voice

he expected from his followers. You don't say no to a priest. And even the way he described the priest's delivery, it was smooth and utterly believable, just like Ryan. Only here, Ryan is the one saying he was a victim of that same authority, that power. Did he at any point, you know, build a relationship with your parents? Were they ever suspicious? I don't think so because, I mean, my parents are very close to the priest. I mean, we're

talking about a town population less than 500. And that was just something that they didn't see. At the time, by his account, Ryan would have been 13 or 14. Ryan's parents hadn't stayed together. His dad married a different woman in 1956. Ryan said his new grandmother was devoutly Catholic. He was born Lutheran, but became infatuated with the Catholic Church. Ryan said he felt different from the other kids

in his blended family because his siblings had a different mom. I think I leaned on the priests in the parish a lot for support and stabilization. When the priests were in my life, I was fine. When they weren't, I was hell on wheels. He trusted these men of the cloth. Ryan said the priest who replaced his abuser never touched him. But once he got a little older, he said it happened again.

As Ryan tells it, a different priest molested him in a car. And then later, he says he was assaulted a third time in 1976. He would have been in his 20s. A priest he trusted invited him to meet an archbishop Ryan admired. They had to go to Milwaukee for the event. But Ryan said after it was over, he was lured to a rectory where he was attacked by multiple priests. We got to this door, and he opened the door and basically shoved me in. I was gang raped by several priests. The seriousness of what he's describing cannot be emphasized enough.

Ryan isn't giving any dates while he's talking, but he is naming names. He says he tried to share those names with the Catholic Church. And he told his grandma he couldn't be around those priests anymore. Did you tell her why? No.

She knew. My grandma was one in a million. He says his grandmother took him to see the bishop after the attack in Milwaukee. Ryan thought the Catholic Church would help him. Well, she pedaled the car up to Madison to the chancery office, and she just walked in. She didn't need no appointment, and the Bishop wasn't going to tell her no.

And she asked me to tell Bishop O'Donnell what had happened. And I did. But in response, Ryan claimed the bishop told him to stay quiet. His silence would be rewarded, the bishop said. You see, throughout his teen years, Ryan said he'd become interested in joining religious life. He wanted to be a priest. So as a young man, he'd do whatever the church told him

he needed to do to make that happen. And in this case, he said that meant taking a pontifical vow of silence about his abuse by order of the church. He said a couple months passed before he got a call from church officials. They had made a decision and they were going to send me to Tucson for counseling and therapy, which I never received. Because I was put under a pontifical vow of silence, I couldn't talk about it.

So therefore, how could I go to counseling when I couldn't talk about it? Here Ryan's story becomes even more incredible. Instead of counseling, Ryan says he got a whole new identity. The chancellor and somebody else and bishop were in this office and he said, we have to protect you. I said, what do you mean you have to protect me? He said, if a scandal such as this ever were made public, it could endanger your life. Father Ryan didn't say who would be out to get him if his story was made public, but it seemed like he believed it was true. Therefore, we are going to change your name.

It wasn't, are you willing to or anything else? And the bishop kind of slides for me on the desk. Driver's license, Social Security card, all with a new name. No explanation? No explanation. Other than because everybody knew me by my other name, if it were to come out, then it wouldn't identify me as the victim because I was under a different name.

So what was your born name and then what was the name that they gave you? Randall Dean Stocks was my born name. They changed it to Ryan Patrick Scott. I now realize what I was really hearing. This was Ryan's story of abuse when he was a child. But it was also something else. The origin of Father Ryan. It was complicated and honestly didn't always make sense.

The Catholic Church could just give him a new social security card? Until this podcast, I wasn't really that familiar with how the Catholic Church handled sex abuse allegations. So I thought I should call a religious expert. I called Peter Manseau, who we last heard from in episode three. He's an author and curator of religious studies at the Smithsonian Institution. I asked him to listen to Father Ryan's account. Hearing Father Ryan use the phrase pontifical vow of silence raised a red flag for me because I had never heard the phrase used exactly that way before.

And it doesn't seem that that is a phrase that is commonly used, at least not described that way. So John Paul II in 2001 declared that abuse cases involving priests should be kept under this seal of pontifical secrecy. But this is something that relates to how the upper levels of the church operates. And so the idea that it would be imposed by a lower level regional bishop struck me as strange. Peter's written a lot about sex abuse in the church. His family memoir, Vows, recounts abuse his mother suffered at the hands of a priest when she was a teenager. A lawsuit she brought against the priest reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2003. I asked him what impression he got from Ryan. Well, it does seem to me that what Father Ryan is good at is playing

with roles that take on a kind of unquestionable authority. In certain circumstances, the role of a priest is that unquestionable authority. In certain other circumstances, the role of victim can take on that same type of authority, where it becomes very difficult to question for very valid reasons. And so to me, it seems that this could be a very insidious part of what he is trying to do, that he's trying to play on people's sympathies. After the interview, I took the names Ryan gave me and saw what I could find. All the names he named are real people or were. Some have passed away, but these priests did serve in Illinois.

The first person Ryan accused was the priest he said approached him after mowing. His name was Father Lawrence London. When I looked into it, I found no other accusations of sexual abuse against him. I checked multiple lists of accused clergy, lists compiled by victim support groups, lawyers, and the diocese in Illinois. His name didn't appear on any of them. I would ask the accused priest himself, but he died in 2009.

So this really all came down to Ryan's word. The same thing I'd spent the last two years proving couldn't be trusted. But now, he seemed genuine. I can't say that about the first time I met him, or any of the recordings I'd heard. This time, though, he was only maybe three feet away from me. You read people differently in person. My gut reaction was that this guy had been abused by someone, somewhere, at some point. As a journalist, I can't say it with certainty. There's not enough evidence.

I don't know if Father Ryan was raped. I don't know if his attackers were the people he named. But some part of me believed he is a survivor. One way some diocese have tried to deal with the fallout from the sex abuse scandal is to release the names of accused clergy. None of the people Ryan named are on these lists from Illinois. But as I'm researching, doing my reporting, I can't believe what I do find. Remember earlier when Ryan said he testified about his abuse? He did actually appear at a news conference in

Washington, D.C. I was given a copy of the speech he claimed to give. The Chicago Tribune reported he described the attack in Milwaukee. The copy of the speech I have also included Father Kuntz's murder and the church changing his identity. He talked about how everything changed for him ever since he spoke out. Quote, as a priest and a victim, it is much harder to find a place to belong. He added, I have been publicly ridiculed and my priesthood has been defamed.

Father Ryan accuses priests of abuse and the bishops of manipulating law enforcement to listen to them, not the victims. And all of it on a national stage, just as the wider institutional scandal was breaking. Hi, everyone. It's Millie here. And it's Liam.

And this is our brand new podcast, Liam and Millie. Why Liam and Millie? Because it's just us. So we are going to take you into the reality of our little love story from that very first chat on Love Island. But now we navigate in our long distance relationship. You may not know, but I live in Wales. you into the reality of our little love story from that very first chat on Love Island. But now we're navigating our long distance relationship. You may not know, but I live in Wales. And I live in Essex. So each week we'll be catching up on each other's lives. We also will be answering your relationship questions and tackling your juiciest dilemmas.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube. Why is the podcast not called Millie and Liam though? 2002 was a historic year for the Catholic Church. The Boston Globe released their spotlight investigation proving the churches in the area systematically covered up sex abuse, moving clergy from church to church. Catholic officials made another effort today to confront a scandal that has shamed and dishonored the church. And yet another apology from Boston's pulpit for failing to protect

children from a pedophile priest. The Catholic community in Massachusetts dealing now with an ugly secret that's been hidden for far too long. The view of the Vatican was shaken. All the U.S. Catholic bishops met in Washington, D.C. in November 2002. They were discussing changes to the church to deal with the sex abuse scandal. A group of victims from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests had a news conference. And it was here where Father Ryan managed to put himself in the center of that national spotlight. Of course, I was dressed in my full habit and

everything else. And one of the reporters at the time was Connie Chung. And the question she asked me was basically what you kind of just said. She said, Father, how can you stand there, dressed the way you are, tell the horrific story that you just told about what happened to you, and still be a part of that organization. All I can say is divine intervention because I have no idea where my reply came from. But my reply was very simple. I said, Connie, good priests don't become evil men. Evil men become priests, and it's time for them to go. And that headline went kind of worldwide. I haven't found that headline anywhere, not even in the articles that prove he was there. I checked with CNN where Connie Chung would have worked then. The one script available from the event didn't include Ryan, and she was not the reporter listed. After weeks of trying, I assumed this was just something

he made up. But then I found a photo. Actual proof Ryan was at the event. The picture shows Ryan standing near a bunch of microphones. He's not the one speaking, but he's standing next to the other victims. Ryan's wearing a baggy black robe and a crucifix necklace. The caption on the photo from the Associated Press says Abbott Ryan St. Ann of Pocahontas, Iowa was one of three victims to meet with reporters that day. But the guy who is the focus of the articles and speaking in the photo as Ryan watches is Mark Serrano. He became one of the public faces of the priest abuse scandal. Here he is with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.

At the age of 38, is it possible to say I am getting over it or do you never get over it? No, this is a lifelong process. Back in 2002, Mark Serrano's story of abuse was featured on page one of the New York Times and even aired on Oprah. So you broke the silence because the silence was killing you. I broke the silence because no one made it right. I noticed something when I watched Mark's interview on Oprah. He used an awfully similar phrase.

Here he is. I don't think priests become pedophiles. I think pedophiles become priests. Remember what Ryan said he told Connie Chung? I said, Connie, good priests don't become evil men. Evil men become priests. We'll never know who said it first, but the phrases sound a lot alike. What struck me, though, was that Father Ryan said he was abused by priests, and yet he became a man of the cloth. In fact, he says it is one of the main reasons he wanted to join the priesthood. The church didn't hurt me. Evil men in the church did. And I think that is my saving grace as far as wanting even more and harder to hang on to my vocation and not let it destroy me. I'll be honest, as I sat across from him, it was hard to keep it all in my head. Was I listening to a man explain how his childhood abuse affected his life?

Or a con man pretending to be a priest fabricate his origin story? I tried to keep both possibilities in my head as we continued. And then, Ryan accuses yet another man of being part of that group of priests who attacked him in Milwaukee, Cardinal Raymond Burke. He was one of them in the room that raped me. Really? Yes. Burke was a name I knew. He's the bishop who first sent out a press release warning people not to join Ryan's First Abbey back in Wisconsin.

Burke worked his way up to the position of Cardinal and is based in Europe. But as with the other accusations, it's hard to confirm that Burke abused Ryan either. Ryan claimed to have evidence and even recordings of Burke discussing the abuse with him. But Ryan never shared the alleged tapes. After sexual abuse survivors spoke out in 2002 at their news conference, a few investigations were launched. The Chicago Tribune reported law enforcement and the Catholic Church looked into Ryan's rape accusations because of that news conference.

The cops and the church found nothing. But neither of those institutions seem reliable when it comes to dealing with crimes within the church. As I'm looking into this, I thought back on the conversation I'd had with Ryan's son, Jonathan. He told me how hard it was to get an investigator to look into his dad. No one will touch this with a 20-foot fucking pole, because it's got the word fucking religion or church. Jonathan doesn't believe his dad's stories of abuse, but he's open to the idea something could have happened.

In a way, I feel nothing but pity for the fucking man. I have to say, this was such a bizarre place to find myself. On one side, you have Ryan, a person evidence shows lied to people about so many things. And then on the other side, you have the Catholic Church, which is documented to have lied repeatedly. And they are lies of the worst order, fabricating their own stories about how they handled accusations of sex abuse.

If Father Ryan is right about anything, he is rightfully angry about that. The church went awry so fast and so quick that most Catholics, I think, didn't understand it. Why can't they simply accept the fact that mistakes were made, correct it, and go on? But they can't, because they continue to do it, and they continue to get away with it, and they continue to influence secular authority. This comment is almost crazily meta, or at least shockingly self-aware. Ryan clearly sees the power that being a priest can give you both in the religious and secular worlds. This has been going on for over 20 years. It's been made public. And you get promise after promise. And I mean, the bishops in the U.S.C.B. have done such a tremendous job

and hired some of the most expensive PR people there are in the world, and they make all these promises and do nothing. It's almost too much. These accusations are practically identical to the ones his former followers make against Ryan, that he uses his religion to avoid punishment in the secular world. He makes promises to followers, but doesn't come through. And then, as we keep talking, the conversation takes yet another unexpected turn. As he makes his way through his accusations of abuse,

the Catholic Church's cover-up, the National News Conference, Ryan manages to connect every part of it to murder. At the beginning of this interview, I sat back and just listened to Father Ryan. He was sharing a heart-wrenching graphic story about being abused by priests as a kid, and I had shown up to ask some tough questions. Before we were sitting in this room, I knew Ryan had made accusations of sexual abuse, but I'd never heard him tell the stories. They were really hard to hear. I wasn't going to parse through dates and times and hammer on his details. Victims of rape and trauma often have fragmented memories.

But I felt I needed to at least ask him to respond to the people who say none of the abuse happened. That Chicago Tribune article I mentioned earlier said even other victim-survivor groups looked into Father Ryan's claims and found nothing. And so how do you respond to the police and the church members and the church as an institution who say the specific events that you just described could not have occurred? Well, if they did their investigation, they'd find out they did.

One of the things that happened, and very sadly, my spiritual director and co-founder of the monastery, Father Alfred Koontz, was brutally murdered. When I went to Washington, D.C., I was not the one that was supposed to go. Father Koontz was supposed to go. And a couple weeks before he was supposed to go, he was brutally murdered in his church in Dane, Wisconsin. Which is not true. Father Koontz was murdered in Wisconsin. Which is not true. Father Kuntz was murdered in 1998. The event Ryan would have spoken at happened in 2002. That's more than a couple of weeks before. Also, this was the first

time I'd heard him claim Father Kuntz co-founded his monastery. He was jumbling facts and starting to sound like the Father Ryan that I'd heard in court proceedings, the kind of man who couldn't get his name straight. And here he is again, working to connect himself to Father Kuntz, like he had in his autobiography. I was interviewed several times by the sheriff's department, as were hundreds of priests, anyone that had any contact with him. I had contact with him probably three or four times a week, if not more. I mean, they took hair samples, saliva

samples, skin samples. I mean, they took samples of everything they could possibly find. Ryan then connects the murder back to the same man he accused of attacking him in Milwaukee, Cardinal Burke. You know, and everything, if you really want to study the history of everything that's on the computer, you're going to drop it all right back down to Raymond L. Burke. By on the computer, Ryan means the internet. Burke did all he could to spread word about Ryan. He was the bishop behind the nationwide warning that alerted every diocese in America to be on the lookout for Ryan Scott. I reached out to Cardinal Burke, which included calling the Vatican press office.

Hi, my name is Alex Schumann. I'm a reporter calling from the United States. But I never heard back. Monsignor Michael Gorman defended Burke. This is what he told me about Ryan's claim. Then regarding an incident that he alleges happened in the cathedral in Milwaukee, and that he was put under a pontifical secret, that's why he cannot ever divulge anything about it. Well, that's all baloney, too.

Gorman is indelicate here. But it's clear he doesn't believe Father Ryan was raped in Milwaukee by Burke or any other priest. But Father Ryan says Gorman and Burke tried to discredit him because he spoke out about being a survivor. They're afraid that I might talk. To tell the stories. To tell my story. And so they have to run me through the gutter so that anybody that would say anything, well, who's he? I mean, if you look at everything on the internet internet and God knows, there's pages. Ryan's talked multiple times. What he's saying here is that in order to get him to stop talking and stay quiet, Raymond Burke spread lies online that Ryan is a fake.

So, you know, he can stand up there and lie all he wants. But if Raymond L. Burt does not come back to the United States and right the wrong he's done, not only to me, but to hundreds of other victims of clerical sex abuse, he can go straight to hell. If he's telling the truth, these accusations of sex abuse and cover-up in the church, they are the reason, it seems, Father Ryan was so intent on inserting himself into the

stories of those dead priests, insisting he was the hero who worked to call out crimes, that he tried to stop a pedophile priest and get out the truth. Maybe he wanted justice for his own pain, even if it was delayed. But I can't get inside his head. Ryan offers an endless number of examples of how Cardinal Burke and the entire Catholic Church have worked against him. This is the story he told Patricia Baldridge, Sheila Anderson, Maria Brown, and now me. He writes about these accusations at length. He says the church discredits him as a priest because he spoke out as a survivor of abuse. But what's crazy is that I still kind of believe it.

At least, parts of the story. I do really think he was abused. But his storytelling ability has me also thinking in this interview, even if it was just for a second, maybe the conspiracy is real. But then, I remember the other problem with this part of the story. He's not an ordained Catholic priest. No seminary, no training, none of it. I'd been thrown by how the interview began, but I was determined to still get answers. And I do. Next time on the final episode of Fake Priest, I'll ask Ryan why he calls himself a priest. I want to just take a minute here.

Absolutely. Because my priesthood has been questioned. And I ask him to answer his victims. Many people feel that they've been wronged by you. Either they gave you money, that... They've done that at the behest of the bishops. That seems very far-fetched. What do you mean?

What will it take for Father Ryan to be held to account for his crimes. He's got old-time religion There is his cash in a coffee can and he makes his decisions down on his knees. He's a full grown man and he...

Fake Priest is a production of Neon Home Media. It is reported and hosted by me, Alex Schumann. The executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Natalie Wann. The executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Natalie Wren. Associate producer is Kate Mishkin. Catherine St. Louis is our editor. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Thanks to Matt McGinley for our theme music, sound design, and additional original compositions by Jesse Pearlstein. And the song you're hearing now is

Old Time Religion by Parker Millsap. Our engineer is Scott Somerville. Special thanks to Peter Manseau and Vikram Patel.