by Jerome Wilde
St. Konrad’s was home to about one hundred priests and brothers and a boys’ school, both grade school and high school levels. St. Konrad’s also housed a seminary for young men wanting to become priests. Another property, located down the road from St. Konrad’s, housed about one hundred nuns and a school for girls. Children at these schools received a “proper Catholic education” away from the influences of “godless secular education.” Catholic parents were obligated to give their child a “proper” education or risk that child’s eternal damnation.
“What do you think?” Daniel asked, looking up at me.
“Definitely one to check out,” I replied.
He kept searching. We came across another group with similar facilities right in Kansas City itself under the auspices of Archbishop Lefebvre. It included the convent we’d visited yesterday, a church down on 48th and Main Street, and schools in St. Mary’s, Kansas.
“This is the group that nun belongs to, right?” Daniel said.
I nodded.
“Should we check it out?”
“Put it on the list, but it’s not a priority. They don’t fit our profile. They don’t go around calling themselves true Catholics and all that, and they don’t have facilities for religious brothers, so that counts out Earl Whitehead. Keep looking. But it’s a possibility.”
Despite his best efforts, he could not turn up any other group aside from St. Konrad’s, at least not in the state of Missouri. There were all sorts of “mass centers,” places where Mass was celebrated on Sunday mornings—bank basements, hotel rooms, even individual homes. But there were no other groups with the sort of facilities that could accommodate Whitehead and our victim—a monastery and a school or seminary program for a young person.
“I think we need to pay a visit to Chillicothe,” I said to Daniel, “if only to cross it off the list. It’s the closest candidate, and we might get lucky. If not, we may have to call in the Feds since they can go across state lines. Anyway, we’ll check them out. If we don’t get no joy, we’ll drive over to St. Mary’s and see what’s going on over there. It’s a place to start.”
“If there’s driving involved, I think I should be the one to do it,” Daniel said.
“Knock yourself out.”
IV
IT was a pleasant drive. We saw many of the famed hills of Missouri, their trees heavy with brilliant reds and oranges. Fields stood empty now, the season’s corn plowed under, the ground ready for winter. The sky was streaked with clouds.
Chillicothe was way out of my jurisdiction. As a homicide detective, I had the right to track a suspected killer anywhere I pleased. It was good form, though, to coordinate with local authorities so people wouldn’t feel their toes were being stepped on. So our first stop was at the Chillicothe police station, where we were ushered into the office of Sergeant Randy Grubbs, the man in charge.
“What can I do for you boys?” he asked, speaking with a heavy Southern drawl.
“We’re investigating the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy,” I explained, wondering if it would be worth the effort to point out that I was no longer a “boy” myself. “We think he might have gotten involved with a Catholic cult. We did a bit of research on the Internet and stumbled across a place called St. Konrad’s, in your neck of the woods. Guess I was wondering if you knew anything about them.”
He bit at his lips and shook his head.
“Does that mean no?” I asked.
“It means those folks at St. Konrad’s ain’t folks you want to be messing with.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Well, Lieutenant, I’ve gotten lots of complaints over the years about those folks.”
“What kind of complaints?”
He leaned back in his chair, seeming reluctant to discuss the matter.
“I have reason to believe that both the killer and the victim met at a place like St. Konrad’s,” I said. “Anything you could tell me would be helpful in figuring out what happened to this boy who got himself killed.”
“Would that be the ‘crucified kid’ the media folks are talking about?” he asked.
I nodded.
He nodded his own head and sighed, still seeming reluctant.
“I don’t want to be stepping on anyone’s toes,” I said, trying to reassure him. Small town cops could be very territorial.
“It ain’t that,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It’s just that there was a complaint filed a couple of months ago about these folks. Story is they nailed some kid to a cross as punishment for something or other.”
“Nailed a kid to a cross?”
“Kind of an ugly thing, I tell you. But the kid submitted to it voluntarily, so there wasn’t much to be done about it. I mean, we only heard about it after the fact from an anonymous source, and neither the kid nor his family were interested in pressing charges. Told us, in fact, it was none of our business.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Well, weren’t much we could do, like I said. Turned it over to the social services people. One of the social workers started an investigation of the place for suspected child abuse.”
“What about this kid?” I asked. “He have a name?”
“Sure does. Or sure did. Hanged himself about a month ago. Alan Dobsen. Seventeen.”
“Hanged himself?”
“At St. Konrad’s. Yessiree. From the choir loft in the main chapel.”
“Then what?”
“Well, it ain’t a crime to hang yourself, is it?”
No, it was not.
“And this anonymous person who reported it: that person have a name?”
“Sure does.”
“And?”
“Well, can’t give it to you. Was very specific about that. Didn’t want to get in trouble with St. Konrad’s for ratting on them.”
“I’d like to talk to this person, if I could.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“What about the other complaints?”
He offered another deep sigh, whether in annoyance, frustration, or boredom, I couldn’t tell. “Complaints about kids, mostly,” he said. “Excessive punishments. Or kids who have run off and joined this group and their parents are trying to get them back. Kids, young people, late teens, in their twenties—parents want to talk to them, but the folks at St. Konrad’s won’t let them, so they come to us, wanting to know what we can do. If the child in question is a minor, we can ride on out there and try to get St. Konrad’s to produce him. If he’s of legal age, there ain’t nothing we can do. If the child don’t want to speak to his parents, that really isn’t our business. Stuff like that, mostly. If the child is a minor, we’ve got more options, but that’s only happened once or twice. Anyway, none of my guys like going out there—place sort of gives you the creeps. And those priests are impossible to deal with. Think they know more about the law than we do, always screaming about their rights, always threatening to sue us for harassment. We’ve found the best course of action is just to stay away unless we have some valid reason to approach them. And then, even when we do, we have to get legal advice beforehand to make sure we don’t open ourselves up to the possibility of a lawsuit. Those are some nasty folks at that place, let me tell you.”
“Sounds like a religious cult,” I said.
“You ain’t the first to say that,” he replied. “But they pay their bills and don’t mess with you unless you mess with them, so we try to leave them alone. The last thing we want around here is something like Waco.”
Perfectly understandable.
“Do you know someone named Earl Whitehead?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“We’re going to poke around,” I said, warning him. “I need to try to establish some connection between this place and my murder victim, and if I can, then I’ll get a search warrant, see if that turns up anything. Just so you know.”
“I understand,” he said agreeably. “And we’ll do whatever we can to be helpful.
I’ll go out with you, if you like.”
“Appreciate it,” I said.
He stood, as if to go with us that very moment, then frowned. “I’ll tell you what,” he said slowly. “Earl Whitehead… that name rings a bell, but what bell, I couldn’t say.”
“Do you know him?”
“No, can’t say I do. In my line of work, though, I’ve got a million names to think about—missing kids, wanted suspects, outstanding warrants, felons, sex offenders, the whole kit and kaboodle. But now that you’ve mentioned it, that name….”
“Sound familiar to you?”
“Well, I guess it does.”
“Is your department computerized?” Daniel asked.
“They’re working on it, from what I hear,” Grubbs replied.
“So there’s no quick way to search your records?”
“I’m not much good with computers.”
“Where’s the county courthouse?”
“Just across the street. Why?”
“Just a hunch,” Daniel said. “Boss, care to come with?”
Daniel Qo was clearly onto something.
“Sure,” I said. To Grubbs, I added, “We may be back in a little bit.”
“I’ll be here,” Grubbs vowed. “Whitehead may have been mentioned in a report filed under someone else’s name. I’ll look through my own files.”
Daniel led me across the street to the county courthouse, an imposing affair that was extremely energy inefficient. The staff were polite.
“Do you have a public records terminal?” Daniel asked the woman at the reception desk.
“We do,” she said. “Second floor. Next to the tags office.”
We went upstairs and found the terminal, which was situated on a desk.
Daniel sat down. “Legal cases,” he said, “are usually available for public inspection now at public access terminals. Freedom of information. Some courthouses have all the records available. Some don’t. Some have civil suits, whatnot. It’s worth a shot.”
He did a search for Earl Whitehead.
“Shit,” I muttered when the man’s name popped up.
“Bingo,” Qo added with a smile.
Earl Whitehead had been named in an alienation of affection civil suit brought against St. Konrad’s two years previous by a man who claimed the group had broken up his family. The man was suing for damages. Whitehead was listed as one of the religious brothers who had helped convince the man’s wife to leave her husband and join the convent.
At St. Konrad’s, Whitehead apparently went by the name of “Brother Boniface.”
“I smell grounds for a search warrant,” Qo said happily. “Is there a judge in the house?”
V
ST. KONRAD’S was located at the end of a dirt road on a heavily-wooded hill about two miles outside Chillicothe. It had once been a Benedictine monastery. After Vatican II, most of the monks had abandoned their vocations and the property was sold to a traditionalist group led by a man named Bishop James, who styled himself as the only valid Roman Catholic bishop left on the face of the planet.
Such a claim was breath-taking, a Big Lie, one of the biggest I’d ever encountered.
“Why do people believe this nonsense?” Daniel asked as we drove down the dirt road leading to St. Konrad’s, following Grubbs and his men.
“There’s no accounting for what people believe,” I replied. “Anyone who’s ever picked up a book on comparative religion could tell you that. People believe what they want to believe, and no amount of facts are going to get in the way. In fact, when it comes to religion, the more fact-free, the better, or sometimes I think.”
“But to call yourselves the only true Catholics in the entire world? Surely people can see through that.”
“Apparently not. Not if it suits their needs.”
“How does it suit their needs?” he asked.
“When it comes to religion, we have a funny habit of believing things that make us feel better about ourselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“Heaven,” I said, “is a good example. When someone dies, we want to believe they went to a better place. We want to deny their death, deny its finality. We want to pretend that life goes on, in some other way, in some nice place like heaven. It’s very self-serving.”
“So what’s the payoff for believing you’re the only true Catholics?”
“That’s the oldest sin of all. Pride. Spiritual pride. Believing that you’re better than others. Believing that you’re enlightened, you’re smart, you’re in the know, and everyone else is stumbling about blindly in the darkness. The old us-versus-them. My group is better than your group. My people, my nation, my country, my religion, my gender, my sexual orientation. Old as sin. And it’s a Big Lie. The bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe it.”
“But what does it mean to be a true Catholic? As opposed to what? A false Catholic?”
“Exactly. They’re true, everyone else is false. They’re saved, everyone else is damned. They’re right, everyone else is wrong. They’re special, they’re privileged, they’re in the know—everyone else has been deceived. Waco, Jamestown—it’s all the same story.”
“That’s why they assigned this case to you, isn’t it? Because it’s about religion.”
“You’re sharp as a tack, Mr. Qo.”
We arrived at the gates to St. Konrad’s and parked behind the Chillicothe police cruisers.
The gates were rather large, and there was a guardhouse next to them. A monk sat inside. He eyed us suspiciously.
Grubbs showed him the search warrant for Earl Whitehead, aka Brother Boniface.
“You want to arrest one of our brothers?” the monk asked, incredulous.
“He’s wanted in connection with the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in Kansas City,” I said. “Could you open the gates, please?”
He looked from me to Daniel Qo to Chief Grubbs and his gaggle of deputies as if trying to judge whether or not this was a joke. It was not. Reluctantly, he unlocked the gates and let us in.
St. Konrad’s was set on a hill, reminding me of the biblical metaphor of a city set on a hill—“let your light shine before men.” St. Konrad’s was not shining, though; it was dark and somber, a huge four-story building with several smaller buildings scattered on the periphery. It looked more like an ancient fortress than a monastery, and seemed far quieter than it ought to be, as if only ghosts walked its halls. If it housed a hundred monks and priests, not to mention a boy’s school with hundreds of pupils, it gave no sign of it.
The main building had a large, white cross on top of it, thrusting itself proudly into the sky. The building was made of dark red brick and had two large wings stretching to the left and the right. The numerous windows seemed like eyes looking back at us, full of questions. In the silence, our feet sounded heavy and clumsy on the sidewalk that snaked through lawns littered with dead leaves and dying flower beds.
It was certainly a peaceful environment, and if one wanted to escape the world, this would be the perfect place to do it.
The monk we followed had not introduced himself. He led us, in complete silence, to the main entrance and gestured that we should show ourselves inside. He hurried off back to his post, his black cassock flapping around his ankles.
We climbed a set of stone stairs and went inside. I was struck by the austerity of the atmosphere: the walls were dark, drab. Aside from a large statue of the Virgin Mary, there were no other decorations in the small lobby, and nowhere to sit, either. It was not a place designed with comfort in mind. Off the lobby were several offices, and we caught glimpses of monks sitting at desks, talking quietly on phones, typing documents, giving us furtive glances.
“This is a cheerful place,” Daniel said.
“Just keep your wits about you.”
There was a commotion in the porter’s office: doors opening, sudden voices. The porter appeared with another man behind him, a priest wearing a black cassock, a Roman collar, and black pl
astic glasses, who introduced himself as Father Alexius.
“We have a search warrant for Earl Whitehead, also known as Brother Boniface, who’s wanted in connection with the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in Kansas City,” Grubbs said rather gruffly. “I’d appreciate it if you would produce this brother immediately. If you can’t produce him, we have a search warrant that gives us the right to look over the property.”
“I’d like to help you, but I’m afraid I can’t,” Father Alexius replied. He adjusted his glasses nervously. He looked like something out of the 1950s.
Grubbs glanced at me as if to ask what he should do next.
“And why is that?” I asked.
“Brother Boniface took a student to Kansas City on Friday and hasn’t returned.”
“Was that student Frankie Peters, by any chance?”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“Because he’s the boy whose murder we’re investigating.”
Father Alexius frowned at this bit of information. “There must be some sort of mistake.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t.”
“You’re investigating his murder?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I don’t understand.”
He was either very good at acting, or was genuinely, unpleasantly, surprised.
“You’re not aware of the death of Frankie Peters?”
He shook his head.
Of course, they didn’t watch television, didn’t read newspapers, wouldn’t know what was going on in the world.
“If you can’t produce the suspect, then we will start our search,” I said.
“You are free to search wherever you like,” he said. “We have nothing to hide.”
“Then we’ll get started.”
Grubbs summoned the other officers.
Father Alexius began to walk away, but I took hold of his arm. “I’d like you to conduct a tour for our benefit. We’d like to see the cloister area first.”
“Of course,” he said. “Whatever you need.”
