Billy Doe Prosecutor: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Investigation

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Bernard Shero got out of jail yesterday. "He's home and we are so happy!!!" his mother wrote in a text.

But the question remains: Why did the scandal-plagued Philadelphia District Attorney's office decide to let a convicted child rapist out of prison 11 1/2 years early? The D.A.'s office isn't talking, but the facts are they only did it after one of their own, retired Detective Joseph Walsh, came forward with damaging accusations of prosecutorial misconduct.

When the D.A. cut their deal with Shero, Walsh was one of the witnesses scheduled to take the stand this fall in another hearing before Judge Ellen Ceisler on Shero's petition for a new trial under the Post-Conviction Relief Act. Now, thanks to that deal the D.A. cut, Walsh won't be making any appearances on behalf of Shero. But the D.A.'s office isn't out of the woods just yet.

Msgr. William J. Lynn, the lead defendant in the so-called "Billy Doe" sex abuse case, is still scheduled to be retried, pending a couple of appeals in state Superior Court over some pretrial rulings in the Lynn case. And unless the D.A.'s office cuts another deal with Lynn, retired Detective Walsh will be taking the stand as the monsignor's star witness, to give another dissertation on the prosecutorial misconduct in the D.A.'s office that he witnessed up close and personal.

A recently released court transcript reveals the D.A.'s defense against Walsh's accusations, and it basically amounts to a comedy skit that was openly met with disbelief by an incredulous judge. But the transcript also contains some damaging admissions from the lead prosecutor about the so-called Billy Doe "investigation." It's a primer on the the legal perils of trying to defend a case after one of your own team members has come forward to blow the whistle.

Memo to interim D.A. Kelley Hodge : it might be high time to cut a deal with Msgr. Lynn and spare the scandal-plagued D.A.'s office further embarrassment. Before this entire travesty goes up in flames on a national stage, namely a retrial of Msgr. Lynn.

Before the D.A.'s office moved to shut down the circus over Shero's PCRA petition, Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington tried to shoot his way out.

At a June 8th PCRA hearing before Judge Ceisler, Blessington decided his only defense was to attack Detective Walsh's credibility, but the volatile prosecutor wound up inflicting more damage on the D.A.'s office than he did on Walsh.

Blessington, the lead prosecutor in the Lynn case, got things rolling by trying to imply that the D.A.'s office couldn't wait to cross-examine Walsh at a future PCRA  hearing.

"I had a pile of information to cross-examine Joe Walsh with, who by the way, was not brought in to investigate the case," Blessington declared. "The investigation had been completed. There had been an arrest. He was brought in for trial preparation."

Blessington further alleged that if there was any prosecutorial misconduct during trial prep, it was Walsh's fault.

"So Detective Walsh, who, by the way, if there is a violation here, he is the violator," Blessington declared. "No one is going to make him this violator and this hero; if there was egregious miscarriage of justice based upon a failure, it was Joe Walsh's -- Detective Walsh's failure. Let's not lose sight of that."

 George Bochetto, a lawyer defending Shero, pointed to a 12-page affidavit filed by Walsh in Common Pleas Court that detailed the prosecutorial misconduct that he witnessed.

"The affidavit," Bochetto told the judge. "He [Walsh] was pleading with the Commonwealth's lawyers about these problems. I was urging them to re-look at this and reconsider this, and they kept saying that you are trying to kill the case."

Bochetto then pointed out that if Blessington is right about the misconduct being Walsh's fault, "It doesn't matter" because "Walsh is part of the Commonwealth." Bochetto then proceeded to attack the rest of of Blessington's argument.

"We do not concede to the Commonwealth's characterization that was just about trial prep," Bochetto said.

"This is Mr. Walsh who was brought in after the indictment to try to go get the evidence that would support the story of Danny Gallagher," Bochetto said. "And this was a series of meetings over time where Detective was trying to A, understand what Danny Galalagher was saying, and B, square it with what he could objectively find as facts."

"And that's where the tension began to grow and grow, which eventually led to the prosecution saying that you are trying to kill my case," Bochetto said.

"This was an attempt to build the prosecution's case," Bochetto told the judge. "Many of these things of Detective Walsh's decidedly and profoundly upset about not having been disclosed, took place not as trial prep, but as an investigation."

What Blessington referred to as trial prep was a session that lasted some three hours before the Lynn trial where Detective Walsh repeatedly questioned Danny Gallagher the lying scheming altar boy about nine key factual discrepancies in his testimony. And Gallagher's responses, according to Walsh, varied from putting his head down and saying nothing, to claiming he was high on drugs, or to inventing new stories of abuse.

And none of this was ever disclosed to the defense. This is the prosecutorial misconduct alleged by Detective Walsh. It was serious enough in the Lynn case to prompt Judge Gwendolyn Bright to announce from the bench that Lynn would have gotten a new trial because of that prosecutorial misconduct, if an appeals court had not already granted him a new trial.

At the PCRA hearing on the Shero case before Judge Ceisler, Bochetto got in a  few more licks.

"Detective Walsh is part of the Commonwealth's team," Bochetto pointed out. "Detective Walsh comes forward, issues an affidavit, gets on a witness stand and testifies under oath that the Commonwealth improperly withheld a lot of this information, and particularly Danny Gallagher's reactions and explanations as to what was going on and the inconstancies, was all withheld."

"And I, Detective Walsh, am going to step forward as a former decorated member of the Commonwealth, their team, and say this is wrong," Bochetto said. "This should not have taken place."

Jeff Ogren, another lawyer for Shero, pointed out that Burt Rose, Shero's trial attorney, said "over and over that we had no idea Danny Gallagher was tested so strongly by the detective on all these inconsistencies, so we never knew what his reactions were."

"Judge, the only I was trying to say is, we disagree strenuously that this was simply trial prep," Bochetto said. "This was a lot more than trial prep."

Blessington blamed Walsh for any possible misconduct, saying the detctive had given several conflicting versions of how his trial prep went down with Gallagher.

The judge went along with the prosecutor's argument, and proceeded to hang him with it.

"Even though the Commonwealth might not have committed any prosecutorial misconduct, maybe the detective did," the judge suggested, referencing the possibility that Walsh didn't tell the prosecutors about what went down in his trial prep session with Gallagher.

Given that opening, Blessington decided it was a good time to take a shot at one of his own team members.

"What is also to consider is Detective Walsh's credibility," Blessington said.

Bochetto cut in.

"Let's say that Mr. Blessington is right" that it's Joe Walsh fault, Bochetto said. "I'd disagree with that severe of a characterization, but let's give him [Blessington] the benefit of the doubt for this argument."

Blessington should have kept talking. When your opponent is agreeing with you, he could be ready to stick a knife in your back.

"Whose problem is that," Bochetto asked the judge about any possible misconduct committed by Detective Walsh.

"It's certainly not Mr. Shero's problem," Bochetto said. "It's not our problem. It's the Commonwealth's problem. This is their investigator. This is the main guy who was putting the case together to put Mr. Shero in jail forever. If he [Blessington] wants to march Joe Walsh in and say at that time you said this and that time you said that, whose problem is that Judge?"

"If there were these types of shenanigans," Bochetto said, whether it was Walsh's fault, or the prosecution's, "we are not here to defend that," Bochetto said. "We are not here to justify it."

"It's a corruption of the system," Bochetto said. "It's not the way this system, particularly in a case of this significance, is supposed to work."

"If Mr. Blessington wants to march Mr. Walsh in here and say what's lacking credibility" is the detective himself, and "how he mishandled this, and how falsified his testimony here and there, and he [Walsh] was the main pillar of their investigation and prosecution of Mr. Shero, whose door step should that fall on?" Bochetto asked.

Blessington spoke up.

"And Detective Walsh, as I said, and I will repeat, he was brought in primarily for trial preparation," Blessington insisted.

That's when the judge got involved.

"Why didn't you bring him [Walsh] in to start questioning all the witnesses related to Shero and Engelhardt," the judge asked.

Here, Blessington made a statement that prompted an incredulous reaction from the judge, and the audience.

"He did that on his own apparently, Your Honor," Blessington said about the investigation conducted by Walsh.

"He did that on his own?" the judge responded in amazement. "In Hagler and Clopp and all these folks, he did that on his own?"

Louise Hagler was one of two archdiocese social workers who interviewed Danny Gallagher about his initial wild allegations of abuse, shortly after he called in on the archdiocese hotline to make a complaint. Donna Clopp was Gallagher's second-grade teacher at St. Jerome's.

Blessington began backtracking.

"I wasn't there when most of that was going on," Blessington said. "I was detailed to Harrisburg."

"But what I'm saying is, this representation of Joe Walsh as being the leading investigator, this defendant was arrested because a grand jury issued  presentment recommending the charges against him," Blessington said.

"It was the grand jury that was responsible for the arrest, not Joe Walsh. He didn't come into it -- and I think [Assistant District Attorney Mariana "You're killing my case"] Sorensen would say that Joe is giving all these inconsistent statements, she's asking him to do other things that he is not doing."

"There may have been an agenda," Blessington added, on the part of Walsh. "I don't know. But what I do know, Your Honor, is there is a burden here on the defense to prove it. That's why his [Walsh's] credibility is at issue, it's their burden."

Here we have the spectacle of the lead prosecutor in the Msgr. Lynn case trying to destroy the credibility of his own lead investigator.

"I understand that," the judge said about the defense's burden. "But I'm kind of intrigued to hear that Walsh might have been kind of doing things on his own."

"I don't think anybody said, hey, Detective Walsh, go out and interview these people," Blessington continued. "I don't think anybody told him to do that . . . He testified twice, and he never said that he received any direction from any of the prosecution."

Time out.

We interrupt this story to point out that this is an amazing declaration from the lead prosecutor in the Lynn case. Here, Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington is stating that the prosecution didn't need to do any further investigation after a faulty grand jury probe led by a rookie prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Mariana "You're Killing My Case" Sorensen, who had never previously prosecuted a traffic stop.

After the grand jury issued its faulty report, a report I found more than 20 factual mistakes in, mistakes that have never been corrected or addressed by the D.A.s office in the past five years, Detective Walsh went out and conducted the only real investigation in the entire Danny Gallagher/Billy Doe case.

Here you have a case that rests solely on the completely uncorroborated accusations of Danny Gallagher. There is no medical or physical evidence to back Gallagher's claims that more than a decade earlier, he had been brutally raped by three different assailants -- two priests and a schoolteacher. And nobody saw or heard a thing. There is no witness to corroborate what Gallagher is claiming.

Here, Blessington is saying, we don't need no stinkin' investigation. We already have all the evidence that we need, the totally uncorroborated accusations of Danny Gallagher. That's all we need to indict a bunch of Catholic priests and a school teacher for sex crimes.

So, according to Blessington's INSANE argument, the D.A.'s office didn't need Detective Walsh to go out to the scene of the crime, where an alleged multiple rape spree occurred, and interview the only possible witnesses.

Danny Gallagher's teachers at St. Jerome's. The priests and nuns at the school and church, the sexton at the church who cleaned up after Mass and locked up the church. No, in a case where the fate of four men rests entirely on the credibility of a single accuser, we don't need to know what anybody who knew him thinks or saw or may have witnessed.

Detective Walsh conducted 21 interviews, mostly with nuns, teachers, and priests at St. Jerome's. He interviewed Donna Clopp, Billy Doe's second-grade teacher who described him as a "happy kid" who "liked attention." Clopp was also a member of the bell choir who pointed out that Danny Gallagher couldn't be telling the truth when he claimed to have been a member of the bell choir maintenance crew.

Gallagher had claimed that he was accosted as a fifth grader by Father Avery, after he was putting the bells away after a bell choir concert. But Clopp, as did several other teachers at the school, told Detective Walsh that only eight-grade boys were big and strong enough to lift the heavy tables and bells to set up for the concerts.

And that it was the bell choir members themselves who put away the bells and tables after the concert, not the eighth-graders who had already gone home for the night.

It was Detective Walsh who interviewed Margaret Long, the church music director, who confirmed what Clopp said. "I read the grand jury report," Long told the detective. "The information contained int the grand jury report concerning the bell choir could not have happened."

Because the bells and tables each weighed more than 30 pounds, and 10-year-old Danny Gallagher the fifth-grader only weighed 63 pounds.

It was Detective Walsh who interviewed James Gallagher Jr., Danny Gallagher's older brother, who was also an altar boy at St. Jerome's. James Jr. said he never saw or witnessed any abuse. He also contradicted his younger brother by saying it was the church sexton who put away the sacramental wine after Mass, and not the altar boys.

Danny Gallagher had claimed he was attacked by Father Charles Engelhardt, while he was putting away the sacramental wine after Mass.

Danny Gallagher also claimed that after he had been raped by Fathers Engelhardt and Edward Avery, he switched Masses with other altar boys to avoid his attackers. But James Gallagher Jr. told Detective Walsh that he never switched Masses with his brother, and furthermore, that switching Masses was hard to pull off because he would need the approval of his parents and the pastor.

The older brother also contradicted Danny's stories that Father Engelhardt locked all four doors to the sacristy when he allegedly raped poor Danny. But Danny's older brother told Detective Walsh one of those doorways in the sacristy led to the dressing room for the priests, and it was always kept open.

[No wonder the prosecution managed to basically hide Danny's older brother during the Engelhardt-Shero trial, even though the jury sent the judge a note asking why they didn't hear from him.]

But according to Blessington, there was no need to know any of that. Because we had already indicted and arrested three priests and a school teacher on false charges.

Let's return to the PCRA hearing on Shero, where Blessington was still attacking Detective Walsh.

"He [Walsh] didn't tell anybody about this [prep] session and he never expressed these misgivings until he says that . . .," Blessington said, until the judge interrupted him.

"What you're possibly saying is that his actions were very improper," the judge said. "And they [the prosecutors] didn't know about it. And I'm not saying that your actions were improper, but I'm saying he might be the one who tainted this, in all aspects."

"I'm not saying his [Walsh's] actions and investigation were improper," Blessington responded. "What I'm saying is, if he had all the information that he claims to have gotten as detailed in this affidavit, and he [Walsh] didn't tell anybody about it, if there is a violation, its his violation. That's all I'm saying.

"His violation," the judge repeated. But it still might have precluded a fair trial. We might be getting into an after discovered evidence situation here."

Here, Blessington repeated a false charge against Detective Walsh, first uttered by the judge in this hearing, but undoubtedly fed to her by somebody in the prosecution. The false charge: that Walsh was allegedly and improperly contacting Mike McGovern, Father Engelhardt's lawyer, before the trial where he and Shero were convicted of rape.

 "As the court pointed out, he [Walsh] was feeding stuff to McGovern," Blessington said. "If McGovern had it, Shero had it. He is not going to hold things from his co-counsel."

This is a lie.

Detective Walsh pre-trial was not feeding Mike McGovern. How do we know this? As part of their PCRA investigation, Bochetto and Ogren contacted McGovern, a former assistant district attorney himself, and asked if this was true. And McGovern said no way, it never happened.

Walsh told Shero's lawyers the same thing.

Here's the proof: if Walsh had been feeding McGovern, Shero and Engelhardt would have never been convicted. Not if they had known all the stuff Walsh detailed in his 12-page affidavit.

If anybody needs proof of this, call a hearing, put McGovern on the stand, and Walsh, and see what they have to say about their so-called collusion.

It never happened. But what's amazing here is that Blessington is willing to repeat a lie to impeach Walsh. And who fed that lie to the judge in the first place?

Imagine if you're a defense lawyer in the Msgr. Lynn retrial and you've got the lead prosecutor and the lead investigator in the case against you going at each other like this. How do you lose the case?

At the PCRA hearing, Bochetto was enjoying the show.

"Judge, listen to what's going on here," Bochetto said. "On the one hand, Mr. Blessington" is "saying they [the prosecutors] had all this stuff" presumably on Walsh.

"But on the other hand," Bochetto said, "he [Blessington] is saying, Mr. Walsh was doing all this stuff on his own, and we didn't know about it. How could they have turned over what they didn't know about?"

"If there is evidence that the Commonwealth wasn't organized and didn't understand completely what Detective Walsh was up to, we get the benefit of that doubt, Judge," Bochetto said. "It's our constitutional right that was violated."

"If there is misconduct," Bochetto said, "I submit that Mr. Blessington's own statements here about Walsh, go a long way towards supporting the idea that there was something amok here."

"They [the prosecutors] didn't known everything that Walsh knew according to them," Bochetto said. "Walsh says that he turned it over and he was rebuffed. We say that none of that [information] came to us. So I just think that we need to keep our eye on the ball here."

Memo to Interim D.A. Kelly Hodge: Keep your eye on the ball here. The entire credibility of the Billy Doe prosecution, and what's left of the credibility of the D.A.'s office, is on the line here.

Your honorable predecessor, Rufus Seth Williams, the sponsor of the Billy Doe witch hunt, is sitting in solitary confinement awaiting his sentencing on political corruption charges Oct. 24th. What a legacy. And what a headache he's left you with, that pesky and now potentially embarrassing retrial of Msgr. Lynn.

Where all the office's dirty laundry will come tumbling out. Maybe even The Philadelphia Inquirer will have to cover it. Along with The New York Times, etc.

To cut a deal with Msgr. Lynn, here's the bad news, Ms. Hodge: you don't have much leverage.

Unlike Shero, Lynn's not sitting in jail. He's already served 33 months out of his 36-month jail term. Unlike Shero, the monsignor ain't pleading guilty to nothing.

So cut a deal. Declare victory, drop all the charges, and forget about the retrial.

Before everybody over there at the D.A.'s office is exposed on a national stage for perpetrating a fraud on the Commonwealth, as well as justice.