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Brutal murders, false confessions, sexual assaults, bear attacks, and disappearances take us down a rabbit hole this week and tell us why some believe there was a serial priest killer on the loose in the 80s. Welcome to Montana Murder Mysteries Season 2. I'm Blake Simonson. And I'm Angela Marshall. It feels real good to be here in 2020 and it's been a long time coming. Oh my goodness. Yes, it has. Well, after the cyber attack that we talked about several times and that locked me away from my research, I spent the last month or so trying to get it back. And now I finally have good news for you guys. I have the Murdered Priest Part 2. Finally. No, but really all...
stemmed from the work that you did on Father Kerrigan, who disappeared from Ronan in 1984, but it turned out to be so much more than just one case. Yeah, so in part one, we talked about how Lake County officials actually ended up working with New Mexico authorities because some investigators believed his disappearance was related to the brutal murder of a priest in Santa Fe two years earlier. That's right. Just to recap real quick, Father Rinaldo Rivera was murdered in 1982 when he went... to administer last rides at a gas station outside of Santa Fe in the middle of the night. His body was discovered a few days later, and his autopsy report shows one person strangled him, possibly with a coat hanger, while another person shot him. Now, Father Kerrigan went missing two years later after he left a Ronan bakery that he stopped at during a late-night jog. His body was never found, but his bloody clothes, a bent coat hanger, a bloody pillow, his car, and a blood-covered shovel were all found.
There are interesting similarities in the cases and some vast differences that have law enforcement still debating their connections to this day. And for all of those, make sure to go back and listen to part one. However, Father Rivera and Father Kerrigan are not the only priests who went missing or were murdered in the early 80s that might be related. Today, we explore the murders of two more priests in the South and the disappearance of yet another Montana priest. Then we'll discuss the outliers of a possible connected suicide and the disappearance of a Missoula teacher that some believe is related to the case of Father Kerrigan. A lot to get to. Let's dig in.
Now, for this first murder, Blake, remember there's a host of murders that we have to get to. You were actually telling me that someone was actually convicted in this case. Yeah, he actually spent 20 years behind bars. But now there's actually a large group of people that don't believe he did it. And I'll tell you why. But first, I have to give credit where credit is due once again. I got my information for today's episode from the Zulian, the Billings Gazette, Wikipedia, the New Mexican, Insider Hook, the Charlie Project, the Austin Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and KRQE in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's a mouthful. All right, let's get to it.
On December 22nd, 1981 in Odessa, Texas, a cleaning woman enters room 126 at the Sand and Sage Motel. There she finds the room is completely torn apart. There's dried blood smeared everywhere. There's holes punched in the wall. The air conditioner was dangling from the wall. The bed and table had been overturned. Clothes were strewn everywhere. The phone had been ripped from the wall and the television was smashed. And there on the floor was the body of a naked man lying face down with his hands tied behind his back with a sock. He had scrapes all over his body and one long slice wound across his buttocks.
A grizzly scene, that's for sure. Now, the man who had checked into the room at 8 p.m. the night before had used a fake name, and there was no identification on the body, so the man was labeled John Doe only until a few days later when Denver City Police put out a missing persons alert for 49-year-old Catholic priest Father Patrick Ryan. Inside Father Ryan's apartment in Denver City, investigators found a backpack, which led them to the doorstep of 25-year-old James Rios. When questioned by police, Rios told them he had known the priest for a few weeks when Father Ryan picked him up hitchhiking, although at the time, the priest had identified himself only as John.
Rios says the night before the murder, Father Ryan invited him over to the rectory, and Rios brought a photo album of pictures from his childhood that he thought the priest might like to look at. However, during the visit, Rios says Father Ryan grabbed him by the shirt collar and forced him to perform oral sex. Rios then fled the rectory, leaving his backpack with a photo album behind. But this isn't the first time Rios would see Father Ryan. He says the next day, he needed a ride to the town of Hobbs, New Mexico, to pick up his truck from a bail bondsman, and the priest was the only other person left that he could turn to. So he says, rather, Father Ryan apologized for the night before.
and agreed to give Rios a ride. Witnesses remember seeing Father Kerrigan drop off Rios at the bondsman's home office and drive away around 11.30 a.m. Rios says the next time he saw the priest's face was on the television when he learned of Father Ryan's murder. Investigators had Rios lift his shirt so they could look for signs of a fight since there were obvious signs of a big struggle at the crime scene. But the only wound they could find on Rios was a small scratch on his hand. He was also able to provide them with mounds of time-stamped receipts that detailed his entire day in New Mexico, placing him thousands of miles away from the murder scene at the time that the killing would have taken place. He even passed a polygraph test.
Now, it seems like he should have obviously been ruled out right then and there, right? Right? Well, 11 months later, 11 months later, the Austin Chronicle says that Rios had already been drinking for several days when he downed several quaaludes and made his way to a nearby payphone where he called 911. He told dispatchers he wanted to talk to the, quote, proper authorities concerning the killing of a Catholic priest in Odessa, Texas. The dispatcher testified that she asked Rios who he was, and he responded, quote, you are talking to the killer.
Officers testified that when investigators brought Rios in for questioning, they only noticed a slight smell of alcohol on him, whereas Rios' public defender says that he was obviously intoxicated and just kept repeating the sentence, in the name of God, I didn't do this. But police say Rios admitted to slicing the priest with a razor in the hotel room, and it was that 911 recorded confession that ultimately led a jury to find Rios guilty of murder and sentenced him to 38 years in prison. 20 years after his conviction, in 1983, Rios was released on parole. Even after getting out of prison, Rios maintained his innocence and fought to have his name cleared. Now, of course, there were people who said, well, why would he admit to something he didn't do? Today, we know that false confessions are a very real thing and cause a lot of problems for investigators. Rails told the Houston Chronicle that he said it because he was consumed by guilt, thinking that if he hadn't asked Father Ryan for a ride that day, he might have lived. And there will be people who say, well, if he's not the killer, then how did he know that the priest was cut with a razor? While it could be a revealing fact that his confession is true, we do need to remember that his confession was nearly a year later, and this piece of information might have been public knowledge by then.
Now, there's also the matter of physical evidence. All of the articles I read during my research said that in the hotel room, there were empty beer cans, cigarette butts, blood-stained fingerprints, semen-stained bedding, and even hairs on the body and carpet. All of those things should be providing a lot of physical evidence that could lead police directly to the killer. However, none of that evidence matched Rios. Here's the thing, though. Rios was homosexual and struggling with his sexuality in Texas.
in the early 80s. He was also Native American, and he did have a rap sheet, but it was all for non-violent offenses. He was known to have a problem with alcohol, and there were even documented occasions where he was known to hallucinate. I really, really don't think he stood a chance against a Texas jury, even though there was no physical evidence. Now, if Reyes did, in fact, murder Father Ryan, then there's no way he could have murdered Father Kerrigan, because he was in jail at the time, and that would mean the two cases are not linked. However, if Reyes didn't kill Father Ryan, and the killer was still out there, well, let's look at some of the similarities between the two priest cases.
So, we know that Father Kerrigan was accused of sexual abuse, and Rios also claims that Father Ryan sexually assaulted him. So we might speculate that Rios wasn't Father Ryan's first or only victim. In fact, it later came to light that two young men claimed Father Ryan propositioned them in a Hobbs parking lot and said something kind of crude that I can't repeat on the podcast. So that's where the theory about the priest being targeted by some sort of vigilante comes in. However, as far as we know, Father Rinaldo Rivera in Santa Fe was never accused of any sexual misconduct. So that would make him an outlier.
Now, some do theorize that if Father Ryan was a habitual offender, he too might have been sent to that retreat in Jimenez Springs, which we know Father Kerrigan spent a little time at before he was transferred to Montana. Now, let's talk about the cars, shall we? None of their vehicles were found with their respective bodies. In fact, Father Ryan's vehicle was found six days after the murder at the Moose Lodge all the way back in Hobbs, where witnesses said it had been parked since the morning of December 22nd, the day after the murder. Here's where some more similarities come in. Investigators found money inside the trunk of Ryan's red and white Chrysler. Now, if you remember, Father Kerrigan's discarded shirt was found with a $100 bill in the pocket, and over $1,000 was found in his wallet. So it seems to me that robbery was not the motive in either of these cases. However, Father Rivera was the outlier once again because his wallet was missing.
However, Father Rivera's eyeglasses and sacrament kit were also missing, which investigators at the time believed to have been taken by the killer as a trophy. Now, there were some things that investigators noticed were missing in the Father Ryan case as well. His accordion and his silver chalice that he was known to always carry with him whenever he traveled, it was nowhere to be found. Two journalists with the Dallas Morning News caught wind of Reyes' story while he was trying to clear his name. Tim Wyatt and Howard Swingle believed the only way to prove Reyes' innocence was to find the real killer. They created a sort of database with as many priests' disappearances and murders in the same time frame as they could. Now, this led to an eerily similar case in Arizona. On November 10th, the year after Father Ryan was murdered in a Texas motel, the body of another priest was discovered in a hotel room in Yuma, Arizona.
54-year-old Father Benjamin Carrier was laying naked, found face down with his hands to hide behind his back. An autopsy determined he died from asphyxiation. Sounds vaguely similar. Now, Father Ben, as he was often called, but most of his time with the clergy on the West Coast, specifically California. The interesting part about this case is that multiple witnesses say two white men, possibly hitchhikers, were with Father Ben that night when he died. Apparently, Father Ben was known to be a bit of a softie when it came to people who were down and out and was often known to help people struggling with homelessness, so he might have been an easy target for a pair of hitchhiking serial killers.
Now, one of those men was described as carrying a cane with a skull on top, which is a pretty noticeable thing to carry around at all, let alone when you're, you know, a suspect in a murder case. So you think that someone, you know, would come forward after the police release this information and be like, oh yeah, you know, my cousin carries one of those or something like that. Well, neither of the suspects were ever found. It's also important to note that like Father Rivera, Father Ben stands apart from Kerrigan and Ryan because as far as we know, he was never accused of sexual misconduct or assault or abuse or really anything like that. This next case brings us much closer to home. Now, I don't have a whole lot of information regarding the disappearance of 54-year-old Father James Otis Anderson, but here's what I do know. He is listed on the National Missing Person Directory, and it says he went missing June 13, 1982, from Townsend, Montana. Now, this is the same year that almost all of these other priests were being killed, minus Father Kerrigan. The rest of the information I have is from the Charlie Project, and I haven't been able to verify this information elsewhere.
The Charlie Project says Father Anderson was last seen driving east on Highway 12 from Townsend towards White Silver Springs, but he was never seen again. However, apparently his 1975 Volkswagen Sirocco was found 10 years later, and it appeared to have been hidden in a wooden area in White's Gulch in the Big Belt Mountains, which, unless I'm mistaken, is quite a ways off of Highway 12. The Charlie Project says that investigators were never able to draw any connections between the disappearances of Anderson and Kerrigan, except that the two had worked together at some point in White Silver Springs and were considered friends. Father Anderson's case would also be similar to Kerrigan, Rivera, and Ryan, in that the vehicle was found separate from the body. Now, let's get to the outlier cases. So this next case was actually first brought up to us by one of our listeners when we released the episode about Sealy Lake teacher Cliff Nelson, which, Ange, this is actually the first episode that you did with us. I know, it brings back memories, that's for sure. Now, the post that I received from a viewer had mentioned that he was really interested in wanting to know other Montana...
murder mystery cases that we would be investigating, and he brought up to me the fact that his teacher, his Target Range Elementary School teacher, was murdered. Yep, so that brings us to this next one. So the disappearance of Missoula teacher Curtis Holman is also on the Charlie Project, but I was able to find a Missoulian article from 1984 to confirm some of the information. Curtis Holman was 31 years old, working as a math teacher at Target Range School in Missoula when he went missing on July 22, 1984. He was last seen when he left his home on Washburn Avenue to drive on the highway to charge his truck's battery, but he didn't say which road he was going to use. The Charlie Project says Holman had told his girlfriend that he would meet her for a movie the next day, but...
never showed up. He also had a three-week hiking trip planned with friends that was supposed to start on July 27, but he didn't show up to that either. His friends told the Missoulian he wasn't the type of person that would just up and leave town without telling anyone. The Charlie Project says Holman's 1976 light blue Toyota pickup with a canoe rack was found 12 days after his disappearance. It was discovered by a berry picker on an old logging road near Lake Placid. Now inside the truck, they found his glasses and wallet along with a map of the forest spread out on the front seat. It is believed that he might have gone out there to scout for new places to hike, but then why wouldn't he take the map with him? Very good question. It's also important to note that he was known to be a bit of a survivalist and would go off on long-term hikes, but would always check in with either family or friends on a weekly basis.
While searchers scoured the area for Holman, they did come across some footprints that appeared to be his size, but they were also overlaid with grizzly bear prints. A female grizzly was also spotted in the area. This is what eventually led investigators to believe he might have died from a bear attack or had some other wilderness mishap. However, there are people who think that the timing of the disappearance is suspicious. In fact, it was only two days after Father Kerrigan went missing in Ronan. And then there's the fact that their vehicles were once again found separately from the bodies, and I think the locations are only, what, 40, 50-ish miles apart? Investigators have never said that they believe the cases are related, though.
Interesting, that's for sure. Now to our final case of the episode. One might seem like a bit of stretch in the connections. We're enough to catch the eye of more than a handful of journalist investigators back in the 80s. Right, and this one actually takes us back to my home state of Idaho. On December 4th, 1982, in the dead of winter in Boise, Idaho, a deeply suntanned man walks into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. A while later, he was found lying on his back in the pews with blood and drool dripping out of his mouth. It was later determined that he had swallowed cyanide pills.
No identification was found on the man, only a wad of cash, nearly $2,000 in fact, and a note that said the money was to be used for his burial costs and whatever was left over would go to the church. So why might this have anything to do with the priest's murderers, you ask? Well, the note was signed W.M.L. Toomey, which of course investigators originally took to mean that this man's name was William Toomey, but that wasn't the case. In fact, it turns out that W.M.L. Toomey was actually a manufacturer of robes for priests in Boston, Massachusetts. The only clue to who this man might be, well, that was his belt buckle.
As it turns out, that belt buckle was unique enough that Boise detectives were able to trace it back to a gift shop in Arizona. Now, the death of the still unknown man comes less than a month after the murder of Father Ben Carrier in Yuma, Arizona, and only three weeks after the arrest of Rios for the murder of Father Ryan. Now, investigators theorize the unknown man was either the killer or knew something significant about the killings. However, if he was involved, he had nothing to do with Father Kerrigan because he died two years before Kerrigan went missing. So there you have it. The rabbit hole of priest killings in the 1980s. Whether or not they are actually connected, I don't know. But every time I research one murder, there seem to be a ton of eerily similar facts in the cases. And obviously, I'm not the only one who thinks so because of all the journalists I've been referencing to throughout the episode. So what do you think, Ange? Do you think they're connected to some serial priest killer? Or is it just... They just happen to be kind of similar. You see all of the similarities lined out in front of you, and you think, yes, that is a possibility. But then some of the dates don't line up. Right.
But then you go back to the similarities and you wonder what else it could be. You know, maybe there are two men. Right, right. Well, and it's like... I don't know. There's only two priests missing in Montana. That we know about. That we know about. That we know about. And I don't know. He's just going from all of these southern states to then suddenly Montana out of everyone, you know. But they did originally, in Kerrigan's case, suspect two youths who had escaped that detention camp. Right. So there is the two people theory there as well. But yeah, I don't know. It just seems so much like a spy novel, as I've seen several other journalists describe it. And that's the only way I can think to describe it. It's a spy novel plot.
You know, the who did it with a big question mark at the end. We, of course, would love for you to chime in. Be sure to follow us on social media. You can follow us on ABC Fox Montana. We're on Facebook. We're on Twitter. And we'd love to know what else you think. Well, we thank you for listening to Montana Murder Mysteries. And if you like our show, you can help us make more episodes by subscribing. That way, you'll never miss a new episode or update. And don't forget to share our podcast with your friends. Something we hear time and time again from authorities on these cold cases and family is that the most important thing you can do is share the information in hopes that someone who knows something will hear it and come forward.
And you can find us anywhere that you do get your podcasts like Spotify, Apple, Google, and CastBox. Montana Murder Mysteries is researched and written by myself and Blake Simonson and produced by Joe Lazar. I do want to say that I don't know how great of a job I did writing this one because I stayed up so late the night before. If this episode seems jumpy, that's on me. It's fascinating, though, because there are so many similarities.
We'll see. I had a lot of Red Bull at this point when I finished writing, so I hope everyone likes it. You know, don't forget to send us your tips and comments through our Facebook page and find out more about the cases we're exploring by checking our website, abcfoxmontana.com. See you in two weeks. That's right. We're going to continue our podcast every two weeks. And as I mentioned, you can subscribe and then you can kind of have one in the can until the next one comes up. That's right. Bye.