Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,120

too. When Donald was sixteen, he had stayed out on the prairie with Freudy for a week, chauffeuring the priest in his car after he’d lost his license. Now Donald was saying he’d been molested by him.

Mimi had no idea how to react. She was almost seventy now; how many more horrors was she supposed to bear? And Donald always said so much, almost all of it nonsense. She tried to ignore it. But Donald continued to insist, in his flat, deadpan way, that it was true. And the crisis of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church was all over the news now. From the publicized cases it seemed that most people were coming forward decades later, just as Donald was, having been silenced by shame and in some cases intimidation.

Father Freudenstein had never made the news in this way. But Mimi could not stop thinking about it. To think that this happened to her son while she was supposed to be protecting him brought her lower than she’d been in years—since, perhaps, the death of her son Brian. The more she thought about Freudy, the more she saw how invasive he’d been, how he’d made himself indispensable to her, how she came to trust him to be alone not just with Donald but with all of her older boys. And the more she learned about priests and young boys, the more Mimi began to wonder how many of her sons might have been victimized.

At first, it seemed like there was nothing to be done. So much time had passed, and Donald was Donald—diagnosed with schizophrenia, heavily medicated for decades. But Donald repeated what he’d said to anyone who asked. He never wavered. The other brothers had varying memories of Freudy. While John remembered being teased by him, Michael and Richard recalled liking him. Richard remembered Freudy taking his older brothers—Donald, Jim, John, and Brian—hiking up in Glenwood Springs for two days at a time. “Mom and Dad were relieved,” Richard said. “They had a trusted priest.”

It was Richard who, entirely by happenstance, learned more about Freudy. A close relative of Richard’s girlfriend Renée, a man named Kent Schnurbusch, told the couple that he had known the priest as a teenage boy in 1966; he’d been groomed by Freudenstein, he said, and had sex with him. Years later, Kent attended a meeting of the Colorado chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and mentioned Freudenstein’s name. Two different men said they had heard of Freudy; he was gay, they said, and suffered from alcoholism, which alone might have explained why he was transferred so often to small parishes and never rose up in the ranks of the Church. Freudy had retired from the priesthood in 1987 and spent his final years in severe decline before his death in 1994.

Kent decided to go to the chancellery and make his claim, to see what else there might be to learn about the priest who had taken advantage of him. The meeting was so brief, it took his breath away. Instead of pushing back against Kent, the priests at the chancellery simply asked him how much he was expecting in damages. He was unprepared for this. He wasn’t there for the money so much as the closure. He asked for $8,000, and the chancellery gave him $10,000.

When Kent told all this to Richard and Renée, he was as astonished as they were that the priest had known all the Galvin boys so well, just a few years before his experience with him. Kent had been eighteen when he knew Freudy—a teenager, like Donald had been when he went out to stay on the prairie as his chauffeur.

When Mimi learned Kent’s story, what was once a possibility became, to her, a certainty. Here was corroboration, and even signs of a modus operandi. It didn’t matter to her that Freudy’s name did not turn up on any of the lists made public by the abuse survivor and advocacy groups, or that he was never named in any public lawsuit. Everything lined up, as far as she was concerned. Who knew what incidents weren’t public, and which disgraced priests had their sins swept under the rug? Mimi came to believe that Freudenstein had been perusing her boys like boxes of cereal at the supermarket until he found