Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,99
alibi that police easily discredited. The priest said he had been a few blocks from the church on West Circle, making his rounds on the annual parish visitation, during the time of the murder. But the surviving investigator interviewed by reporter Mullane said that Sabadish had lied.
“He left a note at one of the houses that showed he was on West Circle a couple of hours before the murder,” the investigator said.
In 1962, a clerk at a Bristol shoe store told the police that Sabadish came into the shop shortly before 4:30 that afternoon—when Carol was apparently already dead—acting strangely. Nervous and distracted, he asked the clerk for the time, and also asked a bizarre question in a shoe store, “Do you sell underwear?” The clerk noted that Sabadish was wearing a wristwatch and knew the time. Police believed Sabadish was trying to create an alibi for himself. And they became increasingly suspicious of the priest’s possible sexual perversions when they obtained receipts for purchases he had made at an upscale ladies’ lingerie shop.
They were still looking at other possible suspects. But the night before Halloween, a week into the investigation, Chief Faragalli received disturbing information that made Sabadish the primary suspect. A married woman in nearby Fairless Hills told police that Sabadish had threatened to rape her three or four weeks before Dougherty’s murder. She knew Sabadish from years earlier when she lived at a home for unwed mothers where he was the chaplain. Now on the telephone he had made sexual advances, including a threat that he wanted to rape her. Sabadish said she needn’t worry about becoming pregnant because he was “sterile.”
Furious, the woman’s husband called Sabadish and confronted him, while taping the phone call. Sabadish admitted making the obscene telephone calls and sexual threats. He apologized and promised not to do it again. Chief Faragalli had obtained the tape.
When Sabadish was making his rounds on parish visitation, the chief and a detective picked him up in an unmarked car and took him to the Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown, where a county detective gave him a lie detector test. The priest passed the polygraph.
After that, police turned to other suspects they considered equally compelling. A town drunk admitted he killed Carol. Later, it was discovered that the man was mentally ill, and furthermore a Bristol cop had coerced his confession. A local convicted child molester rose to the top of the list, but he proved he was in another state at the time of the murder.
At the Vidocq luncheon, the police said that Frank Dougherty could not forget how the church had shunned him and his wife after Carol’s murder. Father Sabadish refused to make eye contact with him. Neither Sabadish, Reverend Carroll, nor Monsignor Baird called on the family to comfort them. When Dougherty asked Sabadish in the church confessional, “Father, am I wrong in assuming a priest could have killed my daughter?” the priest stood up and left the confessional.
Police never questioned Sabadish again. “We had no concrete evidence to tie Sabadish to the murder, except that he was very evasive during the interrogation,” said the surviving investigator.
Shortly after the polygraph, Sabadish was quietly transferred from St. Mark’s with no explanation to parishioners. He returned months later, again without explanation from the monsignor. Five years later, he was transferred to St. William Parish in Philadelphia. Then followed more than a dozen transfers in eighteen years within the archdiocese in eastern Pennsylvania. In recent weeks, Mullane, the reporter, had tracked down Father Sabadish, now in his seventies and still employed by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as a chaplain at a Montgomery County Catholic hospital. Mullane asked the aging priest if he killed Carol Ann Dougherty. Sabadish vehemently denied it, calling it “an absolute, positive lie.” He denied that he had made obscene phone calls to a Fairless Hills woman, saying, “That’s news to me,” and called police detectives “crazy.” After the newspaper stories were published he called Mullane, furious, and called him “anti-Catholic.”
Now the Bristol police were seriously considering other suspects as they reopened the investigation. The Vidocq Society urged police to test the semen, pubic hairs, and a badly smudged fingerprint left on Carol’s plastic hair band, presumably the killer’s.
After the luncheon, Fleisher left the City Tavern determined to solve the case. “It was the priest,” Fleisher said. “We all knew it was the priest.”
Within days, the Vidocq Society had formed a task force to bring the killer of Carol Ann Dougherty to justice.