Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester

A right of defense for accused priests is supported on paper in the Diocese of Manchester, but in one case it has been suppressed and obstructed at every turn.

October 21, 2013 by Ryan A. MacDonald [revised January 7, 2025]

I became quite familiar with the scene above during a short trip this past summer. A nice 4-hour drive from New York took me along Interstate 91 and the Connecticut River.  From Brattleboro, Vermont (locals call it “Brat”) I drove east on Route 9 for 18 miles to the picturesque City of Keene, New Hampshire and its much admired downtown Main Street.

Keene is a small city with a population of about 23,500 — not counting the 5,000 students enrolled in Keene State College.  The social and economic hub of southwest New Hampshire, it boasts the widest Main Street in the United States, and its bustling downtown collection of quaint and busy shops, restaurants, a theatre, offices, and concerts on the Keene Commons is the envy of many cities its size.  Keene’s downtown begins at the doors of St. Bernard Church, today part of a three-parish community known as the Parish of the Holy Spirit.

Saint Bernard Church and Rectory are depicted above. The building in the background is Saint Joseph RegionalCatholic School (grades K to 8). The entire complex is bordered on the left by the bustling campus of Keene State College, and on the right by busy downtown Keene. Across the wide, heavily traveled Main Street from the rectory is the region’s largest and busiest U.S. Post Office, a pizza take-out, and a convenience store conducting a brisk college town business 24/7.

Just above is a closer view of the Main Street driveway between Saint Bernard Church and Rectory. It’s a scene I wanted to see for myself, and was the reason for my summer drive to Keene.  Note the flat roofed adjunct just to the left of the building.  It was added on at some point to the large old mansion that became St. Bernard Rectory.

The rounded doorway on the building’s left side was in 1983 the rectory’s main business entrance. Just to its left is a large window. In 1980, a closed circuit television camera was installed just above that door because the rectory had been the scene of a number of urban burglaries and an armed robbery or two.  In the late 1970s, two priests and the pastor’s elderly mother were tied up in the rectory basement while the house was ransacked and robbed in the middle of the night.

On the other side of that door in the 1980s was the desk of a receptionist and secretary staffed in two shifts from 9:00 AM until 9:00 PM.  There was also a waiting area for parishioners wanting to see one of the four priests assigned there in the early 1980s, and for daily clients of the region’s busy St. Vincent DePaul Society seeking assistance with food, clothing, and emergency shelter.

On the right of the church building just across the narrow driveway from the rectory was the most heavily used entrance and exit for parish activities. These doorways to the church and rectory were the busiest places in or around that parish church.  The photo above was taken very early in the morning.  At virtually any other time, it is a hubbub of activity.

Note the large window just to the left of the rectory’s main entrance with its monitoring TV camera.  It was just behind this highly visible office window — in full view of the daily hustle and bustle of Main Street traffic and the steady stream of visitors into and out of this busy rectory and church — that 27-year-old Thomas Grover claimed that he was four times sexually assaulted by Father Gordon MacRae between April and November of 1983.

It was here behind this highly visible window where Grover claimed that in the months just prior to his 16th birthday he sought MacRae out for counseling for his drug addiction, but instead was threatened, berated, made to cry, and then raped.  It was here that 220-pound Thomas Grover claimed to have returned four times from week to week unable to remember the sexual assaults he claimed to have occurred during previous visits. 

Like so many who have looked at this case, I was aghast when I first became familiar with the details of the trial of Father MacRae.  I wrote of this trial in an article entitled “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.” As The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in “The Trials of Father MacRae” (May 13, 2013):

"Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents."

Once I became aware of the facts of this case, I had to see for myself exactly where this was all claimed to have taken place. What I saw in the scenes depicted above is a compelling visual to accompany something Attorney Robert Rosenthal included in his appeal briefs to the New Hampshire courts:

"In what the petitioner asserts has been revealed as a scam to obtain a cash settlement from the Catholic church, Tom Grover, a drug addict alcoholic and criminal, accused Father Gordon MacRae of molesting him years before.  Grover’s civil suit — featuring MacRae’s conviction — earned him nearly $200,000.  No witnesses to the alleged acts could be found, despite that they were to have occurred in busy places. Grover’s claims were contradicted by objective facts (e.g. inoperable locks that he claimed worked, acts in an office to which MacRae did not have access, claims about a chess set that had not [yet] been purchased)."

Thomas Grover claimed that these assaults occurred in this office commencing in April 1983 and ending just as he turned 16 years old in mid-November 1983.  Father Gordon MacRae did not arrive at St. Bernard Church until mid-June 1983, and did not have access to this particular office because it was occupied by another priest until the end of July 1983.  Upon learning this pre-trial, Grover then vaguely moved one of his claimed assaults to an adjacent busy office to which MacRae also had no access that summer.

In the summer of 1983, St. Bernard Rectory employed a full and part-time staff of twelve, including the four priests who lived in this house, and a total staff of 25 parish and school employees all coming and going throughout the day and evening.  And yet, the prosecution produced not a single witness to these acts. No one ever testified to seeing Thomas Grover there. No one ever opened the door to admit him, or saw him leave. No one ever claimed to have heard anything. 

A lock Grover claimed that MacRae used to secure the office door had been dismantled and painted over years before the priest arrived.  An ornate marble chess set Grover claimed was inside that office during the assaults was not purchased by the priest until three years later in 1986.  Today, Grover’s former wife, Trina Ghedoni says that Grover admitted to her that he perjured himself throughout the MacRae trial, and said he offered perjured testimony about the chess set because “it was what he was told to say.”

The one person who could have helped to inform this appellate defense — Father Robert Biron, a prominent pastor in the Diocese of Manchester — refused to help. The above scene was his office several years before MacRae arrived, and again for several more years after MacRae left St. Bernard’s.  Father Biron might have spoken to the improbability of much of what had been claimed.  He might have described the painted over office door lock that didn’t work, the shade on the office window that wasn’t there in 1983, the absence of air conditioning requiring that this office window remain wide open to the scene overlooking the main entrance and busy Main Street throughout summer months.

Father Robert Biron might have attested to the traffic; to the noise of people coming and going, noise that easily penetrated that office door in both directions. He might have attested to the waiting area just outside that office door, and its steady stream of people.  But he refused.  In his answer to Father MacRae’s plea as the investigation for this appeal began, Father Biron wrote on his official Our Lady of Fatima Parish stationery,

“I can’t be of any help to you, and don’t see the necessity of entertaining any further correspondence from you.”

— Letter of Father Robert Biron, January 19, 2009

Father Biron’s cold letter was received by the imprisoned priest just after the Bishop of Manchester at the time, now deceased Bishop John McCormack, insisted to Vatican officials and others that he and the Diocese of Manchester fully support Father MacRae’s right of defense.

Earlier, Bishop McCormack offered Father MacRae $40,000 toward an appellate defense, but with conditions: he wanted the diocese to choose MacRae’s lawyers, wanted the priest to sever all contact with Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal, and wanted him to agree not to review the history and merits of this case, appealing only his sentence and not the convictions.  Bishop McCormack then reneged on his offer in a grueling and cruel “stringing along” of this imprisoned priest that another prominent writer described in detail in “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits.”

When Father Gordon MacRae was on trial in 1994, and the prosecution finished presenting its case, which consisted of nothing more than Thomas Grover’s hysteria and evasiveness, Judge Arthur Brennan instructed Fr. MacRae not to take the stand in his own defense or else the judge would open the door for Thomas Grover’s brothers to testify to their own false claims brought in civil suits.  Gordon MacRae was the only person never heard from in this trial.

When Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father MacRae to more than 30 times what had been offered in a plea deal, the judge never permitted the priest to speak.  Now, today, both New Hampshire courts receiving this appeal have dismissed it without Fr. MacRae being allowed to utter a word. Even in the Diocese of Manchester, the Bishop presented Father MacRae’s case for dismissal to the Holy See without his ever even knowing what was put forward or having any opportunity to defend himself.  Fortunately, to date, the Holy See has not seen fit to act solely on such unilateral information. The silence forced upon Father Gordon MacRae has been deeply unjust. This case must move forward and be fully heard.  

What are they all afraid of?

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Related:

Affidavit of former FBI Special Agent James Abbott

Statement of Trina Ghedoni, former wife of Thomas Grover

Statement of Charles Glenn, former stepson of Thomas Grover

Statement of Debra Collett, former counselor of Thomas Grover

Statement of Steven Wollschlager, accuser who recanted

Trial Transcripts and Court Documents are available at The National Center for Reason and Justice

Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison

In 2011, former N.H. Judge Arthur Brennan was arrested at an "Occupy Movement" protest at the U.S. Capitol. In 1994, he sentenced Fr Gordon MacRae to die in prison.

Editor’s Note: This eye-opener was written and published by author Ryan A. MacDonald on February 9, 2012. In the 11 years hence, much new information has surfaced that supports and upholds Ryan’s conclusions about the nature and intent of the trial of Father MacRae.

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I spent some time recently poking around inside Beyond These Stone Walls, an extraordinary website that by all odds should not exist. I once wrote of all the random factors that had to coalesce for this story of a Catholic priest falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned to be told. “The Prisoner-Priest Behind These Stone Walls” tells that tale, and hopefully has drawn some fair minded souls to this remarkable site.

Spend just a few minutes at the “About” page at Beyond These Stone Walls, and consider its simple math. On September 23, 1994, in Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Catholic priest, Gordon MacRae to consecutive prison terms for a combined sentence of 67 years in prison. The sentence was imposed after a highly problematic jury trial in which MacRae was convicted of having sexually assaulted Thomas Grover during counseling sessions in 1983 when Grover was 15 years old.

The accused priest was 29 years old when his “crimes” — now deemed by many to be fictitious — were claimed to have occurred. MacRae was 41 years old when the sentence was imposed. At this writing [2012] he is 59 years old and still in prison. Barring the just outcome of a pending new appeal based on new evidence in the case, the priest will be 108 years old when his sentence is fully served and he is free to leave prison. There is no other possible conclusion. Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to die in the New Hampshire State Prison.

From a pragmatic perspective, and even with an emphasis on retributive justice, this makes little sense. Given that New Hampshire prosecutors sought a pre-trial plea deal that would have released MacRae after one or two years had he been actually guilty or willing to pretend so, a 67-year sentence seems an expensive folly that will cost New Hampshire taxpayers millions of dollars. Even if MacRae’s sentences were imposed concurrently instead of consecutively — an option for judges when defendants have no prior felony record — MacRae would not still be in prison today.

Parole in New Hampshire for someone convicted of a sexual offense — true or not — invariably requires completion of a prison sex offender program which in turn requires an unqualified admission of guilt. Because of the vast numbers of men convicted of similar offenses in New Hampshire — by some estimates more than 40% of the state’s prison population — the waiting list for the prison sex offender program requires that inmates must be within two years of their aggregate minimum sentence to be eligible.

By the time MacRae could fulfill this requirement for parole consideration, over 50 years will have passed between the charged offenses and the “treatment” program. At age 80, this priest’s parole would rest on his ability to recall with consistency the details of fictitious sexual assaults alleged to have occurred when he was 29. What seemed to make perfect sense to Judge Arthur Brennan in this sentence eludes just about everyone else.

Nonetheless, these considerations are all rendered moot. From everything I have read on this case, MacRae is innocent of the claims, and will not say otherwise just to avoid dying in prison. Justice is not served when an innocent defendant is coerced to plead guilty to something he did not do just to discharge a decades-long prison term. Coercive plea deals work well for the guilty, but not for the innocent. Careful readers of this story know that MacRae, sitting alone in a county jail awaiting sentencing, his meager assets wiped out by the trial, his diocese having already publicly condemned him, and his lawyers having abandoned the case for lack of funds to investigate and defend it, was coerced by circumstances into a post-trial plea deal on remaining charges in exchange for a sentence of zero additional time in prison. He and others close to the case described this, then and now, as “a negotiated lie.”

Today, I describe what played out in Judge Arthur Brennan’s court after MacRae was found guilty in his first trial as an extorted lie, and it is nothing new. Attorney Barry Scheck, founder of the Innocence Project, reveals that of the hundreds of DNA exonerations his organization has championed to free the wrongfully imprisoned, a full 25% have involved coerced and extorted plea deals such as that inflicted on Father Gordon MacRae, post trial. It is for abuses such as this that a March 21, 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling vastly expanded judicial oversight of the pressures placed on defendants during plea deals, requiring that competent counsel advise them.

The details of the related, but untried charges against this priest render them highly doubtful as well. The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of these claims brought by Thomas Grover’s brothers and others jumping aboard this cash-cow opportunity in “A Priest’s Story.” I wrote of other details related to these claims in “Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest” and “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” No just person can read these documents and conclude the legitimacy of Father Gordon MacRae’s trial and imprisonment.

A Sentence Devoid of Common Sense

Gordon MacRae, Prisoner No. 67546, at this writing [2012] has been in prison for 18 years. Nearly 30 years have already passed since his charges were claimed to have occurred — charges that new evidence shows never occurred at all. New Hampshire prosecutors were willing to let MacRae out of prison after just one year had he been willing to forgo trial and stand before Judge Brennan to utter a single word, “guilty.”

MacRae refused three such prosecution overtures for a plea deal to end the case with a recommended sentence of only one to three years. One such offer was made to the priest’s lawyers in writing. Another came in the middle of MacRae’s trial. That offer was made just after 27-year-old Thomas Grover wept dramatically from the witness stand as he recounted being forced to endure sexual assaults five times during counseling sessions for his drug problem at age 15 in 1983. He vaguely claimed to return from week to week unable to remember being raped the week before. His heavily coached description of PTSD-induced “out of body experiences” was his only explanation for how such traumatic memories were “repressed.” After this incredulous testimony, the two prosecutors looked at each other and headed for a hallway with MacRae’s lawyer to offer a new plea deal — this time a sentence of one to two years. The priest refused it.

In the end, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Defendant Gordon MacRae to more than thirty times the maximum sentence State prosecutors were prepared to request.  Those prosecutors are long since gone. One was inexplicably fired the day after MacRae’s trial ended, and later relocated to another state under a cloud. The other has since committed suicide.

Even a cursory examination of new evidence in the MacRae case warrants vacating his convictions. Additionally, there are elements of the case that could not be part of the appeal process, and are not generally known. For example, MacRae agreed to two pre-trial polygraph examinations in 1994. The polygraph tests were based on the claims of Thomas Grover and his brother, Jonathan Grover, whose accusations amassed most of the indictments for which the priest faced trial. Father MacRae passed the polygraph tests conclusively. Even today, after the passage of many years, the polygraph examiner recalls this case and reported that Father MacRae “did very well” on these investigative tools. Neither Thomas Grover nor Jonathan Grover, nor any other accuser ever agreed to submit to polygraph testing.

There is more. A lot more. David F. Pierre, author of the book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused and host of The Media Report, performed a public service by reviewing hundreds of pages of court documents and trial transcripts now published at the website of The National Center for Reason and Justice. David Pierre’s summary of these documents, entitled “Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest,” includes the following eye-opening facts:

1. The ex-wife of accuser Thomas Grover has revealed this case as a fraud. Her statement describes him as a “compulsive liar” who “never stated one word of abuse by MacRae” until the prospect of money loomed. She describes him as a “manipulator...who can tell a lie and stick to it ’til its end.” She reports that Grover’s lawyer advised him to “act crazy before the jury” and hired a therapist to heighten the effect. Once Grover got his nearly $200,000 settlement, all therapy came to a halt.

2. Thomas Grover’s adult stepson today states that Grover repeatedly told him before and after trial that he “had never been molested by MacRae,” and that he was “setting MacRae and the Catholic Church up for money.” He reports that Grover laughed and joked with him about this scheme before, during, and after MacRae’s trial.

3. The former wife and stepson both report that before MacRae’s trial, Grover repeatedly sought and obtained cash advances on his projected settlement from his contingency lawyer, a practice that is prohibited in the New Hampshire Code of Professional Conduct for lawyers.

4. Two observers present throughout the trial report having observed the manipulation of Grover’s testimony by therapist Pauline Goupil, M.A., a victim advocate hired by Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer. According to signed statements Ms. Goupil influenced Grover’s trial testimony using hand signals for him to feign sobbing during specific segments of his testimony. In several instances she was observed placing her index finger over her eye and down her cheek at which point Grover would commence sobbing, disrupting cross examination and, on at least one occasion, prompting Judge Brennan to call a recess.

5. Debra Collett, Thomas Grover’s former drug addiction counselor, today states that Grover made so many claims of sexual abuse in the course of drug treatment that “he appeared to be going for some sort of sex abuse victim world record.” She reports that his claims of sexual abuse targeted his adoptive father and others, but he did not accuse MacRae.

6. Ms. Collett also described that she was threatened by “coercion, intimidation, veiled and more forward threats,” “overtly threatened” and confronted “with threats of arrest” by the investigating police detective to alter her testimony for the trial and “to get me to say what they wanted to hear.”

7. A former accuser of MacRae has today recanted his claim of abuse stating, “I was aware at the time of [the] trial knowing full well that it was all bogus and having heard of the lawsuits and money involved, also the reputations of those who were making accusations.” This former accuser attests that “[Keene, NH Detective James] McLaughlin had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story ... and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could be easier for us with a large amount of money.” This witness reports he was given cash by Det. McLaughlin after this interview.

8. James Abbott, a veteran career Special Agent with the F.B.I., today reports: “In the entirety of my three-year investigation of this matter, I discovered no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any crimes. Indeed, the only thing pointing to any improper behavior by MacRae were Grover’s stories — that were undermined by the people who surrounded him at the time he made his accusations.”

The Money Flows

After Father MacRae was sent to prison, Thomas Grover’s three brothers reportedly walked away from this case with additional settlements from the Diocese of Manchester in excess of $430,000. I have written of these accusations in my column, “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” Two of the three brothers also accused another priest, but pre-trial discovery shows no indication that the other priest was interviewed or even investigated.

Following publication of the two-part “A Priest’s Story” in The Wall Street Journal  in 2005, Arthur Brennan defended his presiding over this trial and his sentence of MacRae by stating that it was all “more complex” than what Dorothy Rabinowitz reported. Indeed it was, and the complexities which continue to surface leave many doubts about the justice of the MacRae trial and the legitimacy of its entire pre-trial investigation and prosecution.

Arthur Brennan took early retirement from the New Hampshire bench for a brief stint with the U.S. State Department’s Office of Transparency and Accountability in Iraq. The trial and sentence  of Gordon MacRae have transparency and accountability issues of their own still to be resolved.

Do the Math! Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to die in a New Hampshire prison. It’s an outcome I suspect this priest would not shrink from if it comes down to it. For the rest of us, evidence now spells out clearly the travesty of justice this case was — and still is.

“We are disgusted with the lack of integrity in Congress, the Senate, The White House and the U.S. Supreme Court. We will stop these pretenders from stealing our freedom and our universal human rights.”

— By Arthur Brennan, quoted from “Forty years later, a new call to protest” (August 21, 2011).