Shortly before a jury was supposed to be chosen for his trial on criminal charges of kidnapping and raping a boy in the mid-1970s, the self-acknowledged serial child molester and retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker pleaded guilty on Tuesday morning.
The 93-year-old is scheduled to receive a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment on 18 December in New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse, where it has been rare for a Catholic clergyman to be charged – much less convicted – in connection with the church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal.
