Unholy Hours: Four Priests, Four Mysteries, and the Year the Church Looked Away
At the dawn of the twentieth century, whispers of devil worship drifted through the finest drawing rooms of Europe and America. Sacred vessels were stolen from altars, and hosts were carried off into the night. Yet in 1901, the Catholic Church may have had more to fear from within its own walls. Within months, one priest lay dead on a Philadelphia doorstep with a fortune in his pocket. Another was found decomposing in a New York lodging house, a third was shot in a Mexican village, and a fourth fled across the Atlantic with church money and a teenage girl. Each case ended with questions no one seemed willing to ask.
A Century Turns, and the Devil Returns
In 1900, observers noted that if Cotton Mather were alive, he would be a busy man. Satanists, it was said, now numbered in the tens of thousands. Among them were medical doctors, divinity professors who held chairs at major colleges, and whole troops of persons of wealth and social position. The witch-hunters of Mather’s day were gone, and the witches were now hunted with “kid gloves by well-mannered and well-dressed persons.”
France was said to be the heart of the movement. The French author Jules Bois, who had published a history of satanism, declared after his investigations that horrible things truly occurred at the rites. The participants included men and women of high social standing, and even priests, and they were known to sacrifice babies and animals.
The darkness crossed the Atlantic. In 1901, vandals broke into Holy Family Catholic Church in Unionport, New York. They took the sacred vessels and 39 consecrated wafers, yet left the silver and gold untouched. The thieves, it seemed, wanted only holy things. Many believed the culprits were connected to the satanists, or luciferians, recently active in Paris.
But 1901 would prove a bad year for priests, and the Church would learn that it had enemies within as well as without.
Father Charles Riegel: Death in the Tenderloin
In January 1901, Robert Bryan, known as “Sailor Bob” and “Jack Harris,” ran a saloon on North 8th Street in Philadelphia. He soon found himself implicated in the murder of Father Charles Riegel, pastor of the Church of the Presentation in Cheltenham.
Bryan told police that Father Riegel had arrived at the saloon with three other men and insisted on buying beer for everyone. Already drunk, he flashed a large roll of bills and dropped some on the floor. He kept spilling more. Then one of the men left the room and returned with a vial of laudanum and chloral. The priest was handed a glass of beer, and it was drugged.
Bryan claimed he told the men to get the priest out of his saloon if they meant to rob him. He knew nothing more, he said, until the priest’s body turned up in the hallway of the house next door, stripped of his outer clothing.
The tenderloin was no place for a 35-year-old pastor, and the question of why he was there was never raised. Why was he so drunk in such a run-down district, with a large sum of money stuffed in his pocket? Where had a young priest found that much money?
His estate was worth $3,200 (about $145,000 today). It would normally have passed to his parents and siblings, but the claims came quickly. The undertaker took $489 (about $22,000), which his father protested as unreasonable, though it was allowed. His father presented a claim of $2,550 (about $116,000), money he said he had deposited with his son for safekeeping. The church at Iney, where Riegel had once been stationed, claimed $1,328 (about $60,000). The Cheltenham church claimed $2,800 that had been given to the priest for parish use, though that claim was disallowed. In the end, his debts exceeded his estate, and the judge paid the awards at 83 cents on the dollar.
More than 50 priests attended his funeral at the church where he had served.
Three men were convicted of second-degree murder: Steven Bryan and Bob Bryan, sentenced to 15 years each, and Jacob Wynne, sentenced to 20. The cause of death was knockout drops, which proved to be opium. Ella Barrett and Fannie Miller pleaded guilty as accessories and were sentenced to two years and a $500 fine.
Terrible as the crime was, not one newspaper asked why Father Riegel had made himself such an easy target, carousing in a saloon among men and women.
The Grim Reaper was not finished with the Riegel family. In May 1902, the priest’s brother, Dr. Thomas Riegel, died of typhoid fever at 42. In September of that year, Fannie Miller died of consumption in prison. Her death would have faded into obscurity had it not been for her link to the priest’s murder.
The echoes continued. In 1904, Paul Goodwin, notorious for turning state’s evidence at the Riegel trial, was arrested at the League Island Navy Yard for deserting the battleship Maine. He was captured working in a coal yard, four months after he had walked away. It was his second desertion.
A month later, a man named Charles Yeager broke into the Cheltenham church and smashed altar fixtures worth $2,000. Candelabras and crucifixes were destroyed, and the baptismal font and the tabernacle of the Virgin’s altar were reduced to fragments. The sexton, Harry Wilson, discovered the destruction when he arrived at noon to ring the Angelus. He also found Yeager seated in the organ loft, running his fingers over the keys. Wilson fled for help.
He returned with three men, who overpowered Yeager. When the parishioners heard of the desecration, they wanted to lynch him, and only the arrival of Father McHugh stopped them.
Asked why he had done it, Yeager said he hated Catholics, and that Father Riegel was a bad man who deserved to have his things broken. He gave no reason for thinking so, three years after the priest’s death. Those present concluded that he was insane rather than drunk. He was taken to Ogontz and later locked in the Jenkintown jail. Some believed he meant to burn the church down, since he had piled combustibles in a heap on the floor.
Was he insane or possessed by something demonic?
Father Edward Phillips: The Room Behind the Portiere
In June 1901, Rev. Edward S. Phillips of St. Gabriel’s Church in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, vanished for two weeks. He was a prominent member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Elks, well known among the region’s mine workers, and he helped settle the miners’ strike of 1900. Two months earlier, he had traveled to New York to plead with J.P. Morgan on behalf of the miners. He had been staying at Fitzgerald’s Hotel at 50th Street and 8th Avenue when he disappeared.
The mystery was solved by accident. The daughter of Mrs. Bernius went to change the bedding in a room of the family’s lodging house and found the priest’s body on the floor. Police were called.
At first, murder seemed likely, since he lay in a pool of blood. The face was blackened and badly decomposed, and he was identified only by papers found on the body, among them a letter from John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers. Decomposition prevented the coroner from determining whether violence had been done to him, so his internal organs were sent out for testing.
The lodging house stood on Ninth Avenue, in the notorious tenderloin. Kirk Stanley, a massage operator, rented four rooms there, including the one where the priest was found, which could be reached through Stanley’s own sitting room. Stanley was arrested. He was described as tall and thin, with a black beard, 33 years old, a graduate of a school of massage, and only a year in New York.
Stanley’s story was this. He had met the priest that same night while talking with two “base women,” and the man seemed quite drunk and was not dressed as a cleric. The priest was in good humor, and so were the girls. All of them went to Mrs. Stanley’s rooms to drink more whiskey, and the girls stayed two or three hours before leaving. Afterward, both the priest and Stanley fell ill and nauseous, and it was never known whether something had been put in the drinks. Father Phillips pulled a flask from inside his coat, took a swig, and offered some to Stanley. Both felt better, and only then did the priest reveal who he was. Stanley told police that he stepped out for air, and when he returned, the priest was gone.
The detectives did not believe him. They thought the priest had been lured to the apartments by the woman, the man, or both, and neighbors gave their theory support:
“The detectives’ belief that the priest was lured to the apartments by either the woman or the man is strengthened by the testimony of neighbors. They say they have frequently seen the woman bring men to her apartments, where they remained for various periods. They further say she was often promenading the street, and was also in the habit of sitting at her window attired in gaudy gowns, usually of red. She is described as stout with an abundance of auburn hair. She is handsome and dressed well on the street. No one ever heard her called by her Christian name, all knowing her simply as ‘Mrs Stanley.’”
While Stanley sat in jail, Mrs. Stanley had not been seen by the neighbors since May 9th. Police theorized that she lured Father Phillips to the apartment and that, after the priest died, Stanley hid the body behind the portiere until he could decide how to dispose of it. The two girls Stanley had described vanished, and he said he did not know them.
Police did find Mrs. Stanley. Her real name was Lillian Lichtenstadter, and she came from a wealthy Jewish family who flatly denied any involvement with Kirk Stanley. Lillian said she had known him only a year and that he had treated her with his “cure.” She had told her parents she worked in a department store, when in truth she had been spending her days at Stanley’s. She protested that there was nothing intimate between them, yet admitted she had given him the false name Lillian Bernard. Her family offered an alibi, insisting she had never spent a night away from home. After questioning, she disappeared, and it was thought her parents sent her abroad until the trouble blew over.
Then the analysis of the viscera found no poison, and Kirk Stanley was exonerated. Decomposition made the true cause of death impossible to establish, and the coroner’s jury ruled that the priest died of natural causes. He had suffered from chronic Bright’s disease (kidney disease) and a weak heart. He was only 49.
Once it was clear that he had not been killed, the inquiries stopped. No one seemed to ask why a priest had been spending time in a “Gotham dive.” The bishop, told of his death, said the priest had no need to ask leave for absences of a few days, and that Father Phillips often went to New York for treatment.
Questions lingered. Why had Stanley left the body to rot where it fell? Was he, in truth, a pimp who supplied women to clients? Had Father Phillips broken his vow of chastity? And the priest had just met with J.P. Morgan about the threatened strike in the iron and coal regions of Pennsylvania. Could there have been foul play connected to that? Only one newspaper, the Blue Grass Blade of Kentucky, criticized the circumstances.
Even cleared, Stanley was “a marked man in Gotham.” His lawyers warned him against suing for false arrest, since he had escaped a murder charge by the skin of his teeth. Soon after his release, he was found unconscious beneath the Willis Avenue Bridge with a fractured skull and a battered face. When he woke, he said he did not recognize his attackers. He moved to West 114th Street, where a young woman who called herself his daughter, Isabelle, lived with him. It was said she attended Miss Barnard’s finishing school.
Eight years later, in 1909, he returned to the headlines. He sued Jeannette Deere Chapman, sister of Charles Deere, president of the Moline Plow Company of Illinois. Mrs. Chapman was a socialite who moved between New York, Paris, and Berlin. She was 78, and he was 58. He claimed they had met when she came to him for treatment.
According to Stanley, a wedding had been arranged for January 1908, and a marriage license had been secured. But Mrs. Chapman’s daughter, Mrs. Woodcock, opposed the match, and Mrs. Chapman called it off. Stanley spent a year trying to win her back before she ended the relationship for good. She had $2 million of her own and was one of the few heirs to the Deere estate, valued at about $25 million. He said they had planned a honeymoon tour of the world, and that he gave up his practice and lost a large sum of money.
After the suit was filed, Mrs. Chapman locked up her house in Moline, and none of her friends knew where she had gone, or so they claimed. The newspapers dug up Stanley’s connection to the death of Father Phillips, and the lawsuit was dismissed. Six months later, he was sued over an unpaid $35 bill at a boarding house on Dearborn Avenue, which he had left a year before.
After that, the unfortunate Dr. Stanley dropped from sight.
Father Marielo L. Orio: Shots in the Sanctuary
In June 1901, scandal erupted at San Geronimo, a village near Otumba, about 35 miles from Mexico City. Dolores Villavicencio (also given as Villa Vicencio) was madly jealous of an Italian priest named Marielo L. Orio (also reported as Marcario or Marcus). She had been his housekeeper and his mistress.
Two versions of his death survive, and in both Dolores had been cast aside. In the first, he had taken an interest in another woman of the village. Dolores walked into the church while confession was being offered and shot him three times. In the second, he feared his secret would be exposed and tried to end the relationship. Enraged and consumed by jealousy, she broke down the door of his room with an ax and shot him three times with his own revolver as he tried to escape through a window.
Before he died, he declared that he forgave her and willed her his estate, which was estimated at $60,000 or $100,000, a fortune in those years. Forgiven or not, Dolores was sent to jail.
The early reports openly described a carnal relationship between them. Later accounts tried to soften the story, saying only that she had shot him over a quarrel.
The scandal turned on the Archbishop of Mexico, who was publicly attacked for condoning immoral and irreligious practices among the priesthood. One charge held that the Bishop of Vera Cruz paid $10,000 for his position, and that “other bishops have at least winked at concubinage on the part of their priests.” The critics also claimed there was “unprintable immorality” tolerated by some of the Church’s highest officers.
Father Jesus Amado: Flight to Madrid
Printed beside the Orio story was another. Father Jesus Amado, one of the principal priests of Guadalajara, ran away with about $80,000 in church money. He took with him a beautiful 17-year-old girl from one of the city’s leading families. They spent $5,000 in New York City alone and reached Madrid, where he was arrested and held for extradition to Mexico.
While awaiting return, the girl was kept in a convent in Madrid, and she told reporters that she had been the one to persuade Father Amado to run away with her. He had refused her at first. In other words, she said, she had seduced him, and in the battle between her heart and her conscience, love had won. She called him by his birth name, Esperanza. They had hoped to reach Rome and beg the Pope to release her lover from his vows.
She had written her parents that she wished to enter holy orders and feared they would forbid it, as they had forbidden her sister, which was why she was running away. She persuaded a friend to send her parents a telegram saying she had arrived safely in Mexico City, while she was in fact on a train to New York.
Four months later, it was announced that Father Amado would marry Señorita Maria Padilla in a civil ceremony, since she claimed to love the priest. Her father, who had accompanied detectives to Barcelona to bring the couple back to Mexico, withdrew his suit against the priest for abducting his daughter. As of October 1901, Amado was still in the penitentiary awaiting trial for robbery. The outcome is unknown. Did they live happily ever after, or did Maria Padilla marry a man destined to spend many years behind bars?
The Question That Remains
Did the Church shelter its own worst enemies, and in doing so, make itself easier prey for satanists and other anti-Christian factions?