Steubenville
When I wrote back in May about Msgr. William Kerr, how I met him, and his connection to Ted Bundy and one of his victims, I never imagined it would be spread throughout the Internet. I’ve seen people claim it’s a falsehood and an urban legend. I can only respond that I do acknowledge I heard it third-hand, but that it was transmitted from Msgr. Kerr to my friend Fr. Gabriel and then to me, and I trust them implicitly.
On the other hand, I’ve seen the post lifted in its entirety with a false Associated Press dateline added to it, as if to end more credibility to the story. If you think you’re helping Our Lady and the Holy Spirit with this falsehood, don’t. God doesn’t need any lies to spread the Good News.
In any case, I’ve made a few corrections and updates to the original post. For one thing, I don’t know why I wrote that Msgr. Kerr administered last rites, as I don’t recall Fr. Gabriel telling me that. Everything else I wrote was pretty much spot-on, but I edited a bit to clean up emphases. I also added a section on Msgr. Kerr’s later contacts with Bundy and Bundy’s parents, and the forgiveness of the parents of one victim.
If I’d know how much interest there was in the story, I would have checked my facts with Fr. Gabriel first, but I’m glad he’s contacted me to reassure me on the facts I got right and to nudge me on the bits that needed nudging.
[Update: Corrections and updates made throughout the post based on corrections from my friend, Fr. Gabriel. If I’d known this was going to get as much attention as it did, I would have contacted him first to have him vet the story. In particular, Msgr. Kerr did not administer last rites to anyone. Not sure where in my memory that came from. Nearly everything else was essentially correct.]
Monsignor William Kerr has died. Among other things, he was famous for having administered the last rites come to the spiritual aid of one of serial killer Ted Bundy’s lastvictims and then became a spiritual counselor for Bundy on death row.
I met Monsignor Kerr in 1994, I believe, when he was president of La Roche College, outside Pittsburgh. I was a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville and I’d been preparing for the Total Consecration to Mary according to St. Louis de Montfort with some of my friends. One of them was my roommate, Kevin Gillen, now Fr. Gabriel Gillen, OP, who knew the monsignor. Kevin arranged for Msgr. Kerr to lead us in the final consecration following Mass at La Roche. I don’t remember too much about the day, but I do remember Msgr. Kerr was kind and gracious to us.
Kevin told us the story Msgr. Kerr told him about that awful night in Gainesville Tallahassee, Florida, in 1978. He said Kerr got the call from the police in the middle of the night to rush out to the sorority house. When he arrived he was told that all but one of the girls in the house were dead or near death, killed by a serial killer who was later to be known to the world as Ted Bundy. After giving those last rites to the dying college girl, then-Fr. Kerr was asked by the police on the scene to talk to the girl who survived unscathed. They wanted to know how she survived the brutal attacks, because Bundy had stopped right inside the door to her room, dropped his weapon, and left without touching her. But the girl would talk to no one but a priest. [To Clarify: The girl wouldn’t speak to police without a priest present. They called Msgr. Kerr and she told her story. Interestingly, Msgr. Kerr was not on call that night, but the phone rang in his room, not the other priest’s for some reason.]
When Fr. Kerr approached the near-catatonic girl, she told him that her grandmother had made her promise before going off to college for the first time that she would pray the Rosary every night before bed for protection; even if she fell asleep praying the Rosary, which she had that night so that when Bundy came into her room with murder on his mind, the beads were still clutched in her hands.
Later, Bundy would tell Monsignor that when he entered the girl’s room, he just couldn’t go on, he dropped his weapon, and he fled. She awoke to a man standing over her with a bat. She opened her hands, Bundy looked at the rosary beads in them, and fled. Such is the power of our Mother’s protective mantle.
[ Fr. Gabriel reminded me of this part:] Several weeks/months? later, Msgr. Kerr phone rang (again when he was not on call). This time it was the warden of a prison. They had just caught Bundy and he wanted to speak to a priest. Msgr. Kerr did not offer details of the conversation but Bundy would call him on a regular basis.
Bundy called from Florida the night before he was going to be executed (Msgr. was stationed in D.C. at the time) and thanked him for all he had done. Msgr. said he would offer a Mass for him the next morning, which would be at the same time of the execution. Msgr. said it was difficult listening to the radio as he drove to the church to say Mass. Everyone was doing a countdown on the radio, excited about the execution. The Mass was intense and on the way home again it was difficult hearing everyone rejoice at the death of Ted Bundy.
Ted Bundy’s mother called Msgr. (they had been in contact over the previous several years) that morning. She wanted to share something with him. She said: “I just got a call from one of the parents of Ted’s victims. They told me that ‘you’re experiencing the losd of a child today and we’ve experienced the losd of a child. We just want you to know that you are in our prayers and we love you.’”
Msgr. marvelled at the parents’ strength to let love have the last word.
Rest in peace, Msgr. Kerr, and thank you for your small part in my faith journey and for your witness.
One of the unexpected pleasures of Google’s Street View function of Maps is that it allows a nearly literal nostalgic stroll down memory lane. Google recently added more cities to its list of those where Street View works and Pittsburgh was among them. When I lived in eastern Ohio in the mid-90s, I often made trips into Pittsburgh, whether to do shopping in the famed Strip-by-the-River— where in just a few blocks you could get all kinds of Asian, Latin American, or European food ingredients as well as fresh seafood, great meat, and more—or into the college neighborhoods for great restaurants and pubs or the city’s cultural attractions of museums, symphonies, and the like.
While Google Earth and Google Maps have long allowed a top-down view, Street View puts you on the street, looking at storefronts and the people going about their daily business. It’s about as close to being there without hopping on a plane.
I took a virtual stroll through some of my old haunts and recalled places I’d frequented and new places I wish had been there 10 years ago. I could almost smell the fresh tortillas in the Latin American market or the cheese of the Italian grocery or the exotically unidentifiable scents of the Asian foods store. What fun!
Now I just need to remember the names of all my other favorite haunts and check them out once again. This could easily suck up hours of otherwise productive time.
I thought for sure I’d told this story before, but I can’t find it in the archives and it’s too good not to be recorded.
When I was a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio back in the mid-90s, there was one place that was famous as an off-campus destination: Drovers Inn.
Drovers was built originally in 1848 to house drivers on the wagon trail through West Virginia. Today it’s a restaurant and lodge in the hills across the Ohio River from the Steubenville area. It has a regular dining room on the main floor, but the basement has been turned into a great dark, noisy, friendly pub.
Drovers’ wings stand above them all. They are truly delicious and scrumptious.
We made regular trips to Drovers whenever possible, about 30 minutes down the river and then up into the hills. In fact, I was such a regular that the bartenders would acknowledge me by name when I came in, like Norm from “Cheers”. (Every guy should have such a place at one time or another in his life.) The bartenders also liked to joke that whenever I came I was with a group of women and never the same group twice. Now they may have been exaggerating a little, but I did enjoy hanging out with my female friends. I’m not saying I had exclusively ulterior motives, but you could say that part of it was “opposition research”.
The best chicken wings in the world
Technorati Tags: wings | spicy | West Virginia | college |
When I was still in college at Franciscan University of Steubenville, my last two years there I lived in a house with a group of great guys. One’s now a Dominican priest, another is a married father working in Catholic radio, another works for EWTN, yet another is a monk, and oh yeah, another is a Congressman.
They didn’t all live there at the same time. I nfact, in those two year, I think about eight or nine guys lived there at one time or another and almost all of us were studying theology. It was great. I remember late nights debating capital punishment or playing penny ante poker (with Irish accents required for some strange reason) or having our famous “men’s meat dinners” where the only non-meat dish allowed was beans.
We lived off-campus in a nearby neighborhood called LaBelle, which is not pronounced, as Frenchman would, “lah-bell”, but rather like an Ohioan would, “lay-bell”. Anyway, the neighborhood was full of old houses, many of which were housing students, others being home to faculty and staff and their families, and then more with just the regular folk from Steubenville.
One afternoon Kevin answered the front door. I was upstairs studying or writing a paper or, more likely, procrastinating and didn’t pay too much attention to the long time he was kept occupied until he came up to my room, looking excited.
Now, you have to know that Kevin was just rediscovering his faith. He’d been away from the Church for a while and had come back through some amazing and miraculous events. (Too long to go into now, but I blogged it in the past. At the time of that post he was a SOLT, but now he’s OP.)
The missionary
Technorati Tags: memoir | Steubenville | theology | Baptist | missionary | apologetics | Catholic |
