Despite widespread complaints about brother, he was moved from school to school
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a six-part investigative series focusing on former Marianist Brother William Mueller. In 24 lawsuits filed in Pueblo, Mueller is accused of abusing students at Roncalli High School during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This series examines Mueller's tenure at Roncalli, and at schools in other states before and after his stay in Pueblo.
By PATRICK MALONE | THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
Brother Bill demanded secrecy from each boy.
Tell no one about his experiments, he warned, or the results of his project would be irreparably skewed.
Most heeded William Mueller's admonition. After all, he was a man of God.
Some students believed for decades that the blindfolds, the ether, the lost minutes and the boundaries that were crossed were all part of some legitimate study. So they remained silent.
Other students wouldn't hush. They told people who could help, people who could stop this from happening again, people who could spare someone else what they had endured. Principals and three provincials (chiefs of the religious order in charge of Mueller's assignments) all had been warned about Mueller's troubling activities.
But instead of stopping him, leaders of the Society of Mary religious order persisted in assigning Mueller to all-boys high schools five times during his 24 years in the order.
Lawsuits and police reports have identified 40 men whom Mueller allegedly subjected either to frightening, unsanctioned psychological experiments, sexual abuse or both while he was a Marianist brother. The Marianist order has received 52 reports from former students who said Mueller used them in the experiments. It is unknown how many of the former students who contacted the Marianists overlap with those who filed police reports or lawsuits.
Mueller's accusers have said he convinced them to participate in experiments that would help him to earn a master's degree in psychology. Marianist officials have said that Mueller never was enrolled in continuing education in the field of psychology while he was a member of the religious order.
Twenty-four men who attended Roncalli High School in Pueblo between 1966 and 1971 have filed lawsuits alleging abuse by Mueller. Nearly all of them contain specific allegations, or at least suspicions, of sexual abuse. Some have said in their lawsuits that physical indications of some sexual contact existed.
Four lawsuits also have been filed by men who attended two St. Louis high schools where Mueller taught in the 1980s.
Even before he took his vows as a Marianist, Mueller's inappropriate behavior involving one student had been documented. News of it reached the highest level of the Marianist order.
This scenario would replay itself at every stop in Mueller's Marianist career. However, until September 2005, when the first lawsuits were filed by the Roncalli students, the allegations against Mueller were not made public. The revelation came 47 years after the first documented allegation of improper contact between Mueller and a student, and almost 20 years after the last.
Two men who attended St. John Vianney High School in St. Louis, where Mueller taught from 1962-66, have filed police reports alleging that Mueller subjected them to strange experiments. Neither alleged sexual abuse, but one of the men said he mentioned the experiments to the school's principal during a casual conversation, and Mueller was transferred within weeks.
Marianist leaders transferred Mueller to Pueblo, where he taught band and religion classes at Roncalli High School from the time it opened in 1966 until it closed in 1971. At least three Roncalli alumni have claimed in their lawsuits that school officials were alerted to Mueller's behavior, but did nothing to address it.
When Roncalli closed in 1971, Mueller was transferred to Central Catholic High School in his hometown of San Antonio. Mueller had graduated from Central 15 years earlier.
Mueller spent a decade at his alma mater. During the late 1970s, the school's principal contacted Marianist headquarters. He said he had received reports of Mueller conducting bizarre experiments on students.
The Marianist provincial at the time, the Rev. Quentin Hakenewerth, was so concerned by the report that he traveled to San Antonio and confronted Mueller about the accusations. Mueller admitted to conducting experiments on students, but denied he had sexually abused them. The provincial told Mueller to stop the experiments, but allowed him stay at Central High until 1981, when Mueller was transferred to St. Mary's High School in St. Louis.
One year into his stay at St. Mary's, Mueller was promoted to principal. It didn't last long, though. In November 1983, a group of popular student athletes approached a teacher, the Rev. Richard Wosman, and reported that Mueller was performing strange research experiments on students.
The Marianist provincial at that time, the Rev. David Fleming, confronted Mueller about the accusations. For the second time, Mueller admitted to a chief of his religious order that he had conducted the clandestine experiments.
“He told me what he'd been doing, this bizarre conduct,” Fleming said last August during a deposition for the Missouri lawsuits alleging abuse by Mueller. “I told him in that very interview, that same day, ‘You must resign.’ We cannot have one of our members doing this, and certainly not a principal for sure; that I felt ... he needed psychological help.”
Mueller immediately was removed and sent to Jemez Springs, N.M., where a religious order known as the Servants of the Paraclete operated a treatment center. Its mission was to counsel troubled clergymen.
Fleming testified that the few written reports he received about Marianists who were being treated at Jemez Springs were accompanied by a disclaimer that required him to return all of the documents to the Servants of the Paraclete for destruction.
“I believe (the Servants of the Paraclete's) practice was ... to send some reports in writing and then ask that they be immediately returned to them so that there wouldn't be too many reports available in the future to too many people,” Fleming testified.
The Marianists weren’t fond of keeping negative reports involving members, either. Fleming testified that it was the practice of the order's leaders to verbally share allegations such as those made against Mueller. If anything had been put in writing, it was typically destroyed after the Marianist provincial council ruled the allegations were unsubstantiated.
Mueller's trip to Jemez Springs in December 1983 was the first documented step by the Marianists to end his unapproved experiments, other than moving him to a new school or simply telling him to stop.
Mueller stayed at Jemez Springs until August 1984. Then the Rev. Mike Foley, head of the treatment center and superior general of the Servants of the Paraclete, contacted Fleming and assured him Mueller was well, and ready to be assigned to a new mission by the Marianists.
The same month that Mueller was released from Jemez Springs, Fleming named him assistant principal at St. John Vianney High School in St. Louis, the same school where Mueller's teaching career had begun 22 years earlier.
In late 1985, more of the same allegations surfaced at Vianney. Members of the student council reported to their principal, Brother Joseph Grieshaber, that Mueller had made them kneel before him and pledge allegiance to him. The father of two of the students also contacted Grieshaber about the incident.
Two Vianney students from that era have filed lawsuits in St. Louis alleging that Mueller blindfolded them, made them do strange breathing exercises, pressed knives to their throats and sexually abused them.
The reports from the student council members and their parents compelled Fleming to send Mueller back to Jemez Springs in December 1985. His second stay at the treatment center lasted four months, and he was released in April 1986.
More allegations came to the attention of the Marianist leaders while Mueller was in New Mexico. A letter from Fleming dated March 5, 1986, reads: “During the past two days I have received several expressions of concern from parents and school administrators concerning your contacts with current and former students.”
Mueller responded in July 1986. “I don't know how much additional trouble I've caused or am in,” Mueller wrote. “I received a telephone call from Mike Foley saying I was in trouble. I'm sorry people got hurt.”
In September 1986, Mueller voluntarily resigned from the Marianist order. Fleming has testified that Mueller was not forced to quit.
Mueller returned to his hometown and worked in data processing and with the San Antonio symphony in the years that followed. He lived in anonymity until 2005, when the allegations against him became public for the first time.
The first hint that Mueller's secrets were unraveling came in March 2005, when Monsignor Mark Plewka, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Pueblo, placed a phone call to the present Marianist provincial, Brother Stephen Glodek.
Glodek testified that Plewka inquired whether Mueller still was in the order and working with students, because Plewka had received a report of a Roncalli student who alleged that Mueller had subjected him to a disturbing experiment.
Glodek testified that the dioceses in locations where Mueller had been assigned would not have had access to the files of the Marianists, which staffed and operated schools throughout the country.
Glodek sent letters to every alumnus of the schools where Mueller had taught. It informed them that abuse allegations had been leveled against Mueller, and asked others who may have been subjected to this kind of treatment to notify the Marianist leader.
Glodek testified that as of last December 52 men had contacted him in response to his letter. He said only two of them alleged sexual abuse.
Why, almost 50 years after burying the first reported problem between Mueller and a student and myriad other reports that he had conducted strange experiments on children, were the Marianists taking the first steps to notify anyone of the possible danger he posed? Because until the first allegations of overtly sexual behavior toward students surfaced, the Marianists did not take the situation as seriously as they should have.
“Looking back, I think there were signs that I did not read well and certainly did not see the implications of some bizarre behavior. I regret that very much,” Hakenewerth wrote in an e-mail response to The Pueblo Chieftains’ questions. “I believe if there had been any sexual implications at all, I would have been more alert.”
Hakenewerth's successor, Fleming, also testified that the complaints he fielded about Mueller did not involve sex. Today's Marianist chief, Glodek, said if sexual abuse had been alleged years ago, the order would have handled Mueller differently.
“Sexual abuse of minors is a whole different area than the kind of behavior that Father Fleming said that William Mueller perpetrated,” Glodek testified.
Six months after Plewka's call to Glodek, the first Roncalli accusers filed lawsuits in Pueblo, and Bryan Bacon, a lawyer and federal court legal clerk, filed suit in St. Louis alleging that Mueller had sexually abused him during the 1980s while he was a student at St. John Vianney High School.
Media outlets in Colorado, Missouri and Texas jumped on the story. It shocked many who had been Mueller's students, including some who are now litigants accusing him of abuse.
“At that point, I realized there was no research project, no master's degree, and this was some kind of fraud,” testified Matt Giegling, an FBI agent who has accused Mueller of abusing him while he was a student at St. Mary's High School in St. Louis during the 1980s. “Bill Mueller lied to me.”
Realizing that Mueller had preyed on them has tilted the lives of some of his accusers.
“So at that point was I embarrassed? Yes. Did I feel violated? Yes. Is it something that I lose sleep over? Yes,” Giegling testified. “I don't think it's something I should have to deal with. This man who was in a trustworthy position to me, a position of authority, a religious man, took advantage of my trust and of me.”
Mueller's tactic of demanding silence from the subjects of his experiments, and the Marianists' practice of keeping the allegations in-house, insulated him from prosecution. None of the allegations against Mueller, now 69, ever reached investigators in time for him to be charged with a crime. During the Kirkwood, Mo., police investigation, detectives learned that Mueller's criminal history was spotless as of the fall of 2005, and that's how it has stayed.
When police in Kirkwood collected statements in 2005 from 10 men accusing Mueller of abusing them during their high school years in the 1960s and 1980s, it was too late. The criminal statute of limitations had expired and prosecutors in St. Louis County declined to charge Mueller with a crime.
Prosecutors in Pueblo also have said the statute of limitations has lapsed on the allegations here. Some victims have appealed to the district attorney's office to reconsider charging Mueller with kidnapping, for which there is no statute of limitations in Colorado.
“It's extremely frustrating,” said Bacon. “(Mueller) should be in jail forever. It's troubling that he is free and charges won't be brought against him. He's a freaking animal who should be in prison.”
Even if Mueller were charged, convicting him would not be easy. The alleged incidents were private, with no witnesses, Mueller's accusers have said. In the absence of physical evidence or an admission from Mueller, it would be a hard sell to a jury.
Some accusers have said their lawsuits are their last hope for justice. Those cases, too, face the obstacles of civil statutes of limitations in Colorado and Missouri.
As part of the Kirkwood police probe, Mueller was interviewed on Oct. 9, 2005, by a detective from the San Antonio Police Department. The detective's report identified Mueller as a suspect. Mueller denied asking Bacon and other students to participate in experiments, but admitted he had been removed from Vianney High School in the 1980s because the parents of a student “had complained on him.” He refused to elaborate on the complaint.
During a phone conversation with Glodek in the fall of 2005, Mueller again denied he ever sexually abused students. But Glodek is convinced that at the minimum, Mueller conducted twisted, illicit experiments.
“I have enough statements by students that there is indication that he did a lot of these trust experiments,” Glodek testified.
Mueller had a chance to answer the accusations again on Jan. 16, when he was deposed in the lawsuits accusing him of abuse. This time, he took his own advice.
“I respectfully refuse to answer on the ground my answer may incriminate me,” Mueller answered 110 times.
http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1182125747/1
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