Sacred Trust

Danny Croteau was a thirteen-year-old altar boy from Springfield, Massachusetts. His family was close to Father Richard Lavigne, a young priest who spent time with the Croteau children and took them on outings. On April 14, 1972, Danny went missing, and the next morning his body was found in the river along the bank in Chicopee. He had been beaten about the head, and tests put his blood-alcohol level at 0.18.

Lavigne presided at Danny’s funeral Mass, yet detectives had already noticed him asking about tire tracks near the bridge, a detail never released. Danny’s oldest brother, Carl Jr., came to believe the voice on an anonymous call after the funeral was Lavigne’s. No charges followed. In 1992 Lavigne pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two boys, and in 2003 the Vatican removed him from the priesthood. Tips arrived over the years, including a 1993 account of a priest driving away from the riverbank late at night.

In 2021 a language expert found that an anonymous typed letter sent in 2004 matched Lavigne’s writing patterns. In hours of hospital-bed interviews, Lavigne admitted taking Danny to the river and later seeing him face down in the water. On May 21, 2021, prosecutors sought a murder warrant, and Lavigne, 80, died of COVID-19 that same day. Three days later the Hampden District Attorney named him as Danny’s killer and closed the case.