Posted on 06/06/2002 5:29:15 PM PDT by Palladin
TRUCKEE -- Police were digging in search of human remains Wednesday near the Truckee vacation home of a former Fremont priest accused of child molestation -- a man who lived a few blocks from Amber Swartz when that 7-year-old girl disappeared from outside her Pinole home in 1988.
Investigators from several jurisdictions dug first by hand and then with heavy equipment at Stephen Miller Kiesle's property, focused on spots where cadaver-detecting dogs had picked up scents a day earlier, Pinole Police Commander John Miner said.
"We couldn't help but think about the Amber case when we were doing this," he said.
Miner said Kiesle isn't formally a suspect in what has been one of Northern California's best-known missing child cases. But he lived close to Amber and allegedly molested children of her approximate age.
"We're still kind of interested; we're keeping that in the back of our mind," he said.
Other law enforcement agencies were also in Truckee on Wednesday, seeking possible links to their own missing child cases. Truckee Police Commander Scott Berry said the
search halted at 5:30 p.m. but will resume this morning: "As of this time we have not found anything ... but we want to have a thorough investigation."
Amber's mother, Kim Swartz, said Wednesday she recognizes Kiesle as a former neighbor.
"He seemed like a quiet person, like an everyday average person with a wife," she added. "But after 14 years of learning what I've learned, now I know it can be absolutely anybody -- it can be the nicest person but they can have this hidden secret."
Both she and Miner cautioned against leaping to conclusions, explaining that police have pursued thousands of leads in Amber's disappearance over the last 14 years. They've used cadaver dogs many times and have had positive hits before, but found animal remains or nothing at all.
Kiesle, 55, is free on $180,000 bond following his May 16 arrest by Fremont Police. He has pleaded not guilty to seven counts of child molestation for crimes he allegedly committed more than 30 years ago as a seminarian at Fremont's Santa Paula Catholic Church. He called himself "the Pied Piper of the neighborhood" and has admitted to molesting five female victims, ages 9 to 15, from 1968 to 1972, police claim in court documents.
At least 14 more possible victims have contacted police since his arrest, including two from Pinole and three from Truckee, but no more charges have been filed.
Kiesle was defrocked after his 1978 conviction for molesting two boys while serving at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church in Union City, for which he was sentenced to three years of probation. He later married and moved to Pinole, and recently retired from his job as a computer engineer for ChevronTexaco in San Ramon.
Miner said Kiesle did register as a sex offender following his 1978 conviction, but after finishing his probation he exercised his right under California law to ask a court to expunge his conviction. A judge granted that request -- essentially clearing Kiesle's record and ending his duty to register as a sex offender -- "long before" Amber disappeared, Miner said.
No one answered the door at the Kiesle home -- an L-shaped ranch home with a neatly trimmed lawn -- on Savage Avenue in Pinole on Wednesday afternoon. One neighbor said he knew Kiesle from St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Pinole, where he coached one of the kids basketball teams. He was there between 1972 and 1974.
"He was just a normal guy, and all of the sudden he left," said Casey Curtin, 41.
Kiesle next went to Our Lady of the Rosary in Union City from 1974 to 1978, when he was defrocked. About a decade ago, Curtin said, Kiesle moved across the street from him on Savage Avenue in Pinole and he sees him once in a while.
Less than a mile away on the same street, Isaac Perez, his wife and his three daughters live in a home they bought six years ago from Kim Swartz.
His kids know about Amber's disappearance, but he tries not to talk about it.
"I don't want to be negative and have my kids afraid of playing outside," said Perez, who said he keeps an eye on his children when they're outside. He said he hopes police find Amber so "the parents can have some peace."
---snip---
Notice that Kiesle was given a ten-year headstart on his career as a pedophile by the Catholic Church, which reassigned him until he was caught and prosecuted by civil authorities.
Police Search Former Priest's Home For Remains
Possible Connection To Amber Swartz Case
TRUCKEE, Calif. -- Investigators Wednesday dug up the yard of a Lake Tahoe-area vacation home of a former priest accused of molesting children, looking for a possible connection to a widely publicized missing child case.
Police said they believe Stephen Kiesle, a former priest at Fremont's Santa Paula Catholic Church, may have sexually assaulted several children at the upscale Truckee home.
Authorities said a search warrant was served at the home Tuesday night and that special cadaver dogs picked up human scents, prompting investigators to return to the home to look for possible human remains.
"We felt with the allegations and when they occurred ... at that same time there were other children missing. We felt since we're here, we'd love to solve those past cases," Truckee Town Commander Scott Berry said.
No remains were found Wednesday.
Fremont police first started investigating Kiesle in April.
He was arrested at his home in Pinole on May 16 on three counts of child molestation. The home is in the same neighborhood where Amber Swartz, 7, disappeared in 1988.
The investigation led to Kiesle's vacation home in Truckee, where police say he molested several victims in the mid 1990s.
"We've had a molestation investigation going on regarding a molestation back at that time with the same suspect and possible relatives and other young girls when they were up here in Truckee," Berry said.
Kiesle was defrocked in 1978 after he was charged with tying up two boys and molesting them. He also was arrested on molestation charges in 1981 in nearby Union City.
Kiesle remains free on bail after his arrest in Pinole.
We need to know the judge's name and more info about him. There is a judge in Philadelphia, Anita Brody, who just overturned the death sentence of Joseph Henry, a convicted murderer of a college girl. Henry had gone into her dorm room at Lehigh University and brutally murdered her. The same judge overturned the death sentence of Mumia, the darling of Hollywood lefties.
AB
Because he was convicted in open court and put on the California sex offenders' registry, which made his status a matter of public record. What do you expect the bishop to do, put up a billboard on the freeway?
C'mon, this is getting ridiculous. Once the guy is removed from the priesthood and prosecuted, it's out of the bishop's hands and becomes the state's problem. If anyone dropped the ball, it looks like it was the state.
That isn't what it said. It said he admitted molestation starting in 1968, not that the church knew about it from 1968 and covered it up.
Great idea!
Article Last Updated:
Friday, June 07, 2002 - 8:19:52 AM MST
No Remains Found Yet
Stephen Kiesle, a former priest defrocked after a child molestation conviction, worked with youths at a Pinole church at the time Amber Swartz had her first Holy Communion there, just before her June 1988 disappearance. As investigators suspicious of Kiesle's proximity to Amber wrapped up a fruitless search for human remains Thursday at his Truckee vacation home, authorities there said they will charge him with another sex crime -- unrelated to Amber -- atop those already filed against him in the East Bay.
Truckee Police Commander Scott Berry said Thursday the Nevada County District Attorney will charge Kiesle in the case of at least one of three girls he allegedly molested there; police are investigating the other two. One of those three girls is Kiesle's distant relative, the other two her friends.
Kiesle, 55, is free on $180,000 bail after pleading innocent in May to seven counts of child molestation for crimes he allegedly committed more than 30 years ago as a seminarian at Fremont's Santa Paula Catholic Church. He has been down this road before, with a 1978 conviction for molesting two boys while a priest at Our Lady of the Rosary church in Union City.
At least 14 more possible victims have come forward since his arrest, and Fremont Police brought their Pinole counterparts into the case after one person claimed to have been molested there. Together those departments extended their probe to Kiesle's Truckee property and -- mindful that Kiesle lived a few blocks from Amber Swartz's home -- brought cadaver dogs and digging equipment with them.
There are no allegations of any sexual abuse during the time Kiesle worked with youths as a layman at Pinole's St. Joseph's Church from 1985 to 1988, although sources close to the case said Thursday they're investigating why Kiesle's work there ended a few months after Amber Swartz's disappearance.
Kim Swartz, Amber's mother, said she doesn't recall her daughter having any contact with Kiesle during that time.
"We weren't very religious. We weren't going to church on weekends," she said. "She (Amber) went to her courses at the school to get whatever she had to get in order to receive her Communion, but she didn't hang around the church."
Maddi Misheloff, the mother of Dublin middle school student Ilene Misheloff, who disappeared on Jan. 23, 1989, while walking to home from school, said this week's development is disturbing.
"Every time you hear something like this, it makes you sick," she said. "It just makes me ill."
Even so, Misheloff said when human remains are discovered, she doesn't think they're Ilene's.
"Our hope is that she's coming home," she said after a day spent mailing fliers about her daughter's disappearance.
As for whether Kiesle could have some connection to Ilene's disappearance, Misheloff said she doesn't know. But she extends her sympathy to the parents of Amber Swartz during the current investigation.
"Our prayers and hopes are with them, and if they need me, they have my phone number," Misheloff said.
Kim Swartz wondered Thursday how church and state could have let Kiesle work with children only seven years after his child molestation conviction and four years after he was defrocked. The church has "allowed these individuals to hide behind the Lord's cloak -- to me, that's as wrong as wrong can be," she said, adding Kiesle's ability to hide his past from police is equally disturbing. "Here he gets to have his past life expunged as if it never occurred and start fresh, and nobody around him has access to who he really is, but do his victims get to have him expunged from their memory? I don't think so."
Kiesle's escape from notice apparently was a product of state law and church policy, both of which have changed significantly since then.
Upon completing his three years of probation in November 1981, Kiesle convinced an Alameda County Superior Court judge to wipe his record clean. Under California law, a misdemeanor convict who completes his or her probation without problems can seek such a dismissal, which frees that person from having to admit a criminal record on job or credit applications or anywhere else.
At the time, it also freed misdemeanor sex crime convicts from their obligation to register with local authorities as convicted sex offenders.
Alameda County Chief Assistant District Attorney Nancy O'Malley said that changed in the mid-1990s. Now, even if a misdemeanor sex conviction such as Kiesle's were to be set aside, police would still have his name and he would still have to inform police of his whereabouts every year; failure to do so would be a felony.
"Right when the law was being passed ... we had a bunch of these old convicted sex offenders who were rushing in trying to get their records expunged before the law went into effect -- I probably saw four or five," O'Malley said, adding her office opposed those petitions and all of them were rejected by judges.
These days, she said, "registration is for life -- end of story."
Officials at the Diocese of Oakland, encompassing Alameda and Contra Costa counties, weren't available for comment Thursday. But Terrie Light, Northwest Coast Regional Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said the Diocese might never have known of Kiesle's lay work after his defrocking.
But the Diocese has taken a more attentive stance in other ways, Light said. In fact, she said, Kiesle illustrates the very problem Diocese Chancellor Sister Barbara Flannery has cited for many years when opposing the defrocking of priests who molest.
Kicking such a priest out means he goes into the community unknown, Light said, whereas keeping him within the clergy but away from all parishioners lets the Diocese observe and control him.
Gene Buxa -- a lay minister and longtime member of St. Joseph's parish who said he knew Kiesle well -- said the former priest returned to the church under a vague cloud of rumor about molestation of young people, but no one knew exactly why he had left the priesthood.
"He was a good friend. He had a lot of talent, but I guess he was flawed," Buxa said. "When he came back here he was married and he was very involved in our youth ministry at St. Joseph's."
Buxa worked alongside Kiesle as a volunteer and said he didn't believe Kiesle was involved with young children, such as Amber Swartz, in the parish's Holy Communion classes.
"We used to go on weekends with young people -- junior high age. In fact, when he was a priest here (in the 1970s), he started the program for junior high kids and part of that was going on weekends," Buxa said. "When he came back in the 1980s, he coached basketball and I worked with him with junior high-age kids."
Buxa said, "When these molestation charges surfaced, I was truly stunned." Molestation is terrible but it's very different from murder, he added, and he finds it hard to believe Kiesle could be capable of murder.
Carol Jobe, president of the St. Joseph's Parish school board from 1985 to 1988, remembers Kiesle was "very involved in the youth ministry."
"Part of me says it would be nice if they could bring closure to Kim Swartz and solve this crime," she said. "But another part of me just can't believe that this man would do that."
Up in the Sierra, investigators fell silent Thursday as a cadaver-sniffing dog was led through the 15-foot-by-8-foot, 4-foot-deep hole they had dug by hand and with heavy equipment in the front yard of Kiesle's vacation home. Dogs had reacted strongly there on Tuesday, prompting the dig, but on Thursday the sniffing was inconclusive. Crestfallen investigators refilled the hole, packed up and left.
"Right now we have nothing to show if there is anybody, anything ... in the ground. We are going to regroup and discuss this with the experts," Berry said.
Pinole, Fremont and Truckee police; Contra Costa and El Dorado County Sheriff's deputies; and FBI agents all had a hand in the Truckee search. Most of those agencies will discuss next week whether to go back and dig some more or use ground sonar at other spots that cadaver dogs had reacted to in Kiesle's back yard and near a recently built garage.
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