The Murder of Dan O'Connell and the Cleansing of the Catholic Priesthood

On February 5, 2002, Dan O'Connell, a 39 year-old civic leader, funeral director, and Catholic from Hudson, Wisconsin, had coffee with Mary Pagel, a bus driver for St. Patrick's Catholic School. O'Connell asked Pagel if she had ever seen the assistant priest, Fr. Ryan Erickson, inappropriately touch children. He then told her that he was going to confront Fr. Erickson later that day. She advised against it. Undeterred, O'Connell replied, "I can handle it.”

Sometime between 1pm and 1:30 pm that day, Dan O'Connell and a 22 year-old mortuary science intern, James Ellison, were killed at the O’Connell Family Funeral Home. Both men had been shot with a 9mm handgun. Two thousand people were interviewed by Hudson Police over the next several years, as they tried to solve the mystery behind the double slayings. The Pagel connection was not made until the spring of 2005, after detectives Jeff Knopps and Shawn Pettee had been newly assigned to investigate the case. At the top of their cold and unimpressive list of leads and suspects to be reinterviewed, were a certain policeman trained in firearms, and the former assistant priest and youth pastor of St. Patrick's Parish.

A recent report from North Dakota had come to their attention. Father Ryan Erickson, now a full pastor hundreds of miles away in another parish, had been accused of sexual abuse by a teenage male while at St. Patrick's. Erickson had been transferred from St Patrick’s in Hudson in September 2003 to a parish in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, where the pastor asked Superior diocesan officials to “transfer either Erickson or me.” The diocese elevated Erickson to be a pastor on his own at the Church of St. Mary of the Seven Dolors (Sorrows) in Hurley,Wisconsin. On November 11, 2004, the detectives, not as impressed with Erickson as the diocese, interviewed him in person for several hours. They made no facial contact with each other when he described the locations of the bodies at the crime scene. Only police officers knew such details. Later Erickson told Deacon Russell Lundgren, “I done it and they are going to catch me.” The deacon was not under any kind of confessional bond of secrecy but took a somewhat less aggressive approach than that of the police officers. He told no one and prayed that Erickson wasn’t telling the truth.

After the second videotaped police interview on Dec 7, Bishop Raphael Fliss of the Superior Diocese had a phone chat with Erickson. Erickson told him, “I had nothing to do with those murders. God knows I am telling the truth.” The bishop avoided the excesses of the Inquisition and decided to drop the matter with a phone call. As the diocese spokesman said later “there was no reason not to believe him.” Two days later on December 19, 2004, Erickson hanged himself at his church of sorrows. The priest who “supervised” Erickson for the three years during which he murdered O’Connell and was having a teenage boy visit multiple weekends for beer and sex was Fr. Peter Szleszinski. He said on hearing of the priest’s suicide, “I don’t know who in the world would tell the police something that would make them think Fr. Erickson was the guilty one or the culprit.” He added that Erickson showed no signs of mental stress during his three years at Hudson, “nothing at all.”(Readers might want to read the account of Bruce Rubenstein in City Pages of Minneapolis Oct 2005 or the work of reporter Randy Furst in the Startribune of Minneapolis to fact check that assertion.) Even after Erickson’s hanging, the diocese perceptively proclaimed, “We have no conclusive evidence that Fr. Erickson was involved with the tragic events.”

Ten months passed and again it was the civil authorities who told the truth. A John Doe hearing on October 3, 2005 showed “overwhelming evidence” that Erickson murdered O’Connell and Ellison, and that he had in fact been abusing a teen-age male at Mr. O’Connell’s parish. Dan O'Connell story 1/9/06 12:13 PM Page 7 Furthermore, Erickson engaged in homosexual activity during his seminary career in Winona and had been credibly accused but not charged with homosexual abuse even before he was ordained. Multiple psychologists hired by the diocese of Superior and the seminaries of Winona and St Paul found Erickson a fitting candidate for the priesthood. It is not clear if detectives Pettee and Knopps didn’t read the psychologist’s reports or if they judged by different standards. But in the end these men were driven to find justice for Dan O’Connell who was driven to find justice for a male teen abused by a predator.

Because of three men-three fathers who had the courage to act- there is one less masquerade father to sentence the young men of a northern Wisconsin Catholic parish to a life of torment from abuse. The moral blindness and wanton disregard of fatherly duty by the Bishop, the Vicar General of Superior, and the ex-pastor of St. Patrick’s are patently obvious. Others should pursue these men with the goal of resignation and repentance. Our concern here however is the diocesan and seminary cultures that honored Erickson with the name of “father” and still show no capacity for self examination or remorse. A few months after Ryan Erickson had killed Dan O’Connell, he told a friend about their argument and said “now the demon is dead.” Two detectives caught the real demon. Now as Kathi O’Connell, Dan’s sister, said “Dan started out by doing something he thought was right. He got killed, so we’re here to finish it.”

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