The Crusader Who Exposed Pennsylvania’s Sadistic Priests

Without Richard Serbin’s diligence and commitment, many of the atrocities committed by hundreds of Pennsylvania’s Catholic priests would never have come to light.

ROME — Richard Serbin remembers the day in 1987 when he met 19-year-old Michael Hutchinson. The skinny young man was in a mental health institution for criminals serving time for robbery and male prostitution. “I can remember that meeting very well,” said Serbin, who was 40 at the time and just getting his bearings in what he thought would be a career dedicated to civil cases against big corporations.  “He was very hyper and he got all these candy bars from the vending machine. Then he told me what happened.”

Michael, it turns out, was very troubled. He had been sexually abused from just before his 11th birthday until he was 17 by Father Francis Luddy, a Catholic priest in the Pennsylvania diocese of Altoona-Johnstown who has since died.

Luddy, who was in his 40s at the time, was so close to the Hutchinson family he was also Michael’s godfather. He is one of 301 predator priests exposed in a sickening document released by a Pennsylvania grand jury on Tuesday. That document outlines alleged sexual crimes against more than 1,000 children over seven decades of stunning silence and cover ups across six dioceses in Pennsylvania.

Without Serbin’s diligence and commitment, many of these atrocities never would have come to light. Serbin, who has been defending victims of clerical sex abuse since he met Michael more than 30 years ago, provided the names of 109 predator priests to the Pennsylvania grand jury investigation, and to a prior Pennsylvania grand jury investigation in 2016.

Serbin found his way to Michael’s cell after the boy’s mother, Mary Hutchinson, grew frustrated with a lack of response from the local diocese. She went to visit Serbin in his small office. “She was obviously a brave woman, willing to publicly take on the church on behalf of her son,” Serbin recalls. “Keep in mind that in 1987 no one believed a priest would sexually molest a child.” She didn’t want compensation from the church, Serbin insists. She just wanted her son to get the care he needed.

“The false sense of security he got from the priest meant he ran straight into the arms of a monster.”

“He was in a mental institute for criminals. It was close to his 20th birthday,” Serbin told The Daily Beast by phone from Pennsylvania. “Michael was this very slender boy. He had been in prison, he was sodomized in prison, he had borderline intelligence.”

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