Massachusetts 1972 Cold Case Solved After 49 Years — The Killer Was the Priest

Nearly five decades after a Springfield alter boy was found dead along the Chipe River,  the district attorney announced the case is closed.  Former Catholic priest Richard Lavine, who was named as a suspect but never charged, died this past Friday in a hospital in Greenfield. Earlier that day, before he died, District Attorney Anthony Galoon authorized an arrest warrant for Lavine in that murder.

Lavine became a person of interest because of the inconsistent and unusual statements he made to investigators in the days after the murder. The search for answers and proof of what happened to Danny Croto has played out for more than 49 years. And this right here is where Danny’s body was discovered along the banks of the Chapi River here in Chapi.

 The DA’s office said that he was still dressed in his clothes  from his previous school day at Our Lady of Sacred Heart School. The investigation began after Danny Croto was found dead along the banks of the Chapie River in April 1972.  Disappointed that he’s not being brought to justice. But just like District Attorney, we believe there’s a higher power and he will face that higher power.

 No,  we can’t rewrite history,  but we can we can make the future one that children are safe where they should be in church and that all uh the working with our environment, our office of safe environment, that we will do everything we possibly can to make sure that the church is a safe place for all people.

Credibly, due to Lavine’s death, there will be no pro prosecution or trial. But due to the credible and significant evidence that has been assembled in the last year that incriminates Richard Leavine,  I am announcing today that the investigation into the murder of Danny Croto is now officially closed.

 3 days after the family lost their son, the telephone rang in their kitchen. It was a Monday, April 17th, 1972. The house on the east side of Springfield, Massachusetts, had been full of people all weekend. Neighbors, relatives, parishioners carrying casserole dishes and not knowing what to say.

 By Monday, the crowd had thinned. The phone was on the wall the way phones were then, with a cord long enough to reach the table. The oldest son answered it. Carl Jr., he was 19. A man’s voice on the other end said he was very sorry about what happened to Dany. Then the voice said something else.

 It said that Dany had seen something behind the circle that he shouldn’t have seen and it said that it was an accident. Carl Jr. asked who was calling. The man hung up. Now, here is the part that would sit inside this family like a stone for the next 49 years. Carl Jr. did not hear a stranger’s voice on that line. He told investigators the voice was familiar to him.

 He said he knew exactly who it belonged to. He named a priest. A 19-year-old kid standing in his parents’ kitchen 3 days after the worst thing that would ever happen to him gave law enforcement a name. It would take until 2021, until Carl Jr. was in his 60s, until both of his parents were in the ground, until nearly every detective who touched the original file had retired or died for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to stand at a podium and say out loud that the teenager had been right.

 Welcome back to the Crime Bureau, where no case stays cold forever. Before we get into this one, drop a comment right now and tell us where you’re watching from. We read every single comment, and this channel is built out of the people in that comment section. If you’re new here, hit that like button and subscribe. It cost you nothing, and it’s the entire reason we get to keep digging into cases like this one.

 Now, let’s talk about Danny. His name was Daniel Thomas Croto. He was born in Springfield in November of 1958. The fifth of seven children born to Carl and Bernice Croto. Bernice went by Bunny. Everyone called her that. They named him after Danny Thomas, the entertainer, the Catholic philanthropist, the man who founded a children’s hospital.

 That’s the kind of family this was. Church on Sunday, seven kids, a name chosen because it meant something. Dany had blue eyes and dirty blonde hair and freckles across the bridge of his nose. He liked fishing. He liked ice hockey. He talked about going on safari someday, which is exactly the kind of thing a boy in a workingclass New England neighborhood says when the world still looks enormous to him.

 His brothers and sisters remembered him as the one who made everybody laugh. He was 13 years old. He went to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School. He and his brothers served as alter boys at St. Catherine of Sienna, the family parish. And it was there in 1967 that the Croto family met a young priest who had been ordained the year before.

 His name was Richard Lavine. He was in his mid20s. He was charming, energetic, good with kids in a way that a lot of older clergy simply weren’t. The family liked him. That is not a small thing to say, and I’m not going to skip past it. In a devout Catholic household in western Massachusetts in 1967, a priest who took an interest in your sons was not a warning sign. It was a blessing.

 He came to dinner. He socialized with the parents. He took the Croto boys on outings, fishing trips, drives, days out, frequently without their mother and father along. And nobody thought twice about that because why would they? When Lavine was reassigned to St. Mary’s Parish in Springfield in the summer of 1968. He didn’t drift away.

 He kept coming around. He kept taking the boys on trips. He invited them, sometimes together and sometimes one at a time, to stay overnight at his parents’ house in Chapi. For 5 years, this priest was woven into the daily fabric of the Croto family. Hold that. We’re going to come back to it, and it’s going to feel very different the second time.

 April 14th, 1972 was a Friday. Danny came home from school, threw his bag on the floor, and went straight back out the door to play kickball in a neighbor’s yard. Ordinary. Completely ordinary. The neighborhood was the kind where kids moved between houses without asking permission and came home when the street lights came on.

 That was the last time Carl and Bunny Croto saw their son alive. The following morning, Saturday, April 15th, a Chapi patrolman named Burl Howard was near the river where it runs under a bridge close to the Chapi Springfield line. The Chapi River is not a scenic waterway. It’s industrial, brown, fast in the spring, edged with brush and rock and the debris that collects under any bridge in any city in America.

 Officer Howard saw something in the water. Dany was found face down in the river, still dressed in the clothes he had worn to school the day before. The autopsy found fractures of the skull and lacerations of the brain. He had been struck repeatedly about the head and face with a heavy object.

 Investigators believed that object was a stone taken from the riverbank itself. The medical examiner recorded something else too, something that would matter enormously later. a 13-year-old boy with a blood alcohol level of8. Officers documented the scene and photographed it. They noted blood stained soil.

 They noted blood spattered rocks. Those materials were collected, logged, and preserved. And that decision by somebody in 1972 whose name most people will never know is the only reason there was anything left to test half a century later. Meanwhile, at Chapi Police Headquarters, Carl Croto was asked to come in and give a statement.

 Carl asked if the police would pick up Father Lavine and bring him along. He wanted his priest with him. Of course, he did. A man had just been told that his 13-year-old son was dead. He wanted the person he trusted most in a crisis sitting beside him. The police agreed. They collected Lavine. They questioned him.

 And then when the terrible administrative business of identification had to be done, Lavine offered to spare the father that he identified Dany<unk>y’s body himself in Carl’s place. Afterward, he recommended to the family that the casket be kept closed at the funeral. I want you to pause on that sequence because everything that follows in this story lives inside it.

 The priest was in the police station. The priest identified the body. The priest advised the family on how to bury their child. All right, quick one before we go further because this is the point where this case starts to turn. [clears throat] You’ve now heard the same set of facts the Croto family had in April of 1972.

 Put your theory in the comments right now. What was it that finally cracked this open 49 years later? Was it DNA, a witness, something else entirely? Make your guess before you keep watching. And I’ll tell you now, most people get this one wrong because the obvious answer is the answer that failed.

 Let’s get into what the police actually had in 1972. They had a priest who kept changing his story. Within days of Dy’s death, Richard Lavine became a person of interest to investigators. Not because of rumor, not because of suspicion of the church, because of what came out of his own mouth. He made statements that were inconsistent.

 and in the plain language later used by the district attorney’s office, unusual. He lied about when he had last seen Dany. He claimed he had never been alone with the boy, and witnesses flatly contradicted him. On Sunday, April 16th, the day after Dany was found, a witness saw Lavine alone at the riverbank around 4:30 in the afternoon, standing at the scene.

 Then came April 17th. That Monday, the same day as the phone call, Lavine sat for an interview with investigators. And during that interview, according to the police report, the priest asked the detectives a question. He asked, “If a stone was used and it was thrown into the river, would blood still be on it?” That is in a 1972 police report.

 A man who has been told nothing about a weapon, asking investigators a technical question about whether water washes evidence off a rock. And on that same day, in that same 24 hours, the phone rang in the Croto kitchen and a familiar voice said it was an accident. So the police in 1972 had a suspect who changed his story, who was seen at the scene, who was contradicted by witnesses, who asked about the weapon, and whose voice a family member identified on an anonymous call.

 And nothing happened. No charges, no indictment, no arrest. The file stayed open and the years started stacking up. Carl Croto spent decades asking why. And at some point he got an answer that he repeated for the rest of his life. He said the Hampton County District Attorney at the time, Matthew Ryan Jr., told him this, that he didn’t think he could get 12 jurors to convict a priest.

Sit with that sentence for a second. not that the evidence was insufficient, not that the case had holes, that a jury in Western Massachusetts in 1972 would not convict a Catholic priest, and that therefore it wasn’t worth trying. Years later, when a superior court judge reviewed the sealed material in this case, he wrote that the statement alleged a grave abuse of authority by the district attorney in 1972 and raised concerns about the relationship between law enforcement authorities and the dascese and about their handling of

evidence that pointed at Lavine, that’s a judge, in writing, about a prosecutor’s office. And it was not just the prosecution. When the sealed records eventually came out, they revealed that several other witnesses had reported seeing Lavine at the scene or at the location where Dany was found on the night in question, and that those witnesses had waited years to come forward because they had been talked out of it, discouraged, dissuaded by others from giving statements.

 A 13-year-old boy died, and the machinery that was supposed to answer for it turned itself off. Let’s take one beat here because this is the part of the story where I need something from you. If you’ve made it this far, you already understand why this channel exists. Cases like Danny’s don’t stay unsolved because they’re unsolvable.

 They stay unsolved because somebody decided they were inconvenient. Hitting subscribe is genuinely how these episodes reach the people who remember these cases and the families still waiting on them. And I want your answer to this one in the comments because I don’t think there’s a clean answer. If a prosecutor declines to charge a case because he believes the community will protect the suspect, is that a failure of the prosecutor or a failure of the community? Tell me. I’ll be reading now.

The 19 years after 1972, the Croto family did not let go. Carl and Bunny kept a portrait of Dany on the living room wall above the television, and they looked at it everyday for the rest of their lives. They gave interviews. They pushed. They made themselves inconvenient on purpose because the alternative was silence.

 And meanwhile, Richard Lavine kept working as a priest. He was moved parish to parish across western Massachusetts the way problem clergy were moved in that era quietly without explanation to the congregations receiving them. In 1991, Bishop John Marshall removed Lavine from ministry. By then, men who had been boys in those parishes had started to speak.

 Not one, not two, a wave of them. On June 26th, 1992, Richard Lavine stood in a superior court in Newbury Port, Massachusetts, and pleaded guilty to two counts involving the sexual abuse of two adolescent boys. His sentence was psychiatric treatment and 10 years of probation. No prison, not one day. The following year, the Dascese of Springfield reached a settlement with a group of his victims.

 Then more claims came, then more. Over the following decades, the numbers kept climbing. The Dascese eventually acknowledging claims from dozens of people and investigators later concluding the true number of children Lavine had abused was far higher still. Among those who came forward, Joseph Cutoto, Dany<unk>y’s own brother.

 He settled a claim in 1996 concerning Lavine’s conduct between 1969 and 1971, the years the priest was a fixture at the family dinner table. And in Joseph’s account was a detail that lands like a dropped glass. He said Lavine used to take him fishing to the same spot on the river where Dany was later found. That’s not proof of anything.

 I want to be careful and say that plainly. It is not evidence, but it tells you something about how well this man knew that stretch of water. There was also a letter. In 1993, a witness gave investigators a written statement describing being abused by Lavine during an overnight camping trip in Gan, Massachusetts. The witness said the Cretto brothers had been on that trip.

And the witness said that at one point, Dany, angry, confronting the priest, said something. He said, “I’ll tell. I’ll tell.” A 13-year-old boy with a threat and a priest with everything to lose. By the mid90s, the case looked like it might finally break because science had arrived. DNA testing was new, powerful, and being applied to old evidence all over the country.

 In 1995, the material from Dy’s case was tested. It failed to link Richard Lavine to the scene. District Attorney William Bennett, who had made a point of reopening the case when he took over the office, did not bring charges. And the story that hardened into public fact was that the DNA had cleared him. Then came 2004 and a court finally forced the file open.

 The state’s highest court ruled that after more than 30 years, there was no longer any good reason to keep the records sealed. More than 2,000 pages were released. Reporters read them. The public read them. The Croto family read them. Inside were the statements of Dany<unk>y’s teenage friends given to police in 1972.

 They described a priest they had thought was cool. A man who let them look at the magazines he kept under the seat of his convertible. A man who made sure there was leftover communion wine for them. And they described a second version of the same man, one with a temper, one who could turn and turn hard when he was crossed.

 Four more years passed. In 2008, a superior court judge ordered thousands of additional pages released, the ones containing the suppressed witnesses and the judge’s own damning assessment of the 1972 prosecution. And underneath all of it, a wider reckoning was working its way through the dascese of Springfield. In 2020, an investigation led by a retired superior court judge, concluded that abuse allegations against Bishop Christopher Weldon, who had led the dascese at the time of Dan<unk>s death and who had died in 1982, were

unequivocally credible. The bishop in charge when a boy from his dascese died, himself credibly accused. That is the institution the Croto family was asking for answers from. But here’s the thing about all of it. Every document released, every allegation substantiated, every judge’s finding, none of it was a case.

 Circumstantial, all of it. Suggestive, damning, morally overwhelming, legally insufficient. Carl Croto died in 2010. Bunny died in 2016. Neither of them ever heard anyone in authority say who was responsible for their son.  I’m awfully glad that my parents will never hear this.  Boom. Hit that like button if you already know where this is going.

Because there’s one thing this man never counted on, and it’s not forensic. It’s much simpler than that. March 2020, the Hampton County District Attorney’s Office, now led by Anthony Galoon, established a Massachusetts State Police Unresolved Cases Unit. Shortly after it was created, Galoney assigned a trooper to one file specifically, Danny Croto.

What followed was not glamorous work. Investigators and prosecutors assembled and combed through thousands of documents, 48 years of them. Reports, interviews, tips, transcripts, statements from people long since dead. They were looking for two things. Evidence that modern science could reexamine and leads that nobody had ever properly pulled. They found both.

 Start with the science because this is the part that everybody assumed would crack it. The office contracted DNA Labs International, a forensic laboratory in Florida, to work alongside the Massachusetts State Police Lab. Together, they ran dozens of forensic tests across several rounds of testing on the material collected from that riverbank in 1972.

The stained soil, the stones, everyone involved knew the odds. 48 years of storage, of transfers, of degradation. There were moments of hope during that process. There were results that made people sit up and in the end it produced almost nothing. The testing confirmed that Dany<unk>y’s blood was present on the stones. That’s it.

 That’s what half a century of scientific progress bought them. Confirmation of a fact nobody had ever doubted. The DNA was never going to solve this case. Not in 1995. Not in 2021. So they went back to the paper. And in the paper was a letter. Here is where this story becomes something stranger than a standard cold case.

 On March 23rd, 2004, Richard Lavine showed an acquaintance, a man who worked for the Dascese of Springfield, a piece of mail. He said he had received a typed letter, unsigned, no return address. Lavine told this man that the letter must have been written by the person who had actually caused Dany<unk>y’s death because of the guilt described inside it.

 The Dascese employee documented these conversations. He wrote emails about them to his superiors at the Dascese of Springfield and the Dascese did not tell investigators. Not that year, not the next. The existence of that letter only surfaced when the Springfield Dascese was compelled to produce those emails under a grand jury subpoena in a completely separate criminal investigation into a different member of the clergy.

 The letter came to light by accident because of somebody else’s case. On April 6th, 2004, investigators carried out a search warrant at Lavine’s home in Chapi and seized it. While they were there, after advising him of his rights, they spoke with him about it, and Lavine described how he had handled the envelope when it arrived in January of 2004.

 He said he was very suspicious of it because there was no return address. So, he opened it with tweezers. He placed it in a plastic bag before he read it. He told the investigators he did this because he knew about fingerprints and DNA. He described his own reaction to reading it as chilling. Now, for 17 years, that letter sat in evidence as a curiosity, a weird artifact, possibly a taunt from whoever was truly responsible. Possibly nothing.

In March of 2021, District Attorney Guloney brought in Dr. Robert Leonard. Dr. Leonard is a tenure professor of linguistics at Hofster University and a forensic linguist who has been qualified as an expert in 14 states and six federal districts. Forensic linguistics applies the science of language to legal questions.

 In an authorship analysis, an examiner compares a question document against writings of known authorship, looking for the fingerprints people leave in syntax and word choice and rhythm without ever knowing they’re doing it. Leonard was given the anonymous letter. He was also given 10 documents known to have been written by Richard Lavine. He compared them.

 On May 21st, 2021, Dr. Leonard reported his conclusion to the Hampton District Attorney’s Office. In his opinion, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, the language patterns in the anonymous letter were consistent with the language patterns in Lavine’s known writings, to the point that Richard Lavine could not be excluded as a possible author.

 Read that carefully because I’m not going to overstate it. And neither did the DA. It is not an identification. Forensic linguistics cannot say a specific person wrote a specific document. What it can do is exclude people and it did not exclude him. Which raises a question with only one comfortable answer and one deeply uncomfortable one.

 Either an anonymous stranger who happened to write like Richard Lavine mailed Richard Lavine a confession or the priest wrote himself a letter and then showed it around and made sure to mention how carefully he had handled it. By early 2021, Guloon had seen enough to make a decision. He directed his investigators to go and talk to Richard Lavine directly.

 Lavine was 80 years old. He had been leasized, formerly removed from the priesthood back in 2003. He was a patient at a medical facility in western Massachusetts. A Massachusetts state police trooper from the DA’s office went to see him, not once, five times. The dates were April 14th, April 15th, April 16th, April 17th, and May 4th, 2021.

 I want to make sure that registers. April 14th is the day Danny went out to play kickball and did not come home. April 15th is the day he was found in the river. April 16th is the day a witness saw Lavine standing alone at the bank. April 17th is the day the phone rang in the Croto kitchen and a voice said it was an accident.

 49 years later on those same four calendar days, a trooper sat in a hospital room and asked an old man about all of it. The interviews totaled roughly 11 hours. Everyone was audio recorded with Lavine’s consent. The trooper made his identity and his purpose completely clear from the start. Lavine was advised of his rights on multiple occasions.

 Before each session, he was assessed as oriented to time and place and not under the influence of any medication affecting his judgment or his ability to communicate. He was told he could stop at any time. He was told he could ask the investigator to leave the room. He never did. Over 11 hours, Richard Lavine refused to say the words.

He never affirmatively admitted causing Danny Croto’s death. In the district attorney’s description, he was ky. He was evasive. He continued the long-running project of misleading and distracting investigators that he had been running since 1972. But across those 5 days, he gave them pieces.

 He indicated that he was the last person to see Danny Croto alive. He indicated that he had brought Dany to the riverbank on April 14th, 1972. He indicated that he had physically assaulted him there. He said that he left Dany at the river and that he returned a short time later. And he said that when he came back, he saw Dany floating face down in the water.

 He did not go in after him. He did not call for help. He did not call the police. He did not call Carl and Bunny Croto, whose dinner table he had been sitting at for 5 years, to tell them where their 13-year-old son was. He went home. Officer Burl Howard found Dany the next morning.

 In one of the recordings played publicly afterward, Lavine can be heard saying that he remembered being heartbroken when he saw the body going down the river, knowing in his words that he was responsible for giving him a good shove.  Imagine speaking about Danny Gro two days now. He was a he was a strange um interesting kid, you know, not too bright.

Always trying to make jokes about things and if you didn’t answer, he he increase his voice. Hey, you turn right saying, “Will you shut up?”  Why did you go down there with him?  To the river?  Yes.  You wanted to see the waterfall. Okay.  Up close.  Then what happened? So I took them on the other side of your walked up and down and uh that’s all I can remember about that.

Why did you hit him when he was down by the riverbank? Why would you do it down there?  I don’t remember hitting him down by the river,  but give him a good shot.  You did give him a good shot.  And why did you give him a good shot?  That is what 49 years of silence sounds like when it finally cracks.

 Not a confession, a hedge, a minimizing phrase from a man who had spent five decades being careful. On Friday, May 21st, 2021, District Attorney Anthony Galoon authorized detectives with the Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit to bring the case against Richard Lavine before a magistrate and obtain an arrest warrant. It was the same day Dr.

Leonard delivered his linguistic findings. The office intended to seek the warrant that weekend that Friday evening before it could be issued. Richard Lavine died in a hospital facility in Greenfield, Massachusetts. He was 80 years old. His death certificate recorded that he had developed COVID 19 pneumonia 4 days earlier.

 He died 3 days before the announcement. He died with a warrant application sitting on a desk. On Monday, May 24th, 2021, Anthony Glooney stood at a press conference alongside members of the Croto family and formally closed the investigation into the death of Danny Croto, naming Richard Lavine as the person responsible. Glooney said that Dany<unk>y’s parents had told reporters over and over across the decades that they just wanted answers.

He said that based on the accumulation of historical evidence, the evidence gathered in the last year and Lavine’s own admissions, he believed those answers finally existed, and he acknowledged the thing that cannot be fixed, that the answers did not come in time for Carl and Bunny to hear them. He said that while formal justice had not befallen Richard Lavine on this earth, he hoped the office could now provide some measure of closure to Dany<unk>y’s family and to a generation in western Massachusetts who had mourned and

wondered for far too long.  Credibly, due to Lavine’s death, there will be no pro prosecution or trial. But due to the credible and significant evidence that has been assembled in the last year that incriminates Richard Lavine, I am announcing today that the investigation into the murder of Danny Croto is now officially closed.

 Joe Croto, Danny’s brother, the one who had been taken fishing to that same stretch of river, spoke about his family’s disappointment that Lavine would never be brought to justice. And he said that he believed there was a higher power and that Lavine would face it now. The Dascese of Springfield issued a statement acknowledging that the church must do better. 49 years.

That’s the number. 49 years between a 19-year-old recognizing a voice on a telephone and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts confirming what he’d heard. And I keep coming back to how little of this was ever actually a mystery. The suspect was identified in the first week. He was seen at the river.

 He contradicted himself to detectives. He asked whether water would wash blood off a stone. He identified the body and advised the family to close the casket. Dany<unk>y’s own friends told police in 1972 that the priest had a temper. A witness would later describe a boy shouting, “I’ll tell at a man who could not afford to be told on.

 None of that was discovered in 2021. All of it existed in 1972.” What was missing was not evidence. What was missing was the willingness to act on it against a man in a Roman collar. And by the time that willingness arrived, the man was 80 years old and dying, and the two people who had spent their entire adult lives asking for it were already gone.

 There is no trial in this story, no verdict, no jury of 12 people looking at Richard Lavine and deciding. He was never convicted of anything to do with Danny Croto and he never will be. And the record has to say that clearly. What exists is a closed investigation, an official conclusion, 11 hours of recorded interviews, and a family that finally got the sentence spoken aloud.

 Whether that counts as justice is not something I get to decide for you, but I’ll tell you what stays with me. A boy came home from school on a Friday afternoon, dropped his bag on the floor, and ran back outside to play kickball with the neighborhood kids. He was 13. He liked fishing and hockey and he wanted to see Africa someday.

 He had six brothers and sisters and a portrait that hung over a television set in a living room in 16 acres for the rest of his parents’ lives. So that Carl and Bunny Croto saw their son’s face every single day for 38 years and 44 years respectively and asked the same question every one of those days.

 They never got to hear the answer. somebody else did because they refused to stop asking. Danny Croto’s family spent 49 years being told to let it go and they didn’t. And that is the only reason any of this is on the record at all. If this one stayed with you, do me a favor and leave a comment.

 I want to know what you make of the 1972 decision not to charge, whether you think that prosecutor made a judgment call or made a choice. And tell me the one detail from this case you can’t shake. because for me it’s the tweezers. Hit like and hit subscribe and turn on the notification bell. The next case might only need one more person willing to keep digging.

 This has been the Crime Bureau. Thanks for watching.