Unsolved mystery — U.S. priest murdered in D.F.

24 October 2009: for some reason I’m getting several hits on this today. Some priest somewhere else was murdered. THIS priest’s death turned out NOT to be murder. The reason this death never was followed up was that the medical examiner, the Church and the priest’s order hired investigators — all of whom all agreed Rev. Sander’s death, and the way his body was discovered, was a weird and rather embarrassing accident.

Stratfor’s Mexico Security Memo, which is subscription only, and I can only access now and again, mentioned in their July 30 update a murder in Puebla state. Stratfor’s business, is after all, heightening concern about security, but the murder didn’t seem to have much to do with anything other than a private dispute. The ony unusual factor was that the victim was a Catholic priest.

Stratfor said that violence against the clergy was a rarity, and so is violence against American citizens. Normally, if a U.S. citizen is killed — even in an accident — it makes the news. When a priest is murdered, I’d expect more than just a few obscure references (from the Archdiocese of Mexico City, and from an American religious news site).

From what I can tell, 77-year-old Father Richard Sander was a long-time resident of Colonia San Rafael, which is not a “bad neighborhood” (quite the opposite). His body was discovered bound and gagged when the fire department responded to a blaze at the priest’s apartment.

What’s strange about this is that the few mentions of Father Sander’s murder are mostly in the context of complaining about Mexican press coverage of the event — which I didn’t see and apparently was not that extensive. The Church (and their defenders) are suggesting that Sander was killed in retaliation for complaining about underage drinking (or, reading between the lines a little, about an underground rave club). The complaints from the Church connected media has been that there is a suggestion that Fr. Sander’s interest in youth was more than pastoral, and he was another predatory priest.

However, the Mexican clergy complains that they are victims of media speculation on clerical sexual abuse — just as a scandal is brewing (Cardinal Norberto Rivera avoided charges in a Mexican court of covering up for pedophile priests, and was deposed in a U.S. lawsuit involving the same priest earlier this week)

Although I knew a lot of the U.S. residents in San Rafael, I don’t recall Father Sander, and if I met him, may not have realized he was a priest since clergymen in Mexico don’t wear their Roman collars. And, I didn’t exactly move in clerical circles.

There have been a couple of murders of older gay men and they don’t seem to be investigated — or followed up by the Mexican press (or our press for that matter — it wasn’t too long ago that you’d once in a while read in U.S. news stories something like “Bachelor found stabbed in kitchen — police have no suspects”). Mexican attitudes are changing, but these sort of crimes are still just written off as ” homo-cide”.

I want to be careful here. Everyone in the U.S. hopefully learned their lesson from the 1976 murder of movie star Sal Mineo. Mineo was openly gay, and it was assumed back then that being gay had something to do with the murder. It didn’t. Mineo had walked in on a burglar who stabbed him. If Sander was murdered because he was an elderly foreigner, that should be newsworthy. Or, if he was killed because he was a priest.

The real lack of information, bothers me. And it’s the non-coverage that is the mystery.