A Mystery of the Cloth

Father Benz was sick in bed, his brain infected by a lethal virus, his body wasted by leukemia, his soul tainted by sin. A pastor at two parishes for 26 years, Benz had just confessed to something unholy: skimming the collection plate of $1.35 million.

That wasn’t all. Parishioners learned that the Roman Catholic priest had been living lavishly with a lady friend and amassing six-figure gambling losses in Atlantic City. He had rooms at the rectory, of course, but also a house in the suburbs, a condo in Florida, a cache of precious coins and a Cadillac. He had a collection of 27 handguns, most still in the box. He had stylish Japanese furniture and a statue of Buddha.

Now he was trapped in a purgatory of catastrophic illness and impending criminal prosecution. The more the law closed in, the more his health seemed to fade. By the time he began admitting his transgressions, viral fever had addled his brain to the point where he was showering with his clothes on and forgetting how to feed himself. And on the day authorities showed up at his sickbed to arraign him, Father Benz slipped deep into a coma.

Nine days later, somebody crept into his room at a Catholic nursing home and plucked the oxygen tube catheter from his nose and the IV needle from his arm. The Rev. Walter J. Benz, 72, died two hours later, moving on to a judgment day in the hereafter, while avoiding one here in suburban Pittsburgh.

He left behind a confession that implicated his female companion, a former church secretary, and a series of riddles. Who did it? Why kill a dying man? Vengeance? Or mercy? Dr. Cyril Wecht, the Allegheny County coroner, thinks the latter motive is more logical.

“I think that’s far more likely than someone coming in saying ‘You rotten son of a bitch, you stole money from the church! I’m not going to let you die peacefully,’ ” he said.

Wecht wants to conduct an open inquest into the death, but he’s waiting for Allegheny County police detectives to find and arrest the mysterious couple that a nursing home aide said he spotted in Benz’s room on Sept. 4, the night he died. “They said they had suspects, then they didn’t, then they did. If there were people there, they should’ve been identified by now,” Wecht said.

But police say they can’t find them. Among the leads they’re pursuing is whether the couple even exist--implying that pulling the plug was perhaps an inside job. They want Wecht to make a ruling on whether removing the tubes hastened his death--whether he was, in fact, murdered on his deathbed--just as the coroner was waiting for the cops to make an arrest.

Two months after a death that police are investigating as a homicide, nobody, it seems, knows where the case is headed. “There are lots of loose ends,” said Inspector Daniel Colaizzi, chief of Allegheny County detectives. “We’re working hard on this.”

In the meantime, the priest’s former companion, 51-year-old Mary Anne Albaugh, is facing the same charges of theft, tampering with records and conspiracy that Benz would have faced. She was to face a preliminary hearing in state district court Nov. 6, but both sides requested a two-week postponement, a sign that a plea agreement may be in the works. Her lawyer would only say he was talking with prosecutors, and Albaugh has not commented publicly on the case.

The uncertainty of Albaugh’s fate is only one of the untidy elements left by the unraveling of the life she shared with the priest, who told authorities before he died that they became partners in crime after she caught him ripping open collection envelopes one Sunday.

Priest’s Style Troubled Some

Benz was by most accounts a highly personable, almost flamboyant priest who often glad-handed parishioners, much to the consternation of some, during his processional entrance into the church at the opening of Mass.

“He was very down to earth. He didn’t preach to you,” said Donna Books, a parishioner at the St. Mary Assumption Church, a red-brick building atop a hill overlooking Hampton, a comfortable community in the heavily wooded suburbs northeast of the city.

Yet people say the priest was personally distant, chronically unavailable outside of Mass, and constantly complaining about church finances. He was always putting the pinch on parishioners. “Every time people met him, he said, ‘You have to give more,’ ” said Barbara Hartmann, rushing to Mass last Sunday, flashing her collection envelope with a sheepish grin. “Now we know why. Your faith really takes a knock when something like this happens.”

Benz admitted to police and Pittsburgh Diocese officials that he began fleecing the flock back in the early 1970s, when he was assigned to the Most Blessed Sacrament Church in nearby Natrona Heights, where Albaugh was a parishioner with a troubled marriage and later a volunteer cook at the church rectory.

Benz was transferred to St. Mary in 1992 during a diocese reorganization, said the diocese spokesman, the Rev. Ronald Lengwin. Albaugh joined him on the payroll as driver, cook and eventually church secretary. According to county records, she and her husband divorced that same year.

After a few months, the priest who replaced Benz at the other church said he had inherited some curious financial discrepancies, including complaints from parishioners who said they had donated more than their year-end church statements showed, Lengwin said.

Records were missing or incomplete, and Lengwin said the diocese hadn’t audited church offerings during the reorganization. “It was just during that one period of time that we weren’t paying closer attention to them.”

A year later, the same sort of financial irregularities began surfacing at Benz’s new parish, and Lengwin said Benz blamed the discrepancies on the bookkeeper, who at the time was dying of a brain tumor. Now Albaugh is accused of forging the bookkeeper’s name on checks that were being deposited in both her and Benz’s accounts, according to police.

Relationship Drew Bishop’s Questions

While Benz spent months, eventually years parrying the inquiries into his church’s troubled finances, his relationship with Albaugh drew some attention. In 1996, one parishioner complained to the diocese that the friendship seemed “closer than it should have been,” said Lengwin. Benz, confronted by the diocese bishop, insisted it was platonic.

Even this year, when a rectory worker told diocese officials that the priest wasn’t always staying at clerical quarters overnight, Benz said that he was sleeping over at Albaugh’s only on the days when he needed a lift to doctor’s appointments.

“We didn’t know that he was keeping house with this woman,” Lengwin said.

The couple had been living together for three years, police said, taking trips to Atlantic City and gambling at glitzy palaces like the Showboat, Tropicana and the Taj Mahal.

Faced with mounting losses at the church, the diocese conducted an audit that, according to police, turned up $249,000 in discrepancies in church accounts from 1992 to 1996, the bulk of it from weekly donations. Even the votive light fund was getting tapped to the tune of up to $500 a month.

The diocese turned the matter over to local authorities, who spent a year building a case. They found big cash deposits in the bank accounts of both Benz and Albaugh. Albaugh told police in July that the money came from winning a grand or two weekly at the casino slot machines. Benz said his influx of personal savings had come from the sale of his Florida condo and returns on his investments.

Yet evidence indicated otherwise. Casino records showed that the couple were net losers; police said the Taj Mahal alone tallied $117,000 in losses by Benz. After searching Albaugh’s home, police seized documents that indicated Benz’s investments consisted of an IRA set up to reinvest dividends and interest, not pay him whopping returns.

Benz resigned a day after Albaugh’s home was searched. Albaugh called the diocese and, according to a police affidavit, told a church official that Benz “had something to get off his chest.” A church official came to their home, according to the police affidavit, and Benz admitted stealing money, estimating that he took a thousand dollars a week for 26 years at both churches, for a rough total of $1.35 million.

Quizzed by detectives, Benz tried to protect Albaugh and said he acted alone. Then he said the two teamed up after the woman saw the priest emptying envelopes.

Illness Coincided With Case’s Progress

Benz’s health faded in almost eerie concert with the case growing against him. He already had suffered from heart disease, failing eyesight and was later diagnosed with leukemia, which weakened his immune system to the point where--the day after he resigned--he had a biopsy that showed he had contracted multifocal leukoencephalopaty, a fatal brain fever that causes rapidly escalating dementia.

He checked into Vincentian Home, which had a wing reserved for ailing priests. In early September, authorities came to the nursing home to arraign him on theft, forgery and conspiracy felonies. “We all tried to talk to him and he did not respond,” said his lawyer, James M. Ecker, who also represents Albaugh.

After he fell into the coma, Ecker said Albaugh, who had power of attorney to act on Benz’s behalf, wanted him pulled off of life support. Ecker said he discussed the matter with a lawyer for the diocese, who insisted that removing the feeding tube would violate church law.

“I said, ‘Let’s wait and see next week. God works in mysterious ways,’ ” Ecker said.

The next week, an alarm went off in Benz’s room indicating that his IV tube had come undone. Police said a nurses’ aide went to the room and saw a middle-aged couple standing over the comatose cleric, with the man holding the priest’s hand. While medical personnel scrambled to the scene and reconnected the priest, the couple disappeared.

After searching fruitlessly for this couple, Inspector Colaizzi said police have added another theory to the investigation: They didn’t exist. He wouldn’t comment on any alternative suspects, however, though the circumstances suggest that the person knew the layout of the nursing home.

Nursing home authorities won’t divulge the name of the nurses’ aide, and assistant administrator Albert Dingman said he had no reason to doubt the account. Yet detectives and Benz’s lawyer are uncertain how somebody could have entered the nursing home’s locked door, avoided signing the visitor’s log and found the room where Benz happened to be dying. Colaizzi said none of the registered visitors match the descriptions of the mysterious couple.

The inquest that the coroner wants to hold would try to determine to what degree, if any, removing the oxygen and feeding tubes contributed to the death. Wecht said even the brief loss of the supplemental oxygen supply could have pushed somebody so ill over the edge.

As for the money, Ecker said he was not convinced his client took it, or at least all of it. He said the church had a $1-million insurance policy and suggested that the diocese estimated its losses commensurately. Lengwin called the implication “irresponsible” and said that the church filed an insurance claim only for the $220,000 to $250,000 that the audit had found missing.

Speculation persists, meanwhile, about the exact nature of the relationship between the priest and Albaugh. Though some parishioners routinely refer to her as Benz’s “girlfriend,” Colaizzi said Benz had his own room at her house and the two stayed in separate rooms when they vacationed in Atlantic City, often with Albaugh’s teenage son. Ecker said “as far as I know and as far as I have been told, there was no sex relationship” between his clients. “Who knows but the two of them?” he said.

Letting ‘God Make Those Judgments’

Despite the harm the priest had brought to the two parishes, Ecker said turnout was large at the funeral. “It was a beautiful funeral,” he said. “The bishop was there.”

Lengwin said the eulogies made no mention of the priest’s career in crime. “We allow God to make those judgments at that point.”

Some people aren’t waiting. Even though the diocese has commissioned a panel to determine if additional financial safeguards are necessary, many parishioners remain outraged that it took so long to clamp down on Benz. Lengwin said the priest’s constant feinting, and the long duration of church, insurance company and finally police investigations, were the main reasons why nobody stopped Benz from filching from the faithful.

Jack Waclawski, 52, is so devout that a nun gave him Holy Communion while he was recently immobilized by knee surgery. Last Sunday, he drove back to St. Mary and limped to afternoon Mass.

He brought his faith, his rosary, but no collection envelope. Since the scandal broke, “I’ve given nothing. Let the church think about this for a while.”