This afternoon, the gunman’s daughter told Missouri detectives that in Mr. Jeffress’s youth he was a devout Catholic but that in recent years, he had occasionally attended a Methodist church. Why and when Mr. Jeffress left the Catholic Church remained a mystery, Sergeant Lyon said. That left equally unclear whether there was any tie between the killings and the American Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis.
Monastery Gunman Ignored Pleas for Mercy From Monk
(CONCEPTION, MO) The man who shot his way through a rural Benedictine monastery here on Monday ignored pleas for mercy from a Roman Catholic monk he had wounded in a hallway, killing the brother with two more shots from his Chinese-made assault rifle, investigators and the head of the abbey said today.
Law enforcement officials said their investigation of the gunman, Lloyd R. Jeffress, 71, whose shooting rampage on Monday morning left two monks dead and two more seriously wounded, yielded a portrait of a man estranged from his family and neighbors, who had in the past calmed his anxieties by taking the antidepressant drug Prozac.
But the officials said they had no clue as to what had led Mr. Jeffress to fire on four black-robed monks, apparently at random, before taking his own life with a single shot to the head in the abbey’s chapel.
Sgt. Sheldon A. Lyon, a Missouri Highway Patrol spokesman, said detectives searched Mr. Jeffress’s Chevrolet Cavalier and his spartan apartment in a center for the elderly in suburban Kansas City reviewed his military and Social Security files and interviewed his brother, daughter and several acquaintances.
“Usually there are some red flags that indicate why a gunman like this will have acted the way he did,” Sergeant Lyon said. “But that’s not the case here.”
The Rev. Gregory Polan, the abbot of Conception Abbey, about 90 miles north of Kansas City, said today that the main vocation of the few dozen priests and brothers who live there is to offer Christian hospitality to the more than 10,000 visitors the monastery, founded in the 19th century, draws each year. The twin towers of the abbey’s brick basilica loom skyward out of a wooded, 30-acre campus in rolling farm country.
The abbey’s switchboard has been inundated with condolences from all over the United States, including a call this morning from Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Father Polan said. This morning the abbey’s bells tolled 83 times, one for each year that the two monks who died in the shooting, the Rev. Philip Schuster, 85, and Brother Damian Larson, 64, had served the monastery. Brother Damian, the first monk to be shot, had pleaded for his life, Father Polan said.
Abbey officials said today that at least two former priests who attended the seminary at the abbey before their ordination in the 1950’s were later accused by several boys in rural Missouri parishes of sexual abuse. But those priests appear to have been about a decade younger than Mr. Jeffress, and there was no evidence that he ever knew them, said Daniel A. Madden, a spokesman for the abbey.
This afternoon, the gunman’s daughter told Missouri detectives that in Mr. Jeffress’s youth he was a devout Catholic but that in recent years, he had occasionally attended a Methodist church. Why and when Mr. Jeffress left the Catholic Church remained a mystery, Sergeant Lyon said. That left equally unclear whether there was any tie between the killings and the American Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis.
Mr. Jeffress served in the Army as a young man, but investigators have been unable to pinpoint the exact dates because a fire in a St. Louis government archives burned his records. He and his wife divorced when their daughter was young, Sergeant Lyon said.
The daughter, who lives in Missouri but whose name has not been released, told detectives that she did not see her father for four decades, until 1994, when she arranged a meeting out of curiosity and then ended the contact, Sergeant Lyon said. In recent years, Mr. Jeffress had not been in touch with his brother, either. Before his retirement, Mr. Jeffress worked for a steel company and for the post office, though for how long or in what capacity has not been established, the sergeant said.
“It’s very unusual to find a person this private, where their family doesn’t even have contact with him,” he said. “It makes it difficult to say why this man would do this.”
Monastery Gunman Ignored Pleas for Mercy From Monk
New York Times
Sam Dillon
June 12, 2002