Mother Superior Court

The woman who wants you to think there's a major pedophile priest scandal in Kansas City looks like she stepped out of a black-and-white movie.

The pageboy haircut and conservative attire not only give the impression that Rebecca Randles is missing from some 1950s courtroom drama but also match her personality. Cautious and smart, she's fully in control when she steps in front of a crowd of reporters to announce her latest lawsuit against the local Catholic diocese, yet she gives no sense that she's grandstanding. Hers is a cool but intense style that has garnered praise from clients and colleagues alike and seems to enthrall reporters.

Last week, Randles announced the fourth and fifth lawsuits she's filed in the past month claiming that priests in Kansas City sexually abused parishioners. More suits, she says, are forthcoming. A visit to her office, meanwhile, reveals shelves weighed down with files that document interviews Randles has conducted with Kansas Citians who say they were abused by local priests. She's adding more all the time -- five interviews in a single day, she says, is all she can handle before nearly collapsing from the effort.

At her press conferences, Randles hands out copies of her lawsuits as well as photographs of young victims and accused priests -- and it all seems so familiar. For the past decade, the nation's Catholic churches have been reeling from accusations that priests committed heinous acts against trusting young parishioners, that bishops conspired to keep those acts hidden, and that known predator priests were simply moved from parish to parish.

Major scandals in Boston, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago have resulted in criminal investigations, lawsuits and huge settlements. Until last month, the Kansas City Diocese had weathered several allegations of abuse dating back decades but had largely escaped a major dustup -- in fact, it was seen as one diocese that had moved against priest abuse earlier than most. In 1988, a lay committee was formed locally to hear accusations of abuse, and in 1993, when Bishop Raymond Boland was appointed to lead the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese, one of his first acts was to announce a "zero tolerance" policy against molestation.

A decade later, however, Boland finds himself a defendant in each of the suits filed by Randles, even though none of the alleged sexual abuse occurred after Boland arrived:

Kenneth Landes alleges that the Rev. Hugh Monahan fondled him at St. Robert Bellarmine Parish beginning in the 1980s and as late as 1987. Landes, who now lives in California, says the abuse began when he was fifteen years old and involved rubdowns that Monahan gave and asked to receive in turn. "It went from shoulder to back to lower back to the top of my butt and everything. It just progressed," Landes says. "It very quickly became genital contact.... It was never making love. There was never an exchange of sentiments ... I was fifteen, and, yes, it did feel good. I had never experienced these kinds of feelings. It was hard to understand it being so bad when it felt so good. It was a big part of why, for so long, I was unable to accept the fact I was molested." Monahan is no longer a priest. His last known address was in Florida.

Another man, identified only as D.L.B., says that Monahan began sexually abusing him in 1974, when he was about ten years old. Besides the abuse allegations, Randles also charges the present diocese leadership with breach of contract for having stopped paying for D.L.B.'s counseling after twelve sessions.

Chris Biersmith, Monahan's own nephew, alleges that his uncle molested him over an eleven-year period beginning in 1971, while the boy was a parishioner at St. Peter's in Kansas City. Biersmith's is also a breach of contract suit, alleging that the diocese failed to pay for his counseling.

Teresa White says the Rev. Francis McGlynn molested her and tried to rape her after she went to him for religious training at the St. Mary's parish in the early 1970s.

Frank Scheuring also alleges that McGlynn molested him in the early 1970s, while he was an altar boy at St. Mary's.

In her press conferences, Randles clearly aims to give the impression that her suits are part of a movement gaining momentum in Kansas City. In truth, she faces enormous legal obstacles by bringing to court allegations decades old. Similar lawsuits elsewhere in the country have won victims multimillion-dollar settlements -- even when alleged abusers were long out of the priesthood or dead. But in Missouri, such cases -- some brought by Randles -- have repeatedly been dismissed because they don't meet the statute of limitations.

Still, Randles, in her calm, determined style, continues to gather the harrowing stories of local men and women who were betrayed by men of the cloth and struggle in their adulthood with their memories. To them, she's a crusader. And Randles herself is undaunted by past failures in Missouri courts. This time, she says, she has a new strategy to make the Kansas City diocese pay for horrible crimes, even if they happened long ago.