WHAT'S DONE IN THE DARK: Part I | The Murder Of Father Francis Craven

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a four-part investigative feature series looking back on the 1989 murder of Rev. Francis Craven in northern Tuscaloosa County. Be on the lookout for Part II next weekend on Tuscaloosa Patch.

"Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life."

- John 12: 24-26.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Delta Airlines Flight 221 from Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers landed at the Birmingham Municipal Airport after a layover in Atlanta at about 10 a.m. the morning of Jan. 7, 1989.

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Temperatures on the ground were already in the mid-60s, making for the usual muggy, rain-free Alabama winter morning when the landing gear on the charter flight scalded rubber on the Birmingham runway.

"Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison was the No. 1 song on the radio and Japanese Emperor Hirohito died that day. A gallon of unleaded gasoline cost an average of 54 cents, Bill Curry was the football coach at Alabama and President Ronald Reagan was less than two weeks from leaving office.

One of the Delta passengers, a portly and bespectacled 53-year-old Roman Catholic priest with a passion for overpriced electronic gadgets and plodding in a pair of slightly worn black canvas shoes, sauntered through the busy terminal.

He did his business at baggage claim and trudged out into the parking deck after returning from a weeklong Christmas visit with old friends Jay and Jeanne Murphy. The couple affectionately referred to him as "The Pope" and they exchanged presents during their time together in the Sunshine State.

The couple gave the priest a red, white and blue striped sweater and some new slacks with a University of Alabama "A" stitched into one of the pockets.

The New England-born priest didn't attend so much as a single lecture at UA and, instead, had gone to seminary school — several schools, actually. His formal education was a venture that, at any rate, appears to have taken far too long to finish for his liking and left him more disillusioned with the church than when he first became interested in a cloistered life in the cloth as a young boy.

Nevertheless, he was ordained as a minister on May 5, 1963, and had even celebrated his 25th anniversary as a priest just the year before.

Those who knew him best lauded his compassion for others. At multiple turns, they also publicly commented that he placed a high premium on fashion and wasn't one who regularly wore the noticeable Roman Catholic priest's collar outside of the church or his official duties. So, on that day in the Birmingham airport, he would have blended in with relative ease amid the post-holiday buzz going from terminal to terminal.

For once, he was accepted for who he was. By all accounts, he'd finally found the place he had been looking for in Alabama.

It's worth noting early in this series that one court document obtained by Patch in the 21st century offered an unconfirmed claim that he had traveled back to Alabama under an alias but no proof has been uncovered as of the publication of this story to validate it.

But, as seems to be the overarching theme of this story: Who can say for certain, right?

Rev. Francis Leslie Craven, after touching down in the bustling Magic City airport, then got into his van, a blue and silver 1987 GMC Safari, which had been kept by his close friend Robert Cahill.

Cahill, an attorney in Birmingham, dropped the van off in the airport parking deck after Craven made an anticipated heads-up call that morning during a layover in Atlanta.

Craven also called another friend, Birmingham pastor Crescenzio DeFazio of St. Marks Catholic Church, to let him know he had arrived safely.

After landing, Craven made at least three calls from the mobile phone in his van, which was also fitted with a citizens band (CB) radio. If you'd asked some in his congregations over the years, many told the local press that the priest loved his electronics to a fault, so much so that it had prompted a reassignment away from Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Tuscaloosa.

In January 1989, Craven was the priest at St. Williams Catholic Church in Guntersville and was on a tight schedule that Saturday morning as he hit the road driving back in the hopes of making the 5 p.m. mass.

It was a service that never took place, leaving dozens of baffled parishioners sitting in church pews concerned when the amiable priest didn't show up that evening.

Call it a hunch, informed suspicion or genuine worry, the call from the priest around 11 a.m. that morning never set right with the Murphys, who told Harry Satterwhite of the Tuscaloosa News three days later that the priest was not at all his normal, jovial self when he rang their house phone. Even the call itself seemed out of character.

Indeed, Jeanne Murphy told the newspaper that the first thing Craven did was identify himself as "Father Craven," which was a bit odd considering his familiarity with the Murphy family.

Of course, this is the modern-day interpretation and abridged version of what happened that January morning but this introduction sets an appropriate stage for a truly wild who-done-it story with lingering questions that remain marred by twists and turns — aspects of a story that seem to only intensify as each new day came and went.

It's also one that serves as a fascinating case study on the evolution of criminal investigations and the judiciary, even years later at the local level.

More Questions Than Answers

Harold O'Quinn Sr. loved to walk and didn't particularly care if he had to innocently trespass on someone else's property to get his daily steps in. On the afternoon of Jan. 7, 1989, he peeled off from his well-worn routes to plod down the red dirt road.

Just off of Tierce Patton Farm Road, this was well before the persisting boom in growth for the northern end of the county. Today, the quiet nook is paved, has private homes and bears little resemblance to how it would have looked 34 years ago.

But the one thing that can be said about Old Bull Slough Road back then is that no one really lived on it.

Harold O'Quinn, Jr. is a 41-year veteran of the Northport Police Department whose headshot is framed on the wall in the lobby at HQ. He also happened to live nearby.

Sitting behind the main desk at the NPD headquarters in the present day, he told Patch the weather was nice that Saturday afternoon. He was off and spent much of the day doing yard work.

His wife even brought him lunch outside.

"My Dad always walked but didn’t always go down that hill and through the woods on the log roads," O'Quinn said. "There wasn’t nobody up there. You couldn’t even go down to the lake without permission. But he comes back up the hill and says 'I think somebody burned their cow.'"

The young Northport Police officer followed his Dad down to the spot after the elder O'Quinn had checked out the site just long enough to get spooked by what he saw.

"You could tell it was a person laying there on their back and his right hand was straight up in the air," O'Quinn remembered years later. "For the longest time, I hadn’t gone down there. But that spot stayed right there through the rains and seasons and just wouldn’t go away in that old red dirt."

O'Quinn said he noticed aluminum cans and other melted or charred garbage around a body that had been reduced to little more than a smoking black mass.

He didn't prod around the scene though. Instead, he got his truck to block the road and called the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office.

"I still can't believe I was so close and never heard anything," O'Quinn explained. "They would have had to have driven right by my house to get to that spot."

Joe Pearson is a stout man with a key-grip handshake who lives in a beautiful house off of Tierce Patton Road that he built himself because it was cheaper than buying one. He's the kind of candid only found in a career lawman and we sat discussing the case at his dining room table. His trophy bucks were mounted on the wall behind him and flanked by naturalist artwork that included a print of a turkey by British painter Basil Ede that I also have hanging on the wall in my office.

Pearson's picturesque view from his back porch overlooks Lake Tuscaloosa from a hilltop just outside of Northport. Conversely, the facade of the home looks out over something far more sinister and provides a stark contrast if you know what you're looking for.

One of the most revered crime fighters in these parts by the time he retired from full-time service, Pearson was in his late 20s and a greenhorn homicide investigator in 1989 — roughly eight months before the author of this story was born.

He still works part-time at the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse and carries the reputation of being one of the best homicide interviewers in the unit's history.

As one former homicide investigator put it to me, "Joe's the man you'd want in that little room with a suspect."

Pearson told Patch years later that he was very much new to understanding the complexities of murder investigations when he got the call that fateful January afternoon, which developed into an evening he can still recall with the clarity of an energetic young man.

The drive to the scene wasn't far, considering Pearson lived only a few miles away. But what he saw would bring the case that much closer to home. He'd never seen anything like it.

Memory is a funny thing, though, when looking back on something that happened over three decades ago and Pearson first remembered being in street clothes — standard garb for local homicide investigators to this day.

Pearson, a Tuscaloosa Police officer at the time who was assigned to the multiagency homicide unit, then remembered having to identify himself to an attending sheriff's deputy before he was allowed past the cordon to walk the crime scene.

This was an age before sophisticated crime scene technicians and the digital toolbox at the disposal of modern law enforcement simply didn't exist.

"I'd never had anything like this," he explained, standing at the end of his driveway on what was once Old Bull Slough Road. He pointed northeast from where we stood and explained that just feet away was where the body was found on a kind of burn pile.

The crime scene today is far different three decades later and was little more than an underutilized dirt road made mostly of red clay and loose sand. Shrouded by heavy overgrowth on either side, the road in 1989 had nothing much to speak of in the way of houses, apart from an old farmhouse that once sat in roughly the same spot where Pearson's home is today.

Pearson said the corpse was still smoldering when he arrived, with investigators later saying they believed the body had been there roughly an hour before it was discovered by Harold O'Quinn Sr.

Even before investigators had identified the corpse, Pearson knew this was different.

What he found was a body burned beyond any recognition, with its hands appearing to have been bound in the front and some kind of covering, likely duct tape, over the victim's eyes and mouth. A lengthy depression in the sand also suggested to Pearson that the victim had been dragged several feet from what could only be assumed was some kind of vehicle.

By the time he arrived at the scene, the body had expectedly curled up even more from when the O'Quinns discovered it, with Pearson saying the arms and knees had drawn further in —its coal-black fists balled up at chest level like the resting pose of a boxer.

There were other details even more disturbing and culturally relevant for the time, too, facts that were documented by homicide investigators at the scene. Chief among the evidence visible to the naked eye was that the head of the body was resting on a thick, hard-bound prayer book of some kind.

It should be noted here that 1989 can be considered a kind of midway point for the hysterical "Satanic Panic" movement — a uniquely American moral panic over suspected occult involvement in certain violent crimes that began in the early 1980s and lasted until it fizzled out of the public conversation in the late 90s.

Pearson was one of the few homicide investigators around who understood the craze that was eventually found to be a cultural straw man and said years later that he never once suspected the occult had any bearing on this case.

What's more, the unidentified victim also had a steel dog leash around their neck and appeared to have been bludgeoned to death. Pearson recalled finding hair and flecks of blood embedded several inches down in the sand, which he said suggested that the individual had been on the ground when their skull was crushed from above by some kind of blunt object.

For Joe Pearson, what he could see with his eyes and deduce with his wit at the scene constituted the entire breadth of the investigation at that moment. And, truth be told, it wasn't much.

It was also clear to the young investigator that there had been two vehicles at the scene, which was gleaned from the discovery of two different sets of fresh tire tracks. Additionally, there were at least two different sets of fresh footprints visible in the sand — not counting the footprints unintentionally left by Harold O'Quinn, Sr.

According to his son, O'Quinn was trying to get a better look at what had been burning and walked a circle around the burn pile trying to avoid the smoke.

"You know that old saying about how smoke from a campfire seems to follow you," Harold O'Quinn, Jr. said with a warm smile as he fondly remembered his Dad's quirks.

Nevertheless, despite a good bit of physical evidence retrieved from the crime scene, nothing was recovered that helped investigators get any closer to an identification of the victim.

The remains were then sent to forensics experts at the state medical examiner's office and Pearson found himself no closer to answers than when he first walked up on the scene.

In the couple of days that followed, the leads coming in were minimal, other than an odd call from a worried man in Guntersville who had seen a news story about an unidentified body being found in Tuscaloosa County.

Pearson reluctantly took the call and was given the name of Craven's dentist — a helpful lead, as it turned out — but he admitted that he thought little more of the exchange in that moment.

One newspaper story said the following Monday that dental records were analyzed and confirmed that the body was indeed that of Rev. Francis Craven, who had been reported missing after he did not show up for evening mass three days earlier. In fact, his body was discovered around the same time unsuspecting parishioners began to take their seats at St. Williams in Guntersville.

Tuscaloosa County District Attorney Charley Freeman and Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit Chief Warren Miller — a legendary crime fighter in his day and the very first commander of the multiagency task force — then went public with what little information they could, before telling local and statewide media that investigators had yet to recover Craven's GMC van.

Freeman insisted the van was a key piece of evidence and Miller noted that Craven had made several calls from the mobile phone in his vehicle. Freeman also cited a lack of evidence when he validated Pearson's initial belief that the murder did not appear to be a "ritual-style killing."

A statewide all-points bulletin was then issued for the van and local authorities pleaded with the public to come forward with any information.

"He was wearing dark trousers and a blue sweater," Freeman told the Tuscaloosa News before declining to answer if Craven's wallet had been recovered. "We don't think he would have been wearing a clergy collar at the time. Our information is that he did not wear a clergy collar regularly as some priests do. So, he might not have been immediately recognized as a priest.”

But what was Craven doing over 60 miles west of Birmingham? After all, it makes little sense to this day why Craven would have voluntarily gone so far out of his way after telling several people that he planned to be in Guntersville early that evening.

Birmingham Police Department Lieutenant Bobby Popwell said at the time that it was likely Craven met someone in Birmingham just before his murder.

"If he was going to Guntersville, well, that's in the exact opposite direction from here as Tuscaloosa," Popwell told an Associated Press reporter.

Indeed.

As the search for Craven's van commenced, identification of his body was a major break in the case and those who knew him best began to publicly speculate about his final hours. Most importantly, though, they began to talk to investigators.

Indeed, Jeanne Murphy, the Fort Myers mother who was one of the last people to see the priest alive, told investigators and reporters about their odd exchange just hours before his death.

Here is an approximate transcript of the call:

Craven: "Jean"

Murphy: "Yes?"

Craven: "This is Father Craven."

Murphy: "Oh, hi."

Craven: "I just wanted to tell you I got back into Birmingham without a hitch and I'm on my way back home, to Guntersville. I had a great time down there and I'll keep in touch."

Craven also reportedly told her that he planned to lead the 5 p.m. mass at his church that evening.

Before Craven hung up, Jeanne Murphy could tell from the crackling connection that the priest was calling from a mobile phone. She also noted that Craven referred to her as "Jean" instead of his usual "Jeanee."

The Florida couple's 16-year-old daughter also told the Associated Press that her family suspected that Craven might have been trying to tell her mother something was wrong.

Meanwhile, the search for Craven's van continued and Alabama Gov. Guy Hunt offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.

About the time 300 mourners crowded together for a funeral service for Craven on Jan. 14, 1989, at St. Paul's Cathedral in Birmingham, investigators back in Tuscaloosa County found the break they had been looking for.

The late Tommy Stevenson, a celebrated local newsman who was the associate editor of the Tuscaloosa News at the time, reported that same day that Craven's van was spotted by a police helicopter and located on a logging road off of Alabama Highway 69 in northern Tuscaloosa County. It was recovered near the 172-mile marker, roughly 12 miles from where Craven's body was found and approximately three miles north of Windham Springs Baptist Church.

Investigators said the van appeared to have been stuck in the mud before the vehicle was set on fire. The gas cap for the van had already been recovered from the Old Bull Slough Road scene, with investigators speculating that whoever was responsible had tried to siphon fuel from the van to then use in setting Craven's body on fire.

Stevenson reported that police at the scene gathered about "A dozen lunch-sized brown paper bags" of evidence.

As police tried to make sense of the dead priest and the burned-up van, investigators and prosecutors also worked to obtain flight data from the Federal Aviation Administration to determine who was on the flight with Craven. This should underscore the attention to detail on the part of investigators as they labored feverishly for answers.

Meanwhile, as the van was being loaded up on a flatbed wrecker truck, Bishop Raymond J. Boland stood somber at the lectern and officiated a memorial service for the slain priest at St. Paul's Cathedral in Birmingham.

The night before, over 500 mourners had attended a wake at the church.

Craven's remains were placed in front of the altar in a casket draped with an American flag and his visibly bereaved parents were photographed by a Tuscaloosa News reporter as they exited the church.

Bishop Boland began his homily by comparing Craven's death to the betrayal, torture and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.

"Jesus, too, was a sacrificial offering," Boland told more than 300 attendees. "He, too, died a sad death in a place far from home at the hands of strangers.

"It is in giving that we receive," he added, quoting Saint Francis of Assisi. "It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. And it is in dying that we are called to eternal life."

Boland also reflected on Craven's 25th anniversary as a priest the previous May, saying he remembered a bright spring morning full of joy. He said he could have never imagined Craven meeting such a violent end.

"I remember it well," he said. "I remember a deep, blue lake as I entered Guntersville; it signified hope and life. Nature cooperated with him that day — his 25th anniversary — a day when young children were running and laughing. A day the mayor came. ... Frank shined through it all — that smile more impish than angelic. That is what we'll miss most about him. He has been snatched away from us suddenly and with violence. Our God is not a vindictive God; he does not take joy in the suffering of his children. We must not allow our rage to equate us with those who would perpetrate such violence. This is the test of our faith."

Boland ended his homily with a reading of John 12: 24-26 and a mile-long procession of vehicles made their way through Birmingham and on to Elmwood Cemetery.

During the gravesite service, Harold Craven, the priest's father, was presented with a folded American flag by Navy Chaplain Ronald E. Howard of Tuscaloosa — a final act of respect for Francis Craven's five years in the United States Navy that saw him serve as a Navy chaplain in places like the Philippines and Vietnam.

A Wayward Soul

Originally from Lynn, Massachusetts — a town ironically referred to for years as the "City of Sin" — Craven was the second-oldest of eight brothers and sisters. He also lived a restless life, his friends, associates and parishioners would say in the days and weeks after his untimely death.

Still, Craven reportedly knew he wanted to be a priest since he was a second grader at St. Mary's Catholic School and fully committed to doing so two years after graduating high school. While in grade school, Craven was a good student interested in drama, debate and the school newspaper.

But as a kind of foreshadowing of how his professional career would go, it took Craven eight years of study at three different seminaries before being ordained as a priest on May 5, 1963.

After spending his first five years in the cloth at three different parishes in Indiana, he requested a transfer from the Lafayette Diocese in Indiana to the Birmingham Diocese in Alabama after enlisting in the Navy.

In the days following his murder, church leaders said it was obvious Craven was not interested in climbing the traditional hierarchical ladder of pastorship in the large Indiana parishes, yet he still reportedly had a hard time adjusting to the atmosphere of the smaller parishes.

Indeed, Craven's first assignment was at St. Mary's in Muncie, Indiana in 1963, which lasted a year before he left for a smaller parish in Frankfurt, Indiana. He moved again two years later to another parish in Kokomo, Indiana, before informing the leadership of the Diocese in April 1968 that he wanted to enlist in the military.

"There was always a feeling that he was searching for something,"said Rev. Arthur A. Sego, chancellor of the Lafayette Diocese in Indiana where Craven had his first assignment as associate pastor. "He was finding it hard to acclimate into parish life. ... When he came back from the service, we lost track of him for a while. Apparently he wanted to serve in the South in some mission territory, some of the smaller parishes."

Craven was ultimately granted a transfer to Alabama but still had a hard time settling into a home.

This included a stint as assistant pastor at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Tuscaloosa from 1975 to 1977, where he earned the respect of parishioners by visiting with those at Bryce Hospital and the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center.

Craven then took his first job as a head pastor in Athens for a congregation of about 130 families.

This was a period of relative happiness and stability for Craven, who seemed to mesh well with the community and was able to handle the finances of the small parish.

However, it was his transfer back to Tuscaloosa in 1982 that saw trouble find him.

As Harry Satterwhite of the Tuscaloosa News penned, those who knew Craven best said he was "long on humor, long on spiritual guidance, but short on fiscal responsibility."

Rev. Paul Rohling, the chancellor of the Birmingham Diocese, told the Tuscaloosa News that when Craven was tasked with leading a large congregation of over 500 families in Tuscaloosa, he suddenly found himself in over his head when it came to the church's limited finances.

This is where Craven's almost compulsive love of electronic gadgets comes in.

Rohling explained that Holy Spirit Catholic Church was on the verge of bankruptcy during Craven's time as pastor, so much so that a group of parishioners approached the leadership of the Birmingham Diocese with their concerns.

The parishioners had grown to resent Craven, Rohling said, due in part to the fact that the church was struggling financially while the priest had remodeled the church's rectory in his first year and had purchased thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment for his personal use, including telephones, televisions, stereos and video equipment.

Still, the concerns over Craven's lack of sound financial judgment represented the only blemish on his professional record, Rohling said, before mentioning that the troubled priest seemed to have finally found a home at St. Williams in Guntersville after being reassigned to Marshall County in 1985.

"I'm sure Frank was buffeted by all the tensions which haunt the priesthood — the constant struggle for holiness, the temptation to compromise one's ideals, the tightrope walk between the call of the Gospel and the seduction of the marketplace, the cost of discipleship and the resurgences of selfishness," Bishop Boland said during his homily at Craven's funeral. "Like all of us, he probably had his triumphs and his failures."

Craven seemed to thrive in his new home in Marshall County and was even quoted as once telling a parishioner that he could never leave the parish on his own volition.

He also held diocesan-wide offices, such as director of the Cursillo Movement, which is a spiritual retreat program done over a three-day weekend that is geared toward teaching Christian laypeople how to become effective leaders

Ironically, the "first course" of the Cursillo Movement is observed on Jan. 7 — the same day that Craven was murdered.

Craven was also the moderator for the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women and had a reputation for working well with married couples through the parish's Marriage Encounter program.

After Craven's body was lowered into the ground and the mourners dispersed, investigators back in Tuscaloosa were still working to piece together what had happened.

Following the identification of Craven's remains, Tuscaloosa County homicide investigators Joe Pearson and Dennis Levins made the trip to Guntersville with a search warrant for the St. Williams rectory. They were joined by District Attorney Charley Freeman and Marshall County sheriff's deputies but also by some unwelcome onlookers — parishioners from the church.

The crime scene, roughly a block's walking distance from the church, was chaotic with nosey individuals, Pearson recalled years later, and the young investigator, for a moment, even forgot he was serving a search warrant as he repeatedly had to shoo away parishioners who might be meddling with potential evidence.

Crime scene integrity is of paramount importance in a murder investigation and Pearson was understandably growing frustrated with the lack of respect shown for the investigation.

"Some of the people from the church showed up and they were being a pain," he told Patch. "I kept saying 'don't touch that, don't touch that,' and I finally said 'I’ve got a warrant and if you interfere with me again I’m putting your butt in jail. It had been a long day."

At first glance, Pearson said nothing seemed out of place or overly suspicious inside the rectory and he initially figured there would be little, if anything, recovered in the way of helpful evidence.

Then investigators noticed a little closet with more than one lock on the door.

"I thought that was unusual but other people had keys to his house, so I thought this could be the one place he might have where nobody could fool with his stuff," Pearson said. "So we called a locksmith to come open the door."

Pearson had no way of knowing it at the time, but the odd contents discovered behind that locked door would soon capture the attention of an entire state and blow the murder investigation wide open.

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