PITTSBURGH — 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.
