Conflicting accounts were given Tuesday of how a former priest died after he was confronted by Mexican police at a Mazatlan resort over the weekend.
Siegfried F. Widera, who had worked as a priest in Wisconsin and Orange County and was wanted in the United States on 42 counts of child molestation, fell from a hotel balcony Sunday. U.S. authorities described it as an apparent suicide, and relatives of Widera say sheriff's investigators from El Paso told them they had found a suicide note.
But Widera's family disputed the suicide theory and questioned the authenticity of the note.
"I don't know if it's real or not. But it doesn't matter, because he was not in the proper state of mind to commit suicide," said his brother, John Widera of Costa Mesa.
El Paso County sheriff's spokesman Rick Glancey declined to confirm the family's account that investigators believe it was a suicide note, but he said without elaborating that "there is some documentation" for the claim. The Sheriff's Department got involved in the search for Widera when authorities received word that he was hiding in West Texas or New Mexico.
Adding to the confusion, the U.S. marshal in Milwaukee -- whose office called Widera "one of the most-wanted sex-crimes fugitives in the Western Hemisphere" because of his record there and pursued him in a yearlong manhunt -- also discounted the account of a suicide note.
Though he believes the defrocked priest jumped to his death, "there's no suicide note, any way you think about it," said the marshal, William Kruziki. "When the police tried to arrest him, he ran. It wouldn't make sense for him to have scribbled down a suicide note. There's no suicide note."
Widera, 62, was ordained in 1967 and served in Wisconsin parishes. The first assaults attributed to him occurred in 1973, when he was convicted of sexual misconduct with an adolescent boy in Milwaukee.
Transferred to Orange County in 1976 with a warning that he had "a moral problem having to do with a boy in school," he served at St. Justin Martyr Church in Anaheim and St. Martin de Porres Church in Yorba Linda.
In October, Orange County prosecutors charged Widera with 33 counts of child molestation, involving four boys, allegedly perpetrated between 1978 and 1985.
After the church stripped him of the ability to work as a priest in 1986, Widera moved to Arizona. He fled in May 2002 when Milwaukee authorities filed nine counts of sexual abuse against him. It is not clear when those incidents allegedly occurred.
