The Murdered Priests of Montana:

The Vanishing of Father John Patrick Kerrigan

In the long, low light of Montana summers, when the mountains throw their blue shadow over lakes like a slow benediction, small towns hold their histories close — parish registers, school photos, and the warm rumor of things that once were. It is in that quietly kept ledger of local memory that the disappearance of Father John Patrick Kerrigan in July 1984 sits like a torn page: startlingly visible, painfully incomplete. This paper traces the known facts of Kerrigan’s disappearance, places his case in the fraught context of contemporaneous clerical violence and diocesan scandal, and considers the competing interpretations that have lingered for decades — all the while leaning on primary news reports, investigative studies, diocesan disclosures, and first-person contemporary accounts that together form the best available public record. 

John Patrick Kerrigan, born in Butte in 1926 and a long-serving priest within the Diocese of Helena, was assigned to Sacred Heart Parish in Ronan in mid-July 1984. He was seen alive on the evening of July 20, 1984, leaving Deneault’s Bakery in Ronan while out on a jog; he did not return for morning Mass, and two days later a missing person report was filed. On July 29, investigators found bloody clothing and a tangled, blood-soaked wire coat hanger at a turnout on Montana Highway 35 along Flathead Lake — about five miles from Ronan. A week after his disappearance Kerrigan’s brown Chevrolet Malibu was recovered abandoned in Polson. Inside the trunk were his wallet (containing roughly $1,200), a bloody shovel, and a blood-stained pillowcase. No human remains were ever recovered, though authorities from the outset treated the circumstances as strongly suggestive of homicide. 

From the very first days of inquiry, Kerrigan’s case bore an eerie resonance with the violent death of Father Reynaldo Rivera of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who had been murdered in August 1982. Rivera’s body, discovered three days after his disappearance, bore evidence of strangulation and similar use of metal cordage; contemporaneous investigators noted parallels in the staging of scenes and the apparent targeting of Catholic clergy. These coincidences — as they were reported in regional press and later in national true-crime forums — prompted some detectives to speculate about a predatory “drifter” with a particular psychological animus against priests. Yet, investigators in different jurisdictions also expressed caution: similarities in scene characteristics do not a shared perpetrator make, and no forensic or witness link definitively connected Rivera’s murderer to Kerrigan’s disappearance. 

The subsequent decades have added uncomfortable layers to the story. In 2015, as the Diocese of Helena published a list of clergy and staff accused of sexual misconduct as part of legal settlements and transparency efforts, Kerrigan’s name appeared among those clerics associated at one time with allegations or suspicion. The contemporaneous reporting and the diocesan disclosure reopened questions: had Kerrigan been targeted because of misconduct; had the church’s internal handling of troubled priests played some part in his vulnerability; or, as some investigators and later researchers have proposed, did Kerrigan stage aspects of the crime scene to cover a different fate? The Diocese’s own roster of “accused personnel” is a primary document for historians wishing to understand institutional accountability and how public records have reshaped conversations about clergy victimization and culpability. 

Among available detailed treatments, Leon J. Podles’s case study — originally published by the Crossland Foundation — merits close attention. Podles compiled contemporaneous press accounts, legal filings, and archival material to advance a rigorous (if polemical) reconstruction of Kerrigan’s life and the circumstances of his disappearance. He notes Kerrigan’s attendance at the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, in 1983 — a facility that served as a retreat for clergy with addictions, depression, or sexual misconduct issues. The Paraclete’s records, and the opaque culture surrounding such retreats in the late twentieth century, complicate the narrative: they neither prove culpability in a crime nor absolve Kerrigan of possible wrongdoing, yet they do explain why his appointment history and pastoral movements struck contemporaries as peculiar and why prosecutors later revisited the possibility of motive beyond random violence. Podles’s careful harvesting of sources is indispensable for anyone seeking to place Kerrigan within the broader problematized clergy landscape of the era. 

Local journalism has been crucial — and haunting — in preserving the texture of the case. The Flathead Beacon’s 2021 feature, “The Vanishing of a Priest,” reconstructs timelines, interviews surviving parishioners, and quotes lead investigators and local historians. Regional television and radio series, including multi-part pieces from local affiliates and later national true-crime podcasts, refreshed public attention in 2019–2021. These retellings are not mere repetition; they gather oral memory and stray archival artifacts (police blotters, old parish bulletins) that traditional repositories often overlook. Yet the character of such media — narrative-driven, sometimes speculative, sometimes compelled by audience appetite for closure — requires careful weighing of claims. A historian must read broadcast and podcast narratives as both sources of testimony and as interpretive acts that shape communal memory. 

Scholarly caution is also warranted when weighing alternative theories. In 2020, Montana author Brian D’Ambrosio published findings from access to the lead detective’s notes, which opened the door to an alternative hypothesis: that certain anomalies in the evidence might indicate a staged scene or even that Kerrigan had absented himself voluntarily. These suggestions have prompted fierce debate. Some commentators point out that absence of a body, by itself, is insufficient grounds for conjecture of voluntary flight, especially where clothing and blood are found in situ and where personal effects were left behind. Others respond that decades of diocesan opacity about clerical misconduct invite skepticism about official narratives and counsel historians to hold multiple working hypotheses in tandem. The proper historian’s posture here is to balance openness to alternative readings with a refusal to substitute sensational speculation for demonstrable fact. 

What can be said with confidence? Public records and press accounts establish the basic sequence: Kerrigan arrived in Ronan on 18 July 1984, was last seen on 20 July, clothing and a coat hanger stained with blood were located on 29 July, and his automobile was recovered one week after his disappearance with blood-stained implements in the trunk. No arrest was ever publicized, no body recovered, and the case remains open in the hearts of many readers and closed only in the bureaucratic sense where statutes have applied. These facts, corroborated across independent reporting and primary filings, form the foundation upon which interpretative claims must stand. 

Yet the Kerrigan affair cannot be disentangled from the larger moral landscape. The late twentieth century saw increasing public exposure of clerical sexual abuse and of institutional practices that shuffled accused priests between parishes rather than exposing them. Kerrigan’s inclusion on diocesan lists of accused clergy after 2015 colors retrospection: for survivors, for parishes that received him, and for historians who study the nexus of secrecy, power, and violence. To write about Kerrigan as only a victim of an unnamed predator risks eliding the damage that parishioners have long said followed some assignments; to assert Kerrigan’s guilt without due process is to adopt the very certainties that the archival record refuses to grant. The historian’s ethical task is to hold these apparent contradictions — victim and accused, missing body and bloody scene — in analytical suspension, to work the evidence until such time as new materials might allow clearer adjudication. 

In the end, Father John Kerrigan’s disappearance is a lacuna in two American stories at once: the story of small-town Montana and the story of a Church learning, often belatedly and painfully, how to reckon with its darkest failures. The physical evidence was sparse and clustered; the archival evidence is partial and sometimes redacted; the human testimony is vivid but divided. The scholarly response should be neither to fashion a tidy myth nor to reduce the affair to a checklist of institutional failings. Instead, historians must continue to gather — court filings, parish records, interviews with parishioners, and any surviving investigative files — and to narrate what can be grounded in sources, so that Kerrigan’s absence does not become a void but a call to better documentation and clearer moral accounting. 

Bibliography

Charley Project. “John Patrick Kerrigan.” Charleyproject.org. Accessed November 21, 2025. https://charleyproject.org/case/john-patrick-kerrigan

Diocese of Helena. “List of Accused Personnel.” DioceseHelena.org. Posted April 2015. Accessed November 21, 2025. https://diocesehelena.org/list-of-accused-personnel

Flathead Beacon. Darryl (author line varies). “The Vanishing of a Priest.” Flathead Beacon, March 23, 2021. https://flatheadbeacon.com/2021/03/23/the-vanishing-of-a-priest/

Podles, Leon J. “The Rev. John Patrick Kerrigan Murder Case Study.” Crossland Foundation (podles.org), July 27, 2008. https://podles.org/case-studies/John-Patrick-Kerrigan-Murder-Case-Study.htm

InsideHook. Steve Huff. “The Unholy Mystery of the Murdered Priests.” InsideHook, April 4, 2018. https://www.insidehook.com/culture/unholy-mystery-murdered-priests

Great Falls Tribune / Missoulian. Vince Devlin. “Ronan priest who disappeared accused of sex abuse.” Great Falls Tribune, June 5, 2015. https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/crime/2015/06/05/ronan-priest-disappeared-accused-sex-abuse/28533921/

Unsolved Mysteries / Unsolved.com. “Fr. Reynaldo Rivera” and related case materials. Accessed November 21, 2025. https://unsolved.com/gallery/fr-reynaldo-rivera/