Priest listed in sex abuse report was working at church camp in 1958 when deaf boy, 10, disappeared

Title: Priest listed in sex abuse report was working at church camp in 1958 when deaf boy, 10, disappeared

Author: Kevin Vaughan

Publisher: 9News Denver

Date:  02Dec2020

One of the Catholic priests newly named as a child sex abuser was a counselor at a church camp in August 1958 when a 10-year-old deaf boy disappeared under mysterious circumstances, 9Wants to Know has learned.

That makes him one of three seminarians who were counselors at Camp St. Malo that summer who have since had accusations of child sexual abuse sustained after a 22-month examination of church records by investigators working for the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

Jerry Repola, who died in 1971 after a prolonged illness, sexually abused a teen-ager while he was assigned to a parish in Grand Junction, according to a supplemental report released this week by state Attorney General Phil Weiser.

It followed up on a report released in October 2019. Together, the two reports detail sexual abuse of at least 212 children in Colorado by 52 priests between 1950 and 1999.

The disappearance of Bobby Bizup – and the discovery of his remains nearly a year later high on Mount Meeker west of the camp – were the subject of a long-running 9Wants to Know investigation. It found that two counselors there when Bobby vanished, Harold Robert White and Neil Hewitt, were serial child sex abusers.