Jury Weighs Priest's Prison Murder

Jurors began deliberations Tuesday in the murder trial of a prison inmate accused of killing pedophile priest John Geoghan in his cell.

The jury of five women and seven men got the case following more than two weeks of testimony that centered largely on whether Joseph Druce was insane when he beat and strangled Geoghan, a central figure in the clergy sex abuse scandal that started in Boston.

The prosecutor said in his closing argument earlier Tuesday that Druce was a calculating and conniving killer who planned the murder for weeks so he could be a "big shot" in prison.

But Druce's lawyer said he was severely mentally ill and under the delusion that God had chosen him to kill Geoghan and send a message to pedophiles around the world.

Druce admits sneaking into Geoghan's cell at the Souza-Baranowski prison in Shirley in August 2003. He jammed the door shut with a book, then beat and strangled the 68-year-old Geoghan before the guards could stop him.

Prosecutor Lawrence Murphy focused his closing on the planning he said Druce put into Geoghan's killing. Druce told investigators he spent two hours stretching socks into the rope he used to strangle Geoghan, Murphy said, and he made friendly visits to Geoghan's cell so the defrocked priest wouldn't suspect anything when he came to kill him.

"He was not a mentally ill person, raging out of control," Murphy said. "He's a calculating individual who waited for his opportunity."

As Murphy described the gruesome details of the killing, Druce repeatedly nodded his head, looked around the room and smiled.

Druce's lawyer, John LaChance, recapped Druce's troubled childhood, saying he would repeatedly bang his head against glass windows as a toddler, and describing his stay at a residential school for troubled youths, where Druce says he was molested as a preteen.

LaChance said when Druce, 40, killed Geoghan, it was the culmination of a rage that had built up inside him because of his own sexual abuse. He said Druce had heard Geoghan discussing with other inmates about how to molest young boys.

"His mind started racing," LaChance said. "His memories of all the sexual abuse he had incurred over his entire life came flooding back over him.

"He believed that what he was doing was right, that he had been ordained to do this," LaChance said.

Geoghan was serving a nine- to 10-year sentence for groping a 10-year-old boy and was accused of molesting nearly 150 boys over three decades. His case triggered the sex scandal that has rocked the nation's Roman Catholic Church.

Druce is already serving a life sentence for killing a man who allegedly made a sexual pass at him after picking Druce up hitchhiking. He unsuccessfully used an insanity defense during that 1989 trial.

If convicted of Geoghan's murder, Druce would received another life sentence without the possibility of parole.