Pubdate: Sun, 21 May 2006
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2006 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: Rex W. Huppke, Tribune staff reporter
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)

MESSAGE OF PEACE RESONATES AFTER DEATH OF NUN

BUFFALO -- Sister Karen Klimczak moved quick as the wind off Lake 
Erie, a peace-loving nun who crisscrossed the city with such speed 
that friends wondered, only half jokingly, if she hadn't borrowed 
some Catholic saint's miraculous ability to bilocate.

In a day she might race from counseling ex-offenders at the halfway 
house she ran to praying at a murder victim's vigil, then head to the 
youth center she founded before donning a clown suit and bouncing 
joyously through a senior center.

She was 62 years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall and just over 100 pounds, 
tireless and in near-constant motion. In western New York, they 
called her Mother Teresa in fast forward. Without a trace of 
hyperbole, they called her a gift from God.

Now people stumble over their words as they try to speak of her in 
the past tense. That's in part because the tragedy that befell Sister 
Karen Easter weekend seems too impossible, too wrong, to be real. And 
in part because this nun, who left a trail of forgiveness behind like 
footprints, seems as present now in death as she ever was in life.

Raised in a deeply religious home outside Buffalo, Karen Klimczak 
entered the convent after high school, earned a master's in pastoral 
study from Loyola University Chicago in the early 1980s and spent 
several years as a Catholic-school teacher in Buffalo.

A summer of volunteer work at a state prison revealed in her a 
profound sympathy for people who'd served time, setting a course for 
her life's work.

"She felt they were forgotten," said one of her sisters, Mary Lynch. 
"She felt they never had a chance unless somebody was there to help them."

In 1985, Sister Karen opened HOPE House, a "Home of Positive 
Experience" for ex-offenders. With a mix of toughness and motherly 
compassion, it became one of the more successful after-prison 
programs in the region.

Men would return and invite her to their wedding. They'd ask her to 
be godmother to their children. Yet Sister Karen insisted it was she 
who benefited from the work.

"HOPE isn't for men who have been incarcerated," she said in a 
videotaped 1987 interview with the diocese of Buffalo. "HOPE is for 
me. For me to grow, for me to see brokenness in the eyes and in the 
heart of an individual. And when the brokenness is there, you can see 
God, and God can become real. And he's become more real for me 
through HOPE than any other experience."

On Good Friday, Sister Karen attended a 7 p.m. service at Sts. 
Columba and Brigid Church, where she was a pastoral associate. The 
scripture focused on the final words Jesus Christ spoke as he hung on 
the cross at Calvary, including: "Father, forgive them; for they know 
not what they do."

After the service, she drove to the red-brick halfway house. Several 
years ago she had changed the name from HOPE House to Bissonette 
House in honor of Rev. A. Joseph Bissonette, a friend murdered in the 
building in 1987 by two teens who'd come to him seeking help.

Sister Karen believed it important that the site of Bissonette's 
murder be a place of love and forgiveness. Morning prayers are said 
each day in the ground-floor room where he was killed.

About 9 p.m., Sister Karen was on the third floor chatting with 
Robert Walker, an ex-offender who'd been there nearly a year. She 
mentioned the home's newest resident, Craig Lynch, a convicted car 
thief only nine days out of prison.

Walker recalled the nun saying Lynch, who'd battled the law and drug 
addiction more than half his 36 years, seemed ready for a fresh 
start. A few days earlier, he'd helped her string paper crosses for 
Easter decorations. Before leaving Walker's room, Sister Karen spoke 
with her usual optimism: "I think Craig's doing well," she said. "I 
think he's going to be all right."

One floor down, police say, Lynch had just passed Sister Karen's room 
and noticed the door open, noticed the cell phone by her computer. He 
would later tell police he went in to take the phone, hoping to sell 
it to buy crack cocaine and cigarettes.

At 12:45 p.m. Saturday, Walker was in the kitchen of Bissonette 
House, worried. He hadn't seen Sister Karen all day. It wasn't like 
her to not check in.

"I thought, 'It's Easter weekend, maybe for once her planning got a 
little screwed up with all the festivities,'" he recalled. "But it 
didn't seem right."

By 3:30 p.m., Walker phoned the Buffalo police, convinced Sister 
Karen was missing.

Concern grew as Easter weekend continued, and when she didn't come to 
Easter mass, most suspected foul play.

"I knew that something terrible had happened," said Rev. Roy 
Herberger, who'd known Sister Karen more than 20 years. "I was just a 
basket case, emotionally."

Police and more than 100 volunteers spent Monday combing the rough 
Buffalo neighborhoods where Sister Karen was best-known, and a prayer 
vigil was planned for that night. Minutes before the vigil began, 
relatives got word from police: The nun's body had been found.

When Detective Sgt. James Lonergan heard Sister Karen was missing, it 
felt like history repeating. Two decades earlier, one of his first 
homicide cases was the murder of Bissonette. Now he was returning to 
the scene of that crime.

The home's nine residents were rounded up Monday morning, interviewed 
and given drug tests. Police say Lynch was the only one who tested positive.

After several hours of interrogation, Lonergan said, Lynch's claim 
that he knew nothing of Sister Karen's disappearance began to unravel.

"He finally admits he stole her cell phone," Lonergan said. "He says 
she was fine when he left. But it just didn't make sense."

As his stories and alibis crumbled, Lynch confessed to killing Sister 
Karen, Lonergan said.

He led police to her body, buried in a shed behind an abandoned 
yellow house about 5 miles from Bissonette House.

Lynch, who has two prior felony convictions and more than 10 arrests, 
mainly on theft charges, has been charged with two counts of 
first-degree murder and, if convicted, faces life without possibility 
of parole. His court-appointed attorney, David Addelman, has entered 
a not guilty plea and is looking into the circumstances under which 
Lynch confessed.

"He does not consider himself a violent person," Addelman said, 
noting that Lynch got along well with Sister Karen. "He was fond of her."

In a signed transcript of his confession to police, Lynch detailed 
what he claims happened on Good Friday:

About 9:40 p.m. he entered Sister Karen's room on the second floor to 
steal her cell phone but heard her coming and hid behind the door.

When she walked in, he grabbed her from behind and put his hand over 
her mouth. She was trying to scream.

"This is how people get hurt," he told her, according to the 
confession. "People resist and they get hurt. I don't want to hurt you."

He forced the nun to the floor, pressed her face into the carpet and 
held her there until she stopped moving. An autopsy would later 
reveal she died from strangulation.

Lynch said he put her body in the bed so it looked like she was 
sleeping. He then drove to a drug spot and traded the phone for a 
rock of crack cocaine.

He drove off and stopped to smoke the crack, but it wouldn't light. 
The rock was fake.

"I threw the rock out the window," Lynch told police. "That's when 
reality set in and I realized what I had done."

He said he returned to Bissonette House at 4 a.m., wrapped Sister 
Karen's body in a comforter and drove to his mother's home. He hid 
the body outside, then returned on Easter and carried it across the 
street in a garbage can to a shed behind an abandoned house. He dug a 
deep hole in the hard clay soil and said a prayer.

"When I was done, praying, I asked sister for forgiveness," Lynch 
said in his confession. "I picked her out of the garbage can and put 
her in the hole."

Lonergan said it was lucky Lynch confessed.

"We'd have never in a million years found her," he said.

Sister Karen's funeral in the cavernous St. Ann's Catholic Church on 
Broadway Street was believed to be the biggest in Buffalo history. 
White paper doves lined the walls and pews. People held candles high, 
swaying and singing "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."

Rev. Herberger stood in the pulpit and referred to the words of 
Christ read at the Good Friday service eight days earlier: Father, 
forgive them; for they know not what they do.

"If one word would be synonymous with Karen it would be the word 
'forgive,'" Herberger said. "And she would be saying that about 
Craig. She would be the first person to say, 'Father, forgive him, he 
really doesn't know what he's doing.'"

At the base of the altar was a dove-shaped sign. On it was a slogan 
Sister Karen came up with, part of a non-violence campaign she 
planned to launch.

The sign read: "I Leave Peaceprints."

She hoped it would inspire people to leave peace behind them wherever 
they go. Since the funeral, more than 4,000 signs have gone out, with 
more being made each day, and they've sprung like flowers on lawns 
across Buffalo.

Rather than turn people against ex-offenders, Sister Karen's death 
has brought greater commitment to the work she did. Anonymous checks 
have come in to Bissonette House to ensure it keeps running. 
Volunteers have come forward.

"If she would have known that her death would have had such a ripple 
effect, she would've said, 'So be it,'" said Sister Roz Rosolowski, a 
chaplain at Attica prison and longtime friend of Sister Karen's. 
"What keeps a lot of us going is the drive to continue this work in 
her name. And it has just caught fire."

The people of Buffalo have lost someone who will never be replaced, 
yet there is little anger to be found this spring. Instead, there is 
resolve and focus. Determination and forgiveness.

There is a sense of ease, it seems, in the knowledge that Sister 
Karen hasn't gone far.

She's still leaving peaceprints. Everywhere.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman