It was hard to detect the darkness behind John Geoghan's bright eyes. At first glance, almost no one did. Frank Leary certainly didn't see it. The fifth of six children being raised by a single mother on welfare, Leary was thirteen years old and had yet to learn his older brothers’ tricks for ditching Mass on Sunday mornings when he first encountered Geoghan in the late spring of 1974. The priest's smiling face was already a fixture at the back of St. Andrew's Church in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. After Mass, the parish priest would hug the mothers, shake hands with the fathers, and deliver soft pats to the backs of the children. “He always had a big grin — it was as wide as his face,” Leary recalled. “My mother liked him. He was very popular. He was like a little imp.” Leary said hello to the priest, received his friendly tap across the shoulder blades, and didn't focus on Geoghan again until the summer. The rectory groundskeeper was Leary's friend, and Leary helped out a couple times a week, raking freshly mowed grass or gathering hedge clippings in a wheelbarrow.
