Father Leo & Mardell in the 70's

But Father Leo it seems left some unofficial records that do seem to indicate that his relationship with Mardell Eames was far closer and more affectionate than the original newspaper headlines might have suggested. Dennehy contends his client had uncovered a trove of letters the priest had either mailed or hand-delivered to the woman, letters he described as "love letters...all fairly recent...obscene cards and things like that...the kind of stuff that somebody that's just buddies doesn't give to each other."

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For the most part, the letters were never introduced into the court proceedings in the slaying of Father Leo, he acknowledges. Some, however, were. And while they do not necessarily prove that Leo and Mardell were anything more than pals, they do indicate a familiarity, which, by the current standards used by the diocese, would seem to be clearly inappropriate, particularly if Father Leo was, as the church originally maintained, "counseling" Mardell Eames about her rocky marriage.

In the years since Father Leo's death, the Diocese of Allentown has established a code of conduct for priests. Though Kerr says emphatically that the code was not developed as a result of the Heineman case, but was rather implemented in response to a series of child sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the American Catholic Church in recent years, it now specifically bans some of the actions that Father Leo is reported to have taken and cautions about others. Members of the clergy, it says, should "conduct sessions in appropriate settings at appropriate times." "No sessions," the code warns, "should be conducted in private living quarters, but rather in public office areas," and above all, the cleric is advised that he bears "the full burden of responsibility for maintaining clear, appropriate boundaries in all counseling and counseling-related situations.

Letter to Sugar Bushes

In those letters written by Heineman and introduced into court, the priest seems to have gone way beyond those current boundaries. With a kind of lusty poetry, he refers to himself as "his Holiness, the Red Cardinal," and, in a phrase that could be either innocently baroque or intentionally bawdy, he addresses her as "the Dowager of the Sugar Bushes in one instance and "the serene highness of the sugar bushes" in another.

Letter to Her Ladyship

Perhaps the relationship was, as Eames insisted throughout the nearly eight-year ordeal between Father Leo's slaying and the court case that sought to explain it, a simple friendship.

And it was, as Kerr points out, "a different era," a simpler and more innocent time when priests, not yet viewed with the kind of blanket suspicion that now seems to envelop them, felt freer to participate more boisterously in the lives of their congregants

But even by those standards, says Dennehy, some viewed Father Leo with caution and even alarm.

David Stewart, he says, was one of them.

Not long before the confrontation with Father Leo in Stewart's remote home, the ailing truck farmer confided to James Quail, a friend who sometimes did odd jobs for him around his rural home, that his mistrust of Leo Heineman had deepened and that he was convinced that his wife and the priest were having an affair.

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