BOISE — Early in the police investigation of retired Boise priest Thomas Faucher, Detective John Brumbaugh decided he needed to force himself to return to church. If he didn’t go soon, he wasn’t sure he could ever go back.

The admission came about 30 minutes into Brumbaugh’s testimony at Faucher’s sentencing Thursday morning, during which the 73-year-old retired St. Mary’s Catholic Church priest was given a fixed 25 years in prison — more, even, than what prosecutors requested.

Faucher was arrested in February on suspicion of child pornography and drug charges after police received a cyber tip from an internet service provider. He’d retired as a priest in 2015, although at the time he still preached by invitation. Officers later found 2,500 files of child pornography on his electronic devices after they conducted a search warrant of his home where he’d lived for about 15 years, and which was owned by the church. In September, Faucher pleaded guilty to five of the felonies he faced — two counts of possession of child pornography, two counts of distribution of pornography, and one count of possession of a controlled substance.

He has remained in the Ada County Jail on a $1 million bond since this spring.

The arrest came during a sweeping investigation by the Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a group Brumbaugh, a Garden City police detective, worked with. He’d handled plenty of child pornography cases in the past. Even by those standards, though, he said in court, the pictures, videos and written fantasies in Faucher’s possession were extreme.

“Many of the files were extremely disturbing, they were violent in nature,” Brumbaugh said. “They incorporated the wailing or crying of the children. ... There were a number that depicted violent rape, violent abuse.”

Police found those pictures and videos on Faucher’s computer. He would later tell officers — and 4th District Judge Jason Scott in court Thursday — he received much of the pornography from a man he corresponded with online, named Bruno, who lived in Brazil. Throughout the latter half of 2017, the two men wrote each other frequently, often about blasphemy, sadism and sex. Bruno sent Faucher a great deal of child pornography, although, according to Mark Manweiler, Faucher’s attorney, the retired priest only sent Bruno three images of child pornography himself. They also traded written fantasies about raping, torturing and killing children, as well as animals; Brumbaugh said there were photos on Faucher’s computer of animals being sexually abused and killed. There was, for instance, a video of a kitten being trampled by a person wearing cleats. There was at least one video of a child being, in effect, waterboarded, Brumbaugh said, and a snuff film depicting the actual murder of a young woman.

“It’s not uncommon to see a file here or there that’s abusive,” Brumbaugh said. “The volume of it was something I hadn’t come across.”

The age of the children in the videos varied as well, Brumbaugh said.

“I keep saying toddlers — it’s really infants,” he said at one point.

Throughout much of Brumbaugh’s testimony, Kassandra Slaven, the case’s prosecutor, asked him to elaborate on Faucher’s correspondence with Bruno, which she believed helped put the actions in context. He spoke about the conversation between the two men in which Bruno instructed Faucher to watch a video of the abuse of a boy, and to imagine the victim was one of Faucher’s altar boys.

“I’m not sure why (certain videos) are my favorites, but after I watch them over and over I feel this wonderful indifference to what is happening to these kids and animals — and after all, the kids are just animals,” Faucher wrote to Bruno in 2017.

Faucher also wrote about the way his sexual thoughts pervaded his day-to-day life. He messaged with Bruno about the fantasies he’d had about children at his church, and said he found himself sexually attracted to some of his young male relatives. Ultimately, police found evidence he and Bruno had shared a fantasy of Faucher traveling to Brazil, finding a boy, then raping and murdering him.

“I will do something truly evil before I die,” Faucher wrote to Bruno. “The thought of killing someone does begin to excite me.”

Throughout much of the testimony — and even through Slaven’s argument to Scott asking him to sentence the former priest to 30 years prison, with 20 years fixed — Faucher remained silent and seated in a wheelchair at the defense table. During his argument to the court Manweiler, his attorney, who has known Faucher for three decades, posited a question.

“To me, judge, the most difficult question to answer in this case is how did this happen?” Manweiler said. “What caused Father Faucher to get involved in this world of satanism and child pornography?”

It was a question Faucher sought to answer when he stood — thin, hunched and sickly, having lost 47 pounds in 10 months in jail — from his wheelchair to address the court. He asked to speak at the lectern as the attorneys had, but Scott told him to remain at the defense table.

“The images (Brumbaugh) portrays are abhorrent,” Faucher said early in his statement. “They’re truly terrible and, again, that I was, in any way, connected to that — I’m very sorry. But I was.”

He implored Scott to take his actions in context. He pointed out in 2017 he’d just retired from his job as a priest and was spending a lot of time alone. He felt he’d been slighted by the Catholic Church’s upper echelon. He was also drinking a massive amount of alcohol — first to the point of depression, then to the point of dementia. He dabbled in drugs — police found marijuana, LSD and ecstasy in his home.

“I ran into a wall,” Faucher said. “But it was not a brick wall. I ran into a rubber wall. And when I bounced back I bounced … into some truly evil things. New worlds of evil I had never heard of.”Faucher said he “lost track of who I was and what I was, and I ended up with Bruno.”

The two men started talking first about satanism, then adult pornography, then child pornography.

“Should I be punished?” Faucher asked. “Absolutely. And I have been punished and I will continue to be punished.”

Manweiler, however, expressed concern Faucher would be punished not just for the five counts he’d pleaded guilty to, but for the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests around the world. It was an idea Scott addressed before he handed down Faucher’s sentence.The Catholic Diocese of Boise, where Faucher formerly served as a priest, issued a statement after his sentencing, indicating diocese officials are now able to begin their own internal prosecution of the case, and wrote they will hand it off to Church authorities in Rome. In 1996, Faucher was sent to Sisters, Oregon, to serve as a priest there, a position which had not been filled for two and a half years, according to The Nugget Newspaper. He remained there for six years and pursued a degree in canon law, returning to Boise in 2002, the newspaper reports.{/span}

“The volumes of shocking information that the law enforcement information uncovered reveal the heinous nature of child pornography and the tragic impact upon its victims,” the statement from the Catholic Diocese of Boise reads. “While we cannot begin to fathom what brought Faucher to the point that he was able to enter into this evil and dark world, we are thankful for the efforts of the law enforcement community to protect our children from these crimes.”

Scott also noted Faucher had a cadre of supporters in the community, about 100 of whom had written letters to the court on the former priest’s behalf. Among them, Manweiler said in court, was Boise Mayor Dave Bieter, who wrote about the guidance Faucher offered him when he lost both his parents in a traffic crash.

“I don’t know how I would’ve made it through without Tom Faucher,” Bieter wrote in a letter read by Manweiler.

Bieter’s office did not immediately return an Idaho Press request for comment.

But Scott said he had concerns about the rush of community support. As a judge, he was privy to the letters and phone calls Faucher had made from the Ada County Jail. Often, he said, the former priest appeared to be deceiving his supporters about the facts of the case.

“There was a substantial effort on Mr. Faucher’s part to deceive people about what he had done,” Scott said.

Slaven, the case’s prosecutor, asked Scott to sentence Faucher to prison for 30 years, with 20 fixed. Manweiler said probation would suffice, given Faucher’s poor health, age, considering that he’d never raped or molested anyone, and that he’d be on sex offender supervised probation.

In a hearing in September, Slaven said people had come forward claiming Faucher touched them inappropriately in the past, but prosecutors could not add charges to the case because of the statute of limitations, she said.

Scott instead handed down a 25-year prison sentence, all of it fixed. In effect, it all but guaranteed Faucher would die in prison, given that his doctors only expect him to live another five years.

Scott referenced a common theme of much of the testimony heard during the four-and-a-half-hour hearing — the idea that child pornography continues to victimize children again and again as new viewers discover the material. Slaven said authorities obtained written statements from seven of the children depicted in the material on Faucher’s computer, or from their families.

“Each time someone downloads a picture showing me being raped and abused, I picture some pervert enjoying my pain,” the victim wrote in a statement Slaven read part of.

{span class=”print_trim”}The statement ended with, “I do not think I will fully heal until the graphic pictures are removed.”