MAN GETS PRISON FOR CHILD FONDLING 62-YEAR-OLD TAUGHT AT GROTON CHURCH

By Paul Langner, GLOBE STAFF
March 14, 1991

CAMBRIDGE -- A former Sunday school teacher in Groton was sentenced yesterday to two concurrent state prison terms of five to 10 years for indecently fondling four children.

Leslie Daniel Richardson, 62, was found guilty Feb. 25 of the indecent assaults by a Middlesex Superior Court jury that had deliberated more than eight hours in one continuous session.Judge Walter E. Steele also ordered a consecutive sentence of five to 10 years to begin after Danielson is discharged from prison, but that sentence will be suspended and Danielson will be placed on probation. Steele also ordered that after Danielson is released and put on three years' probation he is to have no contact with children, is not to teach Sunday school, and is to receive sex offenders' treatment.

Danielson will be eligible for parole from his committed sentence in three years and four months.

He faces trial on six more indecent assault and battery charges and one charge of rape of a child.

Assistant District Attorney David Linsky had asked that Danielson be sentenced to nine to 10 years in the Cedar Junction state prison in Walpole, and also receive a consecutive sentence of nine to 10 years. Linsky asked Steele to suspend the second sentence for three years during which time Danielson would be on probation and obliged to undergo treatment.

In his appeal to Steele for a harsh sentence, Linsky said that Danielson "is a pedophile who preyed on children for sexual gratification for many years."

Among letters submitted to Steele by the victims and their families was one from a woman in her 40s who wrote that she, too, had been sexually abused when she was a Sunday school pupil of Danielson's during the 1960s.

Linsky said that not only had Danielson's indecent assaults shaken the lives of the victims and their families, but that of the town of Groton, "a small quiet town that now trembles with a child-abuse scandal of major proportions."

Danielson's abuse had "violated his victims' confidence in their teachers, in their church, and in some cases in their religion," Linsky told Steele.

After his arrest, Danielson moved to Arlington and worked as a volunteer at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford where he transported patients in wheelchairs and on gurneys.

Danielson had taught Sunday school to sixth graders at the Union Congregational Church for more than 25 years until his arrest in June 1989. Testimony in his weeklong trial showed that Danielson would embrace the children during Sunday school in ways they said they did not like, and he would invite them to his house for parties when his wife was not home.

There, the children testified, he would fondle them indecently, touching their private parts, and in one case lying atop a 12-year-old girl during a game.

Linsky said he found from probation reports that Danielson displayed "a bad attitude. He refuses to acknowledge his wrongdoing and the effect his improper behavior has had on his victims. That suggests to this prosecutor that he is dangerous and should be punished."

Danielson's lawyer, Paul O'Neill of Portsmouth, N.H., in a brief plea to Steele for a mild House of Correction sentence, said that "at age 62, a nine- to-10-year sentence in state prison is a life sentence." Instead, O'Neill asked Steele, "I would ask for a House of Correction sentence, and I would ask the court to suspend that. This would give him a chance to get help. In all his life, no one ever went to him and said, 'You need help.' There is help out there."

Copyright 1991, 1998 Globe Newspaper Company