January 17, 2022 • 39 mins
In the mid-1990s, a devoutly religious Ukrainian teenager is offered the chance to escape a violent household, for a life-changing opportunity at a Florida monastery. But swapping the hardships of his rural mountain village, for the promise of a better future in America, ends up far worse than his expectations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Less than twenty four hours after sister Michelle Lewis was
found stabbed to death in a Miami convent, investigators were
successfully closing out the search for her killer. Mikail Looco Fell,
a teenage monk in training, admitted how he got drunk
and entered her bedroom in the dead of night, then
stabbed her more than ninety times. As the young Ukrainians
(00:26):
sat in the homicide department, taking police step by step
through his crime, an offer for me, Hilo came in
from the lobby. Well. I was being introviewed by the protectives.
I wanted to take this, interrupted us and says, before
you say anything else, the priests are here and the
seven the lawyer to represent you, and I said, I declined.
(00:50):
I said, I don't want the lawyer. I don't want
to do with him. Yeah. He turned down that lawyer
because after confessing to the murder, Mihailo also alleged that
those same priests, father Abbot Gregory went and father Damien Gibbold,
both sexually abused him. A few hours after refusing the lawyer,
(01:14):
Mihailo was taken into custody without the priest's attorney. He
was now on his own Intad County jail. He knew
nothing about the judicial system or what was going to
happen to him next. Feeling alone and scared, he reached
out to the only family he had since arriving in
Miami almost five years earlier, the same priest from Holy Cross.
(01:35):
But he would find no comfort on the other end.
So you get, they give this through phone calls. So
I don't know anybody, you know, I couldn't call nobody.
So I was scared, and so I called. I just
called Went. I remember called, weren't you know. It was
really just this cold conversation. You know, I could tell
that he was really really angry. I suld find out
(01:58):
what's going to happen next or something like it says
something like this, do you realize that you're going to
be executed me? Hailo hung up the phone, feeling more
solitary than he had before. That short call would be
the last time he ever spoke to Father Abbot Went
or anyone from the monastic family at Holy Cross ever. Again.
(02:30):
I'm Paula Barros and I'm Melanie Bartley, and this is
sacred scandal. Well, the Young, the Young, and the Committee
of the murder was in my Spanish class, very distant,
very you know, just odd um, not a part of anything. Um.
It was very sad. You could tell that he was
(02:53):
very sad with Nick Nikhilo. He was weird to us.
He was just an oddball. He was always an oddball.
He was strange, he walked strange. He just he came
from somewhere else, and he behaved like he was from
somewhere else. Yeah. I was a tender friend, and uh,
you know, I was just I'll be one fitting and
(03:17):
you know it's yes, went by more and more dissolution.
(03:37):
When Melanie and I started trying to tell the story
of Holy Cross Academy more than fifteen years ago, we
knew we needed to talk with the one person at
the center of everything, Hailok Fell. Before the murder, he
was just a quiet, little skinny kid in black clothes
to me, a boy who sometimes I laughed with when
we were paired up to struggle through broken converse stations
(04:00):
in French class. But other than knowing he was from
Ukraine and that he said he was sexually abused by
the priests, I really didn't know all that much about him,
And part of me was always curious about why he
killed sister Michelle, and I couldn't get my head around
how a kid I sat next to in class could
commit such a terrible violent crime. So a few years
(04:22):
after I graduated from Holy Cross, Melanie and I reached
out to me Halo in hopes of some day getting
those answers. It all started with a letter, and I
think the first letter we wrote to him just first
I get to know him, right, because we were like,
let's see, and then we ended up just and then
(04:43):
he was like, you were the first, like, this is
the first letter I've gotten in years, five years, five
years it had been I mean this was like two
thousand six or something, yeah, five years, five years. And
then he remembered everything. He remembered You were an actress, Paula,
and you were sat next to me French, and I
remember your plays and you remember. And then then for
(05:05):
a while we're just getting to know him for like
letters and letters and and remember our moms. Like the
first time we when we started getting letters from prison,
oh my god, they were like, what why does his
murderer have our ad? And who else has our address? Ah? Yeah,
After sending letters back and forth, we finally decided to
(05:28):
make a trip about ninety minutes north of Miami to
visit him in prison. That first visit to Indian Town, Florida,
when he was at Martin Correctional I was the most
nervous I've ever been. We would go, we would take
like our weekend trips and stay at a hotel in Stuart.
How do we remember? Yeah, how do we have money
(05:48):
for them? During that visit, he stopped being me Hailo,
and he asked us to call him Mike, the name
he started using while in prison. It's a name he
told us he wanted to be called once in school,
but the priests wouldn't let him. After that, driving up
to Indian Town to see Mike became something we did
(06:08):
maybe every few months. He was nervous and reserved at first,
but over time he opened up. We got to know
more about his life and his story during each visit.
Until that is we got banned from the prison. So,
being young and amateurs, we may have broken one of
(06:30):
the cardinal rules of correctional facilities, which is, of course,
don't film or take pictures of the actual prison, And
that is exactly what we had our camera person do.
One time. While we were inside, we never got permission
to film an interview with Mike and thought it would
be cool to get this really artsy time lapse of
(06:51):
the clouds rolling over the roof of the prison. But
when we came out, police and security were all over
our camera guide. They surround at us and our car.
They thought we were trying to help break Mike out
of prison. We were horrified. Once things calmed down, they
made us delete all the footage right then and there.
(07:13):
We were banned from the Hailo's visitor list and the
prison altogether. And because of our mistake, things weren't going
well on the inside either. But I want to know
your side, Like what happened to you after? Oh? Yeah, yes,
so the common name. Yeah, they took me to a room.
Of course, they searched me and not and then they
(07:37):
put me a handcuffs, Like what the hell is going on?
They wouldn't tell me, so yeah, they took me to
confine me. Yeah, and I remember the next day classification
obviously came around and uh, she said, soon you're going
to be transferred to another prison. Oh my god. So
(08:01):
really really the best feeling it really likes? Were you
upset at us. Oh, no, of course not, it's not something. Yeah,
of course not. Yeah, you definitely didn't know, and yeah,
you didn't know the rules. Yeah. We scrambled. Over the
next few days, we submitted an apology to the warden
(08:22):
with a packet of information and even a DVD of
the movie trailer. We hoped explaining our project would help
get him out of the confinement area. After eight days,
Mike was sent back to his regular block. We felt
horrible after the whole thing. Losing direct contact with him
is one of the things that really stopped us from
(08:43):
working in our documentary. But worse than that, Paula and
I also knew that we were the only people who
ever came to see him. We started to feel this
sense of compassion for him, like we were the only
people in his life, and after so many visits, we
felt like we couldn't just a peer on him. Since
getting banned all of those years ago, both of us
(09:05):
have continued to keep in touch through snail mall and
the phone at first, and now in a different time,
through lots of email and sometimes video grams. Mike is
very much a part of our lives and getting his
perspective on what happened to him at Holy Cross and
what he witnessed there kept us motivated to tell his story,
(09:26):
and this year we actually started recording those calls as
he walked us through everything that happened. Hello, this is
a prepaid call from an inmate at a Florida Department
of Corrections institution. Hello, Hey, Hi, Yes, I'm not sure
what happened. And these conversations aren't easy. Our phone calls
(09:49):
are capped at thirty minutes, so sometimes we just started
getting really into talking about something, only to be interrupted
by a one minute warning. You have one minute, We've
and after that we can't even jump back into the
conversation straight away because we have to wait another thirty
minutes between calls. Sometimes it can take days to even
(10:12):
finish a single conversation, So I guess I'll call it tomorrow. Tomorrow.
On the inside, from Mike, there's more to worry about.
We talk about some really personal and sensitive stuff on
these calls, things you might not want just anyone to hear.
He talks to us from a bank of shared phones
where the next person over can hear your every word.
(10:35):
In the morning, it's probably really, really hard. We try
talking early in the day, which is better for recording
because there's less noise from the block, but morning calls
make Mike uncomfortable in the empty hallways. His voice echoes
through the quiet for everyone to hear, so a lot
of the time we talk later in the day, when
(10:57):
the sounds of daily life in prison mute. His words
to their inmates. Thank you for using Global crow Link.
Before we go any further, Yes, Mike is a confessed
murderer who brutally stabs someone to death. But the person
(11:17):
we've gotten to know over the years is more complicated
than that single act. We'd like you to get to
know Mike and the way we have, so for the
rest of this episode, we'll be sharing some of our
conversations with him to explain how a boy from a
rural mountain village in Ukraine and others like him found
themselves at a monastery in the suburbs of Miami. That
(11:41):
story after a break, stay with us. Welcome back to
Sacred Scandal. Mihailo Kofel story starts in the early nineteen eighties,
(12:03):
far from the beaches of Miami. It starts far from
any beach, really. His story begins in one of the
most inland parts of Europe. A region of Ukraine in
the Carpathian Mountains called Zacarpatia or trans Carpathia. It's an
area that used to be part of the Kingdom of
(12:24):
Hungary and then Czechoslovakia, but it was absorbed into the
Soviet Union during the Red Armies occupation at the end
of World War Two. Today it sits on the western
end of Ukraine. Zacarpatia is a small state whose complex
history puts it on the border of four other countries, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia,
and Poland. About a two mile hike from the Polish
(12:47):
border sits Virgobina Bistra, the village where Mike was raised.
The towns people, let's say, houses, and the winters were drizzle.
October is pretty much small. That's that's really early in
(13:08):
the year for snow, and really there snow stage in
the mountains. I remember until May Mike lived through these
endless winters with his parents, Maria and Yuri. The co
Fils owned a small, simple house that they shared with
his grandparents. Small and simple, and that there were not
enough rooms for Mike to have his own space. Up
(13:31):
until he left, he shared a bed with his parents.
Village life in Ukraine of the ighties was very much
like it had been a hundred years before. The home
was warmed by a wood burning heater. It had no
plumbing until the mid nine nineties. The toilet was a
simple outhouse in the back. Burco by Nabista was a
(13:52):
picture of rural life behind the iron curtain. And how
did you get around if you had to go to
another town. We just used the bicycles, just walk, you know.
But my father, my father didn't have like motorcycle, motorcycle
the side So did you ride in the side car? Yeah,
I remember you had it. Force was also hard to
(14:14):
get like gasoline at the time, so most of the
time like you walk. Um, what was it like in
your town? Did people have money? What kind of work
did they do? Most of them, if not all, people
were still doing the farmwood. My father did you know?
He was looking at railroad and still about the whole
council was broad, you know that if you're still working,
(14:37):
they still wouldn't pay you developed prolonged delay in delay
and delay you know, yeah months all conscious the time
was really broad or just corrupt, you know, just maybe
and you said your your your your father worked in
the railroad. What about your mom? Me and my mom,
they we were working on the fields, even my father's
(15:00):
after working sometimes come and start working on the fields.
And yeah, during time, I just remembers just working, also
working a lot. The school ended at like twelve o'clock
and after school I'll come bay just keptastic and go
go into the fields to work. How old were you seven? Eight?
Eight years old? You know nothing exceptionally everybody much work
(15:22):
like that. Did you like to work? I didn't mind,
but as I remember, sometimes you get tired of it,
like because basically it was like men work from like
eight hundreds, because you know, you get your shallow, you
got your rate, you know, basically those tools from from yours.
And also in a summer like behindo school in a summer,
(15:43):
so basically then you have to work the whole day.
Did you ever think about what you wanted to do
when you grew up, when you were that age and
you were working in the field, the all the kids
would just decided like they want to do something that
your father here. So I was I was like, oh,
I guess I got work on the railroad, And I
really wasn't sure enough and everything was really uncertain because
(16:06):
everything was just intro models, you know, and just a
hard times. And things got worse in when the Soviet
Union dissolved. The economy collapsed and the entire country started
to change as trade restrictions were lifted. So I grew
up one of my ears and mamas being during the
time so new and so union broke up, everybody broke
(16:28):
gave the whole. It's also empty everything just as the
pluck you see. Then everything you just started coming. The
whole market open up. You know. You got products from
from Europe, coming in from from America. Everything. The movie
was entertainments a totally different What kind of what kind
of movies and TV shows were you watching? Oh you
know they don't people those classics of mcamos, you know,
uh Anno schwazeneger uh sost a long had this uh
(16:53):
small movie there. But I just try to cramming and
get there. And so they had some a lot money.
Remember if you bought that to be like if you
had like one of the first color to be So
it's like a big thing. And so of my friends,
Oh man, you got a color, dude. It's like other nineties.
Um like in general, like, would you say you had
a happy childhood? Uh, some parts, yes, a lot of parts.
(17:20):
No stimes sometimes thinking out, playing soccer that was kind
of fun. But growing up, yeah, there were a lot
of step parts. And the bad parts, Mike says, didn't
just have to do with the struggles of his country's
changing economy. Mike was also dealing with problems inside his home.
(17:41):
Let's talk a little bit about your your family. Can
you describe your dad anything you can think of when
you think of him? Okay, Uh, I just remember growing up.
My first member is my father was already drinking. It
was an alcoholic you know. But he was also working.
(18:01):
Of course my were road but you're of course not
supposed to be drinking when you would of course joining
the trains. So I remember, yeah, before he went to work,
he was like a space mouth wherever. Then my mom,
if she could smell any alcohol, I am, And of
course he was my mom, my mother. He was diling
towards your mom. Yeah, it was it was to get
(18:24):
you get violent. How old do you remember when you were?
How how old you were when you started witnessing that?
Oh that was really I was maybe five four? Remember
being you know. I just remember that my mother started
to be like scared because you know, she would hear
that motorcycle late at night because she knew it would
be usually drinking. How did that make you feel? It
(18:46):
was nervous and scared. But when he was not drinking,
like he was like normal. You know. Eventually he had
an accident. He would crush his motorcycles. So I remember
doing the last play. He had a broken leg, so
I spent some time in hostile he covered. He still
continue to drink when he would get violent when he
(19:07):
was drunk. Did did you or your mom or anybody
ever call the police station? No? No, of course you
didn't have. As Eurie's drinking grew worse over the years,
he became more physically abusive towards Mike and his mother.
The violence was like a dark cloud over his childhood,
(19:28):
which overshadowed any happy memories the family shared. But there
was one of his father's drunken outbursts that Mike could
not forget, and it's the moment he described police after
he confessed to killing sister Michelle. Mike told detectives that
one night, when he was about twelve or thirteen, Eurie
came home after he and his mother had gone to sleep.
(19:51):
Mike said he woke up to feel his dad's hands
and body on him, drunkenly touching Mike in a sexual way.
Did you ever get a sense that that your dad
it was like he understood that he had a drinking problem.
And did he ever apologize that. He ever say like
I'm going to stop drinking or I'm gonna get better
(20:11):
or anything like that. Uh, you know, I remember him
saying that at all. But you know, but basically I
had makes it more suspecting because I hated him because
he was keep on drinking, hit him with my mother
and so always. But also you know, part of me
of course still of course still him because of my
(20:32):
mother and my father, and we had a good times.
I remember, it's just him being mean violence, hit him,
my mother and me. It's just also like crying, try
to send my mother and it's just I remember, okay,
I remember saying my mother or let's just get out
of here, just leave God for the city. And I said,
so you were you were telling your mom that that
(20:54):
you should leave your dad. Yeah, you know that I
was really hard boken, so I thought it to leave
and of course she was flying and she said it
really be handle place to go. Though Mike and his
mom couldn't leave their home together, he would one day
be offered his own way out. That's coming up after
(21:16):
a break, Welcome back the Sacred Scandal. I'm Melanie Bartley
and I'm Bola Barrows. One of the ways Mike and
(21:44):
his mom Maria, dealt with the trauma of URI's drinking
was through their faith as Greek Catholics. Trans Carpathia is
where Greek or Bysantine Catholicism began in the seventeenth century,
but because of the church's affiliation with the Pope, Greek
Catholics in the region were persecuted by the Soviet Union.
(22:04):
Some leaders were imprisoned as suspected spies of Rome, and
their denomination was forced to merge into the Russian Orthodox Church.
I remember during time even my town, like the teachers
were like discourses to go from going to church, but
it was having so it's after everything so new broke up,
you know, everything you've got of freedom. But Greek Catholics
(22:27):
like me Hailo and his mom continued to meet and
pray in secret or gather in rural churches. After the
Soviet Union dissolved, things changed. We were a Greek Catholic.
It was forbidden religious in Holy Ukraine, and they were
like playing in the houses and getting together, and even
(22:49):
my schoolmates didn't know that we have praise at home.
And then we Catholic, we were like always hiding. This
is Elia Hrtzock. He was once a monastic candidate at
Holy Cross too, though he arrived a few years after
Mike and left before Sister Michelle's murder. We reached out
(23:11):
to a number of former monastic candidates because we were
curious to know about how they got to Miami and
learn about their lives at Holy Cross. Of those we
heard back from, Ilia was the only one willing to
speak with us at all. These days, Elia lives in Ukraine.
He's married, has a family, and runs a business. But
(23:32):
back in the nine nineties, both Mike and Ilia were
in similar places, living in small, rural Transcarpathian villages of
about a thousand people, and faith played a large part
in each of their lives. For Mike, by the time
he turned thirteen, he was already planning to spend the
rest of his life living as a monk, serving a
(23:53):
monastery even before going to America and say, oh, I
want thee. I wanted to mock in Ukraine and I
was really really into it. I was really that was
my inventious, like my whole life to be mon And
for Ilia, the end of restrictions around his faith also
(24:14):
moved him in the direction of monastic life. You see
when you grow up ten years and playing and waiting
for your church to become a free church and build
your churches, and to the monk, it was it was
okay from me and especially for Mike Barance. They were
really glad, but didn't push me in any way. At
(24:35):
the same time, Ukraine was undergoing a massive economic shift
as the now independent country found its way in the
wake of the Soviet Union's demise. The new nation was
also becoming more open to Western countries, and it's at
this point that a priest from Miami appeared in Transcarpathia
searching for devout Catholic boys like Mike and Ilia. When
(25:02):
was the first time that you found out about Holy
Cross and went and that these priests were looking for
for monastic candidates who told you about them? The first
time that I heard about Father Wind and father gue
Bolts was from our local priest in Ukraine was going
(25:24):
to my town on Sundays and doing during the Mass,
and his name was Zuru Sable. At the time on
Sundays I was reading from my Gospel during Mass, and
on Saturdays he was teaching me about the Bible, Catholic
religion in general. So at one time it actually he
fold me all about Father wind and um if I
(25:48):
was interested of going to in that the space, and
do you remember how how he described them, like what
he told you about them? So Father Sable he said this,
you know this a good people, good so of course
you know so. And they said that if I was interested,
(26:08):
that I would go to his house in Ukraine. And
this was like a test youth test us questions. So
I said yes. Mihailo said yes to what he thought
would be a great opportunity to escape a violent and
chaotic home. His own priest, Father Sabov was kind of
(26:29):
a mentor, and he was finding more reasons to spend
time at the church, to study with the priest or,
to attend religious festivals. So the offer to join an
American monastery was exciting. On top of joining the monastery,
the boys were also told that they would have the
opportunity to study at the newly built Holy Cross Academy
(26:51):
with the permission of their parents. Those interested in joining
would leave home for a trial run of what life
at the monastery would be like. It was kind of
like a reality TV show where all of the contestants
arrived at the house and the last one standing win. Okay,
at the beginning, we were the first ones ever. So
at the time, they just rented this this house like
(27:14):
like in the woods in this town called host Once
a day came to go. I remember being really nervous.
I was nervous of going and was meeting you know
this American priests. So we believe that we ended up.
We went to the main city, which is once there
(27:36):
by the wind get out from the wind. I remember
this this tall guy just dressed in black and and
big inperiod. When you saw him the first time, where
you what did you think? I was really nervous, as
I think he might have hugged me or something, I
think so, So anyway, you know, I said very bay
(27:58):
from my mother, and um I got inside the van.
So we told there and eventually they were about us
say seven or inside the house there was in the
sum of in July. When Ilia found out about Holy
Cross a few years later, the experience was similar. A
(28:20):
local priest who met the American and knew he was
looking for boys to become monks, introduced Ilia to the
idea of joining the monastery in Miami. Ilia never met
Went until he joined the training center. Also, by the
time he signed on, Went moved things from the rented
cabin in the woods to a newly built country house
(28:40):
mate specifically to be used as a year round monastic
training and recruiting center. It was staffed by local people
and went would visit during the year. Elia joined the
center with about nine other boys, including his cousin Fasile. Yes,
and we went there and for is prepression center together
(29:02):
and we were like driving home back and forth August together.
So what was your first impression of Father Abbott. The
impression of Father went, It's like when you when you
know some person. Everybody was saying who is he and
how is he? And when when when I saw him,
(29:24):
it was for me like a pope. Because we were
prepared for this. We were told that it's a bigger
authority and he is almost holy man and you see
and and you have to obey and then he's the
first person in in monastery. So describe a little bit
(29:45):
what the process was like for you. Yeah, and we
stayed here in those road learning, studying and getting ready
for for for church, for singing and English, because before
I learned German. So I think this for me was
like something new totally. And we were braining and we
(30:13):
had schedule every day at the same time. We were
doing the same things or two to be prepared for
month life like this, aside from living like monks at
the training center. Mike told us that when also interviewed
the potential candidates regularly through an interpreter, father went asked
questions about their faith and families to figure out who
(30:36):
would be best suited for life at Holy Cross. Did
he ask you any questions about your relationship with your father,
Like did you tell him about your father's drinking problem
and all of that? Do you remember that? Oh? No,
you know, of those It's something I would help, you know.
I don't want to say yeah. I wasn't feeling comfortable
(30:57):
telling that, you know, and especially I said, you know,
I'm you know, everything's fine, you know, um my parents fine.
So you were you were you were trying to get selected.
You were basically saying the things you know he wanted
to hear to get selected. Oh yeah, at the time,
I just wanted to get away from my town, from
(31:19):
my father and uh go to go to America, you know,
looking back, and I was really really emotional and if
things depress, that was really different time at the time.
(31:41):
By the end of July, most of the boys quit
or were asked to leave the house in the woods.
Only Mi Halo and two other boys passed the test.
One of them was Petro Tornta, the monk who would
one day find sister Michelle's body. Next, they were sent
alone on a daylong traine I need to Kiev, Ukraine's
(32:02):
capital city, to get their visas to study in the
United States. Petro was approved that day, Mike was told
to make another long trip home and return with his parents,
and the third boy never got the visa. Mike and
Petro would be the first monastic candidates at Holy Cross.
(32:26):
What was the criteria do you think that went was
using when he started narrowing down And why why did
you Petro and this other kid um stay and the
other kids leave? Uh? Now now thinking back, I know
why he was looking at a take that the guys
(32:46):
that were like really humble, really obedience, really also religious,
the boys whom you could easily control, manipulate whom they could.
He's the band wash. Yeah, there was the main thing.
At the end of summer approached, and with a new
(33:07):
school year around the corner, the teenagers would need to
leave almost immediately in order to have enough time to
get settled in. But Mike, who was now fourteen, knew
he was leaving a lot of worries behind the Ukraine,
especially with his dad. He was dead drunk the foot
last last day before I went to the stage, drunk.
(33:28):
What do you mean that drunk? He was just special
out from drinking, and I just, yeah, I think I
said like goodbye dad, and I remember saying that, and uh,
then left And when you said goodbye, did he what
did he say? Do you remember? No, he didn't, he didn't.
You might have said something incoherent in all by the time,
(33:51):
it was really just really drinking bad. How did that
make you feel when when you were leaving and your
dad was was passed out drunk, like, oh yeah, I
was of course heartbroken. Most most of the time, even after,
of course left, because I was still worrying about my mother,
just how is she doing? And of course I also
(34:12):
worried about him because he was drinking and I was
going to work on this big train. Is the dangerous work,
you know. After that hard goodbye, Maria ko Fell would
take her son into the city. From there he could
get on a vent to Slovakia, followed by a flight
to the Czech Republic, a flight to New Jersey, and
then finally he'd make his way to his new home
(34:34):
in Miami, Florida. For Elia herd Sock, the path to
Miami was different. After almost two years of preparing, Elia
was finally approved for a visa to study at Holy
Cross Academy. His cousin Basil was able to go a
year before him. When the cousins were reunited in Miami,
(34:55):
Elia noticed something was off. The pair grew up together
and work close in Ukraine, but during this year in
Miami the sile became distant. But when I came to
U say, I I had a little contact with Basil,
so we didn't talk. We talked about about some things.
(35:17):
Was Silius was He didn't like to talk about a lot.
He wanted to be a monk more than anyone who
was there. We were allowed to speak Ukraine between us,
but Pasil almost didn't talk Ukrainian on the English. Did
(35:39):
the sial change at all in your eyes? I wouldn't
say that he changed, He just he just he became
more close. But Vasil wasn't the only manastic candidate who
Ilia saw being closed off like this. He said that
he and the other boys usually talked and studied together
(36:00):
in a common area of their house when they weren't
in school. But Elia noticed that sometimes mi Halo's attitude
would change and he didn't want to be a part
of the group. Elias says that usually seemed to happen
after Father Damien would ask to speak with Mike privately
in his room. Sometimes Mihailo ran to the Damien's room
(36:23):
and after one hour or two hours staying there, came
me out and didn't talk to anybody. Going directly to
the to his room and staying there built the money.
So it was always like this Father Damon and Mihailo.
So no other monks would ever go into Damien's room
(36:45):
for two hours like that. It was only Mihailo not
at all. I didn't see anybody else to go there.
Even better didn't go there, and they would close the
door behind them. I don't remember that. Maybe maybe but
they student sun of life. As a regular student at
(37:09):
holy Cross Academy, I always thought the monastic candidates were
a little weird and quiet, just because they had to be.
But hearing things like this from Ilia made me realize
that even though we were on campus every day, we've
really had no idea what was going on behind the
walls of that monastery. And after talking to Mike for
(37:30):
all these years, what we found out has shocked us.
So next time on Sacred Scandal, we're gonna take a
look at what life was like on the campus of
holy Cross when no one was looking. Sacred Scandal is
(37:57):
a production of Exile Content Student in partnership with I
Heart Radios Michael Podcast Network. Sacred Scandal was created and
produced by Melanie Bartley and me Paula Burrows. Our senior
producer is Dennis Funk of Written in Air. The executive
producers are Rose Red and Nando Villa. Our production assistant
(38:22):
is Imani Leonard. The show is fact checked by Kimberly Winston.
Original music was composed by Patrick Hart and special thanks
on this episode to Travis Roig. If you'd like to
reach out, email us at hello at Sacred Scandal podcast
dot com, and you can follow us on Instagram at
(38:46):
Sacred Scandal
Less than twenty four hours after sister Michelle Lewis was
found stabbed to death in a Miami convent, investigators were
successfully closing out the search for her killer. Mikail Looco Fell,
a teenage monk in training, admitted how he got drunk
and entered her bedroom in the dead of night, then
stabbed her more than ninety times. As the young Ukrainians
(00:26):
sat in the homicide department, taking police step by step
through his crime, an offer for me, Hilo came in
from the lobby. Well. I was being introviewed by the protectives.
I wanted to take this, interrupted us and says, before
you say anything else, the priests are here and the
seven the lawyer to represent you, and I said, I declined.
(00:50):
I said, I don't want the lawyer. I don't want
to do with him. Yeah. He turned down that lawyer
because after confessing to the murder, Mihailo also alleged that
those same priests, father Abbot Gregory went and father Damien Gibbold,
both sexually abused him. A few hours after refusing the lawyer,
(01:14):
Mihailo was taken into custody without the priest's attorney. He
was now on his own Intad County jail. He knew
nothing about the judicial system or what was going to
happen to him next. Feeling alone and scared, he reached
out to the only family he had since arriving in
Miami almost five years earlier, the same priest from Holy Cross.
(01:35):
But he would find no comfort on the other end.
So you get, they give this through phone calls. So
I don't know anybody, you know, I couldn't call nobody.
So I was scared, and so I called. I just
called Went. I remember called, weren't you know. It was
really just this cold conversation. You know, I could tell
that he was really really angry. I suld find out
(01:58):
what's going to happen next or something like it says
something like this, do you realize that you're going to
be executed me? Hailo hung up the phone, feeling more
solitary than he had before. That short call would be
the last time he ever spoke to Father Abbot Went
or anyone from the monastic family at Holy Cross ever. Again.
(02:30):
I'm Paula Barros and I'm Melanie Bartley, and this is
sacred scandal. Well, the Young, the Young, and the Committee
of the murder was in my Spanish class, very distant,
very you know, just odd um, not a part of anything. Um.
It was very sad. You could tell that he was
(02:53):
very sad with Nick Nikhilo. He was weird to us.
He was just an oddball. He was always an oddball.
He was strange, he walked strange. He just he came
from somewhere else, and he behaved like he was from
somewhere else. Yeah. I was a tender friend, and uh,
you know, I was just I'll be one fitting and
(03:17):
you know it's yes, went by more and more dissolution.
(03:37):
When Melanie and I started trying to tell the story
of Holy Cross Academy more than fifteen years ago, we
knew we needed to talk with the one person at
the center of everything, Hailok Fell. Before the murder, he
was just a quiet, little skinny kid in black clothes
to me, a boy who sometimes I laughed with when
we were paired up to struggle through broken converse stations
(04:00):
in French class. But other than knowing he was from
Ukraine and that he said he was sexually abused by
the priests, I really didn't know all that much about him,
And part of me was always curious about why he
killed sister Michelle, and I couldn't get my head around
how a kid I sat next to in class could
commit such a terrible violent crime. So a few years
(04:22):
after I graduated from Holy Cross, Melanie and I reached
out to me Halo in hopes of some day getting
those answers. It all started with a letter, and I
think the first letter we wrote to him just first
I get to know him, right, because we were like,
let's see, and then we ended up just and then
(04:43):
he was like, you were the first, like, this is
the first letter I've gotten in years, five years, five
years it had been I mean this was like two
thousand six or something, yeah, five years, five years. And
then he remembered everything. He remembered You were an actress, Paula,
and you were sat next to me French, and I
remember your plays and you remember. And then then for
(05:05):
a while we're just getting to know him for like
letters and letters and and remember our moms. Like the
first time we when we started getting letters from prison,
oh my god, they were like, what why does his
murderer have our ad? And who else has our address? Ah? Yeah,
After sending letters back and forth, we finally decided to
(05:28):
make a trip about ninety minutes north of Miami to
visit him in prison. That first visit to Indian Town, Florida,
when he was at Martin Correctional I was the most
nervous I've ever been. We would go, we would take
like our weekend trips and stay at a hotel in Stuart.
How do we remember? Yeah, how do we have money
(05:48):
for them? During that visit, he stopped being me Hailo,
and he asked us to call him Mike, the name
he started using while in prison. It's a name he
told us he wanted to be called once in school,
but the priests wouldn't let him. After that, driving up
to Indian Town to see Mike became something we did
(06:08):
maybe every few months. He was nervous and reserved at first,
but over time he opened up. We got to know
more about his life and his story during each visit.
Until that is we got banned from the prison. So,
being young and amateurs, we may have broken one of
(06:30):
the cardinal rules of correctional facilities, which is, of course,
don't film or take pictures of the actual prison, And
that is exactly what we had our camera person do.
One time. While we were inside, we never got permission
to film an interview with Mike and thought it would
be cool to get this really artsy time lapse of
(06:51):
the clouds rolling over the roof of the prison. But
when we came out, police and security were all over
our camera guide. They surround at us and our car.
They thought we were trying to help break Mike out
of prison. We were horrified. Once things calmed down, they
made us delete all the footage right then and there.
(07:13):
We were banned from the Hailo's visitor list and the
prison altogether. And because of our mistake, things weren't going
well on the inside either. But I want to know
your side, Like what happened to you after? Oh? Yeah, yes,
so the common name. Yeah, they took me to a room.
Of course, they searched me and not and then they
(07:37):
put me a handcuffs, Like what the hell is going on?
They wouldn't tell me, so yeah, they took me to
confine me. Yeah, and I remember the next day classification
obviously came around and uh, she said, soon you're going
to be transferred to another prison. Oh my god. So
(08:01):
really really the best feeling it really likes? Were you
upset at us. Oh, no, of course not, it's not something. Yeah,
of course not. Yeah, you definitely didn't know, and yeah,
you didn't know the rules. Yeah. We scrambled. Over the
next few days, we submitted an apology to the warden
(08:22):
with a packet of information and even a DVD of
the movie trailer. We hoped explaining our project would help
get him out of the confinement area. After eight days,
Mike was sent back to his regular block. We felt
horrible after the whole thing. Losing direct contact with him
is one of the things that really stopped us from
(08:43):
working in our documentary. But worse than that, Paula and
I also knew that we were the only people who
ever came to see him. We started to feel this
sense of compassion for him, like we were the only
people in his life, and after so many visits, we
felt like we couldn't just a peer on him. Since
getting banned all of those years ago, both of us
(09:05):
have continued to keep in touch through snail mall and
the phone at first, and now in a different time,
through lots of email and sometimes video grams. Mike is
very much a part of our lives and getting his
perspective on what happened to him at Holy Cross and
what he witnessed there kept us motivated to tell his story,
(09:26):
and this year we actually started recording those calls as
he walked us through everything that happened. Hello, this is
a prepaid call from an inmate at a Florida Department
of Corrections institution. Hello, Hey, Hi, Yes, I'm not sure
what happened. And these conversations aren't easy. Our phone calls
(09:49):
are capped at thirty minutes, so sometimes we just started
getting really into talking about something, only to be interrupted
by a one minute warning. You have one minute, We've
and after that we can't even jump back into the
conversation straight away because we have to wait another thirty
minutes between calls. Sometimes it can take days to even
(10:12):
finish a single conversation, So I guess I'll call it tomorrow. Tomorrow.
On the inside, from Mike, there's more to worry about.
We talk about some really personal and sensitive stuff on
these calls, things you might not want just anyone to hear.
He talks to us from a bank of shared phones
where the next person over can hear your every word.
(10:35):
In the morning, it's probably really, really hard. We try
talking early in the day, which is better for recording
because there's less noise from the block, but morning calls
make Mike uncomfortable in the empty hallways. His voice echoes
through the quiet for everyone to hear, so a lot
of the time we talk later in the day, when
(10:57):
the sounds of daily life in prison mute. His words
to their inmates. Thank you for using Global crow Link.
Before we go any further, Yes, Mike is a confessed
murderer who brutally stabs someone to death. But the person
(11:17):
we've gotten to know over the years is more complicated
than that single act. We'd like you to get to
know Mike and the way we have, so for the
rest of this episode, we'll be sharing some of our
conversations with him to explain how a boy from a
rural mountain village in Ukraine and others like him found
themselves at a monastery in the suburbs of Miami. That
(11:41):
story after a break, stay with us. Welcome back to
Sacred Scandal. Mihailo Kofel story starts in the early nineteen eighties,
(12:03):
far from the beaches of Miami. It starts far from
any beach, really. His story begins in one of the
most inland parts of Europe. A region of Ukraine in
the Carpathian Mountains called Zacarpatia or trans Carpathia. It's an
area that used to be part of the Kingdom of
(12:24):
Hungary and then Czechoslovakia, but it was absorbed into the
Soviet Union during the Red Armies occupation at the end
of World War Two. Today it sits on the western
end of Ukraine. Zacarpatia is a small state whose complex
history puts it on the border of four other countries, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia,
and Poland. About a two mile hike from the Polish
(12:47):
border sits Virgobina Bistra, the village where Mike was raised.
The towns people, let's say, houses, and the winters were drizzle.
October is pretty much small. That's that's really early in
(13:08):
the year for snow, and really there snow stage in
the mountains. I remember until May Mike lived through these
endless winters with his parents, Maria and Yuri. The co
Fils owned a small, simple house that they shared with
his grandparents. Small and simple, and that there were not
enough rooms for Mike to have his own space. Up
(13:31):
until he left, he shared a bed with his parents.
Village life in Ukraine of the ighties was very much
like it had been a hundred years before. The home
was warmed by a wood burning heater. It had no
plumbing until the mid nine nineties. The toilet was a
simple outhouse in the back. Burco by Nabista was a
(13:52):
picture of rural life behind the iron curtain. And how
did you get around if you had to go to
another town. We just used the bicycles, just walk, you know.
But my father, my father didn't have like motorcycle, motorcycle
the side So did you ride in the side car? Yeah,
I remember you had it. Force was also hard to
(14:14):
get like gasoline at the time, so most of the
time like you walk. Um, what was it like in
your town? Did people have money? What kind of work
did they do? Most of them, if not all, people
were still doing the farmwood. My father did you know?
He was looking at railroad and still about the whole
council was broad, you know that if you're still working,
(14:37):
they still wouldn't pay you developed prolonged delay in delay
and delay you know, yeah months all conscious the time
was really broad or just corrupt, you know, just maybe
and you said your your your your father worked in
the railroad. What about your mom? Me and my mom,
they we were working on the fields, even my father's
(15:00):
after working sometimes come and start working on the fields.
And yeah, during time, I just remembers just working, also
working a lot. The school ended at like twelve o'clock
and after school I'll come bay just keptastic and go
go into the fields to work. How old were you seven? Eight?
Eight years old? You know nothing exceptionally everybody much work
(15:22):
like that. Did you like to work? I didn't mind,
but as I remember, sometimes you get tired of it,
like because basically it was like men work from like
eight hundreds, because you know, you get your shallow, you
got your rate, you know, basically those tools from from yours.
And also in a summer like behindo school in a summer,
(15:43):
so basically then you have to work the whole day.
Did you ever think about what you wanted to do
when you grew up, when you were that age and
you were working in the field, the all the kids
would just decided like they want to do something that
your father here. So I was I was like, oh,
I guess I got work on the railroad, And I
really wasn't sure enough and everything was really uncertain because
(16:06):
everything was just intro models, you know, and just a
hard times. And things got worse in when the Soviet
Union dissolved. The economy collapsed and the entire country started
to change as trade restrictions were lifted. So I grew
up one of my ears and mamas being during the
time so new and so union broke up, everybody broke
(16:28):
gave the whole. It's also empty everything just as the
pluck you see. Then everything you just started coming. The
whole market open up. You know. You got products from
from Europe, coming in from from America. Everything. The movie
was entertainments a totally different What kind of what kind
of movies and TV shows were you watching? Oh you
know they don't people those classics of mcamos, you know,
uh Anno schwazeneger uh sost a long had this uh
(16:53):
small movie there. But I just try to cramming and
get there. And so they had some a lot money.
Remember if you bought that to be like if you
had like one of the first color to be So
it's like a big thing. And so of my friends,
Oh man, you got a color, dude. It's like other nineties.
Um like in general, like, would you say you had
a happy childhood? Uh, some parts, yes, a lot of parts.
(17:20):
No stimes sometimes thinking out, playing soccer that was kind
of fun. But growing up, yeah, there were a lot
of step parts. And the bad parts, Mike says, didn't
just have to do with the struggles of his country's
changing economy. Mike was also dealing with problems inside his home.
(17:41):
Let's talk a little bit about your your family. Can
you describe your dad anything you can think of when
you think of him? Okay, Uh, I just remember growing up.
My first member is my father was already drinking. It
was an alcoholic you know. But he was also working.
(18:01):
Of course my were road but you're of course not
supposed to be drinking when you would of course joining
the trains. So I remember, yeah, before he went to work,
he was like a space mouth wherever. Then my mom,
if she could smell any alcohol, I am, And of
course he was my mom, my mother. He was diling
towards your mom. Yeah, it was it was to get
(18:24):
you get violent. How old do you remember when you were?
How how old you were when you started witnessing that?
Oh that was really I was maybe five four? Remember
being you know. I just remember that my mother started
to be like scared because you know, she would hear
that motorcycle late at night because she knew it would
be usually drinking. How did that make you feel? It
(18:46):
was nervous and scared. But when he was not drinking,
like he was like normal. You know. Eventually he had
an accident. He would crush his motorcycles. So I remember
doing the last play. He had a broken leg, so
I spent some time in hostile he covered. He still
continue to drink when he would get violent when he
(19:07):
was drunk. Did did you or your mom or anybody
ever call the police station? No? No, of course you
didn't have. As Eurie's drinking grew worse over the years,
he became more physically abusive towards Mike and his mother.
The violence was like a dark cloud over his childhood,
(19:28):
which overshadowed any happy memories the family shared. But there
was one of his father's drunken outbursts that Mike could
not forget, and it's the moment he described police after
he confessed to killing sister Michelle. Mike told detectives that
one night, when he was about twelve or thirteen, Eurie
came home after he and his mother had gone to sleep.
(19:51):
Mike said he woke up to feel his dad's hands
and body on him, drunkenly touching Mike in a sexual way.
Did you ever get a sense that that your dad
it was like he understood that he had a drinking problem.
And did he ever apologize that. He ever say like
I'm going to stop drinking or I'm gonna get better
(20:11):
or anything like that. Uh, you know, I remember him
saying that at all. But you know, but basically I
had makes it more suspecting because I hated him because
he was keep on drinking, hit him with my mother
and so always. But also you know, part of me
of course still of course still him because of my
(20:32):
mother and my father, and we had a good times.
I remember, it's just him being mean violence, hit him,
my mother and me. It's just also like crying, try
to send my mother and it's just I remember, okay,
I remember saying my mother or let's just get out
of here, just leave God for the city. And I said,
so you were you were telling your mom that that
(20:54):
you should leave your dad. Yeah, you know that I
was really hard boken, so I thought it to leave
and of course she was flying and she said it
really be handle place to go. Though Mike and his
mom couldn't leave their home together, he would one day
be offered his own way out. That's coming up after
(21:16):
a break, Welcome back the Sacred Scandal. I'm Melanie Bartley
and I'm Bola Barrows. One of the ways Mike and
(21:44):
his mom Maria, dealt with the trauma of URI's drinking
was through their faith as Greek Catholics. Trans Carpathia is
where Greek or Bysantine Catholicism began in the seventeenth century,
but because of the church's affiliation with the Pope, Greek
Catholics in the region were persecuted by the Soviet Union.
(22:04):
Some leaders were imprisoned as suspected spies of Rome, and
their denomination was forced to merge into the Russian Orthodox Church.
I remember during time even my town, like the teachers
were like discourses to go from going to church, but
it was having so it's after everything so new broke up,
you know, everything you've got of freedom. But Greek Catholics
(22:27):
like me Hailo and his mom continued to meet and
pray in secret or gather in rural churches. After the
Soviet Union dissolved, things changed. We were a Greek Catholic.
It was forbidden religious in Holy Ukraine, and they were
like playing in the houses and getting together, and even
(22:49):
my schoolmates didn't know that we have praise at home.
And then we Catholic, we were like always hiding. This
is Elia Hrtzock. He was once a monastic candidate at
Holy Cross too, though he arrived a few years after
Mike and left before Sister Michelle's murder. We reached out
(23:11):
to a number of former monastic candidates because we were
curious to know about how they got to Miami and
learn about their lives at Holy Cross. Of those we
heard back from, Ilia was the only one willing to
speak with us at all. These days, Elia lives in Ukraine.
He's married, has a family, and runs a business. But
(23:32):
back in the nine nineties, both Mike and Ilia were
in similar places, living in small, rural Transcarpathian villages of
about a thousand people, and faith played a large part
in each of their lives. For Mike, by the time
he turned thirteen, he was already planning to spend the
rest of his life living as a monk, serving a
(23:53):
monastery even before going to America and say, oh, I
want thee. I wanted to mock in Ukraine and I
was really really into it. I was really that was
my inventious, like my whole life to be mon And
for Ilia, the end of restrictions around his faith also
(24:14):
moved him in the direction of monastic life. You see
when you grow up ten years and playing and waiting
for your church to become a free church and build
your churches, and to the monk, it was it was
okay from me and especially for Mike Barance. They were
really glad, but didn't push me in any way. At
(24:35):
the same time, Ukraine was undergoing a massive economic shift
as the now independent country found its way in the
wake of the Soviet Union's demise. The new nation was
also becoming more open to Western countries, and it's at
this point that a priest from Miami appeared in Transcarpathia
searching for devout Catholic boys like Mike and Ilia. When
(25:02):
was the first time that you found out about Holy
Cross and went and that these priests were looking for
for monastic candidates who told you about them? The first
time that I heard about Father Wind and father gue
Bolts was from our local priest in Ukraine was going
(25:24):
to my town on Sundays and doing during the Mass,
and his name was Zuru Sable. At the time on
Sundays I was reading from my Gospel during Mass, and
on Saturdays he was teaching me about the Bible, Catholic
religion in general. So at one time it actually he
fold me all about Father wind and um if I
(25:48):
was interested of going to in that the space, and
do you remember how how he described them, like what
he told you about them? So Father Sable he said this,
you know this a good people, good so of course
you know so. And they said that if I was interested,
(26:08):
that I would go to his house in Ukraine. And
this was like a test youth test us questions. So
I said yes. Mihailo said yes to what he thought
would be a great opportunity to escape a violent and
chaotic home. His own priest, Father Sabov was kind of
(26:29):
a mentor, and he was finding more reasons to spend
time at the church, to study with the priest or,
to attend religious festivals. So the offer to join an
American monastery was exciting. On top of joining the monastery,
the boys were also told that they would have the
opportunity to study at the newly built Holy Cross Academy
(26:51):
with the permission of their parents. Those interested in joining
would leave home for a trial run of what life
at the monastery would be like. It was kind of
like a reality TV show where all of the contestants
arrived at the house and the last one standing win. Okay,
at the beginning, we were the first ones ever. So
at the time, they just rented this this house like
(27:14):
like in the woods in this town called host Once
a day came to go. I remember being really nervous.
I was nervous of going and was meeting you know
this American priests. So we believe that we ended up.
We went to the main city, which is once there
(27:36):
by the wind get out from the wind. I remember
this this tall guy just dressed in black and and
big inperiod. When you saw him the first time, where
you what did you think? I was really nervous, as
I think he might have hugged me or something, I
think so, So anyway, you know, I said very bay
(27:58):
from my mother, and um I got inside the van.
So we told there and eventually they were about us
say seven or inside the house there was in the
sum of in July. When Ilia found out about Holy
Cross a few years later, the experience was similar. A
(28:20):
local priest who met the American and knew he was
looking for boys to become monks, introduced Ilia to the
idea of joining the monastery in Miami. Ilia never met
Went until he joined the training center. Also, by the
time he signed on, Went moved things from the rented
cabin in the woods to a newly built country house
(28:40):
mate specifically to be used as a year round monastic
training and recruiting center. It was staffed by local people
and went would visit during the year. Elia joined the
center with about nine other boys, including his cousin Fasile. Yes,
and we went there and for is prepression center together
(29:02):
and we were like driving home back and forth August together.
So what was your first impression of Father Abbott. The
impression of Father went, It's like when you when you
know some person. Everybody was saying who is he and
how is he? And when when when I saw him,
(29:24):
it was for me like a pope. Because we were
prepared for this. We were told that it's a bigger
authority and he is almost holy man and you see
and and you have to obey and then he's the
first person in in monastery. So describe a little bit
(29:45):
what the process was like for you. Yeah, and we
stayed here in those road learning, studying and getting ready
for for for church, for singing and English, because before
I learned German. So I think this for me was
like something new totally. And we were braining and we
(30:13):
had schedule every day at the same time. We were
doing the same things or two to be prepared for
month life like this, aside from living like monks at
the training center. Mike told us that when also interviewed
the potential candidates regularly through an interpreter, father went asked
questions about their faith and families to figure out who
(30:36):
would be best suited for life at Holy Cross. Did
he ask you any questions about your relationship with your father,
Like did you tell him about your father's drinking problem
and all of that? Do you remember that? Oh? No,
you know, of those It's something I would help, you know.
I don't want to say yeah. I wasn't feeling comfortable
(30:57):
telling that, you know, and especially I said, you know,
I'm you know, everything's fine, you know, um my parents fine.
So you were you were you were trying to get selected.
You were basically saying the things you know he wanted
to hear to get selected. Oh yeah, at the time,
I just wanted to get away from my town, from
(31:19):
my father and uh go to go to America, you know,
looking back, and I was really really emotional and if
things depress, that was really different time at the time.
(31:41):
By the end of July, most of the boys quit
or were asked to leave the house in the woods.
Only Mi Halo and two other boys passed the test.
One of them was Petro Tornta, the monk who would
one day find sister Michelle's body. Next, they were sent
alone on a daylong traine I need to Kiev, Ukraine's
(32:02):
capital city, to get their visas to study in the
United States. Petro was approved that day, Mike was told
to make another long trip home and return with his parents,
and the third boy never got the visa. Mike and
Petro would be the first monastic candidates at Holy Cross.
(32:26):
What was the criteria do you think that went was
using when he started narrowing down And why why did
you Petro and this other kid um stay and the
other kids leave? Uh? Now now thinking back, I know
why he was looking at a take that the guys
(32:46):
that were like really humble, really obedience, really also religious,
the boys whom you could easily control, manipulate whom they could.
He's the band wash. Yeah, there was the main thing.
At the end of summer approached, and with a new
(33:07):
school year around the corner, the teenagers would need to
leave almost immediately in order to have enough time to
get settled in. But Mike, who was now fourteen, knew
he was leaving a lot of worries behind the Ukraine,
especially with his dad. He was dead drunk the foot
last last day before I went to the stage, drunk.
(33:28):
What do you mean that drunk? He was just special
out from drinking, and I just, yeah, I think I
said like goodbye dad, and I remember saying that, and uh,
then left And when you said goodbye, did he what
did he say? Do you remember? No, he didn't, he didn't.
You might have said something incoherent in all by the time,
(33:51):
it was really just really drinking bad. How did that
make you feel when when you were leaving and your
dad was was passed out drunk, like, oh yeah, I
was of course heartbroken. Most most of the time, even after,
of course left, because I was still worrying about my mother,
just how is she doing? And of course I also
(34:12):
worried about him because he was drinking and I was
going to work on this big train. Is the dangerous work,
you know. After that hard goodbye, Maria ko Fell would
take her son into the city. From there he could
get on a vent to Slovakia, followed by a flight
to the Czech Republic, a flight to New Jersey, and
then finally he'd make his way to his new home
(34:34):
in Miami, Florida. For Elia herd Sock, the path to
Miami was different. After almost two years of preparing, Elia
was finally approved for a visa to study at Holy
Cross Academy. His cousin Basil was able to go a
year before him. When the cousins were reunited in Miami,
(34:55):
Elia noticed something was off. The pair grew up together
and work close in Ukraine, but during this year in
Miami the sile became distant. But when I came to
U say, I I had a little contact with Basil,
so we didn't talk. We talked about about some things.
(35:17):
Was Silius was He didn't like to talk about a lot.
He wanted to be a monk more than anyone who
was there. We were allowed to speak Ukraine between us,
but Pasil almost didn't talk Ukrainian on the English. Did
(35:39):
the sial change at all in your eyes? I wouldn't
say that he changed, He just he just he became
more close. But Vasil wasn't the only manastic candidate who
Ilia saw being closed off like this. He said that
he and the other boys usually talked and studied together
(36:00):
in a common area of their house when they weren't
in school. But Elia noticed that sometimes mi Halo's attitude
would change and he didn't want to be a part
of the group. Elias says that usually seemed to happen
after Father Damien would ask to speak with Mike privately
in his room. Sometimes Mihailo ran to the Damien's room
(36:23):
and after one hour or two hours staying there, came
me out and didn't talk to anybody. Going directly to
the to his room and staying there built the money.
So it was always like this Father Damon and Mihailo.
So no other monks would ever go into Damien's room
(36:45):
for two hours like that. It was only Mihailo not
at all. I didn't see anybody else to go there.
Even better didn't go there, and they would close the
door behind them. I don't remember that. Maybe maybe but
they student sun of life. As a regular student at
(37:09):
holy Cross Academy, I always thought the monastic candidates were
a little weird and quiet, just because they had to be.
But hearing things like this from Ilia made me realize
that even though we were on campus every day, we've
really had no idea what was going on behind the
walls of that monastery. And after talking to Mike for
(37:30):
all these years, what we found out has shocked us.
So next time on Sacred Scandal, we're gonna take a
look at what life was like on the campus of
holy Cross when no one was looking. Sacred Scandal is
(37:57):
a production of Exile Content Student in partnership with I
Heart Radios Michael Podcast Network. Sacred Scandal was created and
produced by Melanie Bartley and me Paula Burrows. Our senior
producer is Dennis Funk of Written in Air. The executive
producers are Rose Red and Nando Villa. Our production assistant
(38:22):
is Imani Leonard. The show is fact checked by Kimberly Winston.
Original music was composed by Patrick Hart and special thanks
on this episode to Travis Roig. If you'd like to
reach out, email us at hello at Sacred Scandal podcast
dot com, and you can follow us on Instagram at
(38:46):
Sacred Scandal
Host
Jasmine Romero
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