Donald W. Kimball, the charismatic Catholic youth minister convicted of molesting a 13-year-old girl, was found dead at a Windsor town house early Friday, police said.
Officials said there were no signs of foul play in the death of Kimball, a defrocked priest who rose to national prominence in the 1970s and '80s but lived his final years in ignominy and isolation.
Kimball's criminal conviction was erased by the U.S. Supreme Court, but his fate was sealed by allegations that he had raped or molested eight North Coast girls and by his nationally televised insistence that he had done nothing wrong.
The scandal-battered Santa Rosa Catholic Diocese paid nearly $5 million to settle claims by Kimball's youthful victims, one-fourth of the nearly $20 million total in settlements that pushed the local church to the brink of declaring bankruptcy.
Free of custody for the past three years, Kimball, 62, lived quietly at two Windsor addresses, largely unknown to his neighbors and with few known assets.
Windsor police found Kimball's body shortly after 6 a.m. Friday in a Lakewood Hills town house rented by longtime friend Anna Scally, who is president of Cornerstone Media, the multimedia youth ministry Kimball launched more than two decades ago.
Neighbors in the gated community said he appeared to be living in Scally's town house but seldom was seen coming or going, though at least one neighbor heard loud arguments from time to time.
Kimball had been staying alone in the town house when officers went to check on him at the request of an unidentified caller who grew concerned after trying to reach him for more than a day, Police Sgt. Tim Duke said.
The former priest, who served in the Santa Rosa Diocese from his ordination in 1969 to his removal in 1990, had been dead for at least several hours, Duke said.
He said Kimball was neither on the floor nor in bed, but would not disclose in which room his body was located.
An autopsy will be conducted next week to determine cause of death, but there were no signs of foul play or suspicions of anything other than natural causes, authorities said.
No one answered the door at the town house Friday morning, and Scally reportedly was out of the country on business. Calls and e-mails to her at Cornerstone Media were not returned.
Kimball's stunning fall from grace began in 1997 when he was accused in a lawsuit of molesting four people, a case ultimately settled by the diocese for $1.6 million.
The suit prompted criminal charges, culminating in Kimball's conviction in April 2002 for molesting a parishioner, Ellen Brem, at a Healdsburg church rectory in 1981. But the conviction and seven-year prison sentence were voided by the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling that California could not prosecute decades-old child molestation cases.
Kimball had been out of custody since September 2003, when he was released from Sonoma County Jail after serving 10 months for assaulting a newspaper photographer during his sexual abuse trial the year before.
His three-year probation was to end Monday.
News of his death led Msgr. Daniel Whelton, the diocesan vicar for priests, to recall a time when Kimball "could walk into a room of 500 young people and having them eating out of his hands in five minutes," said Deirdre Frontczak, diocese spokeswoman.
Chris Andrian, the Santa Rosa lawyer who defended Kimball against the sex charges, said the trial was a "sad, humiliating time" for the former priest who once lived large on a national stage.
"I just hope he rests in peace," Andrian said. "The way I look at him, he's just another imperfect human being."
Dave Henderson, a former Santa Rosa Diocese priest who attended seminary with Kimball in the late 1950s, said Kimball served the church well as a media-savvy youth minister.
"He was really a celebrity on the national youth circuit," said Henderson, who served in the local diocese at the same time as Kimball.
Henderson, a Sonoma resident, left the priesthood in 1978 and said he has no tolerance for Kimball's misdeeds. "I still want his positive work to be remembered, as well," he said.
Prosecutor Gary Medvigy called Kimball a "perfect pedophile" for skillfully luring adolescents into sex.
At his trial in 2002, eight women testified that Kimball had raped or molested them decades ago in parishes from Santa Rosa to Eureka.
The Probation Department's report noted that anger over Kimball's actions prompted many Catholics to abandon their faith. "The scars left by the defendant on the psyche of many people may never heal," the report said.
Frontczak said any ties between Kimball and church leaders after he left his last parish in 1981 had long since been severed. He did not draw a pension, she said.
The probation report said Kimball had earned $15,000 to $18,000 a year from speaking engagements, lecturing and writing. It said he relied on "family and friends for additional support."
Kimball, who attended St. Rose School in Santa Rosa and graduated from St. Vincent High School in Petaluma in 1961, was ordained a priest at St. Eugene Cathedral in Santa Rosa in 1969.
He had quietly been suspended from clerical duties in 1990 after admitting sexual misconduct with six underage girls to former Santa Rosa Bishop John Steinbock. He was defrocked by the Vatican in late 2002 after ignoring three requests to voluntarily resign from the priesthood. Kimball declined to sign the papers, even after the Vatican made it official.
Kimball, glib and good-looking as a young priest, did not testify at his trial. But in an interview with CNN's Connie Chung, broadcast the day after jurors found him guilty, Kimball denied illegal sexual conduct with girls. He also said he was surprised by the attention from women his cleric's collar attracted.
"I found women wanted the challenge of the forbidden fruit, which they thought I had," he said.
When Chung asked again if women were sexually attracted to him as their priest, he replied: "Oh, yeah, big time. I think they were in love with the uniform. It's a uniform thing."
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: