They had waited six years to see their former pastor in court.

On July 11, a small group of Wells residents gathered at the York County Judicial Center to watch the trial of the Rev. Peter Leon, indicted in 2017 on charges of endangering the welfare of a dependent person.

They were shocked by what happened next.

Police had said that Leon, 72, once pastor of the Wells Branch Baptist Church, befriended a woman in her 60s when he was ministering at her Kennebunk nursing home. They had said he took the woman, who was in a wheelchair, to a bank to withdraw cash and changed the locks at the house she still owned.

And prosecutors kept adding charges. In 2019, after Leon visited another nursing home where the woman now lived, they charged him with violating the terms of his bail. In 2020, they charged him with aggravated forgery for allegedly misrepresenting his finances when he had requested a court-appointed attorney.

Leon’s trial had been rescheduled several times, as he went back and forth between being represented and representing himself.

Then on July 11, more than half an hour after Leon was expected to go before a jury for the first time in the case on the forgery charge, prosecutors agreed behind closed doors to dismiss that charge, as well as the original 2017 charges – and to drop the bail violation charge in three months, once Leon completed 50 hours of community service.

Leon told the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram he wasn’t surprised.

“I think they wanted it gone, but they didn’t know how to get rid of it,” he said of his case. “And I wasn’t going to plead out to anything because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

‘COMPLETELY STUNNED’

But members of his former congregation and neighbors, who thought they would see him held accountable, were blindsided.

“We were just left completely stunned,” said Stanley Weeks, one of the Wells residents who had come to court to bear witness. Weeks was not a member of Leon’s church but live nearby.

No public explanation for the dismissals was forthcoming.

Assistant District Attorney Kyle Myska did not respond to multiple requests for information. Detective Candice Simeoni, who investigated the case for the Kennebunk Police Department, referred questions to Myska’s office.

Leon’s attorney, Luke Rioux, said the charges were dropped because they were unprovable.

The 2017 charges were based on false allegations, he said, and the subsequent charges were mistakes. Prosecutors could not prove Leon had done anything intentionally criminal.

“We’re glad we were able to work together with the prosecutor’s office to resolve the cases,” Rioux said.

The Press Herald spoke with several people who spent years following Leon’s criminal cases but who asked not to be identified because of fear of repercussions. They said they were devastated that the case had been dismissed.

Members of the Wells Baptist Church had fought for years to fire him as their pastor and evict him from the church parsonage, court records show – not just because of the November 2017 indictment, but because Leon had also been convicted of assault that August in an incident involving a teenage girl.

At a McDonald’s in Sanford, video footage – which jurors watched – showed him putting his hands on the girl’s back.

In court, she testified that he told her that her jeans were “nice and tight in all the right places.”

Leon continues to deny this, even after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction in 2018 after he appealed.

After his conviction, Leon was fined $300, ordered to undergo psychological and sexual harassment counseling, and barred from contact with the victim or her family.

Leon’s indictment in Shirley White-Cooney’s case attracted attention, and some used it to speak out about the need for elder justice.

In 2018, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, mentioned the case in a speech to the Senate Committee on Aging. She said such cases highlight “shocking breaches of trust” by those in positions of power over vulnerable older people.

Collins said in a statement last week that she didn’t know enough about Leon’s case to comment on its dismissal, “but in general, elder fraud and abuse are serious problems in Maine. I hope that the law is being vigorously enforced.”

Locally, the dismissal of the charges this month “was a death knell” to those hurt, damaged, and deceived by Leon “through the 20 years he has lived in Wells,” one town resident wrote in a letter to the District Attorney’s Office.

‘PASTOR PETER LEON IS NOT TO VISIT SHIRLEY COONEY’

Cooney was a resident at Atria Senior Living in Kennebunk when she met Leon on one of his weekly visits there as a volunteer pastor, and the two became friends, police told the Journal Tribune of Biddeford.

But Cooney was mentally incapacitated, police and prosecutors said in court records. According to her legal guardian, she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive disease that attacks nerve cells and that affects a person’s ability to walk, talk and breathe.

On or around May 20, 2017, police alleged, Leon brought Cooney from Atria to a bank to withdraw cash. He then took her to the house she owned, which was on the market, police said. He removed a “for sale” sign from the yard and told her he wanted to help her move back in, even though the house was not wheelchair-accessible and she needed full-time care.

Leon doesn’t deny ever taking Cooney from the nursing home. In fact, he said he took her out several times – but he said he was only trying to help her after she asked him to check on her house for her. Leon said Cooney also wanted his help checking probate court records because she was concerned about her estate and her legal guardian.

“This woman came to me, begged to me,” Leon said. “She felt like she was being taken advantage of, she was not being treated the way she wanted to be. She was still on top of her game.”

A York County grand jury indicted him on six charges in the incidents with Cooney: two counts of endangering the welfare of a dependent person – one punishable by up to five years in prison and the other, less than a year; misdemeanor counts of criminal restraint for taking Cooney from Atria; criminal trespass for entering her home; criminal mischief for damaging her door locks; and unauthorized theft for allegedly stealing her money.

Leon contends the case was “conjured up” by Simeoni, the Kennebunk detective, who he said gathered more than 20 witnesses from Atria to support the charges before a grand jury.

Nancy Oxford, who became Cooney’s guardian around 2015, said Leon never had approval to take Cooney from Atria and that he was only interested in getting into Cooney’s home.

“He would take her to church services. He took her to lunch. He made arrangements and took her to a dentist,” Oxford said Thursday. “Which he did not have permission (for), nor did he have any rights. But he didn’t care.”

She said Leon at one point wanted Cooney to hire his daughter as an in-home caretaker.

“I think it’s disgraceful that the charges were dismissed,” Oxford said. “What is that telling our elder people? That anybody can abuse you and they won’t be punished for it?”

Oxford said she and Cooney were friends long before Cooney was ill. She said she splits her time between Florida and Canada, and Cooney used to visit her at both of her homes.

Cooney moved to Maine about a decade before she died in March 2020, Oxford said. She grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where her family ran a local inn. Oxford said she had a pilot’s license and enjoyed flying her own plane. In Kennebunkport, Oxford said, she was active in the historical society.

Cooney’s family filed a joint petition with Oxford, making her appointment as guardian official, in 2016.

But Cooney’s daughter Elizabeth tried withdrawing over the next several years, according to probate records. Elizabeth Cooney, who lives in New York, said Thursday that she did not support pressing charges against Leon because she was never shown evidence of his financial wrongdoing.

Leon was ordered not to contact Cooney after he was indicted.

Two years later, he was arrested for violating that order in Biddeford, where Cooney had relocated to St. Andre Health Care center. When she moved in, court records state, she gave the front desk a photo of Leon and warned staff that he wasn’t allowed to see her.

On the photo, the front desk staff wrote, “Pastor Peter Leon is not to visit Shirley Cooney.” Staff were instructed to call 911 if they saw him.

But a receptionist didn’t recognize Leon when he showed up in March 2019, signing in as Pat Gamble, according to a police report. After spending about half an hour on the resident floor, Leon returned to the front desk and spent an hour asking the receptionist personal questions and suggesting she visit the Wells Branch Baptist Church.

While he was lingering, the receptionist later told police, he kept looking back at a glass door behind them, where residents gathered in a community room.

Police reviewed surveillance footage days later and realized Cooney was in the room. Leon would have been able to see her from where he was standing, police stated. Leon told the Press Herald he never saw her there.

The Biddeford incident resulted in a new charge for violating the conditions of his release.

EVICTED FROM THE PARSONAGE 

As Leon initially was nearing trial in August 2019, Scott Houde, then his court-appointed attorney, told the judge prosecutors hadn’t disclosed in discovery any evidence that Leon had endangered Cooney.

A couple of weeks later, Houde withdrew from the case. Soon after, he was appointed a probate court judge.

Leon’s trial was again on hold as he briefly represented himself, then retained Rioux. Rioux said that his client had been hit with the aggravated forgery charge in 2020 when the courts found out some of the information in Leon’s financial forms was inaccurate. Leon said he was confused by the form’s questions and did the best he could to be accurate.

Even though Leon’s case has been dismissed, the charges cost him his home and his church, which members for a time renamed Trinity Coastal Community Church.

In July 2021, a district judge entered a forcible entry and detainer order against Leon, evicting him from the parsonage at 17 Clark Road, where he and his wife had lived for 18 years.

Leon’s church had already tried evicting him in 2019, according to court records. Twenty church members – the entire congregation except for Leon, his wife and two others – voted to fire him in 2019. They hired a private attorney to write up a 30-day eviction notice, which they tried three times unsuccessfully to serve. Leon remained at the parsonage until the judge ordered him to leave in 2021.

The indictment, and the assault conviction from August 2017, “caused the church’s membership to question Defendant’s fitness to serve as pastor,” the judge wrote, and they were “concerned for the reputation of the church.” The church distanced itself from Leon with the new name, though it has since reverted to its old name, and it has a trespass order barring Leon from entering the property.

Leon called his ouster a “hostile takeover” and likened the group that voted to fire him to a “lynch mob.” Now that the charges have been dropped, he said, he is deciding what to do next. In an interview with the Press Herald, he admitted that the history of criminal allegations isn’t a good look when you are trying to get a new job in ministry.

“You have to have a pretty impeccable record to go get a job,” Leon said at one point. “With ministry, you have to have a pretty good reputation. This is almost like … when you help people, like no good deed goes undone.”

But what happened in Wells wasn’t the first time he’d been pushed out of a church.

In 1990, members of Gibbs Mill Road Baptist Church in Livermore asked an Androscoggin district judge to remove Leon from their church property, according to court records.

The members had tried evicting Leon themselves after voting to dismiss him. It was unclear why they fired him, as people mentioned in court records have since died or could not be reached.

Leon did not respond to a text message Friday asking about his time at Gibbs Mill Road Baptist Church.

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