In the first few weeks after the slaying, it all seemed so simple -- transcendentally, painfully simple. "Ashland Priest Shot Dead Settling Marital Squabble." That's how The Morning Call headlined its first story on the September 16, 1990 slaying of Father Leo Heineman.

In a strange way, the tragic narrative of Father Leo's death fit perfectly with the fire-forged faith of coal-country Catholicism. It's an austere faith formed in a poisoned land. Ashland, Tamaqua, Centralia - a town that seems to have been ripped out of the Book of Revelations, all but erased because of an underground mine fire that still burns more than forty years after it first erupted, poisoning the air with the hellish stench of sulphur. This is the cradle of coal-country Catholicism. It's a place where disappointment verging on despair is dogma, and where people have to believe that the good, and perhaps only the good, die young, certain that their reward is awaiting them in heaven.

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That dogma, it seemed, was reflected in the first newspaper accounts of the slaying.

"During his 32 years of priesthood in the Allentown Diocese," The Morning Call reported on September 18, 1990, "the Rev. Leo Heineman was known for going to great lengths to help troubled people."

"It was that devotion," the newspaper declared, "that led to his death."

In a bizarre way, it was perhaps almost a comforting thought that Father Leo died an innocent victim, a man who could never, it was assumed, have taken any steps to provoke his killer, or to have hastened his own demise. In the belief structure of coal-country Catholicism, it is far more soothing to believe that the world is predatory and black, and that people must succumb to its pernicious dangers so that they can ultimately reach salvation.

The truth, however, like the rocks and hills of this mine-scarred corner of Pennsylvania, may be found more in shades of gray.

It is now known, says Bloomsburg attorney Michael Dennehy, that the Rev. Leo Heineman was a far more complex and perhaps even conflicted character than he initially appeared. It took a six-and-a-half-year legal battle -- a battle that went all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court -- before the Diocese of Allentown ultimately released what it described as Father Leo's complete personnel file. And when it was at last unsealed, it offered little insight into the man's character, Dennehy says.