Richard McClung died in a plane crash Feb. 14 when the small aircraft he was piloting plummeted into a residential neighborhood between McHenry County and Rockford, narrowly missing homes, severing a gas line and horrifying locals.
McClung’s online death notice described the 83-year-old Rockford resident as having “a love for his family” who “tried his best in all the ways he knew how.”
A darker reality has since emerged: McClung was a former Mormon church figure in Illinois and registered sex offender who’s been repeatedly accused of sexually abusing children.
At the time of his death, McClung was a defendant in a federal lawsuit in Chicago accusing him of molesting a young congregant while he was a member and leader of a Mormon church in Rockford in the early 2000s.
The death notice said the crash was “a result of having a mechanical failure.”
A nonprofit general aviation safety organization says McClung likely plunged his airplane into the ground because of mounting pressure from recent court filings.
Lawyers involved in the suit wouldn’t comment.
This much is known: A formal cause of death hasn’t yet been determined by the Boone County coroner, and the National Transportation Safety Board also hasn’t concluded its investigation. An arm of the federal government, the NTSB is generally the final word on how and why a fatal plane crash happened.
Filed in 2025, the lawsuit also says certain Illinois leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints knew about at least one sex abuse allegation against McClung and still let him serve at the Rockford congregation where he had access to children, including the accuser now suing.
The Salt Lake City-based denomination is a defendant in the case — which remains pending — and has denied wrongdoing.
While the Latter-day Saints, or LDS, has been rocked with a child sex abuse scandal in the West where most adherents live, more accusations have begun surfacing in Illinois.
Just recently, the Sun-Times reported Wade Christofferson — a brother of Mormon apostle D. Todd Christofferson — is suspected of molesting multiple children, including while he was a member and leader of a Latter-day Saints congregation in far northwest suburban Crystal Lake in the 1980s and 1990s.
D. Todd Christofferson is part of the church’s powerful “first presidency” headed by former Chicago lawyer Dallin H. Oaks.
The lawsuit doesn’t name the Mormon leaders who allegedly let McClung stay active in Rockford despite knowing about one or more prior abuse allegations. But a deposition recently given for the case by the mother of another McClung accuser claims Oaks’ son-in-law, Jack Ward, is one of them.
A Blue Island native, Ward was president of the Latter-day Saints’ Chicago Temple in Glenview until last year, according to church web sites.
He couldn’t be reached for comment, but court records show he’s being called for a deposition in the case.
The pending federal lawsuit says at the time McClung “abused plaintiff, he had been charged with the sexual abuse of another minor girl in September 2006, at which time church was put on notice of the danger that perpetrator posed to plaintiff and other minor children.
“Yet the LDS church did nothing to protect the young children of their community, in continuing to allow perpetrator to be on LDS church property, and maintain his leadership position within the LDS church, as Second Counselor to the Bishop.”
Congregants weren’t told, so parents and children didn’t know McClung was a danger — and McClung molested two girls during this time: the accuser in the suit and her friend, whose mother recently gave the deposition, court records allege.
“LDS church ratified perpetrator’s sexual abuse and sexual assault of plaintiff because LDS church had knowledge that perpetrator had sexually assaulted and abused other young girls who were members of LDS church, and yet they intentionally allowed perpetrator to remain in his position of authority in LDS church, and did nothing to prevent any further abuse from occurring, thus allowing perpetrator to gain access to and sexually abuse plaintiff,” the lawsuit says.
“The LDS church did not discipline, denounce, or discharge perpetrator after his September 2006 charge of sexual abuse of a minor. As such they instead accepted and thus ratified perpetrator’s conduct.”
McClung was convicted in 2007 in the criminal case initiated the year before. He was sentenced to probation and required to register as a sex offender.
McClung was excommunicated from the church that same year, records show.
Initially reluctant to tell their parents or others about what happened, the accuser in the lawsuit and her friend went to police several years later, leading to another arrest for McClung, records show.
In an interview with police, McClung said he molested children not for his gratification but their own, prosecution records show.
While that case was pending in 2012, the plaintiff in the lawsuit was stunned to see McClung back at the Rockford church one day, apparently trying to reclaim his active membership, according to the lawsuit.
“Allowing perpetrator back on church grounds in 2012, by which time he had been convicted of sexual abuse of a minor and indicted on additional charges of sexual abuse of a minor, was a clear careless, reckless, negligent, and conscious disregard of plaintiff’s rights,” the suit says.
McClung was convicted in 2014 on some of the 2011 sex offenses and sentenced to prison.
Around 4 p.m. on Feb. 14, McClung’s “experimental, amateur-built” single-engine Tailwind plane hit the ground between two homes in the Poplar Grove community, destroying a fence.
He was the sole occupant. A small airport was nearby.
“According to witnesses, the pilot attended a local fly-in event at Cottonwood airport … and was returning to Poplar Grove Airport … at the time of the accident,” the NTSB says in a preliminary report. “The pilot departed [a runway] about 15 minutes before the accident. The pilot was not in communication with air traffic control” during the flight.
Upon impact, the “engine was embedded about 3 feet into the ground. The propeller hub and remnants of the wooden propeller were impact separated and buried beneath the engine.”
A neighbor said a group of children was playing outside not far away at the time. A natural gas line was broken, spurring a temporary evacuation of the area.
The NTSB report also said: “A witness who was working in his driveway when he heard the airplane stated that it sounded louder than normal. When he looked up, the airplane was in a nosedive and then impacted the ground in his yard.”
A woman who lives at the house with the wrecked fence said she was at home at the time of the impact and has no idea how or why the plane ended up on her property — she didn’t know McClung and isn’t a member of his church.