Mr. Marshall said that Father Murphy visited him there, that they sat on the bed talking, and that the priest tried to put his hand down the boy’s pants. Mr. Marshall said he resisted, and as soon as Father Murphy left the cell, the teenager told a security officer, who called the superintendent of the center. The superintendent interviewed him twice to make sure he did not change his story. But Mr. Marshall said the superintendent told him that they had had previous complaints about Father Murphy, and that the priest’s superiors had been told.

Another accusation, from a former altar boy at a church in Boulder Junction, surfaced in a letter written to a bishop, Raphael M. Fliss, in the Diocese of Superior, covering the Northwoods region. The accuser, now a teacher, came forward in 2002, at age 52, stating that Father Murphy had sexually abused him at his lake cottage. It is not clear whether Father Murphy was still working in Milwaukee when he met the second accuser, who is believed to have been from the Northwoods.

“I want you to know that Father Murphy molested me many times at his cottage in Boulder Jct since I was a little, naïve, deaf boy,” wrote the man, whose name had been redacted in the document received by The New York Times. It is unclear whether he attended St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, outside Milwaukee, where Father Murphy had worked.

In a letter, the man also asked for a settlement of $25,000 “so I can forgive you and not be angry when I see the church,” he stated.

A call to Bishop Fliss, now retired, was not returned this week. The Diocese of Superior said it had had no comment to add about the Murphy case.

Years earlier, when Father Murphy was still at St. John’s, he was said to gravitate to boys who were sexually inexperienced and lacking in social skills, according to Kathy Lyn Walter, a social worker and an expert on sexual disorders who was hired by the archdiocese to interview Father Murphy in 1993. She said he offered them what seemed like a beachfront reprieve from their lives in the dormitories, with canoe trips, picnics and barbecues.