St. George’s investigator replaced

Ten days after he was selected to oversee a sex abuse investigation at the embattled St. George’s School, Scott Harshbarger was replaced on Wednesday by Martin F. Murphy, a former Middlesex County prosecutor and a partner at the Boston firm Foley Hoag.

The move came after representatives of the victims and the school’s board of trustees were unable to reach “agreement on legal terms of engagement” with Harshbarger and his firm, Casner & Edwards. Neither side would elaborate on the disagreement.

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The news came on the same day that lawyers for the victims identified another of the alleged perpetrators in the scandal, Timothy Tefft, who is currently serving prison time on child pornography charges. He worked at the prestigious Rhode Island prep school in the early 1970s.

“The inability to reach agreement with C & E had nothing to do with the purpose of the independent investigation, or any underlying facts,” according to a joint statement released by the school and SGS for Healing, a victims’ group. “All parties have great respect for Mr. Harshbarger and his work, and remain committed to conducting an independent, comprehensive and thorough investigation.”

Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general who left that post in 1999 to become chief executive of Common Cause in Washington, D.C., was appointed to the St. George’s probe on Jan. 11 after victims questioned the independence of the school’s first investigator, Will Hannum, who is the law partner and husband of the school’s legal counsel.

Harshbarger could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but his law firm issued a statement that said, “Although our highly qualified team was fully prepared to conduct the investigation at St. George’s School, we were unable to reach terms that we believed were necessary to foster an effective and truly independent investigation.”

In 2014, state Attorney General Martha Coakley appointed Murphy, who is the former chief of the major crimes division of the Massachusetts US attorney’s office, as special prosecutor in the death of a 23-year-old Bridgewater State Hospital patient. In 2010, Coakley appointed Murphy to a five-year term on the State Ethics Commission.

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On Wednesday, Murphy released a one-line statement about his new role: “I look forward to conducting a careful, fair and independent investigation to get to the truth about what happened at St. George’s School.”

In a statement, the victims’ group SGS for Healing said it remained committed to working with the school on a new independent investigation with Murphy. The group is “confident that the results of the investigation will shine a clear light on a positive path forward for survivors and the entire school community,” said Anne Scott, who as a 15-year-old in 1977 was assaulted by the school’s athletic trainer.

Leslie Heaney, head of the school’s board of trustees, pledged the school’s full support for Murphy’s investigation.

Since December, when Scott and other victims who have reported sexual abuse at St. George’s first publicly told their stories, more than 40 others have reported abuse to attorneys Eric MacLeish and Carmen Durso, who are representing some of them. Most of the abuse occurred in the 1970s and ’80s. Both the school and the victims’ attorneys say there are at least nine staff or student perpetrators.

The school’s report of its own initial investigation, which it released in late December, identified all but one perpetrator by number, not name, at the request of law enforcement officials, according to the report. The only named employee was former athletic trainer Al Gibbs, who was fired in 1980 and died in 1996.

Earlier in January, Durso and MacLeish identified two other employee perpetrators from the school report as former choir director Franklin Coleman, fired in 1988 for misconduct, and the Rev. Howard W. White Jr., an assistant chaplain fired in 1974 after a parent reported “inappropriate conduct” with a male student. Neither was reported by the school to child protective services, as required by law.

On Wednesday, Durso and MacLeish identified the person called “Employee Perpetrator #5” in the school’s report as Tefft, hired in 1971 and terminated “a few months later after providing alcohol to students,” according to the report. The report also stated that the employee “reportedly sexually touched and attempted to perform oral sex on a student.”

According to the report, the school learned about the allegations during the recent investigation and reported Tefft to the Rhode Island State Police.

Tefft is currently serving five years in federal prison after being arrested in September 2013 and pleading guilty in 2014 to a child pornography charge. He was then 65 and had most recently been the editor of the Greenwich Journal and Salem Press, a weekly in New York state owned by his family. He acknowledged possessing dozens of files of child pornography that showed boys under the age of 12 engaged in sexual activity. Tefft admitted he had been downloading such material for at least four years.

In 2013, a report by the Brunswick School in Connecticut named Tefft as the teacher who had been accused of sexually abusing three male students there in the 1980s. No criminal charges were filed.

MacLeish said Wednesday that St. George’s should have reported Tefft to child protective services in 1971 for serving alcohol to minors. “The police would have been involved, and things might have turned out very differently for students and campers at various locations where Tefft went on to work,” he said.

Bella English can be reached at english@globe.com.