There is even more to this than meets the eye; White said there are about thirty-five other survivors just like her, and more reaching out all the time. Jean Wehner also added that, one day, Cesnik took her aside, just to ask if the priests were hurting her. They already knew the murderer, but looking further would unearth information he wasn't supposed to know. Viewers of The Keepers do not fondly reflect on Sharon May, the prosecutor in charge of the Maryland State Attorneys Office Sex Abuse Unit. The Baltimore Sun is republishing archived coverage of the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, which is the subject of a Netflix documentary series set to debut May 19. And she has not stopped looking into the murder of her former teacher. So it probably wasn't the result of some random act of violence. [15] The series features interviews with women who were Cesnik's students, with some who say they were sexually abused by Maskell and others.[16]. In his late 20s at the time and described as pretty charismatic, he was easy to like, working as a counselor with a psychology degree from Johns Hopkins. ', They were told to 'stop harassing him,' he said. Almost 50 years ago, a Baltimore nun named Sister Catherine Cesnik was found choked and beaten to death . 102, September Term 1995, "Baltimore Archdiocese Pays Settlements to a Dozen People Alleging Abuse by Late Priest", "Netflix's 'The Keepers' generates interest in other Md. There are countless untold stories backing up the accusations made against A. Joseph Maskell and the Catholic Church that the docuseries doesnt even begin to explore. Sister Cathy was left in a remote area of Lansdowne, near a garbage dump. Ryan White's aunt attended Archbishop Keough High School, and had stayed in touch with Jean Hargadon-Wehner. It made sense that she'd gone into some kind of wooded area, and with Leakin Park near where the car was found, it was a place to start. Wehner says she remembers trying repeatedly to brush off the maggots crawling on Cesnik's face while frantically repeating the words, "Help me, help me." No one, not even fellow Keough graduates, knew that Jean Hargadon-Wehner was the so-called "Jane Doe" who came forward in the early 1990's and accused the Archdiocese of Baltimore of allowing the abuse to continue. ', While the murder of Sister Cathy is in the forefront of the series, White noted that there were other crimes 'happening before and after, and still filter down to today and may be linked to her murder. The mutilated body of the 26-year-old teacher was found on January 3, 1970. RELATED:16 TV Shows Too Disturbing To Binge-Watch, Most dont believe Gerry Koob when he talks, but a member of the police force, Detective Roemer, claimed that Koob confessed to having a sexual relationship with Sister Cathy before her disappearance. According to police, Joyce Helen Malecki, 20, disappeared from a shopping mall only days after Cesnik on November 11, 1969, in Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore. Every bit of it, vividly. In general, he exploited 1960s counterculture, offering a relaxed environment and a willing ear regarding sex, drugs, alcohol, and the like all things that the students' strictly religious parents detested. Investigators dug up Maskell's grav to compare the DNA of Maskell, to evidence from the crime scene. As in, a three-year-old who remembers it. Or does White know more than hes telling his audience? Armacost says the timing of Maskells exhumation has nothing to do with the documentary, and opening the priests grave was simply a step that cold-case investigators felt needed to be taken to leave no stone unturned. Photos hit the internet, many of which have been taken down, that where morbid and graphic of the crash site where Kobe's helicopter went down, killing 9 people. A Warner Bros. James Maskell, A. Joseph Maskells uncle, is a similarly powerful and threatening figure that deserves to be prodded harder. It was apparently a fixation for Maskell, who would then perform his own mock "exams" on the girls, flaunting his authority and power. She had moved to an apartment outside the convent with another nun and began teaching at Western High School in Baltimore on November 7, 1969, when she left her apartment to run an errand at Edmondson Village Shopping Center in Baltimore, according to Armacost. The next time the young nun was seen, it was by a female student from Cesnik's school, Archbishop Keough High School. However, theres even more to the story to be considered: Sharon Mays husband used to be a state cop. When Wehner could only nod in reply, Cesnik promised that she would take care of it (though Maskell did continue to abuse students after that, too). She was found dead two months later. Wehner, who reported her allegations about Maskell to the Baltimore Archdiocese in 1992, claimed that the only nun at the school who sought to help the abused girls was Sister Cathy. Frightened and feeling threatened by the strapping, dominating clergyman who was popular with churchgoers for his Sunday masses the girl decided to keep secret her gruesome discovery. Police have also looked into whether Cesniks death is related to the deaths of three other young women in the Baltimore area around the same time. They were all young, attractive women, police said, who looked similar. And this update involves Father Joseph Maskell. All six murders are still unsolved, so technically, the similarities could just be coincidence, but despite the lack of evidence, experience tells investigators that there's some connection. Joseph Maskell knew that the victims of his abuse would want to talk (and that they were talking to Catherine Cesnik, at least), so he had to shut that down with violent threats. One of Baltimores most infamous cold cases, Cesniks death is the subject of a new documentary series, The Keepers, which releases May 19 on Netflix. ", court of Appeals of Maryland, No. In a school where a number of the teachers seemed to know Joseph Maskell was "weird" but sent students to him at his request, Catherine Cesnik offered a light in a very dark, twisted place. I always felt like there was some reason for me to be here and I didn't know what it was. Catherine Cesnik's disappearance scared a lot of people. The green 1970 Maverick had been parked illegally near the apartment. The current team of cold case detectives, assigned the Cesnik case in 2016, began discussing the exhumation of Maskell almost immediately, but it took time to get proper authorization. Cesnik's murder is still unsolved in 2021, although Maskell was suspected to be involved in Cesnik's murder at the time f his death in 2001, his DNA didn't match the evidence from the . Hoskins did write about her theory on the killer in her book "Keeping On: How I came To Know Why I Was Born.. She "was found strangled and stabbed to death in a small creek . For us, our bar was more about bringing these womens experiences to light and starting this conversation.. Instead, it made more sense if someone Catherine Cesnik already knew coerced her from the car. It was a name he kept hearing in interviews with other priests, and the man had worked with Cesnik while she taught at Keough. In that case, Cesnik might've been killed to stop her from actually being able to do that. 'After that we had to break away from him. (Aside from reports that Maskell invited uniformed officers to assault the girls). Hoskins and Schaub looked into each of those tips, and the tips have kept coming in for the past five years. In 2016, the Baltimore County Police Department (BCPD) reassigned the case due to retiring officers, prompting new interviews and further investigation into the alleged sexual abuse at Keough. Autopsy findings reportedly narrowed the time of death to between 4:30 a.m. and as late as 7:30 a.m. an hour after Krauseneck claimed to have left the house. The amount of people that have seen The Keepers now is mind-blowing around the world, White said. November 1969: Sister Cathy Cesnik disappears. When she was reported missing later that night, several dozen cops and half-a-dozen dog teams unsuccessfully searched a wide swath of Baltimore's southwest neighborhood searching for clues to her whereabouts. More than 40 years after her death, the case of Sister Cathy Cesnik's murder is still unsolved. [11] Cesnik's body was not found until January 3, 1970, and its discovery by two hunters was not in the wooded location near Fort Meade, but on the open hill trash dump of a small business property in Lansdowne. Nearly 10 years ago the filmmakers started to meet with her; this was long before Netflix got involved. Two women anonymous at the time but who later came forward as Jean Wehner and Teresa Lancaster came forward with allegations of abuse, saying he (and some of his associates) had assaulted them while they were students at Archbishop Keough (later Seton Keough) High School (via Baltimore Sun). Father Neil Magnus Is A Possible Suspect On 'The Keepers'. We know this speculation about the circumstances is not false, because Jean Hargadon Wehner tells us in the show that she has evidence proving otherwise. Her body was found a few months later, discarded unceremoniously in a garbage dump. Investigators didn't really buy that, thinking that he knew more than he let on, but the church forced them to stop searching. Leads dried up quickly and no one came forward with information about Cathy's whereabouts, and the search dragged on for months. On January 3, 1970, the body of Catherine Cesnik was found by two hunters. After the complaints were made to the archdiocese, Maskell was temporarily removed from his post at the school for psychological evaluation. 'There were a lot of layers that if you peeled them back went a lot deeper. [5], In the fall of 1969, Cesnik was teaching drama and English at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland,[6] a school for girls that had opened in 1965. There were actually six different murders that might all be connected with each other three teenage girls, a teenage boy, Cesnik, and Joyce Malecki. But beyond that, all of them had ties of some kind to Maskell, either working with him or attending churches where he was a priest. Huffpost added that choke marks colored her neck, and a quarter-sized hole in the back of her skull pointed to her actual cause of death blunt force trauma, leading to a skull fracture and brain hemorrhaging. The mysterious Brother Bob is, in many ways, even more chilling a figure than A. Joseph Maskell. . The show is responsible for initiating a deeper look into the case of A. Joseph Maskell and Sister Cathy Cesnik, as Baltimore County Police start investigating again due to a public outcry. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a true crime fan is dealing with endless cover-ups from authorities and government entities, like police and the FBI. Her body was found in Lansdowne, south of Baltimore, on January 3, 1970. As time would tell, she had good reason to keep quiet. The scandals were always covered up by reassigning the offending priests to new parishes or just saying they were "on sick leave.". [13][14] Police spokeswoman Elise Armacost announced that this discovery does not exclude Maskell from being a suspect in the case. The seven-episode docuseries explores the 1969 death of Catholic nun and Baltimore schoolteacher Sister Cathy Cesnik and touches on 20-year-old Joyce Malecki's murder mere days later. She was warm and energetic, always ready to engage with her students, writing musicals for them to perform on stage, or inventing games to encourage them to teach each other new vocabulary. Police took DNA samples from the corpse to check against a DNA profile developed from evidence taken in 1970 from the scene in Maryland where the badly decomposed body of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik had been found by a father and son out hunting. Netflix's documentary series "The Keepers" dives into the case and uncovers a web of abuse that may . They filed a $40 million civil lawsuit against him, the Baltimore Archdiocese, the sisters who ran the school, and a local gynecologist. Whats worse than considering the fact that A. Joseph Maskell terrorized one community? Just a few days before she vanished, the priest reportedly called her and, once again expressing his love, had asked her to marry him. appreciated. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. On May 17, the Baltimore Sun reported that his DNA did not match a sample that was taken. Joyce Helen Malecki, 20, disappeared from Harundale Mall a few days after Cesnik; her . Her body was left out in the open on a slight rise. Around 7:30pm on . Oddly, her Ford Maverick, which she had recently purchased, was found just a block from her apartment parked illegally in a no parking area and unlocked. Stories shared by Capital Gazette showed that Cesnik was thought of fondly by all the people she'd worked with, despite being a teacher at Western High School for only a couple months. . Cold cases", "About the BCoPD Cold Case Unit and the Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik Homicide", "Police: Exhumed Priest's DNA Does Not Match Evidence from Crime Scene Killing of Sister Cathy", "Priest's Body Exhumed from Randallstown Cemetery in Investigation of Baltimore Nun's Decades-Old Killing", "The Dead Nun, the School Sex Scandal, and the Amateur Detectives Fighting for Justice", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murder_of_Catherine_Cesnik&oldid=1117759661, This page was last edited on 23 October 2022, at 12:23. The autopsy concluded her cause of death . Without getting into a bunch of complicated legal jargon, victims of abuse would've had three years to come forward. He later became a Methodist minister, but before that (and before Cesnik had taken her final vows as a nun), he'd asked her to marry him. Unfortunately, Russell is . What we do know is that the FBIs continuing failure to contribute meaningfully to this case has negatively impacted any chance at an ending to the story. Born in Pittsburgh, Penn., in 1942, reports the Baltimore Sun, Cesnik was described by her younger sister as devoted and rather ambitious. Shortly before her disappearance, he'd called her again, telling her that he was still in love with her. But she wasn't fully happy there, and by 1969, at the age of 26, Cesnik knew she had potential that her order was stifling, knew she could become so much more, and moved out to take a job at Western High School. Supposedly, according to White and Jean Wehner, the Archdiocese opened an investigation into A. Joseph Maskell, and so, those records should exist. Feb 28, 2020. Either way, theyre lying and withholding information that would be helpful to the case. Jane Doe (Jean Wehner) is quoted as recalling a man she knew only as Brother Bob, who she can hardly remember from being traumatized so badly by him, whispering to her that he was the one who had killed Sister Cathy. Nicole Mello is an author of horrors, romances, and comedies. One of the initial persons of interest was a Jesuit priest who had been romantically involved with the pretty nun, and had once asked her to marry him, before she took her vows. ', One former student, Teresa Lancaster, told WJZ-TV in Baltimore, that Sister Cathy had 'confronted' Maskell 'and she lost her life for it.'. And to end. The autopsy reportedly found that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Though White says he included absolutely all the information he knew in the documentary, he did contradict himself later by saying, The project was heavily vetted by lawyers there were times when I believed we knew somebody that was involved in the abuse, but we couldn't include a name for legal reasons. True crime buffs will know that this often happens, that the law tangles everything up in red tape so details like names and dates will be removed from stories. They have another project scheduled to come out later this year. White tells us there is some dogged reporting happening right now in Ireland, digging deeper into the time that A. Joseph Maskell spent there, in addition to his time spent in the United States. [8], In 1995, Teresa Lancaster and Jean Wehner (ne Hargadon), former students at Keough who say they were sexually abused by Maskell, filed a lawsuit against him, the school, gynecologist Christian Richter, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and William H. Keeler. The idea that he terrorized many, and that the Catholic Church chose not to stop him. Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way. However, Spitz, who worked on the case, later confirmed that there had been maggots in both the victim's mouth and trachea when found. Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. Koob had an alibi for the night he'd been out at a movie with another priest and claimed not to know anything. As the next morning rolled around, Catherine Cesnik still hadn't returned to the apartment, and her roommate became very concerned. So-called Grandma Nancy Drew Gemma Hoskins has spent years asking for the federal case files on Joyce Maleckis murder. ', He theorized that because there had been no signs of a struggle, 'it looked too clean. Granted, there was the argument that this was, technically, still within three years Jean Wehner and Teresa Lancaster had just recovered those memories. Other times, he would arrange full pseudo brothels. Investigating detectives found no leads on Cesnik's death, and the investigation was later abandoned. Maskell's DNA did not match the forensic profile from 1970, although investigators noted that this . Sister Catherine Cesnik, a nun from the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a teaching order, began her career at Archbishop Keough High School, a private, all-girls Catholic School. As one of the Baltimore detectives who initially worked on the case, Nick Giangrasso, told a reporter for Huffington Post: 'The Catholic Church had a lot of input into the police department. Baltimore Detective Lt. Sam Bowerman always believed Sister Cathy was killed by a man who either lived in, or was familiar with, the area around the Carriage House Apartments, knew the location off Monument Avenue where her body was dumped, and that the murder was unplanned. ", Up Next: Netflix Hidden Gems For Sci-Fi And Fantasy Lovers. An autopsy soon revealed the victim was Sister Cathy Cesnik, a beloved 26-year-old nun who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School and had vanished two months earlier during a Friday night shopping trip. At the time of her disappearance, Sister Cesnik was on a sabbatical from the Roman Catholic Church and was teaching at Western High School in Baltimore City. Another dead end, apparently. What the show doesnt touch on, however, is Koobs supposed relationship with Sister Cathy. They were always invited to come to her apartment, where she checked in on the situation regarding Maskell. Investigating a Catholic priest presented challenges, especially in Baltimore a predominantly Catholic city (via Huffpost). Much like the government, the Catholic Church has their own internal system for keeping track of the people who make up their organization. Theres no question she told them she would do something about it.. Source:https://www.spreaker.com/user/americancrimecast/sistercathy-1Join Gemma Hoskins and Shane Waters in this new podcast series about the unsolved murder . It was thrown out on a technicality, according to Huffpost. The girl left but the next day, she later claimed, Maskell waved a gun at her, warning he'd kill her and her family if she revealed the abuse. RELATED:10 Best True Crime Shows On Netflix. And after almost 50 years, Sister Cathy's murder has remained unsolved. On occasion, they will attempt to combine all three, as there really isnt too much to life overall than fear, love, and laughter. 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