The Keepers (2017) s01e06 Episode Script
The Web
We heard that in August of 1994, WJZ showed a retrospective clip of newsman Jerry Turner, who got a phone call from a gentleman who said he had information about Cathy's murder and he knew who had her rosary.
We were told that in this news clip, they actually played some audio of the phone call itself.
We haven't been able to access it anywhere else, so, we're hoping it's on one of these tapes, but there's a good-sized box of tapes from August.
So, we'll see what we can find.
One day in the '90s, I got a knock on the door.
It was Detective Tincher and Detective Marll.
They brought a tape recorder, and when they pressed play on the tape, it was the Jerry Turner call-in radio show.
And I'm hearing a disguised voice, and he's calling in to let Jerry Turner know that he knows who has Sister Cesnik's rosary.
What a strange flashback into the past.
It was a black case, and it had the name Cesnik on it.
And he said this was her rosary.
The rosary had Cesnik on it? - The case had Cesnik on it.
- Oh, the case did.
And just a couple seconds into disguising his voice, he let the disguise down and he clearly spoke like himself, and I said, "My God, that's him.
" It was Ed.
Okay, Edgar? Yeah, I wanted to show you Do you recognize this man? Maskell.
I've seen his picture.
But I did not know him.
So, you never met him? No.
And then this one? That's Cathy.
So, you told us that the police thought you did it.
Can you talk about that? When was that, and what did they? What did they think? Oh, just questions.
Questions about what? Her.
And what happened to her.
I'm telling you the same thing I told them.
I don't have the slightest idea.
Do you remember why they visited you? My ex-wife.
So, if she told the police at some point that you came home covered in blood that night, is she telling the truth? I don't know.
She said I did.
Your first wife, is she an honest person? Oh, yeah.
Do you remember having blood on your shirt that night? Mm-hm.
You do? Why was that? I hit my hand.
You had what? I hit my hand.
You hit your hand? Do you remember how you did that? No.
I'm gonna play this news clip for you, okay? then on January 3rd, 1970, she turned up murdered in a field in Lansdowne.
Police have followed up on numerous leads, but none of them panned out, not even the tape of a still-unidentified caller who told anchorman Jerry Turner in 1976 that he knew a man who was carrying Sister Cesnik's rosary.
It was a black case, and it had the name Cesnik on it.
And he said this was her rosary.
The rosary had Cesnik on it? - The case had Cesnik on it.
- Oh, the case did.
Police have followed up on numerous leads, but not Was that you that called Jerry Turner? Mm-hm.
- That was your voice? - Yes.
Did you know a guy with her rosary case? No.
No.
Were you making up information? Yes.
Can you kind of just give me a little bit of an explanation of that so I understand it? Because it doesn't make much sense to us.
Doesn't make much sense to me.
I'm just trying to understand, then, why you would have called a popular radio show many years later to give information about that that led police and her family to think that it might be a lead.
I was dumb, stupid.
Did you perhaps lead your first wife to believe you were involved in the murder even though you weren't? At first, yeah.
I let her believe it.
That's kind of why we're here today, because you led her to believe it, and all these clues and the Jerry Turner thing make people think you were involved.
But did you? Did you do it? Did you kill Sister Cathy? No.
Do you have any information about her murder? No.
I had nothing to do with it.
Hi.
How are you? I have one of these minds that never stops, you know.
I mean, aren't you guys shocked that this sort of thing can go on? And nobody's fessed There's people that know.
You remind me so much of her just in We were so close.
Well, you're exuberant, and she was.
This was an album that my mother had given Cathy when she turned 18.
She was six and a half years older than me.
She made me feel extremely special.
We shared a bedroom together.
Cathy was a sleeper, and I was not a sleeper.
It took her forever one day to get up.
So, I had gone downstairs, and my mother had made some chocolate pudding, and I painted her shoes.
Because she slept so long, I had a lot of time to fill these slippers with chocolate pudding.
And then when she got up, I just sat there and watched her get up and put her feet in the chocolate pudding slippers, you know.
"What?" If I were to play a joke on you, it would be a one-upmanship and you would have to figure out how you were gonna get me back.
She never, ever got me back.
She's always told me she loved me unconditionally.
She had the ability to do that.
And I probably tested that, you know, a lot, and she never, never wavered.
She taught me what unconditional love means.
No matter what they do, you're gonna love them.
I know it's been a long time and it's hard for people to understand, and a lot of people feel that you can't grieve a lifetime.
You needed to have closure.
That's not it.
You just miss somebody in your life.
You miss not having that person there for all the important things that happen.
And if it's five minutes, if it's 45 years, you still miss that person and you can still feel that loss.
There is no reason for any secretiveness or anything kept hidden or concealed.
When Cathy died, I said, "You will not die as long as I'm alive.
You will not die.
" I'm not letting this go.
I'm not letting this go.
I never came to peace.
I shut up.
But I never came to peace.
You know? I shut up for the sake of my parents.
And I always kept my mouth shut for the sake of my mother, but all these years, I wanted to know who killed my sister.
All I knew was what I knew all these years, that it was probably the wrong place, the wrong time.
It was a random killing, and the police had zero evidence.
They found nothing.
When you go down these family discussions with this, then, you know, you start crying and everybody gets really upset, and my dad always would stop us at that point and say, "This doesn't bring Cathy back.
" And the line was, "She would not want you to cry, Marilyn.
" My parents were very protective of me because it was really, really, really difficult.
And they had two little kids, you know, to raise.
So, that's why, when my mother passed away a year ago, Bob and I had cleaned out her apartment, and I was absolutely no help because as soon as I started cleaning it out we found all this stuff.
I mean, there was boxes all over the apartment.
I was trying to sort through everything.
That's when I found the articles that my mother cut out.
She saved it all, but she didn't tell me.
I mean, there's articles from '69, and then there's articles from the '90s that my mother saved that was in the paper.
You know, and I read that for the first time.
When you read this sort of thing, I mean, it's hard to explain to you what was going on, because you read this, and it's like "What is this?" It's a lot to absorb because it's so It's not what I have thought happened for 45 years.
I didn't know the name Maskell until my mother died.
I joined the Baltimore County Police Department in July of 1997, and I went to the Homicide Unit here in Baltimore County in February of 2000.
I've been there ever since.
I'm new to the case, this is a couple weeks into this cold case, looking Re-looking at it.
I can only tell you this: If there was any evidence that anybody was involved in this murder, Father Maskell or anybody else, and that evidence was developed by these investigators there would be no cover-up.
These allegations against Father Maskell weren't brought about until the '90s.
He was investigated.
He was questioned.
He was looked at as a suspect.
As time went on, he was looked at even harder.
He wouldn't talk about the allegations of abuse.
He said he had nothing to do with Sister Cesnik's death.
He denied showing people certain things and being involved in that.
Flat-out denied it.
But let's be clear.
Nobody has been cleared yet by us, that are now working on the case.
I mean, we haven't given up on anything just 'cause it's 45, 47 years old.
We're not ruling out anybody.
This was from '69 when she was missing.
November 10th, 1969.
And I think this one I'm not sure where this one fits.
"Case priest" Yeah, this is all from '94 right there.
Gemma and Abbie seem to have so much information.
I cannot believe that the police have not talked to them.
You know, I was trying to take this in little pieces, 'cause it's a little overwhelming, and trying to be protective of, you know, my family, too, and try to see how far I needed to go in this investigation.
Okay, put it on.
Okay.
Is everybody ready? From a church in New Jersey, a former priest reads the words of a murdered nun.
It's not quite the agony to talk about it now as it was then.
But, you know, I really lost a, uh a fantastic human being.
On November 7, 1969, Cathy Cesnik was abducted Cathy cared deeply about a lot of people.
I just felt it was always a little different with Gerry.
She said, "I really feel Gerry will always be in my life.
He's someone that's very important to me.
" I knew she cared, but that was all I got out of her.
I got nothing else out of her.
After Cathy died, my parents didn't want me to talk to Gerry.
The way my dad told me is they have to clear everybody.
Everybody that was involved with Cathy has to be cleared.
I think the police might have told my dad that they suspected him.
It took me ten very painful years to recover from her death.
That was a long, tough journey.
What I needed to do eventually was get away from all that so I could start over.
I went out to Minnesota a celibate Jesuit priest, came back 12 years later a Methodist pastor, married with two kids to Diane.
This Is this for drinking or for putting into your cooking? Yes, for both.
Gemma and her crew told me that they went with Koob to the Carriage House.
They reviewed it all and looked at where the car had been and talked about all of that.
The way Gemma characterized that for me was that Koob had an emotional catharsis.
I was a little bit distressed.
Let's leave it with that.
There are so many holes in his story of what went on at the Carriage House that night I'll tell you the truth, I would take everything he says with a gigantic boulder of salt.
I do not believe the things that he told me.
There are three people that were present in Cathy's apartment all night after she disappeared.
One of them was Gerry Koob.
The other one was Pete McKeon, who was his friend, another priest, who we have not been able to locate or talk to.
And the third was Cathy's roommate, Russell Phillips.
Russell, unfortunately, died of cancer so, the information that we have been given about what happened the night that Cathy disappeared really comes in a large part from Gerry Koob.
Once they discovered her body, the police really grilled me because I was a man that she knew, and that was their theory, was that she was killed by somebody who knew her.
Detective Harry Bannon This is an exact quote 'cause it's burned its way into my memory over many years.
"Nugent, if Father Koob didn't kill her, he knows who did.
" I was in no way involved with it, never have been, never would have been.
I was trying to tell them to stop investigating me the first time I talked to them.
I said, "Here are the stubs to the movie we were at.
Here's the restaurant we were at.
Pete and I were together the whole night.
" That's fact.
We went back to my office in the retreat house.
And I remember this detail.
We were drinking Tia Maria, little chocolate liqueur.
And the phone rings, and it's Russell Phillips.
Koob told me that we got the call, and we drove up together from Annapolis.
There's a chance that Koob forgot, but Koob doesn't forget.
He's one smart guy.
For the first report in the morning Sun the day after the nun vanished, Brother Pete McKeon told the crime reporter that he had learned the nun was in terrible trouble and drove there from Beltsville, the suburb of Baltimore where he lived at the Christian Brothers Monastery.
Not from Annapolis with Koob.
I can remember two or three days at the police station being grilled, and I remember saying to them, "I'm Peter's alibi.
Peter's my alibi.
If you're gonna come after me for the murder, you have to go after Peter at the same time because we were together that night.
" Reports indicate that Koob and McKeon were polygraphed regarding those statements that they made about going back to the house and then coming to Ms.
Russell's house.
The records only indicate that they say they went to a movie and that after, then they had dinner.
The polygraphs didn't indicate any signs of deception in their story.
But Baltimore City detectives were not able to confirm by any eyewitness about the time they would've left there or the time they came back from dinner.
One of the many chores that still has to be done here, and a big one, is find McKeon and see if he'll tell you anything from his point of view.
Can I find Peter? No, I haven't pursued it that much.
I wouldn't say we were the world's closest friends, but, you know I can't tell you that he's alive still, but did you go looking at all or? The night that Cathy went missing, it was Russell, Gerry, and a third person that was there, - a guy named Pete McKeon.
- Mm-hm.
Mm-hm.
I called him at some point, and he hung up on me or the phone got disconnected.
I tried him back.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe let me call.
Hello? Hi, is this Pete McKeon? Is this Pete McKeon? Hi, Pete, I don't think I've ever met you, um, and, um If this conversation is something you don't wanna have with me, I'm okay with it.
My name's Marilyn Cesnik.
Um I'm Cathy's sister.
Right, right.
I'm her little sister.
I'm her younger sister.
I know that Russell had called you when Cathy went missing and that you had come there that night with Gerry.
Uh I mean, I guess I'm just searching for some answers, you know? Thanks, Pete.
Bye-bye.
He's 85.
The conversation was all over the place, except for when you mentioned Gerry's name, he repeated the whole story again and again.
I do think he's told the story so many times and had to tell it that that story Once you start him on that story, he's gonna say the whole story.
We had dinner together, we went to a movie, and then we were back when we got the call from Russell.
"'We made the decision that it was time to put the heat on Koob, ' Roemer recalls.
Roemer asked the Jesuit priest again and again, 'What exactly was the nature of your relationship with Sister Cathy?' Father Koob insisted that the two were simply good friends who enjoyed a great deal of purely platonic affection for each other.
'That's fine, ' he told the priest.
'But why would Sister Russell have called you instead of the police after Cathy disappeared that night?' Roemer understood the reason better a few days later after visiting Father Koob's residence at the Manresa Jesuit Community.
There, he said, he came across a letter Cesnik had written to the priest on November 3rd, only a few days before the nun vanished.
" My very dearest Gerry: "If Ever I Should Leave You" is playing on the radio.
My period has finally arrived ten days late, so, you might say I'm moody.
My heart aches so for you.
I must wait on you, your time and your need, because your life is so erratic.
I think I can begin to live with that more easily now than I did two months ago, just loving you within myself.
I must tell you, I want you within me.
I want to have your children.
I love you.
Koob hurried to make this point even before we started talking.
"I wanna make one thing clear.
I knew nothing of any abuse at that school, and Sister Cathy never breathed a word.
" And I, of course, politely would say, "She's being threatened.
She's probably left Keough and gone to Western because she's terrified of what's going on there.
You're deeply in love and may get married, yet she can never bring herself to say, 'Oh, by the way, he's raping girls in the chaplain's office.
'" If she had said something to me about priests sexually abusing girls at Keough, if she had said anything like that to me when she goes missing, I would've steered the detectives to look in that direction.
Later on, this one detective kept pursuing me and kept finding out more and more about my relationship with Cathy.
I remember finally saying to him, "You know, you're completely distracted.
I thought you were trying to find the murderer and you're not.
You're just curious about her relationship with me that you don't understand, but that's got nothing to do with this.
So, I consider you a completely distracted detective, and get back to doing your job.
" And then he got up and did something for which I will never forgive him.
He went back to the back room and he handed me her vagina.
And he said, "You need to understand, we're going after somebody viciously.
" And he was justifying his roughness with me.
So, it was a picture of her vagina? It was a black No, no.
The vagina was wrapped in newspaper.
So, it was It looked like a heart wrapped up.
And he threw it on the table.
I hate that guy for that.
That's nothing that would be done there.
I don't know where he came up with that.
That sounds like a dream or or something that I don't understand.
Not Not under my watch.
It might've been County.
I don't know.
I can't speak for them.
I've never heard from investigators that Koob ever made that allegation that he was mistreated or threatened by something like that.
I can't imagine a pr Somebody would think that a priest would cave by telling them something's wrapped up in a newspaper like that.
I'm not saying that "good cop, bad cop," those kind of techniques weren't used in the past.
Um I think that's a little out there.
Detective Bannon's last statement to me: "Tom, we got close to Koob and we were ready to break it, and a church lawyer stepped in and chewed the police-department brass out royally.
And from the day those lawyers showed up we was pulled off Koob and you couldn't go near him anymore.
" I think what infuriated me about this one particular guy was he was still saying, "There was more to that that we didn't get to, because we were blocked.
" And the idea that it had something to do with me I could never make any sense out of that story.
Hey, if you've got a priest and somebody's working on him and they're getting nowhere and nothing's being done on him, you're making a lot of waves.
The archdiocese had a right to ask, "Look, either charge Koob or get the hell off of him.
" The city had run him on the box.
Then when we get into it, we ran him on the box.
And we couldn't come up with anything that said he knew about or knew it was gonna happen or had any part in doing it.
We couldn't point our finger at Koob and say he was the one.
When Cathy's body was found, we had gone to the apartment, and I'll never forget, Russell was sitting on the couch and my mother was asking her for Cathy's things, and I remember distinctly Russell saying, "I can't help you.
I don't know where anything's at right now.
" She was that out of it.
She didn't talk much to begin with.
You know, she was quiet and reserved.
But at that point, she was non-communicative.
It was beyond reserve and quiet.
Her full name was Helen Russell Phillips.
We all called her Russell.
I loved her as one of my Sisters, but I always wondered what makes her tick.
And I I I could not connect with her that well.
I never could really read her.
I think Russell knew a lot more than what she ever expressed and told people.
How could she not? She lived in the house with Cathy.
After Cathy's death, Russ and I We were talking one night.
I guess I was just checking in on her.
And she said, "You know, Trish, if you wanna come live with me, you know, I have the room here.
You're welcome to do that.
" And so, I moved in, in June of 1970.
That first night I remember laying in the bed that was Cathy's and just wide awake, thinking "This was Cathy's room.
" For almost a whole year, I would be frightened to get out of my car and go into the apartment.
I would park the car and I would look at the rearview mirror, the two side mirrors, put whatever work I was gonna take in, and would go charging to get across the parking lot.
I did that every single day.
It was like, "That person that did it to her is out there.
" I wanted to know what happened and all that, well I cannot remember a time that Russell talked about Cathy.
Cathy's birthday would come and go.
No mention of Cathy at all.
I never asked questions but I wondered a lot.
Did Russell know what was happening to these girls? Of course.
Mother Maurice gave them permission to experiment with teaching in public high school and being nuns out in the regular world.
And I thought: "Wow, they're leaving to do something absolutely wonderful.
" But then I also know there are other questions, because it wasn't long after that Cathy was killed.
We've talked about the young woman who visited Cathy the night before she disappeared to talk about being abused at Keough.
She was very specific about what she remembered.
Joseph Maskell and Father Magnus came into the apartment as she was visiting with the two Sisters.
I find it hard to believe, because Russell would've said something about an upsetting visit the night before from Maskell.
And the question I raised for Gemma when she told me about it was, "Was Russell there?" When I questioned whether or not she was sure if Sister Russell was present, she was a little bit impatient with me and said, "I told you she was there.
She was there.
" That greatly puzzles me as to why she said nothing to Peter and me about that when Cathy has disappeared.
That only makes me scratch my head.
Was she hiding something from us? And so, could it have been something more? Could they have been leaving Keough because something wasn't right and they were trying to expose this priest? Were they threatened? I don't know.
I've never actually had the answer to that in my own mind.
Sister Helen Russell Phillips was with these priests.
They were all real closely associated.
It was all in the circle, and the killer was someone in that circle.
Sister Phillips knows a shit-lot more than she's ever told the police.
Phillips didn't say nothing to me or nobody else that I know of, but I still say she's got the key to unlock this thing.
Okay.
Here we are.
This is kind of hard to talk about, but I did some research on maggots.
I know there were some disagreements between what Jean shared about maggots being on Sister Cathy's body and the police saying that they weren't.
We need to see documents.
I mean, we don't know about the autopsy yet.
Autopsy reports in closed cases are public record, but the medical examiner's office said that they refused to have any information just out there.
They said they wouldn't release the autopsy information because if a perp did come forward and was a suspect, that might be valuable to them.
So, they didn't want the information just out there.
So, I think that's a dead end.
Diane.
Can you come here a minute? Can you find the file on this case? - Did you find it? - I did.
Oh, my God.
Look at that.
Hey, Diane, while you are here He was wondering, can you tell him what big cases I've been involved in? Well, it started with Kennedy.
John F.
Kennedy.
He was with the House Assassination Committees with Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
He was also hired by the family of Mary Jo Kopechne with Ted Kennedy.
O.
J.
, civil case against him.
JonBenet Ramsey.
Let's see, the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez.
- Spector.
- Spector.
Oh, Casey Anthony, yes.
Oh, Casey Anthony.
That was a good case.
- There was the Memphis - Oh, the Memphis Memphis Three and the Norfolk Four.
It was the appeals on those.
And, uh, the Stairway Killer.
- Not a - He consulted for the defense, but when he gave his opinion to the defense attorney, he decided that was not very beneficial for his case.
- Well, okay, thank you very much.
- You're welcome.
Okay.
If you are willing to look You know, a picture tells a thousand words.
That's what Confucius say Said.
This case came to my attention when I was in the city of Baltimore, working at the medical examiner's office as pathologist sometime in 1970.
Police call up and they say, "You know, we would really like to have Dr.
Spitz come to the scene with us.
" And what would I do when I get there? I would look over the body.
I would tell the photographer of the police, "Why don't you take a picture of the body as it is here? Don't move anything.
Don't even touch the body.
Just take a picture.
" And he would do that.
And this is the picture that I'm showing you here.
And what was it? What does it show? Her skirt was pulled up.
The chest was bare.
The person had obviously been severely assaulted.
Closer examination revealed a big defect in the side of the head.
Chest.
Chest.
Aha.
This is her skull.
This is the injury.
I take off the skin so that I get the correct visualization of this area.
This type of trauma would be from an impact with a dense, heavy object that was forcefully struck against the, uh skull.
So, she was probably not even dead immediately when the injury was inflicted.
She probably died subsequently.
Who knows for how long she remained alive? And, um made it so much more sad than it already was.
I was remembering for the first time back then, and I had no idea why I was remembering it other than I thought I was crazy.
And so, I didn't want anything to do with anyone who actually was remembering, too.
Abbie and Gemma and this grassroot movement has given me more confidence.
I am more prepared now to meet other people who have been abused.
And one of the things it does is, it stops the fear of meeting them from becoming a big monster, you know.
- Hi.
- Hi.
Nice to meet you.
And you're You're Jane Doe, I take it.
Yeah, yeah.
I take it you're Jane Roe? Yes.
Well - It's hard to believe I never met you.
- I know, I know.
Well - And you're Donna.
- Hi, I'm Donna.
- Nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I'm Jean.
Come in.
Come in.
I didn't even know what you looked like.
Oh! Back in '94 when I got the notice, you know, asking if I knew anything about sexual abuse at Keough, it was like, "Oh, my God, they know.
" - Yeah.
- "Oh, they know.
Somebody had the nerve to come forward.
" You did a lot for my recovery, you know.
I know we lost and they swept it under the carpet, but it made me feel better.
Yeah.
I can't even be Like, now that I'm an adult, I can't even be mad at him.
I'm mad at people that hid him and let him, you know Ugh.
It's just unbelievable.
Were either of you called to the nurse's office? 'Cause I got called to the nurse's office a lot, and the nurse would say, "Father Maskell wants to see you.
" They both knew that I was walking down that hallway to hell, and But then I think of Sister Cathy, and I think, "Well, maybe they were scared to death that he was gonna kill them," you know? My husband had a plan to kill him.
And I would go to therapy, and I would come back and I would say, "Nancy said don't do that, you know, because, you know You know, it will be us who end up being hurt by it because me and the kids won't have you around.
" - Right.
- But he had it planned out.
He knew what he was gonna do, and he only didn't do it because I had asked him not to.
I called him in '80 and told him, "If I ever see you around me or one of my kids, I will kill you.
" Wow.
Wow.
And then another time later, I heard he was in this church service, and I walked into the confessional.
I was just gonna start yelling and screaming at him, and I thought, "Everybody will be back here defending him.
" - Right.
- I know they'll defend him.
And so, I, you know, told him, "Stay away from me or I'll kill you.
" And I am so glad he's dead, because I don't know that I would be able to control myself now.
Now that we're all together, you know, we might have to carry out that Thank you.
This is really special.
This one nightstick This is the one I carried all these years.
There was a lot of different uses for these.
You could walk people with them.
If they were handcuffed, under their arm, you could walk them.
When I was a detective with the Baltimore Police Department in the '90s, I was studying to be a funeral director.
Well, I was working for some of the local funeral homes at the time.
And we were doing a funeral at Holy Cross Church.
And me and the funeral director were standing outside.
Well, I saw them bring Maskell out behind the church.
He was walking in the center of a small squad of people, maybe three or four.
And they put him in handcuffs and drove him away in unmarked cars.
In the city, we were not allowed just to put handcuffs on people.
You put the handcuffs on somebody, they were under arrest.
So, to see him come out of that church that day with handcuffs on there were charges to be filed, or it was a pretty intense investigation going on.
There would have to be some kind of paper trail.
You just don't take somebody out of a building, put him in a car, take him somewhere, and there's no paper trail.
It don't work that way.
There have always been stories that there were police/government cover-ups of Maskell's crime Hi.
I was looking for information on old criminal records.
They said if I came, I could look up names in a log and find the case numbers? that he was never criminally charged even though he had multiple accusations of abuse and that he was protected by the church and the state.
I'm pretty conservative, or I'm the doubting Thomas.
Give me documentation.
Give me proof.
But it's been two years now, and we're being told that documentation we have every reason to know existed does not exist.
I've written letters to the City of Baltimore Police, to the CIA, the FBI, Freedom of Information Act request.
"Dear Baltimore City Police Department: This is a request under the Maryland Public Information Act.
I am requesting copies of all complaints made to the Baltimore City Sex Crimes Unit that named Father A.
Joseph Maskell.
" We know that between 30 and 100 Keough women went to the Baltimore City Police Sex Crimes Division in 1994.
The police came to our office and met with and spoke to our victims.
All of my notes from my interviews with the victims, including their contact information, and my notes of what they described happening to them, I turned over.
Once I turned things over I don't know.
After your first letter, I conducted a database search.
The Sex Offense Unit had advised me they did not have files for Joseph Maskell.
The Homicide Section also advised that they do not have any files concerning Joseph Maskell.
There is no other place to search for the records you were asking for.
Sorry I could not be of more help.
" Why are these documents not available? Why are they not found? Yeah, I don't understand how that would be, you know, unless the reports were just made to disappear.
If there were detectives in Baltimore working this case, there would be a case folder there and the state's attorney's office would have a case folder because they would get copies of everything.
Where would those statements be? Would they be destroyed for some reason, do you know, or? Well, keep in mind that, um, this was the mid-'90s, so, things were not kept in a computer.
They would have just been pieces of paper in a folder.
So, there's a Jane Roe and a Jane Doe v.
Maskell and all.
Somewhere in these records, it says that documents from the dig were shown to the judge privately in chambers.
The cover here says "With one box of exhibits.
" Now, we would've loved to see the exhibits, but they say it's just gone.
It's not there.
We've now heard that the cemetery-dig documents were stored in a basement evidence room that was flooded during a storm and were just destroyed and disposed of.
It seems like all the hard documents that we've tried to get from the city have just disappeared.
They're just not there.
And I am very uncomfortable that the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office opted not to bring any criminal charges against Father Maskell.
I went down to the Baltimore City Courthouse several times.
I went to the archives.
- Are you in line? - Yeah.
Okay.
We found not only Maskell, but there was virtually no priests in Baltimore that had been found guilty of sex-abuse crimes, despite the archdiocese list of '02 that had maybe 50 names on it.
And when I go through the civil cases that were filed against the priests and the archdiocese, every one I can find was either dismissed on the statute of limitations or it was settled by the church with a cash settlement.
So, there were no findings.
No Catholic priest was ever found guilty of abuse there either.
I don't know if you remember this, but in 2002 the archdiocese published a list of abusive priests, and it had over 50 names, and as far as we can find, there's only one case in Baltimore City where a guilty verdict happened.
And in that case, the priest pleaded guilty.
Why is that? Well, once again, you've gotta have the evidence, okay? If the evidence isn't there to meet the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you can't go forward.
My mood changes.
Some weeks I'm angry and burned out and just wanna say we've done what we can.
You're not sure if it's just a complete waste of your time and energy, or whether there's some strategic advantage to just politely nibbling away, saying, "Hey, we're paying attention.
We're still here.
" You would think that this was a significant enough high-profile case that there would be records saved about the investigation, about the complaints.
It's hard to believe that there's nothing there.
Ocean Heights Presbyterian Church.
I think whoever did it is guilty and has had to live with something for a long time, hiding concealing, avoiding.
You know, has lived a miserable life wrapped around it.
I'd be the first person to tell you that the first person to forgive him would be Cathy.
That's the kind of person she was.
And she would inspire Has inspired forgiveness in me, whoever he is.
I can't walk around with that anger inside me.
I want to locate the discussion tonight about the real meaning of Yom Kippur, seeking perfection and then acknowledging failures and then seeking it again.
I can't help but think, for those of us who were raised in the Catholic community, this is what? Going to confession on Saturday, going to Communion on a Sunday, and then coming back the next Saturday and needing to go to confession again.
It had nothing to do with being rescued from a fall called original sin.
Well, Gerry and I met um, when I was in my last year seminary at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
We didn't hit it off very well at first.
I was in a fairly newfound feminist phase.
And I had a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment.
I thought a lot of the stuff that had been important to him in his life was pretty much nonsense.
You know? Just calling people "Father" and, you know But somehow we started talking, and he talked about Cathy, this very dear friend, this person he loved who was killed, and I Then I said, "Well, I had someone, actually my first love, who was killed in Vietnam.
" And that opened the door.
The rest, as they say, is history.
But that that drew us together.
Our values, our commitment to ministry, to trying to work for love and justice and peace in the world, all of those things drew us together.
There is a passage in Scripture about everything that is in darkness being brought to light.
If there were ever any remote possibility that he had been involved in something criminal I would want that brought to light.
The truth is more important than some story that we tell ourselves to keep our lives untroubled on the surface.
- Hey, how was the class? - Hello.
I'm confident that he was not involved.
I believe he was not in any way involved in anything that would ever have harmed or hurt her or anyone else.
And I've lived with him for 34 years, so, I think I have a good read on that.
After Cathy disappeared, I went back to school, and I was at my dorm.
I hadn't been back long, so, I'm thinking it had to be about a week afterwards.
And I went in the evening, got my mail from my mailbox, and that's when the letter was there from Cathy.
Her handwriting was very distinctive.
It was Cathy's handwriting.
I called my father, who'd worked for the post office.
He said, "Tell me everything that the postmark says.
" He said, "Marilyn, it was sent after Cathy went missing.
It was not sent before.
Stay there and don't move and don't open it, because it could be evidence.
So, please, don't open it, Marilyn.
" You know? You can imagine how much I really wanted to open that letter.
I remember expecting a policeman to come, but it was somebody It must've been a plainclothes policeman.
He didn't have a uniform on.
I called my father and I said whoever came to get that letter was not dressed as a policeman.
He said, "It was probably a detective.
Don't worry about that.
You did the right thing by giving it to them.
" For all these years, the fact that I was told that it was evidence and that's why they couldn't release it made me think that What is in that card? What did it say? What did it say? The detectives that I met with when I went to Baltimore in March I was there to give them my contact information since my parents were dead.
Is there anything new? Anything going on? Do you know who did it? But also to tell you I would really like my letter, and I understand that's evidence, and if I'm not even allowed to touch it, could we? Could I just look at it? Could I read it? They said they can't find it.
It must have been lost.
It existed.
There's no doubt it existed.
There's no doubt it was given to the police.
There's no doubt the police had it.
Where is it? Marilyn Cesnik, who's Cathy's sister, said that she received a letter after Cathy went missing.
Yes.
Could it have had a clue about what engagement present she had bought her? 'Cause Marilyn was the one who had just gotten engaged.
My understanding from her is that the letter is lost or has disappeared? Yeah, well, I know about the letter.
I have information about the letter, that there was a letter received by her sister afterwards.
But as far as I know, the letter isn't a part of the evidence anymore.
The city would have had possession of that, and we've never seen it.
So, what you're saying, I think, Robin, is that you know that it wasn't At least right now, you know it wasn't part of the evidence handed to County? It's not in our evidence room.
- Do we got a copy of the beast? - Yes.
So, we don't have anything from the city.
Correct.
Can you give me one sec? I gotta call the city and see if they still got evidence down there.
I made a bunch of calls, talked to some people.
Haven't been able to verify that the letter was ever turned over to us from the city.
Uh It was something that was heard about but never We From what I just got from the phone calls I made, we never received any physical evidence from the city.
So, I can't tell you.
I would have thought any documentation, any physical evidence that would have been recovered by the city during the missing-person investigation, would have been turned over to Baltimore County.
Marilyn says it was either postmarked on the Monday or Tuesday I believe.
It was postmarked on the 8th.
I've got it here.
You got the letter? No, not the letter, but I have the information on the letter.
Interesting.
So, there's a log of it being turned over as evidence, but there's no There's no indication of what was inside of it or what? - It doesn't say what the letter said? - No.
It says there was an envelope addressed to Ms.
Marilyn with Cathy's handwriting.
I mean, if they came into possession of it, it should be somewhere.
It should've been kept.
What I'm looking at is the autopsy report from Cathy Cesnik, and it's my understanding that, aside from the police and Cathy's family, that nobody else has had a chance to look at this.
I received this from Cathy's sister.
Marilyn's never read this, and she wants this information to be public information because she feels like it's important, I guess, for people to do what I did, just analyze this against what I know about the situation, measuring it against what we already have found out from other people.
Last year, we had the opportunity to talk to James Scannell, the supervising officer on duty the day that Cathy's body was found.
James Scannell said there were no maggots on Cathy's body.
Jean Wehner has told us that she was taken to see Cathy's body and that there were maggots on Cathy's face.
I have had police cold-case investigators snicker and laugh.
I remember the line, I think, from one cold-case investigator to me was, "Let's just say that Jane Doe has a poor memory, okay? She dreamed things that could not have occurred.
Cold weather does not allow for maggots.
" People always tell us that the Baltimore County Police say that some of the details of Jane Doe's recount weren't possible or weren't true.
So, I often wonder, when Jane Doe came forward in 1994 and said Father Maskell took her to see the body of Sister Cathy, if the Baltimore County Police, have always thought her story doesn't make sense.
I really can't comment on, you know, the credibility of that witness relative to another investigator.
I never spoke to her.
I never interviewed her.
One of the details that she always said about Sister Cathy's body being found was that she wiped maggots off of her face when she saw it, and what we've always heard is that that was always discredited because maggots would not be present in the winter.
Does that come up in the records at all? It's in the autopsy that there were maggots internally, in the trachea and in the mouth.
That's true.
When a fly lays an egg, in a day, the egg is converted into a living, moving maggot.
A tiny maggot.
The maggot grows in one week In seven days, the maggot grows to about an inch.
And flies don't propagate in the wintertime.
This is November 7th.
When Sister Cathy first disappeared, 55 degrees.
November 9th, 57.
The line graph is going up.
Well, the fact that there were maggots is indisputable.
If I said maggots, there were maggots.
So, there must have been some sunny and warmer days.
We continued to get warmer and warmer.
Monday was 62 degrees.
Oh, my God.
I always believed Jean, but this is clear evidence right here that what she says she saw was definitely there.
The truth is here in black and white.
We were told that in this news clip, they actually played some audio of the phone call itself.
We haven't been able to access it anywhere else, so, we're hoping it's on one of these tapes, but there's a good-sized box of tapes from August.
So, we'll see what we can find.
One day in the '90s, I got a knock on the door.
It was Detective Tincher and Detective Marll.
They brought a tape recorder, and when they pressed play on the tape, it was the Jerry Turner call-in radio show.
And I'm hearing a disguised voice, and he's calling in to let Jerry Turner know that he knows who has Sister Cesnik's rosary.
What a strange flashback into the past.
It was a black case, and it had the name Cesnik on it.
And he said this was her rosary.
The rosary had Cesnik on it? - The case had Cesnik on it.
- Oh, the case did.
And just a couple seconds into disguising his voice, he let the disguise down and he clearly spoke like himself, and I said, "My God, that's him.
" It was Ed.
Okay, Edgar? Yeah, I wanted to show you Do you recognize this man? Maskell.
I've seen his picture.
But I did not know him.
So, you never met him? No.
And then this one? That's Cathy.
So, you told us that the police thought you did it.
Can you talk about that? When was that, and what did they? What did they think? Oh, just questions.
Questions about what? Her.
And what happened to her.
I'm telling you the same thing I told them.
I don't have the slightest idea.
Do you remember why they visited you? My ex-wife.
So, if she told the police at some point that you came home covered in blood that night, is she telling the truth? I don't know.
She said I did.
Your first wife, is she an honest person? Oh, yeah.
Do you remember having blood on your shirt that night? Mm-hm.
You do? Why was that? I hit my hand.
You had what? I hit my hand.
You hit your hand? Do you remember how you did that? No.
I'm gonna play this news clip for you, okay? then on January 3rd, 1970, she turned up murdered in a field in Lansdowne.
Police have followed up on numerous leads, but none of them panned out, not even the tape of a still-unidentified caller who told anchorman Jerry Turner in 1976 that he knew a man who was carrying Sister Cesnik's rosary.
It was a black case, and it had the name Cesnik on it.
And he said this was her rosary.
The rosary had Cesnik on it? - The case had Cesnik on it.
- Oh, the case did.
Police have followed up on numerous leads, but not Was that you that called Jerry Turner? Mm-hm.
- That was your voice? - Yes.
Did you know a guy with her rosary case? No.
No.
Were you making up information? Yes.
Can you kind of just give me a little bit of an explanation of that so I understand it? Because it doesn't make much sense to us.
Doesn't make much sense to me.
I'm just trying to understand, then, why you would have called a popular radio show many years later to give information about that that led police and her family to think that it might be a lead.
I was dumb, stupid.
Did you perhaps lead your first wife to believe you were involved in the murder even though you weren't? At first, yeah.
I let her believe it.
That's kind of why we're here today, because you led her to believe it, and all these clues and the Jerry Turner thing make people think you were involved.
But did you? Did you do it? Did you kill Sister Cathy? No.
Do you have any information about her murder? No.
I had nothing to do with it.
Hi.
How are you? I have one of these minds that never stops, you know.
I mean, aren't you guys shocked that this sort of thing can go on? And nobody's fessed There's people that know.
You remind me so much of her just in We were so close.
Well, you're exuberant, and she was.
This was an album that my mother had given Cathy when she turned 18.
She was six and a half years older than me.
She made me feel extremely special.
We shared a bedroom together.
Cathy was a sleeper, and I was not a sleeper.
It took her forever one day to get up.
So, I had gone downstairs, and my mother had made some chocolate pudding, and I painted her shoes.
Because she slept so long, I had a lot of time to fill these slippers with chocolate pudding.
And then when she got up, I just sat there and watched her get up and put her feet in the chocolate pudding slippers, you know.
"What?" If I were to play a joke on you, it would be a one-upmanship and you would have to figure out how you were gonna get me back.
She never, ever got me back.
She's always told me she loved me unconditionally.
She had the ability to do that.
And I probably tested that, you know, a lot, and she never, never wavered.
She taught me what unconditional love means.
No matter what they do, you're gonna love them.
I know it's been a long time and it's hard for people to understand, and a lot of people feel that you can't grieve a lifetime.
You needed to have closure.
That's not it.
You just miss somebody in your life.
You miss not having that person there for all the important things that happen.
And if it's five minutes, if it's 45 years, you still miss that person and you can still feel that loss.
There is no reason for any secretiveness or anything kept hidden or concealed.
When Cathy died, I said, "You will not die as long as I'm alive.
You will not die.
" I'm not letting this go.
I'm not letting this go.
I never came to peace.
I shut up.
But I never came to peace.
You know? I shut up for the sake of my parents.
And I always kept my mouth shut for the sake of my mother, but all these years, I wanted to know who killed my sister.
All I knew was what I knew all these years, that it was probably the wrong place, the wrong time.
It was a random killing, and the police had zero evidence.
They found nothing.
When you go down these family discussions with this, then, you know, you start crying and everybody gets really upset, and my dad always would stop us at that point and say, "This doesn't bring Cathy back.
" And the line was, "She would not want you to cry, Marilyn.
" My parents were very protective of me because it was really, really, really difficult.
And they had two little kids, you know, to raise.
So, that's why, when my mother passed away a year ago, Bob and I had cleaned out her apartment, and I was absolutely no help because as soon as I started cleaning it out we found all this stuff.
I mean, there was boxes all over the apartment.
I was trying to sort through everything.
That's when I found the articles that my mother cut out.
She saved it all, but she didn't tell me.
I mean, there's articles from '69, and then there's articles from the '90s that my mother saved that was in the paper.
You know, and I read that for the first time.
When you read this sort of thing, I mean, it's hard to explain to you what was going on, because you read this, and it's like "What is this?" It's a lot to absorb because it's so It's not what I have thought happened for 45 years.
I didn't know the name Maskell until my mother died.
I joined the Baltimore County Police Department in July of 1997, and I went to the Homicide Unit here in Baltimore County in February of 2000.
I've been there ever since.
I'm new to the case, this is a couple weeks into this cold case, looking Re-looking at it.
I can only tell you this: If there was any evidence that anybody was involved in this murder, Father Maskell or anybody else, and that evidence was developed by these investigators there would be no cover-up.
These allegations against Father Maskell weren't brought about until the '90s.
He was investigated.
He was questioned.
He was looked at as a suspect.
As time went on, he was looked at even harder.
He wouldn't talk about the allegations of abuse.
He said he had nothing to do with Sister Cesnik's death.
He denied showing people certain things and being involved in that.
Flat-out denied it.
But let's be clear.
Nobody has been cleared yet by us, that are now working on the case.
I mean, we haven't given up on anything just 'cause it's 45, 47 years old.
We're not ruling out anybody.
This was from '69 when she was missing.
November 10th, 1969.
And I think this one I'm not sure where this one fits.
"Case priest" Yeah, this is all from '94 right there.
Gemma and Abbie seem to have so much information.
I cannot believe that the police have not talked to them.
You know, I was trying to take this in little pieces, 'cause it's a little overwhelming, and trying to be protective of, you know, my family, too, and try to see how far I needed to go in this investigation.
Okay, put it on.
Okay.
Is everybody ready? From a church in New Jersey, a former priest reads the words of a murdered nun.
It's not quite the agony to talk about it now as it was then.
But, you know, I really lost a, uh a fantastic human being.
On November 7, 1969, Cathy Cesnik was abducted Cathy cared deeply about a lot of people.
I just felt it was always a little different with Gerry.
She said, "I really feel Gerry will always be in my life.
He's someone that's very important to me.
" I knew she cared, but that was all I got out of her.
I got nothing else out of her.
After Cathy died, my parents didn't want me to talk to Gerry.
The way my dad told me is they have to clear everybody.
Everybody that was involved with Cathy has to be cleared.
I think the police might have told my dad that they suspected him.
It took me ten very painful years to recover from her death.
That was a long, tough journey.
What I needed to do eventually was get away from all that so I could start over.
I went out to Minnesota a celibate Jesuit priest, came back 12 years later a Methodist pastor, married with two kids to Diane.
This Is this for drinking or for putting into your cooking? Yes, for both.
Gemma and her crew told me that they went with Koob to the Carriage House.
They reviewed it all and looked at where the car had been and talked about all of that.
The way Gemma characterized that for me was that Koob had an emotional catharsis.
I was a little bit distressed.
Let's leave it with that.
There are so many holes in his story of what went on at the Carriage House that night I'll tell you the truth, I would take everything he says with a gigantic boulder of salt.
I do not believe the things that he told me.
There are three people that were present in Cathy's apartment all night after she disappeared.
One of them was Gerry Koob.
The other one was Pete McKeon, who was his friend, another priest, who we have not been able to locate or talk to.
And the third was Cathy's roommate, Russell Phillips.
Russell, unfortunately, died of cancer so, the information that we have been given about what happened the night that Cathy disappeared really comes in a large part from Gerry Koob.
Once they discovered her body, the police really grilled me because I was a man that she knew, and that was their theory, was that she was killed by somebody who knew her.
Detective Harry Bannon This is an exact quote 'cause it's burned its way into my memory over many years.
"Nugent, if Father Koob didn't kill her, he knows who did.
" I was in no way involved with it, never have been, never would have been.
I was trying to tell them to stop investigating me the first time I talked to them.
I said, "Here are the stubs to the movie we were at.
Here's the restaurant we were at.
Pete and I were together the whole night.
" That's fact.
We went back to my office in the retreat house.
And I remember this detail.
We were drinking Tia Maria, little chocolate liqueur.
And the phone rings, and it's Russell Phillips.
Koob told me that we got the call, and we drove up together from Annapolis.
There's a chance that Koob forgot, but Koob doesn't forget.
He's one smart guy.
For the first report in the morning Sun the day after the nun vanished, Brother Pete McKeon told the crime reporter that he had learned the nun was in terrible trouble and drove there from Beltsville, the suburb of Baltimore where he lived at the Christian Brothers Monastery.
Not from Annapolis with Koob.
I can remember two or three days at the police station being grilled, and I remember saying to them, "I'm Peter's alibi.
Peter's my alibi.
If you're gonna come after me for the murder, you have to go after Peter at the same time because we were together that night.
" Reports indicate that Koob and McKeon were polygraphed regarding those statements that they made about going back to the house and then coming to Ms.
Russell's house.
The records only indicate that they say they went to a movie and that after, then they had dinner.
The polygraphs didn't indicate any signs of deception in their story.
But Baltimore City detectives were not able to confirm by any eyewitness about the time they would've left there or the time they came back from dinner.
One of the many chores that still has to be done here, and a big one, is find McKeon and see if he'll tell you anything from his point of view.
Can I find Peter? No, I haven't pursued it that much.
I wouldn't say we were the world's closest friends, but, you know I can't tell you that he's alive still, but did you go looking at all or? The night that Cathy went missing, it was Russell, Gerry, and a third person that was there, - a guy named Pete McKeon.
- Mm-hm.
Mm-hm.
I called him at some point, and he hung up on me or the phone got disconnected.
I tried him back.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe let me call.
Hello? Hi, is this Pete McKeon? Is this Pete McKeon? Hi, Pete, I don't think I've ever met you, um, and, um If this conversation is something you don't wanna have with me, I'm okay with it.
My name's Marilyn Cesnik.
Um I'm Cathy's sister.
Right, right.
I'm her little sister.
I'm her younger sister.
I know that Russell had called you when Cathy went missing and that you had come there that night with Gerry.
Uh I mean, I guess I'm just searching for some answers, you know? Thanks, Pete.
Bye-bye.
He's 85.
The conversation was all over the place, except for when you mentioned Gerry's name, he repeated the whole story again and again.
I do think he's told the story so many times and had to tell it that that story Once you start him on that story, he's gonna say the whole story.
We had dinner together, we went to a movie, and then we were back when we got the call from Russell.
"'We made the decision that it was time to put the heat on Koob, ' Roemer recalls.
Roemer asked the Jesuit priest again and again, 'What exactly was the nature of your relationship with Sister Cathy?' Father Koob insisted that the two were simply good friends who enjoyed a great deal of purely platonic affection for each other.
'That's fine, ' he told the priest.
'But why would Sister Russell have called you instead of the police after Cathy disappeared that night?' Roemer understood the reason better a few days later after visiting Father Koob's residence at the Manresa Jesuit Community.
There, he said, he came across a letter Cesnik had written to the priest on November 3rd, only a few days before the nun vanished.
" My very dearest Gerry: "If Ever I Should Leave You" is playing on the radio.
My period has finally arrived ten days late, so, you might say I'm moody.
My heart aches so for you.
I must wait on you, your time and your need, because your life is so erratic.
I think I can begin to live with that more easily now than I did two months ago, just loving you within myself.
I must tell you, I want you within me.
I want to have your children.
I love you.
Koob hurried to make this point even before we started talking.
"I wanna make one thing clear.
I knew nothing of any abuse at that school, and Sister Cathy never breathed a word.
" And I, of course, politely would say, "She's being threatened.
She's probably left Keough and gone to Western because she's terrified of what's going on there.
You're deeply in love and may get married, yet she can never bring herself to say, 'Oh, by the way, he's raping girls in the chaplain's office.
'" If she had said something to me about priests sexually abusing girls at Keough, if she had said anything like that to me when she goes missing, I would've steered the detectives to look in that direction.
Later on, this one detective kept pursuing me and kept finding out more and more about my relationship with Cathy.
I remember finally saying to him, "You know, you're completely distracted.
I thought you were trying to find the murderer and you're not.
You're just curious about her relationship with me that you don't understand, but that's got nothing to do with this.
So, I consider you a completely distracted detective, and get back to doing your job.
" And then he got up and did something for which I will never forgive him.
He went back to the back room and he handed me her vagina.
And he said, "You need to understand, we're going after somebody viciously.
" And he was justifying his roughness with me.
So, it was a picture of her vagina? It was a black No, no.
The vagina was wrapped in newspaper.
So, it was It looked like a heart wrapped up.
And he threw it on the table.
I hate that guy for that.
That's nothing that would be done there.
I don't know where he came up with that.
That sounds like a dream or or something that I don't understand.
Not Not under my watch.
It might've been County.
I don't know.
I can't speak for them.
I've never heard from investigators that Koob ever made that allegation that he was mistreated or threatened by something like that.
I can't imagine a pr Somebody would think that a priest would cave by telling them something's wrapped up in a newspaper like that.
I'm not saying that "good cop, bad cop," those kind of techniques weren't used in the past.
Um I think that's a little out there.
Detective Bannon's last statement to me: "Tom, we got close to Koob and we were ready to break it, and a church lawyer stepped in and chewed the police-department brass out royally.
And from the day those lawyers showed up we was pulled off Koob and you couldn't go near him anymore.
" I think what infuriated me about this one particular guy was he was still saying, "There was more to that that we didn't get to, because we were blocked.
" And the idea that it had something to do with me I could never make any sense out of that story.
Hey, if you've got a priest and somebody's working on him and they're getting nowhere and nothing's being done on him, you're making a lot of waves.
The archdiocese had a right to ask, "Look, either charge Koob or get the hell off of him.
" The city had run him on the box.
Then when we get into it, we ran him on the box.
And we couldn't come up with anything that said he knew about or knew it was gonna happen or had any part in doing it.
We couldn't point our finger at Koob and say he was the one.
When Cathy's body was found, we had gone to the apartment, and I'll never forget, Russell was sitting on the couch and my mother was asking her for Cathy's things, and I remember distinctly Russell saying, "I can't help you.
I don't know where anything's at right now.
" She was that out of it.
She didn't talk much to begin with.
You know, she was quiet and reserved.
But at that point, she was non-communicative.
It was beyond reserve and quiet.
Her full name was Helen Russell Phillips.
We all called her Russell.
I loved her as one of my Sisters, but I always wondered what makes her tick.
And I I I could not connect with her that well.
I never could really read her.
I think Russell knew a lot more than what she ever expressed and told people.
How could she not? She lived in the house with Cathy.
After Cathy's death, Russ and I We were talking one night.
I guess I was just checking in on her.
And she said, "You know, Trish, if you wanna come live with me, you know, I have the room here.
You're welcome to do that.
" And so, I moved in, in June of 1970.
That first night I remember laying in the bed that was Cathy's and just wide awake, thinking "This was Cathy's room.
" For almost a whole year, I would be frightened to get out of my car and go into the apartment.
I would park the car and I would look at the rearview mirror, the two side mirrors, put whatever work I was gonna take in, and would go charging to get across the parking lot.
I did that every single day.
It was like, "That person that did it to her is out there.
" I wanted to know what happened and all that, well I cannot remember a time that Russell talked about Cathy.
Cathy's birthday would come and go.
No mention of Cathy at all.
I never asked questions but I wondered a lot.
Did Russell know what was happening to these girls? Of course.
Mother Maurice gave them permission to experiment with teaching in public high school and being nuns out in the regular world.
And I thought: "Wow, they're leaving to do something absolutely wonderful.
" But then I also know there are other questions, because it wasn't long after that Cathy was killed.
We've talked about the young woman who visited Cathy the night before she disappeared to talk about being abused at Keough.
She was very specific about what she remembered.
Joseph Maskell and Father Magnus came into the apartment as she was visiting with the two Sisters.
I find it hard to believe, because Russell would've said something about an upsetting visit the night before from Maskell.
And the question I raised for Gemma when she told me about it was, "Was Russell there?" When I questioned whether or not she was sure if Sister Russell was present, she was a little bit impatient with me and said, "I told you she was there.
She was there.
" That greatly puzzles me as to why she said nothing to Peter and me about that when Cathy has disappeared.
That only makes me scratch my head.
Was she hiding something from us? And so, could it have been something more? Could they have been leaving Keough because something wasn't right and they were trying to expose this priest? Were they threatened? I don't know.
I've never actually had the answer to that in my own mind.
Sister Helen Russell Phillips was with these priests.
They were all real closely associated.
It was all in the circle, and the killer was someone in that circle.
Sister Phillips knows a shit-lot more than she's ever told the police.
Phillips didn't say nothing to me or nobody else that I know of, but I still say she's got the key to unlock this thing.
Okay.
Here we are.
This is kind of hard to talk about, but I did some research on maggots.
I know there were some disagreements between what Jean shared about maggots being on Sister Cathy's body and the police saying that they weren't.
We need to see documents.
I mean, we don't know about the autopsy yet.
Autopsy reports in closed cases are public record, but the medical examiner's office said that they refused to have any information just out there.
They said they wouldn't release the autopsy information because if a perp did come forward and was a suspect, that might be valuable to them.
So, they didn't want the information just out there.
So, I think that's a dead end.
Diane.
Can you come here a minute? Can you find the file on this case? - Did you find it? - I did.
Oh, my God.
Look at that.
Hey, Diane, while you are here He was wondering, can you tell him what big cases I've been involved in? Well, it started with Kennedy.
John F.
Kennedy.
He was with the House Assassination Committees with Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
He was also hired by the family of Mary Jo Kopechne with Ted Kennedy.
O.
J.
, civil case against him.
JonBenet Ramsey.
Let's see, the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez.
- Spector.
- Spector.
Oh, Casey Anthony, yes.
Oh, Casey Anthony.
That was a good case.
- There was the Memphis - Oh, the Memphis Memphis Three and the Norfolk Four.
It was the appeals on those.
And, uh, the Stairway Killer.
- Not a - He consulted for the defense, but when he gave his opinion to the defense attorney, he decided that was not very beneficial for his case.
- Well, okay, thank you very much.
- You're welcome.
Okay.
If you are willing to look You know, a picture tells a thousand words.
That's what Confucius say Said.
This case came to my attention when I was in the city of Baltimore, working at the medical examiner's office as pathologist sometime in 1970.
Police call up and they say, "You know, we would really like to have Dr.
Spitz come to the scene with us.
" And what would I do when I get there? I would look over the body.
I would tell the photographer of the police, "Why don't you take a picture of the body as it is here? Don't move anything.
Don't even touch the body.
Just take a picture.
" And he would do that.
And this is the picture that I'm showing you here.
And what was it? What does it show? Her skirt was pulled up.
The chest was bare.
The person had obviously been severely assaulted.
Closer examination revealed a big defect in the side of the head.
Chest.
Chest.
Aha.
This is her skull.
This is the injury.
I take off the skin so that I get the correct visualization of this area.
This type of trauma would be from an impact with a dense, heavy object that was forcefully struck against the, uh skull.
So, she was probably not even dead immediately when the injury was inflicted.
She probably died subsequently.
Who knows for how long she remained alive? And, um made it so much more sad than it already was.
I was remembering for the first time back then, and I had no idea why I was remembering it other than I thought I was crazy.
And so, I didn't want anything to do with anyone who actually was remembering, too.
Abbie and Gemma and this grassroot movement has given me more confidence.
I am more prepared now to meet other people who have been abused.
And one of the things it does is, it stops the fear of meeting them from becoming a big monster, you know.
- Hi.
- Hi.
Nice to meet you.
And you're You're Jane Doe, I take it.
Yeah, yeah.
I take it you're Jane Roe? Yes.
Well - It's hard to believe I never met you.
- I know, I know.
Well - And you're Donna.
- Hi, I'm Donna.
- Nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I'm Jean.
Come in.
Come in.
I didn't even know what you looked like.
Oh! Back in '94 when I got the notice, you know, asking if I knew anything about sexual abuse at Keough, it was like, "Oh, my God, they know.
" - Yeah.
- "Oh, they know.
Somebody had the nerve to come forward.
" You did a lot for my recovery, you know.
I know we lost and they swept it under the carpet, but it made me feel better.
Yeah.
I can't even be Like, now that I'm an adult, I can't even be mad at him.
I'm mad at people that hid him and let him, you know Ugh.
It's just unbelievable.
Were either of you called to the nurse's office? 'Cause I got called to the nurse's office a lot, and the nurse would say, "Father Maskell wants to see you.
" They both knew that I was walking down that hallway to hell, and But then I think of Sister Cathy, and I think, "Well, maybe they were scared to death that he was gonna kill them," you know? My husband had a plan to kill him.
And I would go to therapy, and I would come back and I would say, "Nancy said don't do that, you know, because, you know You know, it will be us who end up being hurt by it because me and the kids won't have you around.
" - Right.
- But he had it planned out.
He knew what he was gonna do, and he only didn't do it because I had asked him not to.
I called him in '80 and told him, "If I ever see you around me or one of my kids, I will kill you.
" Wow.
Wow.
And then another time later, I heard he was in this church service, and I walked into the confessional.
I was just gonna start yelling and screaming at him, and I thought, "Everybody will be back here defending him.
" - Right.
- I know they'll defend him.
And so, I, you know, told him, "Stay away from me or I'll kill you.
" And I am so glad he's dead, because I don't know that I would be able to control myself now.
Now that we're all together, you know, we might have to carry out that Thank you.
This is really special.
This one nightstick This is the one I carried all these years.
There was a lot of different uses for these.
You could walk people with them.
If they were handcuffed, under their arm, you could walk them.
When I was a detective with the Baltimore Police Department in the '90s, I was studying to be a funeral director.
Well, I was working for some of the local funeral homes at the time.
And we were doing a funeral at Holy Cross Church.
And me and the funeral director were standing outside.
Well, I saw them bring Maskell out behind the church.
He was walking in the center of a small squad of people, maybe three or four.
And they put him in handcuffs and drove him away in unmarked cars.
In the city, we were not allowed just to put handcuffs on people.
You put the handcuffs on somebody, they were under arrest.
So, to see him come out of that church that day with handcuffs on there were charges to be filed, or it was a pretty intense investigation going on.
There would have to be some kind of paper trail.
You just don't take somebody out of a building, put him in a car, take him somewhere, and there's no paper trail.
It don't work that way.
There have always been stories that there were police/government cover-ups of Maskell's crime Hi.
I was looking for information on old criminal records.
They said if I came, I could look up names in a log and find the case numbers? that he was never criminally charged even though he had multiple accusations of abuse and that he was protected by the church and the state.
I'm pretty conservative, or I'm the doubting Thomas.
Give me documentation.
Give me proof.
But it's been two years now, and we're being told that documentation we have every reason to know existed does not exist.
I've written letters to the City of Baltimore Police, to the CIA, the FBI, Freedom of Information Act request.
"Dear Baltimore City Police Department: This is a request under the Maryland Public Information Act.
I am requesting copies of all complaints made to the Baltimore City Sex Crimes Unit that named Father A.
Joseph Maskell.
" We know that between 30 and 100 Keough women went to the Baltimore City Police Sex Crimes Division in 1994.
The police came to our office and met with and spoke to our victims.
All of my notes from my interviews with the victims, including their contact information, and my notes of what they described happening to them, I turned over.
Once I turned things over I don't know.
After your first letter, I conducted a database search.
The Sex Offense Unit had advised me they did not have files for Joseph Maskell.
The Homicide Section also advised that they do not have any files concerning Joseph Maskell.
There is no other place to search for the records you were asking for.
Sorry I could not be of more help.
" Why are these documents not available? Why are they not found? Yeah, I don't understand how that would be, you know, unless the reports were just made to disappear.
If there were detectives in Baltimore working this case, there would be a case folder there and the state's attorney's office would have a case folder because they would get copies of everything.
Where would those statements be? Would they be destroyed for some reason, do you know, or? Well, keep in mind that, um, this was the mid-'90s, so, things were not kept in a computer.
They would have just been pieces of paper in a folder.
So, there's a Jane Roe and a Jane Doe v.
Maskell and all.
Somewhere in these records, it says that documents from the dig were shown to the judge privately in chambers.
The cover here says "With one box of exhibits.
" Now, we would've loved to see the exhibits, but they say it's just gone.
It's not there.
We've now heard that the cemetery-dig documents were stored in a basement evidence room that was flooded during a storm and were just destroyed and disposed of.
It seems like all the hard documents that we've tried to get from the city have just disappeared.
They're just not there.
And I am very uncomfortable that the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office opted not to bring any criminal charges against Father Maskell.
I went down to the Baltimore City Courthouse several times.
I went to the archives.
- Are you in line? - Yeah.
Okay.
We found not only Maskell, but there was virtually no priests in Baltimore that had been found guilty of sex-abuse crimes, despite the archdiocese list of '02 that had maybe 50 names on it.
And when I go through the civil cases that were filed against the priests and the archdiocese, every one I can find was either dismissed on the statute of limitations or it was settled by the church with a cash settlement.
So, there were no findings.
No Catholic priest was ever found guilty of abuse there either.
I don't know if you remember this, but in 2002 the archdiocese published a list of abusive priests, and it had over 50 names, and as far as we can find, there's only one case in Baltimore City where a guilty verdict happened.
And in that case, the priest pleaded guilty.
Why is that? Well, once again, you've gotta have the evidence, okay? If the evidence isn't there to meet the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you can't go forward.
My mood changes.
Some weeks I'm angry and burned out and just wanna say we've done what we can.
You're not sure if it's just a complete waste of your time and energy, or whether there's some strategic advantage to just politely nibbling away, saying, "Hey, we're paying attention.
We're still here.
" You would think that this was a significant enough high-profile case that there would be records saved about the investigation, about the complaints.
It's hard to believe that there's nothing there.
Ocean Heights Presbyterian Church.
I think whoever did it is guilty and has had to live with something for a long time, hiding concealing, avoiding.
You know, has lived a miserable life wrapped around it.
I'd be the first person to tell you that the first person to forgive him would be Cathy.
That's the kind of person she was.
And she would inspire Has inspired forgiveness in me, whoever he is.
I can't walk around with that anger inside me.
I want to locate the discussion tonight about the real meaning of Yom Kippur, seeking perfection and then acknowledging failures and then seeking it again.
I can't help but think, for those of us who were raised in the Catholic community, this is what? Going to confession on Saturday, going to Communion on a Sunday, and then coming back the next Saturday and needing to go to confession again.
It had nothing to do with being rescued from a fall called original sin.
Well, Gerry and I met um, when I was in my last year seminary at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
We didn't hit it off very well at first.
I was in a fairly newfound feminist phase.
And I had a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment.
I thought a lot of the stuff that had been important to him in his life was pretty much nonsense.
You know? Just calling people "Father" and, you know But somehow we started talking, and he talked about Cathy, this very dear friend, this person he loved who was killed, and I Then I said, "Well, I had someone, actually my first love, who was killed in Vietnam.
" And that opened the door.
The rest, as they say, is history.
But that that drew us together.
Our values, our commitment to ministry, to trying to work for love and justice and peace in the world, all of those things drew us together.
There is a passage in Scripture about everything that is in darkness being brought to light.
If there were ever any remote possibility that he had been involved in something criminal I would want that brought to light.
The truth is more important than some story that we tell ourselves to keep our lives untroubled on the surface.
- Hey, how was the class? - Hello.
I'm confident that he was not involved.
I believe he was not in any way involved in anything that would ever have harmed or hurt her or anyone else.
And I've lived with him for 34 years, so, I think I have a good read on that.
After Cathy disappeared, I went back to school, and I was at my dorm.
I hadn't been back long, so, I'm thinking it had to be about a week afterwards.
And I went in the evening, got my mail from my mailbox, and that's when the letter was there from Cathy.
Her handwriting was very distinctive.
It was Cathy's handwriting.
I called my father, who'd worked for the post office.
He said, "Tell me everything that the postmark says.
" He said, "Marilyn, it was sent after Cathy went missing.
It was not sent before.
Stay there and don't move and don't open it, because it could be evidence.
So, please, don't open it, Marilyn.
" You know? You can imagine how much I really wanted to open that letter.
I remember expecting a policeman to come, but it was somebody It must've been a plainclothes policeman.
He didn't have a uniform on.
I called my father and I said whoever came to get that letter was not dressed as a policeman.
He said, "It was probably a detective.
Don't worry about that.
You did the right thing by giving it to them.
" For all these years, the fact that I was told that it was evidence and that's why they couldn't release it made me think that What is in that card? What did it say? What did it say? The detectives that I met with when I went to Baltimore in March I was there to give them my contact information since my parents were dead.
Is there anything new? Anything going on? Do you know who did it? But also to tell you I would really like my letter, and I understand that's evidence, and if I'm not even allowed to touch it, could we? Could I just look at it? Could I read it? They said they can't find it.
It must have been lost.
It existed.
There's no doubt it existed.
There's no doubt it was given to the police.
There's no doubt the police had it.
Where is it? Marilyn Cesnik, who's Cathy's sister, said that she received a letter after Cathy went missing.
Yes.
Could it have had a clue about what engagement present she had bought her? 'Cause Marilyn was the one who had just gotten engaged.
My understanding from her is that the letter is lost or has disappeared? Yeah, well, I know about the letter.
I have information about the letter, that there was a letter received by her sister afterwards.
But as far as I know, the letter isn't a part of the evidence anymore.
The city would have had possession of that, and we've never seen it.
So, what you're saying, I think, Robin, is that you know that it wasn't At least right now, you know it wasn't part of the evidence handed to County? It's not in our evidence room.
- Do we got a copy of the beast? - Yes.
So, we don't have anything from the city.
Correct.
Can you give me one sec? I gotta call the city and see if they still got evidence down there.
I made a bunch of calls, talked to some people.
Haven't been able to verify that the letter was ever turned over to us from the city.
Uh It was something that was heard about but never We From what I just got from the phone calls I made, we never received any physical evidence from the city.
So, I can't tell you.
I would have thought any documentation, any physical evidence that would have been recovered by the city during the missing-person investigation, would have been turned over to Baltimore County.
Marilyn says it was either postmarked on the Monday or Tuesday I believe.
It was postmarked on the 8th.
I've got it here.
You got the letter? No, not the letter, but I have the information on the letter.
Interesting.
So, there's a log of it being turned over as evidence, but there's no There's no indication of what was inside of it or what? - It doesn't say what the letter said? - No.
It says there was an envelope addressed to Ms.
Marilyn with Cathy's handwriting.
I mean, if they came into possession of it, it should be somewhere.
It should've been kept.
What I'm looking at is the autopsy report from Cathy Cesnik, and it's my understanding that, aside from the police and Cathy's family, that nobody else has had a chance to look at this.
I received this from Cathy's sister.
Marilyn's never read this, and she wants this information to be public information because she feels like it's important, I guess, for people to do what I did, just analyze this against what I know about the situation, measuring it against what we already have found out from other people.
Last year, we had the opportunity to talk to James Scannell, the supervising officer on duty the day that Cathy's body was found.
James Scannell said there were no maggots on Cathy's body.
Jean Wehner has told us that she was taken to see Cathy's body and that there were maggots on Cathy's face.
I have had police cold-case investigators snicker and laugh.
I remember the line, I think, from one cold-case investigator to me was, "Let's just say that Jane Doe has a poor memory, okay? She dreamed things that could not have occurred.
Cold weather does not allow for maggots.
" People always tell us that the Baltimore County Police say that some of the details of Jane Doe's recount weren't possible or weren't true.
So, I often wonder, when Jane Doe came forward in 1994 and said Father Maskell took her to see the body of Sister Cathy, if the Baltimore County Police, have always thought her story doesn't make sense.
I really can't comment on, you know, the credibility of that witness relative to another investigator.
I never spoke to her.
I never interviewed her.
One of the details that she always said about Sister Cathy's body being found was that she wiped maggots off of her face when she saw it, and what we've always heard is that that was always discredited because maggots would not be present in the winter.
Does that come up in the records at all? It's in the autopsy that there were maggots internally, in the trachea and in the mouth.
That's true.
When a fly lays an egg, in a day, the egg is converted into a living, moving maggot.
A tiny maggot.
The maggot grows in one week In seven days, the maggot grows to about an inch.
And flies don't propagate in the wintertime.
This is November 7th.
When Sister Cathy first disappeared, 55 degrees.
November 9th, 57.
The line graph is going up.
Well, the fact that there were maggots is indisputable.
If I said maggots, there were maggots.
So, there must have been some sunny and warmer days.
We continued to get warmer and warmer.
Monday was 62 degrees.
Oh, my God.
I always believed Jean, but this is clear evidence right here that what she says she saw was definitely there.
The truth is here in black and white.