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Brian O'Neill: Justice for Sister Cathy is long overdue

By Brian O'neill
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
May 14, 2017

http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/brian-oneill/2017/05/14/Sister-Cathy-Catherine-Cesnik-murder-Baltimore-1969/stories/201705140086


Catherine Cesnik was the valedictorian of her Catholic high school class in Lawrenceville in 1960, where she’d also been the May Queen and the president of the senior class and student council.

Nine years later, Sister Cathy was brutally murdered in Baltimore. Nearly 48 years have passed and the killer has yet to be named, but Baltimore County Police haven’t given up.

The body of a priest was exhumed in February in hopes of finding DNA evidence that could be linked to an item found near the body.

The murder and possibility of a decades-long coverup are the subject of a Netflix documentary, “The Keepers,” set to begin streaming May 19 in seven one-hour episodes. It’s filled with the testimony of the students of Sister Cathy, who taught English at Archbishop Keough High, an all-girls Catholic school in Baltimore.

Many of them believe that Father John Maskell, the priest whose body was exhumed, was either the killer or an accomplice. He was the school chaplain and guidance counselor, and several of these women say he sexually molested them. At least three women say uniformed police officers also participated in the abuse; Maskell was also the Baltimore County police chaplain and the brother of a police officer.

One accuser, Jean Wehner, 16 at the time of Sister Cathy’s murder, says Maskell took her to a remote area to see the nun’s lifeless body, as a way to keep the teenager in line. She’d hold her tongue for decades.

The murder victim’s sister, Marilyn Cesnik Radakovic, who lives in Sarasota, Fla., messaged that passing years have made it no easier to talk about the murder. She was very close to her “wonderful sister” who was “so much more than a murder victim,” but she asked that I get information from the documentary director, Ryan White.

Mr. White’s aunt was a student of Sister Cathy’s and a friend of Jean Wehner’s. He’d read the news accounts of the accusations, “quite unbelievable on the written page,” but after his aunt introduced him to Ms. Wehner, he heard the story firsthand at her dining room table. By the time that conversation ended, he believed she was credible.

He and his colleagues have spent three years making the documentary, interviewing dozens of people and shooting 750 hours of footage. That it’s arriving in the wake of Baltimore County’s revived investigation may be a coincidence, but “it’s a very positive move forward that they’re taking Father Maskell seriously as a suspect,” Mr. White said.

Maskell died in 2001, seven years after he’d been removed from the ministry due to the abuse allegations and a year before Baltimore County Police Department launched its Cold Case squad. He’d fled to Ireland in 1994 while the case was still under investigation but returned a couple of years later. He was buried just south of the city. After his death, the Archdiocese of Baltimore reached settlements with at least a dozen people who said he abused them.

Maskell’s body was exhumed, a police spokeswoman explained, after retirements from the Cold Case squad led to a new group of detectives deciding that recent advances in DNA testing might lead to a break in case. They’re dealing with 250 unsolved homicides dating to 1916, but they believe it could now be easier to either match or exclude Maskell from a piece of evidence found near Sister Cathy’s badly decomposed body.

She was found by passing hunters in a clump of bushes off the Baltimore Beltway on Jan. 3, 1970, the back of her head caved in. She’d last been seen on the evening of Nov. 7, when she’d gone shopping for an engagement present for her sister. Her car was found near her apartment the next morning but her body was found miles away.

The day after that grisly discovery, The Pittsburgh Press had the story at the bottom of a crowded front page. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a Page 2 story the following day about the death of this 26-year-old Sister of Notre Dame, Catherine Cesnik, daughter of a postal worker and blood sister to three, who’d attended St. Mary’s School on 57th Street and St. Augustine High School.

Each newspaper ran a one-paragraph obituary two days later. Sister Cathy’s did not reappear in a Pittsburgh newspaper again until the exhumation announcement last week.

Sister Charmaine Krohe, provincial leader of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Baltimore, knew Sister Cathy and is also from Pittsburgh but didn’t wish to be interviewed. Instead, she emailed:

“Sister Cathy was a warm, vibrant, kind person, beloved by her family, our SSND community and her students. Our hearts go out to the women who had the courage to come forward about their abuse. ... Cathy’s loss was difficult and also personal. We wish to honor her memory more privately.”

Sister Cathy’s mother, Ann Patricia Cesnik, died at 92 in November 2015. Her Mass of Christian Burial was held at the St. Augustine Monastery Chapel on 36th Street, and Mrs. Cesnik left this Earth not knowing who had killed her daughter or why.

One expects Sister Cathy would be proud of her English students, some now grandmothers, doggedly chasing down leads and sharing them in a Facebook group. They’re seeking her killer and that of another young murder victim who disappeared the same week not too far away. “Justice for Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki” is the group name and its mission.

Contact: boneill@post-gazette.com




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