OHIO
Toledo Faith & Values
David Yonke Jun 2, 2014
Gerald Robinson, the Toledo Catholic priest who was convicted in 2006 of murdering a nun 26 years earlier, suffered a severe heart attack and has been moved to a prison hospice in Columbus, according to his attorney.
Rick Kerger, who has represented Robinson in a series of appeals since 2010, said the 76-year-old priest suffered the heart attack over the weekend and is not expected to recover. He is seeking to have Robinson moved to Toledo so that he can “die at home.”
Robinson was convicted in Lucas County Common Pleas Court on May 11, 2006, for the brutal murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, a 71-year-old nun who was attacked in the sacristy of the former Mercy Hospital near downtown Toledo on Holy Saturday, 1980. The petite, elderly nun had been choked nearly to death and then stabbed 32 times in the neck, chest, and face. The killer left Sister Pahl lying on the floor of the sacristy, adjacent to the hospital chapel, partly naked, where her body was discovered by another nun.
Detectives who investigated the murder in 1980 said that within a week Robinson was their sole suspect. But he was not arrested until April, 2004, after another Toledo nun testified before the diocesan review board that she had been abused as a child by members of a cult that included Robinson. Her testimony reached the Ohio Attorney General’s office, which ordered the Lucas County Cold Case Squad to look into her allegations.
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