BALTIMORE (MD)
Inside Baltimore
Retired Cop Confirms 2 Witnesses Also Reported
“Death Threats” from the Later-Defrocked Cleric
“I Wiped Maggots from Her Face,” Recalls
Former Student at Baltimore Catholic School
Archdiocese Paid $40,000 to a Second Abuse Victim
For Injuries Dead Nun Allegedly Sought to Prevent
By Tom Nugent
[Editor’s Note: The two poems at the end of the following story are published with the permission of the author, who signed them as: “Jean Hargadon Wehner, Survivor.”]
November 2014 – After remaining anonymous for more than 40 years, a Baltimore woman has come forward to identify herself as a witness who was “shown the dead body of Sister Cathy” Cesnik by a Catholic priest who was allegedly involved in the nun’s murder as a way to keep her from reporting his sexual abuse of students at a Catholic high school in the city.
Jean Hargadon Wehner, known only as “Jane Doe” during a controversial 1994 lawsuit that sought to collect $40 million in damages resulting from alleged rampant sexual abuse at Archbishop Keough High School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, said she was taken to a garbage dump in Lansdowne by the alleged abuser-priest in the late fall of 1969.
The isolated and difficult to find dump was located only half a mile from the St. Clement Roman Catholic Church in Lansdowne, where the alleged – and later defrocked – abuser-priest served as pastor for several years.
“When [the now-deceased pastor, Father A. Joseph] Maskell told me he would take me to Cathy [murder victim Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, a former English teacher and drama coach at the high school], he led me to believe she was still alive,” said Wehner. “I had no idea where we were going. As I walked around a corner, I saw her on the ground. I ran over, bent down, and began wiping maggots off her face.
“As I stared at my hands in shock, Maskell leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘You see what happens when you say bad things about people?’”
Wehner, one of two plaintiffs in the 1990s lawsuit, said she had decided to come forward at this time because other former Keough students have also been speaking out about the alleged abuse in recent months – and because her own healing process has now reached the point where she can talk more openly about the years of abuse she allegedly endured at the former Catholic girls high school in southwest Baltimore during the late 1960s.
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