BALTIMORE (MD)
Inside Baltimore
New Evidence Links Merzbacher Child-Rape Case To Rampant 1970s Sex Abuse at Keough High School, According to Former Police Investigators in Maryland
By Tom Nugent
Twenty years after convicted child-rapist John Merzbacher received four life sentences plus ten years for his crimes at a South Baltimore Catholic middle school, there is new evidence to show that a later-defrocked, sex-abusing priest at a city Catholic high school was also involved in helping to cover up the middle school abuse, according to former high-ranking Maryland police officials who did not wish to be identified.
The newly emerging evidence is the first to suggest that there were significant links between the sex crimes at the Catholic Community Middle School in the Locust Point section of the city and the widely reported Archbishop Keough High School sexual abuse. That abuse was accompanied by the 1969 murder of former Keough teaching sister Catherine Ann Cesnik.
The murder of the nun (who was reportedly killed while trying to blow the whistle on rape and other sexual assaults at Keough) and the Keough chaplain’s suspected role in her death were both described in massive detail in a lengthy story recently published by Huffington Post.
The Huffington Post story quoted a retired Baltimore homicide detective who said that Father A. Joseph Maskell became a key figure during the early days of the murder investigation. “It got to the point that Maskell was the number one guy we wanted to talk to,” said the detective, “but we never got a chance.” The detective was never able to interview the priest, he said in the HP story, while also noting that “the Catholic Church had a lot of input into the police department, a lot of power.”
The Huffington Post story (http://huff.to/1Q1EKqd) did not mention the horrific child-rapes that had taken place at the Catholic middle school in Locust Point during roughly the same period as the Keough abuse. But a two-year investigation by Inside Baltimore of the sexual abuse that occurred at both Keough and Catholic Community Middle School in South Baltimore – both of which were operated by the School Sisters of Notre Dame – has revealed significant connections between them.
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