MARYLAND
City Paper
Tom Nugent
City Paper
No one knows who bashed-in Sister Cathy Cesnik’s head and left her in a Landsdowne ditch 47 years ago. But everyone who has looked at the case in the past two decades or so thinks it’s a good bet that the parish priest murdered the young nun, probably because she was going to blow the whistle on the priest’s sexual abuse of young girls at the school where she taught.
Yesterday, authorities exhumed the body of Father A. Joseph Maskell, dead 16 years, to obtain his DNA and test it against evidence found in Cesnik’s case.
“Maskell was a player in this scenario that we needed to take a look at so,” Elise Armacost of the Baltimore County Police told WJZ. “This was a step that we needed to take.”
Maskell’s brother was a city cop, and Father Maskell was friends with a lot of other cops. One of the sexual abuse allegations was that Maskell forced students to have sex with a cop.
On May 19, Netflix premieres a seven-part documentary about murder of Cesnik called “The Keepers.”
Below is a reprint of City Paper’s 2005 piece detailing Cesnik’s murder, the alleged abuse—and the murder, just a few weeks after Cesnik disappeared, of another woman who might have known something about the sexual abuse. (Edward Ericson Jr.)
The old man sat on a metal folding chair in his Essex garage. His big right hand reached out to a wooden table, to a faded police autopsy photo lying there.
“Do you see that hole in the back of her skull?” asked Louis George “Bud” Roemer, a retired homicide detective formerly with the Baltimore County Police Department. Wrinkled and white-haired, he pointed to one side of the yellowing photograph he had dug out of a box of files. “That hole is perfectly round, and about the size of a quarter.
“I’ve studied that photo over and over again, trying to imagine how she might have died,” he said. “A hole like that—it looks to me like it could’ve been made with a ball-peen hammer.”
He paused for a moment, as he recalled the still unsolved murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, whose body was discovered 35 years ago this month.
“It might have been a hammer,” Roemer continued. “Or maybe a tire iron. Or maybe it was a priest’s ring—one of those heavy gold rings a lot of Catholic priests wear. A priest’s ring would make a hole like that, if he hit her hard enough.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.