MARYLAND
Washington Post
By Tom Jackman May 5
The body of a Catholic priest from Baltimore, whose sexual assaults on teenaged girls in the 1960s and 1970s caused the Archdiocese of Baltimore to pay out a dozen settlements last year, has been exhumed by Baltimore County police still trying to solve the 1969 slaying of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, police said Thursday.
Cesnik’s death has long been one of Baltimore’s most puzzling homicides, and is the focus of a new documentary series, “The Keepers,” to be released on Netflix on May 19. The longtime suspect in her death is the Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, who was the chaplain at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore and also a chaplain for the police in both Baltimore city and county. He was removed from priestly duties in 1992 when allegations of sexual abuse against him were first made to the church, he fled the country in 1994, and was never charged with a crime before his death in 2001.
Baltimore County police spokeswoman Elise Armacost said Thursday that detectives had been working actively on the case for the last four years, in part because of continuing tips about sexual abuse at Keough, and that the timing of the exhumation of the body on Feb. 28 was not related to the Netflix documentary. “As part of the effort to leave no stone unturned,” Armacost said, “our homicide detectives asked the state’s attorney to approve an order to exhume the body of A. Joseph Maskell so we could take a DNA sample and work up a DNA profile to see if it would match remaining evidence” in the Cesnik case. “If it does, it’s a huge step in this investigation.”
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