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Posted 06-21-2017 by Kelly McEvers
This story includes content some readers may find disturbing.
Who killed Sister Cathy Cesnik? The Baltimore nun and school teacher was murdered in 1969, and in the Netflix documentary series The Keepers, her students tell a troubling story of abuse by priests, alleged police complicity and a possible cover-up by the Catholic Church.
Jean Wehner is one of those students. She attended Archbishop Keough High School in the late 1960s. Wehner tells NPR that she was “systematically abused, manipulated, raped, conditioned by [school chaplain] Joseph Maskell for a good year and a half before any of this with Sister Cathy happened.”
Wehner buried her memories of the abuse, and they stayed buried until 1992, when she began to remember things — like telling Cesnik about what was happening to her. After their conversation, Cesnik transferred to a different school, then disappeared. She was found dead nearly two months later. Her murder remains unsolved.
Wehner believes Cesnik may have been killed for knowing too much, but Maskell always maintained his innocence in both the killing and any abuse allegations. (He died in 2001.) The Archdiocese of Baltimore denied that there was any cover-up, but they have paid nearly $500,000 in settlements to 16 people (including Wehner) who accused Maskell of sexual abuse.
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