UNITED STATES
Daily Mail (UK)
By Caroline Graham for The Mail on Sunday
One cold November afternoon in 1969, a 17-year-old schoolgirl called Jean Wehner was driven to a remote rubbish dump on the outskirts of the American city of Baltimore. There, she was led to the rotting corpse of her murdered teacher, Sister Cathy Cesnik.
‘This is what happens when you say bad things,’ the terrified teenager was warned.
The chilling scene from the new Netflix series, The Keepers, may seem like the plot of a Scandi-inspired thriller, but the hit show keeping millions of viewers on the edge of their seats is not a voguish noir fiction, but a cold-case documentary.
Already one of Netflix’s most successful series ever, the gripping seven-part show follows the real-life unsolved murder of Sister Cathy, who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer – apparently because she was threatening to expose widespread child sex abuse at the girls’ school in which she worked.
The murder of a nun is only matched by the revulsion viewers feel when the prime suspect is revealed to be Father Joseph Maskell, a paedophile Catholic priest who died in 2001 without ever being brought to justice.
The series reveals stunning new evidence in the case and brings to light disturbing allegations from victims who claim powerful figures in the Church and police – Maskell’s brother was a Baltimore police officer – colluded to shield him from justice. Already it has forced detectives to look again at the case, and has sparked an inquiry 3,000 miles away in Co. Wexford, Ireland, a country where the Church has been forced to apologise for a series of abuse scandals perpetrated by Catholic clerics and nuns.
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