UNITED STATES
Catholic Herald
Chris Byrd
Catholic News Service
NEW YORK — Director Ryan White’s visually striking, atmospheric documentary series “The Keepers” examines the unsolved murder in 1969 Baltimore of popular 26-year-old Sr. Cathy Cesnik. Presented in seven one-hour installments, “The Keepers” began streaming on Netflix May 19.
A former English teacher at Archbishop Keough High School, an archdiocesan academy for girls, Sr. Cesnik was on a year’s leave of absence from her order, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and working in the city’s public education system at the time of her death. She was likely killed — so the filmmakers hypothesize — because she knew too much about her former colleague, Fr. A. Joseph Maskell.
Long after it came to light through the accounts of his victims, that Fr. Maskell, a chaplain and counselor at Keough, sexually abused multiple students during his time there.
The extensive descriptions of the priest’s vicious crimes — in egregious violation of his sacred trust — will sicken, trouble and outrage viewers, faithful Catholics above all. With one notable exception, however, the presentation of these unsettling details isn’t lurid.
During an interview with former Jesuit priest Gerry Koob, who was close to Sr. Cesnik and a suspect in her murder, Koob bizarrely accuses a Baltimore detective of intimidating him during the initial investigation by showing him the dead woman’s private parts, severed from her body by the killer.
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