TOLEDO (OH)
WTOL11 [Toledo, OH]
March 20, 2026
By Brian Dugger
From missing records to questions about church cooperation, the lead prosecutor reflects on the challenges of convicting Father Gerald Robinson decades later.
Editor’s note: This article is just part of a much larger story. Beginning March 23, you can stream the full documentary on WTOL 11+. The app is free and available on your phone or smart TV, giving you access to exclusive reporting, extended interviews, and the complete investigation.
In the days after Father Gerald Robinson was convicted of killing Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, Dean Mandros finally took a moment to catch his breath and look at his computer at some of the coverage of the case.
For months, he had been inside the prosecutorial bubble, shielded from the global attention on the first U.S. case involving a Catholic priest accused of killing a Catholic nun.
“My eldest daughter walks by my computer screen and sees what I’m doing, and she turned and looked at me and said, ‘Dad, the trial is over.’ So, I moved on to the next case,” Mandros says.
Although he was the lead prosecutor of Robinson, he did not run toward the case. But as a member of Julia Bates’ cold case unit, he was familiar with the name of the longtime Toledo priest when prosecutors received a letter mentioning allegations of his involvement in sadomasochistic abuse.
“The accusations in the letter were pretty extreme and some of them hard to accept as being true,” he says, “but just his name stuck out. It resonated with the investigators that he was a suspect many years before.”
Even then, he was not eager to take it on. “My personal inclination was I wasn’t very excited about putting in the time and effort on this case because of the age of the case, the fact that he was a priest, and that’s a pretty good high hurdle to have to overcome.”
It was not fear so much as realism. A priest. A nun. Missing reports. Fading memories. A city with a long Catholic memory, with a history of protecting clergy. Mandros knew exactly what kind of case that was.
What changed his mind was the work. “The investigators did such a good job of research, bringing forth the items of physical evidence, finding witnesses that were still alive, that they presented a compelling case,” he says. “We felt we have to follow the evidence, so here we go.”
“Follow the evidence” sounds clean and clinical, but the reality was messier. Mandros had to help lead a prosecution in a case that had already been damaged by time and, he strongly suggests, by something more than time.
“Having missing evidence, missing police reports, doesn’t go in the plus column for the prosecution,” he says. “All the paperwork that dealt with the detectives’ interactions (in 1980) with Gerald Robinson came up missing.”
He stops short of claiming he can prove what happened to those records.
“We have suspicions, but we could never establish that as a fact.”
Those suspicions sharpened when the diocese was less than forthcoming. Prosecutors asked for Robinson’s records and received what Mandros recalls as fewer than 20 pages. Much later, reciprocal discovery from the defense produced a personnel file of more than 100 pages.
“We knew at that time that the diocese apparently had a particular point of view as to how they were viewing matters,” he says. “They weren’t candid and forthright with us.”
Prosecutors responded with search warrants, trying to determine whether there were other records “that we weren’t made privy to that we should have been.”
Mandros is careful, in the way judges and seasoned prosecutors often are. He will not overclaim. He does not say he can prove collusion. He does not say he can prove obstruction in a criminal sense. But he leaves little doubt about what the conduct looked like from his side of the courtroom.
“Clearly, when we ask for records and paperwork and we don’t get what we lawfully requested, yes, that’s a hindrance to the prosecution.”
He is just as measured when he talks about 1980, when Robinson was the lone suspect – but not charged. Yet his frustration is easy to hear, especially when the conversation turns to Deputy Chief Ray Vetter and Monsignor Jerome Schmit entering the police station and interrupting Robinson’s interrogation.
Mandros pressed Vetter at trial. He points to the missing reports, to the private file Vetter maintained, to the testimony that Schmit was his close friend, to the fact that Schmit was picked up and driven to the station.
A letter is discovered in which a priest informs the bishop that Vetter is keeping Schmit in the loop about the investigation, even saying that police were preparing to present the case to prosecutors. Mandros pressed him on the stand about the appropriateness of that communication. Vetter said he didn’t remember making those statements.
“There was plenty of talk during the trial and after the trial about how the police department gave passes to a lot of misconduct by local priests,” he says. “There was kind of an unwritten policy on how to handle priests if they should happen to be forced to interact with policemen.”
Mandros also understood that the jury would not be trying the 42-year-old Robinson who worked at Mercy Hospital in 1980. They would instead be looking at a frail, elderly priest sitting with counsel, so the prosecution kept forcing the contrast into the room.
“It was critical for us, for every witness who was there at the time back in 1980, we put up a picture of him when he was, I think, 42 years old at the time of the offense,” he says. “We’re not trying this 68-year-old little old man here at the counsel table. It’s this 42-year-old fellow who looks healthy and vibrant that did this crime.”
His theory of the case was not ultimately about ritual, even if ritual elements hovered around it. It was simpler, and in some ways darker. A witness said Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was upset about the way Good Friday services had been conducted. She cried over it. She was, as Mandros put it, “a classic old school straight arrow conservative nun,” a woman used to authority and unafraid to use it.
The prosecution believed she confronted Robinson and humiliated him. In closing, Mandros distilled it to one line: “A man got very angry at a woman. And the woman died.”
He knew the jury first had to accept one thing above all else: the letter opener was the murder weapon.
“If we couldn’t convince a jury of that, then nothing good is going to happen thereafter,” he says.
The rest followed from there: Robinson’s lies, the witnesses who placed him near the chapel, Sister Margaret Ann’s anger the day before, and the letter opener found in his exclusive control. Mandros believed the case was strong. He still knew one juror could sink it, so when the verdict came back quickly, he thought only two things were possible: “Either we presented a very underwhelming case or we had a very overwhelming case. I didn’t think we presented an underwhelming case.”
Now a Lucas County Common Pleas Court judge, elected in 2010, Mandros looks back at the case less as a career marker than as a lesson in what the justice system can and cannot do.
It can answer who, what, when and where. It often cannot answer why. And it cannot undo the indignities that follow a crime. He remains especially struck not by how the church treated Robinson after conviction, but by how it treated Sister Margaret Ann after her death.
“The diocese never once reached out to the police department or the prosecutor’s office and inquired about the status of the investigation as to who killed this nun in this chapel,” he says. “Never once.”
And when Robinson died, still bearing his priestly title and receiving a full funeral Mass, Mandros saw another injury layered on top of the first.
“I’m not Roman Catholic and if they want to give him a full priestly sendoff, so be it,” he says, “but it just seems like another indignation and slap at this poor woman.”