TOLEDO (OH)
WTOL11 [Toledo, OH]
March 20, 2026
By Brian Dugger
The longtime religion reporter recalls the moment the story broke, the national attention that followed and why he ultimately believes the jury got it right.
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.
David Yonke spent decades covering religion for The Blade, but none of that experience prepared him for the moment a colleague walked up to him in the newsroom in 2004 with a career-defining tip.
“I was sitting in my cubicle,” Yonke says. “Chris Hall came up, and she was the police reporter. And she asked me if I knew anything about a Father Gerald Robinson.”
Yonke barely did.
“I knew he served the Polish Catholic churches and not much more than that. I said, ‘Why do you ask?’”
Hall’s answer stunned him.
“And she goes, ‘Well, I think he’s about to be arrested.’ I said, ‘Arrested? For what?’ And she goes, ‘Murder.’”
Yonke still remembers the jolt of hearing those words.
“I almost fell out of my chair.”
Days later, Father Robinson would be arrested for the killing of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.
At the time, the Catholic Church was already dominating headlines for another reason. Following the Boston Globe’s investigation of the Boston Archdiocese in 2002, dioceses across the country began settling with victims of priest abuse. In 2004, Yonke reported that the Toledo Diocese had settled with 23 victims for more than $1 million that summer.
“At the time, the Catholic Church was in the news for all the clerical abuse cases and allegations and things,” he said. “So there was a lot going on with the Catholic Church, but murder was a real shock.”
As Yonke began researching the case, he discovered just how unusual it was.
“I researched it as much as I could,” he says. “I think there was one in Italy, but this was the only case in U.S. history of a priest arrested and charged with the killing of a nun.”
The nature of the religion beat changed dramatically in the early 2000s. After the attacks of Sept. 11 and the explosion of clergy abuse investigations, stories about faith had become front-page news.
“Before I started covering religion in 2000, it was kind of the back page stuff about what church is building a new sanctuary or whatever, what color carpet they were going to use,” Yonke says. “And then all of a sudden you had 9/11 in 2001 and Islam was in front page news and then the clerical sexual abuse scandal rocked the Catholic Church in 2002.”
The next morning, Yonke had a meeting that set the tone for years of reporting.
“I went down to the police station the next day on Saturday and met with the detectives,” he says. “That’s when things really kind of snowballed because Steve Forrester and Tom Ross were talking about it and said they believed that the nun was killed in a ritual killing.”
When Yonke brought the claim to readers, it immediately drew national attention.
“I wrote a story about that that ran at the top of The Blade on Sunday,” he says. “And on Monday, I started getting calls from New York publishers saying this case is so unusual, you need to write a book about it.”
He resisted the idea at first.
“I really wasn’t too keen on writing a book about such a sad story,” Yonke says. “But I ended up doing it.”
The result was “Sin, Shame & Secrets: A True Story of the Murder of a Nun, the Conviction of a Priest, and the Cover-up in the Catholic Church.”
As Yonke dug deeper, he became convinced that the story stretched far beyond a single crime scene. It reflected the power the Catholic Church once held in Toledo.
“I talked to some policemen that worked in Toledo in 1980,” Yonke says. “They said you could not arrest a priest. It was just impossible.”
In 2005, Yonke’s colleagues, investigative reporters Joe Mahr and Mitch Weiss, documented a 50-year history of Toledo police officers protecting the church and the church quietly transferring suspected pedophiles to other areas of the country.
Officers told Yonke that allegations involving clergy were often handled quietly inside church leadership.
“If you try to arrest a priest for anything, the police chief would go to the bishop, no charges would be filed,” he says. “The bishop would take care of it and the priest would be sent away or moved or whatever, but there were never any official charges.”
Yonke pointed out that several key officials in Toledo at the time of Sister Margaret Ann’s killing were themselves deeply connected to the Catholic Church.
“The Lucas County prosecutor, Tony Pizza, was a devout Catholic,” he says. “The deputy police chief Ray Vetter was a devout Catholic who was looking at becoming a deacon in the Catholic Church.”
To Yonke, those dynamics helped explain why the investigation stalled in 1980.
“Yes, I really do believe that,” he says when asked if Robinson could have been protected by the church. “The detectives on the case said that within 10 days they had narrowed it down to one suspect.”
But when investigators presented their evidence to prosecutors, Yonke says the case stopped there.
“The prosecutor said there wasn’t enough there to charge him,” Yonke said. “The police detective Art Marx, in particular, was really frustrated because he said we wanted to go arrest him and take it to court and let the court decide, but the prosecutor wouldn’t even let it go that far.”
By the early 2000s, however, society’s perception of the church was much different.
“Yes, it changed dramatically after the clerical sexual abuse scandal erupted in Boston and then spread across the country,” Yonke says. “Back in 1980, the priests were put on a pedestal.”
He remembers hearing stories from victims who were not believed.
“One of the victims told me that he went and told his mom that he had been abused by a priest, and the mom slapped him and said, ‘Don’t you ever talk about father like that,’” Yonke says.
When the police investigation reopened in 2004, there were a series of new developments, including the altar cloth evidence and theories about the distinctive letter opener prosecutors believed was the murder weapon.
Detectives also exhumed Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s body to examine the wounds again.
“They looked at the wounds on her body and they saw that it did appear to match the shape of the letter opener’s blade,” Yonke says.
When the case finally went to trial in 2006, Yonke realized just how much attention it would draw.
“There was a line of national television network trucks along the street parked in front of the courthouse,” he said. “Court TV was there. They covered the trial from gavel to gavel.”
After decades in journalism, Yonke says the case was a one-of-a-kind experience.
“I retired from journalism in 2023 after almost 50 years, 48 years in journalism,” he says. “I’ve never seen a case like this.”
Though he knew intimate details of the case because of his access to records and investigator, he was on the fence about Father Robinson’s guilt.
“I went into the trial with an open mind saying, OK let’s see what you got,” Yonke says. “Is he guilty? Is he innocent? I really didn’t know.”
But his doubts slowly disappeared.
“As the case kept going, I thought that the prosecution team did a terrific job of proving that Father Robinson was the killer,” Yonke says.
By the end of the proceedings, he believed the jury reached the right conclusion.
“I felt like I was the 13th juror,” he says. “I agreed with the jury that I really believed that they had the evidence to prove that he was guilty.”
Still, Yonke acknowledges that the case leaves lingering questions.
“One of the big questions is, was it a ritual killing or was it just a man who snapped,” he says.
Twenty years after the conviction, the story still feels surreal to him.
“Even now I still kind of shake my head and find it almost hard to believe,” he says. “If I made this up as a fiction story, nobody would believe it.”