TOLEDO (OH)
WTOL11 [Toledo, OH]
March 20, 2026
By Brian Dugger
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.
Lee Pahl does not carry many firsthand memories of his aunt, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. She was much older than he was, and by the time he was old enough to remember her clearly, she was more like a revered presence in the family than a familiar daily figure.
But through family stories and documents, he has learned about her immense impact on the community through her more than 50 years of service to the Catholic Church.
“She was a registered nurse. She taught and was a science teacher. She had many supervisory positions in different hospitals over the years. She was the administrator of Mercy Hospital in Tiffin. She was the administrator of Saint Charles Hospital in Toledo,” Pahl says.
“She had some big positions in her time, but she was getting a little older and she was not ready to retire, so she took a job at Mercy Hospital in Toledo in 1971, basically just taking care of the chapel.”
Unfortunately, her job at Mercy eventually led to dozens of articles that fill albums put together by Pahl and his family. One day before she turned 72 years old, Sister Margaret Ann was brutally killed by Father Gerald Robinson in the sacristy of Mercy Hospital. It is the only known case in the United States of a Catholic priest killing a Catholic nun.
Pahl learned the horrific details of the crime while sitting through the three-week trial in the spring of 2006. But on a sunny, winter day, Pahl points out happier memories as he gingerly pulls out family photos from an album.
“She grew up here in Edgerton. It was on a 200-acre farm, north of town here,” Pahl says. “She was a very kind, gentle, caring person. She was very meticulous, very organized person, and she loved people. She always, that was her goal. She always wanted to help people.”
In the family, they did not call her Margaret Ann. They called her what she had become. “Sister,” Pahl says. “We just always referred to her as Sister.”
But the title was not just habit. It was respect.
In the spring of 1980, Pahl was 27 years old, working, raising a young son with his wife, a schoolteacher, and living what he called “everyday life.”
A phone call shattered that normality.
“I called home to my mom for something, and she told me about the murder,” he says. “You just don’t ever expect anything like that to happen, to a nun especially.” Then he adds the detail that still seems to defy sense all these years later: “In a chapel.”
What he remembers most from those first days is not being brought into the center of the investigation but being kept far from it.
“Our family knew nothing about what was going on, or very little,” he says. “We never knew that Father Gerald Robinson was a suspect in my aunt’s murder until he was arrested in 2004.”
When Robinson was arrested, Pahl was at work. Someone called and told him to turn on the television.
“I was so stunned,” he says. “I just never in a million years would have dreamed that. We thought this case was dead and gone.”
The arrest opened one of the most surreal chapters in Toledo history. But it also brought back memories of his aunt’s funeral in the days after her murder.
Pahl’s memory of the funeral is sharp, almost cinematic. He was one of the pallbearers. The funeral was held at the Pines in Fremont, where Sister Margaret Ann had begun her religious life in 1927.
He remembers the weather because of how violently it changed. “It was just a normal day,” he says. “It was not threatening.”
Then, during the funeral Mass, a violent storm hit. The windows shook. Hail pounded the chapel.
“The back doors to the chapel blew open and leaves blew in. Everybody was just sitting there wondering if this roof was coming off,” he says.
The storm coincided with Robinson delivering the homily. A family member turned to the rest of the family and made a comment about Robinson being the killer. When the service ended, the storm had passed, and outside there was “a big, beautiful rainbow.”
At the time, Pahl did not know what to make of it. Now he does. “It makes you wonder,” he says. “I think there was much more going on with that storm than what anyone realized at the time.”
Asked what he thought that might be, Pahl doesn’t hesitate.
“He was sending a message to Father Robinson.”
That belief grew stronger as Pahl learned more about the case, especially during Robinson’s 2006 trial. He went the first day thinking he should simply be there for his aunt, but then he kept coming back.
He had never heard most of what came out in the courtroom.
“I could not believe what I was hearing,” he says. “The pictures were scary.”
By the time witness after witness placed Robinson near the chapel, Pahl felt the case falling into place.
“It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle,” he says. “The prosecution just kept putting the pieces in, putting the pieces in, and pretty, pretty quickly there was a picture there.”
But for Pahl, the case was not only about Robinson. It was also what he believes happened behind the scenes in 1980 and what the church and police did not do.
“Absolutely,” he says when asked whether he believes there was a cover-up. “The church knew what was going on. The diocese knew what was going on. The police department knew what was going on.”
His conviction fuels his desire to tell his story one more time. He believes that his aunt’s loyalty was repaid with self-protection and silence.
“I don’t get it,” he says. “They’ve just protected themselves. Instead of being accountable for it and handling the situation and moving on, they just keep covering up, covering up, covering up.”
As part of this series, 11 Investigation has discovered – through documents and interviews – a number of questions about the church’s involvement in the case. Notably, Monsignor Jerome Schmit intervened in an early interview with Father Robinson, effectively ending the case. When it reopened in 2004, police and prosecutors struggled to get records from the church.
For years, Pahl has sought a conversation with church leaders and he has always been rebuffed.
That is why he still pushes today, especially over the public honors for Monsignor Schmit, including a street sign near Fifth Third Field and his name being attached to a CYO complex.
He describes his interaction with city and church leaders as “dismissal and then eventually silence.
Yet when he talks about his aunt, any anger gives way to tenderness.
“She was a servant of God,” he says. “She was very dedicated.”
Then he taps a favorite image of her. In it, a much younger Sister Margaret Ann is smiling broadly.
“She had a radiant smile. I really remember that.”