MARYLAND
Inside Baltimore
By Tom Nugent
January 2015 – A second witness in the brutal 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik told Baltimore-area criminal investigators 20 years ago that she was shown the dead nun’s body by a policeman, according to two former Maryland law enforcement officials who did not wish to be identified.
The former law enforcement officials said the witness alleged that after showing her Sister Cathy’s body, the policeman warned her to keep silent and raped her “on the back of a police car.”
According to the former officials, the witness added that she was shown the corpse “at another location” than the Lansdowne, Maryland, remote wooded area where the nun’s badly decomposed body was discovered 45 years ago this month, on January third, 1970.
The former Maryland law enforcement officials also said the woman’s written statement “went up the chain of command, per standard operating procedure” at the Baltimore County Police Department – but that it was never acted upon by cold case investigators who were charged with working on the unsolved murder.
(Baltimore County Police conducted the murder investigation after the nun’s body was found lying in the dirt near a trash dumpster, in a remote area located in their jurisdiction a few miles south of the city of Baltimore.)
“Eventually the word came down that her information had not persuaded the [cold case detectives] to re-open [an active] investigation,” said one of the former law enforcement officials.
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