TOLEDO (OH)
WTOL11 [Toledo, OH]
March 20, 2026
By Brian Dugger, Melissa Andrews
Now a judge, the former defense attorney recalls the pressure, the evidence and why she believed the case against Father Gerald Robinson fell short.
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.
Nicole Khoury was 28 years old when the Father Gerald Robinson trial began, young enough to call herself “third chair” without disrespecting herself and experienced enough to know that she had stepped into something enormous. She had already built the outlines of the life Toledo would come to know well: University of Toledo law school graduate, public defender, criminal defense attorney, musician.
Long before she took the bench as a Toledo Municipal Court judge, long before she built Project iAm and Acoustics for Autism into a signature cause, Khoury sat in the middle of one of the city’s most unusual murder cases, helping defend a priest accused of killing a nun.
“I was a very young attorney,” she says. “I was working on my own, both for the public defender’s office and as a criminal defense attorney. But from the time I was in law school all the way through my career was doing research for Alan.”
That Alan was veteran defense attorney Alan Konop. John Thebes was across the hall. When Robinson’s case landed in their offices, Khoury joined the team behind them, doing the dense, technical work that old cases demand.
“So when this case came about and John and Alan decided to represent Father Robinson, there were a lot of really unique issues for research that needed to be done because the case was so old,” she says. “So they brought me on to kind of do all that research and to sit, I’d call myself, third chair in the trial.”
The research itself forced her into corners of evidence law most lawyers never touch.
“So the craziest thing that I did was the ancient document rule, a 20-year-old case,” she says. “A lot of these people are not going to still be around.”
She dug into old police reports, statements from dead witnesses, questions about whether aging evidence had been preserved correctly and whether any of it could still come into court. She even went back to a mentor at the University of Toledo.
“I actually talked to my old evidence professor, Ron Raitt,” she says. “I went and had a whole meeting with him about it because the only time I had ever heard about the rule or used anything with it was in evidence class in law school because it’s so rarely used.”
But Khoury does not remember the case as an academic exercise. She remembers the pressure. She remembers noise. She remembers a courtroom so tense that “you could cut the tension with a knife.”
“In my opinion, the biggest problem trying to prepare for the case was just the attention to it and the outside thoughts about the case,” she says. “You’re hearing everybody and you have to put all of that out when you’re trying to research it and prepare for a case like this.”
She also remembers what the defense centered itself on: science, doubt and the burden the state had to carry. The prosecutors built much of their case around the letter opener they said matched wounds in Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s body. Khoury and the defense fought that conclusion from every angle they could.
“Well, first and foremost, we absolutely attacked the way that the coroner’s department went about analyzing whether the weapon fit into the mandible,” she says. “We had our own experts. We used nationally recognized experts and we had them come, in my opinion, we had a forensic answer for everything that they threw at us when they said it was a letter opener.”
The defense argued that a different missing object made more sense: Sister Margaret Ann’s scissors.
Khoury lights up when she tells the story of how that theory came together.
“That was an a-ha moment that John Thebes had one night late,” she says. “He had all this evidence in his hand and he dropped it and when he looked down, there was the picture of the blood spatter on the cloth and it was upside down. When he looked at it upside down, he goes, oh my gosh, that looks like a pair of scissors.”
Then there was the DNA.
“The DNA was huge,” Khoury says. “None of the DNA that was found at the scene belonged to Father Robinson, not the DNA that was underneath her fingernails, and I think that that was a really big deal for us.”
All these years later, that evidence – and the jury dismissing it – still doesn’t make sense to her.
“Having a 70-year-old nun, having a man’s DNA under her fingernails, and I believe if I remember correctly, that it came back that it was blood included … where is that going to come from?” she says. “You have to have somebody’s male bloody DNA under your fingernails, and she’s a nun and she lives her life in Mercy Hospital and Mercy College and how are you going to explain that away?”
Khoury believes the defense had done enough. More than enough. When the jury came back quickly, she thought the speed meant acquittal.
“I was pretty shocked, yeah,” she says. “The verdict came back quick. I think it was like six hours, and when it came back quick, I thought this is good news. I really did.”
Instead came guilt, and Khoury has lived with that outcome for two decades now.
“I was spent after this,” she says. “I was exhausted emotionally. I was exhausted physically.”
As a judge now, she says the lesson has never left her. “Beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt,” she says. “It is a very large burden to prove, and that has absolutely, absolutely swayed the way that I do things in the courtroom.”
For all the years that have passed, Khoury still carries one date in her mind.
“Whether it’s Father Robinson or whether it’s not, I would love to know the truth. Everybody always asks, is there one day in history you’d go back to? It’s not the birth of Christ. It’s not the day JFK got shot. It’s April 5, 1980. I want to know what happened that day exactly.”