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Who Killed Sister Cathy?
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2005_01_06/2005_01_12_Erlandson_MurderHe.htm
Much more at the linkBaltimore, City Paper
By Tom Nugent | Posted 1/5/2005
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The body of the 26-year-old nun was found Jan. 3, 1970, in southwest Baltimore County. The circumstances surrounding the case were mysterious and disturbing at the time; in the wake of a City Paper investigation, those circumstances seem even more disturbing now.
Years after Cesnik’s murder, a lawsuit documented numerous findings of sexual abuse at the Catholic high school for girls where Cesnik taught shortly before her death. City Paper’s investigation also reveals that a second young murder victim (killed only four days after Cesnik vanished, and only a few miles from where the nun died) attended the same Catholic church where the alleged sex-abuser had been serving as parish priest.
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...Cesnik had vanished on Nov. 7 during a brief, early evening trip to a shopping center about a mile from the Westgate apartment she shared with another Notre Dame nun, Sister Helen Russell Phillips.
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Talking fast, the officer told the M Squad captain that two hunters had just called to report what looked like a “woman’s body” lying near a garbage dump off Monumental Avenue, in an isolated, wooded area in the southwest Baltimore County community of Lansdowne.
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In all likelihood, the unknown assailant had then killed the nun and dumped her body about five miles away, in Lansdowne. But his hypothesis was contradicted by one troubling fact: The nun’s car, a green 1969 Ford Maverick, had been parked near her Carriage House apartment complex only a few hours after she drove off to the shopping center.
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On Nov. 13, 1969, six days after Sister Cathy Cesnik vanished, not to be found murdered for two long months, a second young woman—20-year-old Joyce Malecki—was found strangled and stabbed to death in a small creek located on the U.S. Army’s Fort Meade military base in Anne Arundel County, only a few miles from where Cesnik’s body would later turn up. That crime also has never been solved.
A four-month investigation by City Paper did find some disturbing links between the two crimes:
- Interviews with remaining family members reveal that the Malecki family, which lived in Lansdowne (less than a mile from where Cesnik’s body was found), attended the nearby St. Clement Church. The Malecki siblings, including Joyce, also attended week-long “retreats” as high school students—during which they spent entire days engaged in religious instruction with priests.
- Baltimore Archdiocesan records confirm that alleged abuser-priest A. Joseph Maskell served “at St. Clement (Lansdowne) from 1966 to 1968 and at Our Lady of Victory [located on nearby Wilkens Avenue, about three miles distant] from 1968 to 1970.” The official Archdiocesan record continues: “[Father Maskell] lived and assisted at St. Clement (Lansdowne) while serving at Archbishop Keough High School from 1970 to 1975.”
- St. Clement Church is located less than a mile from where Cesnik’s body was found, in a very remote area. Says one former high-ranking Baltimore County Police investigator who preferred not to be identified: “Whoever dumped the nun’s body there had to know the area well. That dump was difficult to get to, if you didn’t know your way around, and the nun did not vanish until after dark.”
continued at the linkLetter to the Editor
[SIZE=+1]Murder, He Wrote[/SIZE]
By Robert A. Erlandson
Letter in the Baltimore City Paper
January 12, 2005
Congratulations to Tom Nugent for his excellent recap of the Sister Catherine Cesnik murder case (“Who Killed Sister Cathy?,” Jan.5), in which my former Sun colleague Joe Nawrozki and I immersed ourselves for more than a year in 1993 and 1994. Then-Baltimore County Police Chief Mike Gambrill reopened the then-25-year-old case after we presented him with extensive evidence of sexual abuse at Seton Keough High School at the time of Sister Catherine’s abduction and murder in 1969-70, and of possible links to the murder.
I believe that our investigation actually turned up a prime suspect, a convicted rapist from the area where the murder and dumping occurred. Whoever dumped Sister Catherine’s body on a snowy piece of isolated waste ground (now completely overgrown) in Lansdowne had to know the area well. The spot was not easily accessible to a casual passerby. Detectives traveled to the Seattle area to interview the man, but without any solid evidence they were unable to elicit a confession.
The late Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, chaplain and guidance counselor at Seton Keough, may have known more about the murder than we discovered. However, I do not believe he killed the nun, despite the former Seton Keough student’s allegations that he took her to view the corpse and warned her to remain silent—or else.
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We also looked at the murder near Fort Meade of Joyce Malecki, but like the police, we found nothing to link the two crimes. Both murders were brutal crimes that cry out for solution, but after 35 years resolution appears to remain beyond investigators’ grasp. Even if, as Tom Nugent reports, county police and the FBI have reopened the Cesnik investigation, this is truly a cold case.
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2005_01_06/2005_01_12_Erlandson_MurderHe.htm