MD MD - Sr. Catherine Cesnik, 26, Baltimore, 7 Nov 1969 "The Keepers"

Baltimore, 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.”

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Letter 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.

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JUNE 27, 2012 6:58PM
Open Salon

On Friday, November 7, 1969, Cathy Cesnik left her apartment at around seven in the evening to go to the nearby Edmonton Village Shopping Center to purchase some rolls for dinner and to cash a check. When Sister Cathy hadn’t returned home by 11 p.m., Sister Helen became alarmed but instead of calling the police she called two Priests, Father Gerald J. “Gerry” Koob and Father Peter McKeon, Jesuits who lived in the community Manresa near Annapolis, Maryland. Fathers Koob and McKeon drove to the Carriage House apartments and a little before 1:00 a.m. they telephoned police and reported Sister Cathy missing. Then, “after several hours of conversation,” they decided to take a walk around 4:00 a.m. in order to “calm their nerves.” It was then, they claimed, that they discovered Sister Cathy’s green Ford Maverick parked at an odd angle in a parking lot just adjacent to the Carriage House apartments. Aside from a small wastebasket being tipped over there was no signs of a struggle in the vehicle.

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http://www.eurekaencyclopedia.com/index.php/Category:Maryland_Dioceses

1. Cesnik affair Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik (1942-1969), teacher at Archbishop Keough High School, was found murdered in Lansdowne garbage dump, southwest Baltimore County, after being abducted from the Edmondson Village Shopping Center on Edmondson Avenue 7 November 1969, on 3 January 1970. Prior to her disappearance she was having an affair with Jesuit Father Gerard J. (“Gerry&#8221 Koob. Catholic Church officials conferred with high-ranking police officials about the case and the investigating officers were told to backoff. The case remains unsolved.

“My very dearest Gerry,
''If Ever I Should Leave You’ is playing on the radio. I’m all curled up in bed. My ‘period’ has finally arrived, ten days late... So you might say I’m moody.... My heart aches so for you. I must wait on you—your time and your need—even more than I had before.... I think I can begin to live with that more easily now than I did two months ago, just loving you... within myself. I must tell you, I want you within me. I want to have your children....”
Note Koob has never been a suspect in the murder, he left the priesthood and married a Methodist minister in another state. He denied having sexual relations with Cesnik.

1. Malecki murder Joyce Malecki (1949-1969), who attended Archbishop Keough High School and whose parish priest was Maskell during a two-year period shortly before she was killed, was abducted from the parking lot of an E.J. Korvette’s department store in Glen Burnie. After disappearing around 7 p.m. on 11 November 1969, she was found the following morning with her hands tied behind her back, lying face down in the Little Patuxent River at the US Army’s Fort Meade military base in Anne Arundel County. She had been strangled and stabbed several times in the throat; cause of death was strangulation, only a few miles from where Cesnik’s body would later turn up. The crime was never solved.
   1. Jane Doe testimony Witness claimed to have been taken to the Lansdowne garbage dump by Maskell in late November 1969 and shown the body of a dead nun, as a warning that she should say nothing public about the sexual abuse.

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But police revived the investigation this spring after a former student at Archbishop Keough High School approached them with a startling story. She said a Catholic priest who had sexually abused her took her to see Sister Catherine's body weeks before the hunters discovered it on a local dumping ground off the 2100 block of Monumental Ave.

The woman, now 41, was an Archbishop Keough student when Sister Catherine taught there. She also told police that another man she met in the priest's office told her he had beaten Sister Catherine to death because the nun knew of the alleged sexual (( molestation.

She said the priest and the other man -- whom she has not identified -- warned her that she would suffer the same fate if she told her story to anyone else.

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In Baltimore in 1969, Giangrasso said, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to investigate a Catholic priest for any crime. The Archdiocese of Baltimore is the oldest in the United States, and the church considers it to be the premier Catholic jurisdiction in the country. More than half the city’s residents identify as Catholic. According to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Baltimore City prosecutors have charged only three of the 37 Baltimore priests who have been accused of sexual abuse since 1980. Just two of those priests were convicted, and one of those convictions was overturned in 2005.

Maskell in particular was a difficult target. At the time, he served as the chaplain for the Baltimore County police, the Maryland State Police and the Maryland National Guard. Maskell kept a police scanner and loaded handgun in his car, drank beer with the officers at a local dive bar, and often went on “ride-alongs” with his police friends at night to respond to petty crimes or catch teenagers making out in their cars.

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fred&edna said:

I came across this:

"New Evidence Links Merzbacher Child-Rape Case To Rampant 1970s Sex Abuse at Keough High School, According to Former Police Investigators in Maryland"

“The Rapes at the Two Catholic Schools Are Connected”

Keough Priest-Suspect in Murder of Teaching Nun Was Also Involved in an Apparent Cover-Up of Abuse at Merzbacher’s School in S. Baltimore, Say Former Cops

http://insidebaltimore.org/

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Two women, both with close ties to an unnamed man who may have been recently questioned by police, tell WJZ they believe her death may be linked to widespread sexual abuse by a powerful priest that took place decades ago...

“I instinctively felt that when Sister Cathy was murdered, that my husband at the time had committed the murder,” Ann told WJZ’s Denise Koch...

For years, the investigation has looked at two men — Ann’s husband and Father Joseph Maskell, who is now dead, but is believed to have sexually abused dozens of young girls...

Debbie Yohn tells WJZ she witnessed that evil firsthand. She said these two men were working together — even sharing victims. She tells WJZ that she was one of them.

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