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Gemma Hoskins (right), is a retired elementary school teacher who attended Keough from 1966-1970. She leads the amateur detective group investigating Cesnik’s murder. Abbie Schaub (left) is a retired registered nurse who attended Keough from 1966-1970. She is working with Hoskins to investigate the murder. (Photos: Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins)
On a frigid day in November 1969, Father Joseph Maskell, the chaplain of Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, called a student into his office and suggested they go for a drive. When the final bell rang at 2:40 p.m., Jean Hargadon Wehner, a 16-year-old junior at the all-girls Catholic school, followed the priest to the parking lot and climbed into the passenger seat of his light blue Buick Roadmaster.
It was not unusual for Maskell to give students rides home or take them to doctor's appointments during the school day. The burly, charismatic priest, then 30 years old, had been the chief spiritual and psychological counselor at Keough for two years and was well-known in the community. Annual tuition at Keough was just $200, which attracted working-class
families in deeply Catholic southwest Baltimore who couldn't afford to send their daughters to fancier private schools. Many Keough parents had attended Maskell’s Sunday masses. He'd baptized their babies, and they trusted him implicitly.
This time, though, Maskell didn't bring Wehner home. He navigated his car past the Catholic hospital and industrial buildings that surrounded Keough’s campus and drove toward the outskirts of the city. Eventually, he stopped at a garbage dump, far from any homes or businesses. Maskell stepped out of the car, and the blonde, freckled teenager followed him across a vast expanse of dirt toward a dark green dumpster.
It was then that she saw the body crumpled on the ground.
The week prior, Sister Cathy Cesnik, a popular young nun who taught English and drama at Keough, had vanished while on a Friday-night shopping trip. Students, parents and the local media buzzed about the 26-year-old’s disappearance. People from all over Baltimore County helped the police comb local parks and wooded areas for any sign of her.
Wehner immediately recognized the lifeless body as her teacher. "I knew it was her," she recalled recently. "She wasn’t that far gone that you couldn’t tell it was her.”
Cesnik was still clad in her aqua-colored coat, and maggots were crawling on her face. Wehner tried to brush them off with her bare hands. "Help me get these off of her!" she cried, turning to Maskell in a panic. Instead, she says, the priest leaned down behind her and whispered in her ear: “You see what happens when you say bad things about people?”
Maskell, Wehner understood, was threatening her. She decided not to tell anyone. “He terrified me to the point that I would never open my mouth,” she recalled.
Two months later, the police announced that a pair of hunters passing through a dump outside of Baltimore had stumbled upon the body of the missing nun. Cesnik had choke marks on her neck and a round hole about the size of a quarter in the back of her skull. An autopsy confirmed she had been killed by a blow from a blunt object, probably a brick or a ball-peen hammer. But no one came forward with information about the murder, and the police never solved it.
Over the past year, however, Wehner and other Keough alumni have begun piecing together their memories and talking openly for the first time in decades about the traumatizing things that happened to them in high school — events they believe are connected to Cesnik’s murder. And a group of them has launched their own investigation in hopes of answering the questions that continue to vex the police: Who killed Sister Cathy – and why?
Gemma Hoskins set a bowl of Doritos and a plate of sugar cookies on her dark wooden coffee table and passed out typed copies of the January meeting agenda. One by one, her guests took their places around the oriental rug in her pale-yellow living room. “I’ll start by introducing everyone, because we have a few new faces here,” Hoskins said.
Tom Nugent, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, secured a prime spot in the wooden rocking chair in the corner. A retired Baltimore police detective the group calls “Deep Throat” settled into an armchair next to him. Teresa Lancaster, a Keough alum and Baltimore-area attorney, sat next to her husband, Randy, on the oatmeal-colored sofa. Hoskins and another former Keough student, Abbie Schaub, pulled up chairs from the dining room to form a circle.
Hoskins, 62, is spirited and irreverent, with cropped, dyed red hair and a tendency to carry around snacks for people -- a habit that's lingered since her days as a Harford County "Teacher of the Year." Today, she lives with her labradoodle, Teddy, in a duplex in Halethorpe, Maryland, a working-class suburb of Baltimore. Hoskins was a senior at Keough in 1969 when Cesnik disappeared. Now, she is at the center of the effort to find out who killed her. “I think I’m Nancy Drew,” she joked recently.
Cesnik was like a real-life version of Maria, Julie Andrews’ character from “The Sound of Music,” Hoskins recalled: warm, exuberant and strikingly beautiful. The nun played guitar and wrote musicals for the girls to perform on stage. She took her students to see the 1968 movie version of “Romeo and Juliet” after they read the Shakespeare play. She invented creative vocabulary games to push the girls to teach each other new, obscure words.
Cesnik lived in a modest apartment in Southwest Baltimore with another nun, and her students would occasionally drop by in the evenings or on weekends to chat, sing and play music. “She was the reason I became a teacher,” Hoskins said. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”
Around 7:30 p.m. on November 7, 1969, Cesnik told her roommate, Helen Russell Phillips, that she was going to swing by the bank and then shop for an engagement gift for her cousin. According to media reports from the time, she cashed a $255 paycheck at a bank in Catonsville, Maryland, then drove to the Edmondson Village Shopping Center, where she bought buns at Muhly's Bakery. When she hadn't returned home by 11 p.m., Phillips called two priest friends, who drove to her apartment and called the police. Later that night, Cesnik's brand-new green Ford Maverick was found unlocked and illegally parked a block from her apartment, even though she had a designated parking spot behind the building. There was no sign of the nun anywhere.
The man assigned to investigate Cesnik's disappearance was Nick Giangrasso, a 28-year-old homicide detective who had worked in the Baltimore City Police Department for five years. Giangrasso led the investigation for the three months Cesnik was missing, then had to turn the case over to Baltimore County detectives when her body was found outside the city limits. But Giangrasso, now 72, spent enough time on the case to feel like something suspicious was going on between the police department and the church.
“The Catholic Church had a lot of input into the police department,” he said. “A lot of power.”
Giangrasso has a deep voice and a Baltimore accent, and speaks about the Cesnik case as if it happened yesterday. He said it was clear to him from the fact that her car had been deposited back at her apartment complex without any signs of struggle that she had not been the victim of a
random robbery or assault. “It looked too clean,” he said. “It had to be somebody who knew her.”
The first person of interest in Giangrasso's investigation was Gerard Koob, a Jesuit priest. Koob was one of the priests Cesnik’s roommate had called when she realized the nun had not returned from her shopping trip, and he had been the one to call police to report Cesnik missing.
Koob, now a 77-year-old Methodist minister living in New Jersey with his wife, was in a romantic relationship with Cesnik at the time. Two years earlier, before he was ordained and before she had taken her final vows, he had asked her to marry him. She turned him down, but they continued to spend time together and write each other love letters. And three days before Cesnik disappeared, Koob called her from a Catholic retreat to tell her he still loved her. He was prepared to leave the priesthood for her and hoped she'd leave the nunhood for him. "I said, 'If you decide to leave, we'll leave and get married," Koob told The Huffington Post in an interview.
The police brought Koob in for questioning, but he had an alibi for the night that Cesnik disappeared. He and a fellow priest had gone to dinner in downtown Baltimore and watched "Easy Rider" at a movie theater afterward. He produced receipts and ticket stubs and passed two lie detector tests.
Harry Bannon, another retired Baltimore City homicide investigator, told the Baltimore City Paper in 2004 that he thought Koob knew more about the murder than he was admitting, but that the church forced him to back off the priest. “The church lawyers stepped in and they talked to the higher-ups at the police department. And we were told, 'Either charge Koob with a crime or let him go. Stop harassing him,'” said Bannon, who died in 2009. “After that, we had to break away from him. And that was a shame, because I’m sure Koob knew more than he was telling.”
Koob says he had no information that could have been helpful to police. “When the police were asking me, 'Who do you think did this to Cathy?' I had no clue,” he said.
Still, Giangrasso, who retired from the police force in 1980, had a gut feeling that Cesnik had been murdered by someone with ties to the church. “I personally thought it was in-house, within her social network – the priests and the religious order,” he said.
Giangrasso interviewed half a dozen priests who knew Cesnik as his investigation continued, and there was one in particular whose name kept coming up: Father Maskell, who worked with Cesnik at Keough. Giangrasso said he tried to interview Maskell a number of times about Cesnik’s disappearance, but the priest always managed to elude him. “He was always busy and never available,” Giangrasso said. “It got to the point that Maskell was the number one guy we wanted to talk to, but we never got a chance.”
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.
Bob Fisher, the owner of an automotive repair shop in southwest Baltimore where Maskell took his car on his days off, remembers the priest boasting about his police privileges to anyone who would listen. “He'd say, ‘I hear something on the scanner' and we'd jump in the car and take off, and we'd catch these people!” said Fisher, 74. “Really wild stories.”
Maskell’s older brother, Tommy, was a hero cop who had been shot and injured while trying to stop a robbery. Going after Maskell would mean violating the unwritten rules by which the police operated. “We’re a police family,” Giangrasso said. “The policeman’s involved, his family’s involved, we try to help the guy out. When we found out Maskell’s brother was a lieutenant, we knew we had a problem.”
Giangrasso remembers feeling pressure from his superiors to leave the priest and other members of the clergy alone. “I felt like the church was coming in and interfering, and the chain of command was coming down and checking on us – ‘How much longer are you gonna be playing with this case?’– as if to say, you gotta back off and move on,” he said. The Baltimore City police did not respond to a request for comment.
That Cesnik’s body was found outside of his jurisdiction, in Baltimore County, where Maskell was chaplain, was no coincidence, Giangrasso thought. Nevertheless, he had to turn the case over to Baltimore County police. The county police never charged anyone.
Getty
Jean Wehner in 1970. (Photo: Jean Wehner)
“You see what happens when you say bad things about people?”
"You see what happens when you say
bad things about people?"
Gemma Hoskins (right), is a retired elementary school teacher who attended Keough from 1966-1970. She leads the amateur detective group investigating Cesnik’s murder. Abbie Schaub (left) is a retired registered nurse who attended Keough from 1966-1970. She is working with Hoskins to investigate the murder. (Photos: Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins)
Area newspapers
followed the case closely.
"It looked too clean.
It had to be somebody who knew her"
Area
newspapers
followed the case closely.
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