Think you can’t be shocked? Think again
Netflix’s true-crime series, The Keepers, is a devastating story about child abuse and institutional corruption
Victims don’t usually loom large in true-crime stories. That all changes with The Keepers, Netflix’s new docu-series, which started streaming May 19. The ads for the series focus on the murder of a nun and teacher, Catherine Cesnik, who disappeared in November 1969. Her bludgeoned body was found a couple months later at a garbage dump not far from her Baltimore apartment. In Episode 2, however, The Keepers reveals that it isn’t just about Cesnik. It’s as much about one of her students at Archbishop Keough High School, Jean Wehner.
Wehner is the heart of the series, elevating it from a typical titillating whodunit to a devastating drama that will haunt viewers. Now in her 60s, Wehner, as a student at Keough, was routinely sexually abused by the school’s chaplain, Joseph Maskell, and his associates, including another priest, police officers and local businessmen.
A devout Catholic and an innocent teen, Wehner believed the nightmare was penance for what Maskell told her was a sin: the fact her uncle had abused her as a young child.
At the time, Wehner assumed she was the only one the priest was assaulting. She wasn’t — but she kept it to herself, with one exception. When Cesnik asked if Maskell was making her do things she didn’t want to do, the girl responded with a silent nod.
Wehner buried her experience for decades, but the memories resurfaced in the early 1990s. During that time, she had another recollection: Maskell taking her to see Cesnik’s body and telling her she’d be next if she talked. Once the memories came back, Wehner went to the Baltimore Archdiocese, but when the church failed to acknowledge her ordeal, she initiated a lawsuit under the name Jane Doe in 1994. She and another woman were thwarted, however, by the Maryland statute of limitations. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church’s lawyers cast doubts on the veracity of Wehner’s resurfaced memories.
Filmmaker Ryan White (The Case Against 8), directed the series and he found Wehner through his aunt, another Keough alumni.
The narrative is also told from the perspective of two other Keough alums who were Cesnik’s students, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Schaub. The pair, who hadn’t known about the abuse, have become amateur sleuths late in life, trying to get to the bottom of a murder that police had once abandoned. (Since the series was filmed, Baltimore County Police have returned to the case, even exhuming the remains of Maskell, who died in 2001, to see if his DNA matched what was found at the scene of the murder; it didn’t.)
“I knew when I met Abbie and Gemma that that was cinematic gold,” White said. “It was such a fresh way of accessing a mystery like this — through the (point of view) of the victim’s students who cared very deeply for her and were saying this isn’t too late.”
Former students, not to mention Cesnik’s closest friend and her younger sister, speak at length about the magnetic, beloved nun. But Wehner still has an outsized impact on the story, if only because she’s such an anomaly. Survivors of sexual abuse rarely open up about their ordeals, so it’s startling and awe-inspiring to watch someone speak so frankly in front of a camera.
Wehner’s courage is one of the lasting impressions of The Keepers. After years of being silenced and doubted, her forthcoming attitude comes off as nothing less than heroic.