Victim’s body from cold case exhumed
DNA sought in 1969 Md. murder
More than 50 years after his sister was killed, Darryl Malecki watched Thursday as her body was lowered into her grave, for a second time, at a cemetery in Baltimore.
No one has ever been charged with the killing of Joyce Malecki, who disappeared in November 1969, when she was 20, and was found dead days later on the Fort Meade military base south of Baltimore. The exhumation of her remains for DNA samples has raised her family’s hopes the case will finally be solved.
“It is a steppingstone,” Darryl Malecki, 71, said in an interview after his sister’s body was returned to her grave.
On Thursday, the FBI confirmed in a statement that it had exhumed Joyce Malecki’s body at Loudon Park Cemetery in southwest Baltimore as part of an investigation into her killing. It gave no further details, but the announcement revived questions about the case, which was featured in a 2017 Netflix documentary series about the death of a nun and allegations of sexual abuse against a local priest.
Two days after Malecki was reported missing, her body was found in a pond at Fort Meade, a sprawling military base about 18 miles south of Baltimore. She was on her way to meet her boyfriend, a soldier posted at the base, when she disappeared, her brother said. An autopsy determined that she had been strangled.
The Netflix series “The Keepers” examined Malecki’s death in connection with the killing of the nun, Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, a 26-year-old English teacher at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore. The women went missing within days of each other, and their bodies were found just a few miles apart. People familiar with the case said in the series that Cesnik was about to reveal allegations of sexual abuse by the Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, a guidance counselor at the school, when she was killed.
Days before the documentary was released, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore said in a statement that the first suggestion that Maskell might have been involved in Cesnik’s death was made to the Baltimore Archdiocese in 1994. But Lori said that there was no record of Cesnik contacting the archdiocese about Maskell and that no criminal charges were filed in connection with her death.
In 1992, Jean Wehner, a former student of Cesnik’s, accused Maskell of sexually assaulting her when she was in high school. She said that she had confided in Cesnik, and that Maskell took her to see the nun’s body as a warning against speaking out.
“The Keepers” focused mainly on Cesnik’s killing, but it revived accusations of a broader cover-up by the archdiocese that some of her former students, as well as some who have accused Maskell of abuse, say has clouded the investigation into Malecki’s killing.
Maskell died in 2001. In 2017, the Baltimore County Police Department announced that a DNA sample from his remains did not match crime scene evidence from Cesnik’s killing.
“One of our strongest conjectures about all this is they are not exhuming this young lady after 54 years in a random attempt to gain evidence,” said Kurt Wolfgang, the executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center, which has been working with the Malecki family. “We think they have a strong theory or they would not be doing this.
“If the person who did this is still alive, they want to see him prosecuted,” he said.
Darryl Malecki said that the FBI has told his family that its file on the investigation has grown to 4,000 pages. The bureau has provided no specific information about what, or who, it is looking for, he said.