Who Killed Sister Cathy? 47-Year-old Cold Case: SOLVED
In Touch Nearly five decades after she was murdered, a close friend of Sister Cathy Cesnik tells he knows what really happened to the beloved Baltimore nun
Apair of hunters stumbled upon her body at a dump just outside of Baltimore in January 1970. She had choke marks around her neck, maggots in her throat and a hole in the back of her skull. An autopsy soon revealed the victim was Sister Cathy Cesnik, a beloved 26-year-old nun who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School and had vanished two months earlier during a Friday night shopping trip.
For the next 47 years, the case went unsolved — until now. A group of Keough alums launched their own investigation into Sister Cathy’s death, uncovering decades of horrifying sexual abuse and a vast conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of power in the Catholic Church and the Baltimore Police Department. Almost immediately, the alums zeroed in on the late Father Joseph Maskell, the chaplain of the all-girls Catholic school, as a prime suspect. But Sister Cathy’s close friend, Pastor Gerard Koob, tells In Touch exclusively that he knows what really happened to the beloved nun. “Maskell wasn’t working alone,” says Koob, 79. There was a hit man, and that person, whom In Touch will not name, is still alive. “I still think Maskell is the key person responsible for her death, but [ he] arranged for her to be assassinated. She was killed because she knew too much.”
The popular young priest was protecting a dark secret. “He was sexually abusing some of the students. He preyed on girls he knew were having issues,” Gemma Hoskins, a 64-year-old former Keough student, tells In Touch. For years, Maskell — who was the school’s chief spiritual and psychological counselor — allegedly would call the troubled female students into his office for counseling sessions,
then rape them. “He would let me know that I either went along with whatever he wanted to do,” says former victim Teresa Lancaster, 63, “or it was going to be worse than I could ever imagine.”
For some girls, it was. Several of Maskell’s victims claim that the priest, who was also a police chaplain, would often invite other men to participate in the abuse. “I remember a policeman wearing dark pants, a white shirt and a badge coming in the back door,” recalls victim Donna Vondenbosch, 60, adding that the priest once put a gun in her mouth when she threatened to tell someone about the repeated rapes. “He was prostituting us,” adds victim Jean Hargadon Wehner, who says that Maskell brainwashed her into thinking that the abuse was an “extracurricular activity” and that the men he would make her perform sex acts on were her “dates.” The women say he would even take them to a gynecologist friend for pregnancy tests.
Desperate for help, the victims confided in Sister Cathy. “They trusted her and knew that she would try to help,” says Hoskins, whose investigation into the murder will be documented in Netflix’s The Keepers, out May 19. Koob believes that Sister Cathy was planning to expose Maskell. “We were scheduled to get together the day after she was murdered. She told me she had something very serious to talk to me about,” he says. “I’m guessing she wanted to talk to me about the abuse.” Instead, she was silenced. “To think that she probably died because she confronted the devil,” Hoskins says of Maskell, “gives me chills.”
But this devil didn’t work alone. “A woman came forward [in recent years] and said that on the night of Cathy’s death, [the woman’s] then-husband came home with a bloody shirt,” Koob tells In Touch. “I personally think he was someone who Maskell hired, and [the hit man] told Maskell where the body was.” Indeed, days after Sister Cathy went missing, Wehner says that Maskell drove her to see Sister Cathy’s corpse, whispering in her ear: “You see what happens when you say bad things about people?”
Maskell was never charged with Sister Cathy’s murder. “I’m convinced the church was protecting him,” Nick Giangrasso, a former detective with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, tells In Touch, adding that it was nearly impossible to investigate a priest for any crime in the predominantly Catholic enclave of Baltimore back in 1970. Making things even more difficult, Maskell was friends with many of the officers, and his older brother was a well-respected lieutenant. “When we found that out, we knew we had problems,” says Giangrasso, who felt pressure from his superiors to leave Maskell alone. “The power of the church can be very difficult. I’ve handled hundreds of murders, but this is one case that still really haunts me.”
The priest was never punished for any of his other crimes, either. In 1994, after more than 30 women
came forward with stories of sexual abuse, Wehner and Lancaster filed a $40 million civil lawsuit against Maskell accusing him of rape, and also provided authorities with information that linked him to Sister Cathy’s murder. However, the case was later thrown out of court on a technicality. (According to Maryland law at the time, victims have three years from the time of the sexual abuse to file a civil lawsuit.) Maskell moved to Ireland, where he continued to work as a priest, and died in 2001 at age 78. In 2010, the Archdiocese of Baltimore finally apologized to Maskell’s victims and paid them settlements out of court. But many of the other participants in the abuse — including possible cops — have never been identified, though Baltimore Police say they’re still investigating.
Sister Cathy’s former students won’t give up until the truth comes out. “She was truly amazing, and she could have done so much more with her life, but it was cut short,” says Hoskins, adding that she believes justice will one day be served, not just for Sister Cathy but for “all the innocent victims. These women do not deserve what happened to them.” ◼