In exactly one month today, on May 19, the subject of your conversations with mates / co-workers / family is likely to be centred around one thing: ‘The Keepers’, a Netflix original docuseries that’s already being tipped as the next ‘Making A Murderer’.
A seven-part series, it’ll delve into the mysterious death of 26-year-old Baltimore nun Sister Cathy Cesnik, who went missing during a Friday night shopping trip in November 1969 and whose body was discovered months later, her life snuffed out by blunt force trauma that police believe was caused by either a brick or hammer.
As you would’ve gleaned from the first poster for the docuseries – which Netflix says “pieces together a story that goes beyond the death of a beloved Catholic schoolteacher to encompass clergy abuse, repressed memories and government and religious institutions” – the question on everyone’s lips will soon be ‘Who did it?’.
The subject of much suspicion is Father Joseph Maskell, the late chaplain of the Archbishop Keough High School (he died in 2001), where Sister Cathy taught English and drama; in the 60s and 70s, he was accused of molesting dozens of students, most of whom were female, and it’s one widely-held theory that the Sister was killed to cover up the abuse.
“She confronted him and she lost her life for it,” Teresa Lancaster, one of Maskell’s alleged victims, has previously said.
Why are police only now making progress in identifying and charging her killer, 50 odd years after the tragedy? Information with the potential to crack the cold case wide open has been sparse over the years, with many of Sister Cathy’s peers and friends too scared to speak out at the time of her actual murder.
Sister Cathy’s body was actually discovered by one of her students months before it was formally called in: 16-year-old Jean Hargadon Wehner, a junior at the all-girls Catholic school, claims she was driven by Maskell to a deserted garbage dump on the outskirts of Baltimore and shown the Sister’s decaying body as a power move.
In a hugely detailed 2015 investigation into the murder by the Huffington Post, called ‘Buried In Baltimore: The Mysterious Murder Of A Nun Who Knew Too Much’, Wehner recalled the harrowing experience.
“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.
A pair of hunters came across her body when they passed by the dump site two months later, and immediately reported it to police.
There was a round hole the rough size of a 20c coin in the back of her skull and choke marks on her neck, though the autopsy confirmed she died by way of blunt force trauma.
Wehner and other Keough alum are among the friends, relatives, journos, government officials and other crime experts interviewed for the Netflix doco, directed by Ryan White, the man behind marriage equality documentary ‘The Case Against 8′.
Add to the mix long-held allegations that local police helped to cover up the abuse of Keough students by Maskell and other members of the clergy and you’ve got yourself one spicy murder meatball.
All episodes of The Keepers will be available to stream from May 19.
Photo: Netflix.
