Sister Catherine Anne "Cathy" Cesnik, S.S.N.D. (November 17, 1942 - disappeared November 7, 1969) was a Catholic religious Sister who taught English and drama at the formerly all-girls Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland. On November 7, 1969, Cesnik disappeared. Her body was discovered on January 3, 1970, near a garbage dump in the Baltimore suburb of Lansdowne. Her murder remains unsolved. Cesnik's murder is the basis for the 2017 Netflix series The Keepers.
Video Murder of Catherine Cesnik
Biography
Catherine Anne Cesnik was born on November 17, 1942, in Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eldest child of Joseph Cesnik and Anna Omulac Cesnik, who married in February 1942. Her paternal grandparents, John (Jan) and Johanna Tomec ?esnik, were Slovenians who emigrated from Yugoslavia to Pittsburgh, while her maternal grandfather, Joseph Omulac, came from Yugoslavia and her maternal grandmother, Martha Hudok, was born in Austria. She had three siblings. She attended St. Mary's School on 57th Street and St. Augustine High School, both in Lawrenceville. She was valedictorian of her Catholic high school class in 1960, where she had also been the May Queen and the president of the senior class and student council.
Cesnik's father died in 1985 and her mother died in 2015. Neither ever learned who killed their daughter.
Maps Murder of Catherine Cesnik
Disappearance and death
At the time she disappeared, Cesnik was teaching at Western High School in Baltimore, Maryland. On November 7, 1969, she left the apartment shared with Sister Helen Russell Phillips at the Carriage House Apartments at 131 North Bend Road in Catonsville, en route to the Edmondson Village Shopping Center to purchase a gift at Hecht's for her sister's engagement. Records found Cesnik cashed a paycheck at First National Bank in Catonsville that night, and possibly made a purchase at Muhly's Bakery in Edmondson Village since a box of bakery buns was found in the front seat of Cesnik's car. The car was found illegally parked across from her apartment complex at 4:40 the next morning by Russell's friends, Rev. Peter McKeow and Rev. Gerard J. Koob, in muddy condition. Residents of Carriage House Apartments spotted Cesnik in her car at approximately 8:30 that night, and others spotted her car at the illegally parked location across the street around two hours later.
Police searched the area immediately following Cesnik's disappearance but did not find her. On January 3, 1970, her body was found by a hunter and his son in an informal landfill located on the 2100 block of Monumental Road in a remote area of Lansdowne. An autopsy of the body by Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Werner Spitz revealed that Cesnik died from an intracerebral hemorrhage following a fracture to her skull due to a blow to her left temple by a blunt instrument.The murder case remains open.
Background
During the time Cesnik was at Archbishop Keough High School, it is alleged that two of the priests, including Father Joseph Maskell, were sexually abusing the girls at the school, in addition to trafficking them to others. It is widely believed that Cesnik was murdered because she was going to expose this scandal.
In 1995, Teresa Lancaster and Jean Wehner (née Hargadon), former students at Keough who were sexually abused by Maskell, filed a lawsuit against the school which was dismissed under the statute of limitations (Doe/Roe v A. Joseph Maskell et al.). Wehner said that Cesnik once came to her and said gently, "Are the priests hurting you?" Both women have said that she is the only one who helped them and other girls abused by Maskell et al., and have said that she was murdered prior to discussing the matter with the Archdiocese of Baltimore. There is currently no physical evidence linking Maskell to the crime. It was revealed in late 2016 that the Archdiocese had paid off numerous settlements for Maskell's victims since 2011.
Wehner alleges that, two months before Cesnik's body was discovered, and only a day or two after Cesnik disappeared on November 7, Maskell drove her to a wooded site near Fort Meade and showed her the body. Wehner remembers trying repeatedly to brush off the maggots crawling on Cesnik's face while frantically repeating the words, "Help me, help me." However, Maskell reportedly told Wehner, "You see what happens when you say bad things about people?" A day or two later, the body of Joyce Malecki, a 20 year-old woman who looked like Wehner, was discovered by "two hunters" in the same wooded location that Maskell had driven Wehner to see Cesnik's body. The body was not found until January 3, 1970 and its discovery by "two hunters" was not in a wooded location near Fort Meade, but on the open hill trash dump of a small business property in Lansdowne.
In 2016, the Baltimore County Police Department (BCPD) reassigned the case due to retiring officers, prompting new interviews and further investigation into the alleged sexual abuse at Keough. After attaining permission from the State's Attorney's office, the BCPD exhumed the body of Maskell, who died of a major stroke in 2001, but did not find a DNA match to evidence from the crime scene. Police spokeswoman Elise Armacost announced that this discovery does not exclude Maskell from being a suspect in the case.
Due to new awareness to the case brought upon by The Keepers, the Baltimore Police Department created an online form to report sexual abuse that occurred at Keough.
In popular culture
Netflix produced a seven-part documentary series about the case called The Keepers, which debuted on May 19, 2017. The series features interviews with women who were once Cesnik's students as well as interviews with some of those who were sexually abused by Maskell and others.
See also
- Crime in Baltimore
- Deaths in 1970
- List of unsolved deaths
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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