The Nun’s Skeleton PT 1
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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hey, Kate. How are you doing today? I'm exhausted. Do you know what happened yesterday? You don't. Let me read your mind here. So yesterday, my fourth book came out. I

I can't even believe I have a first number one book that ever came out, let alone a fourth. My fourth one came out yesterday. I don't know how you do that. How do you write so many books? It's a drive I have. You and I have talked about it. It's also a fear, a fear because I'm the main breadwinner in my family. So I'm driven by fear and love of writing and then back to fear, I would say. Yeah.

Back to fear. But it's been a really great experience. You know, this is, we're, well, first of all, welcome back because we're back from winter break and it's been such a whirlwind for me because of this book. But, you know, I hope, did you have some good holidays? I hope I missed you. Yeah, you know, I visited my parents out in Hawaii. That's a tough time to travel between Christmas and New Year's out to Hawaii. But yeah, definitely was a good, good time. Wow. Well, that's great.

I'm going to be doing some traveling, I hope, in the Northeast for this book. You are featured, my friend, prominently in the book because it is very Buried Bones-esque. Do you remember me talking to you like a year ago or more about

about the case of the woman in 1832 hanging from a haystack pole on a rural farm in New England. You remember that? Does that ring a bell to you? That is ringing a bell. So you were so helpful for me because this book, it's called The Sinner's All Bow. It is a case from 1832 about a woman who was a member of a Methodist church who

She's got some secrets that she has kept, and she is found by a farmer one day, as I said, hanging from a haystack pole. And the question is whether this was murder or suicide. If it is murder, who did it? There are certainly suspects, including a minister from the church, the Methodist church where she was.

You know, I think one of the things that I do that I've never done before is I'm reinvestigating this case from 1832. Does that seem like I'm really up a creek here already? Have you ever, you've never investigated a case from 1832? No, no. You know, but it's like any cold case is you have to work with what you got, right? Yeah. And I think...

With something from 1832, obviously no one is ever going to get criminally charged. And so I think you can be a little bit looser in terms of maybe some assumptions that you have to make or even some speculation you need to do to fill in some of the holes in the investigation, so to speak. Yes, and this was a very, very important case. What I ended up doing, which was very interesting and unique for me, was...

was I ended up working with another journalist, which I've never really done before. But this was a journalist who reported on this case and wrote a book on the case in 1833. So I'm using her notes. I'm using the book that she wrote, talked to her descendants.

And we are investigating this case, Catherine Williams and I, together, more than 100 years after she died. It's been such a great experience for me. She spoke to all the family members. She interviewed witnesses. She interviewed the coroner. She had really great notes and just really great thoughts. The problem was she really hated the Methodists.

They were pretty different than they are now. They were really wild, and they had tent revivals that were crazy, and they were seen as, you know, like, seducing young women. So she was very clearly biased, which is very important to not be in journalism as much as we can. So taking her notes, reading her assessment, you have to take all that with a grain of salt. We're all humans, right?

And then I, you know, of course, leaned in on you for my 21st century perspective, along with toxicologists and other experts. I talked to a not expert, you know, people who could really give me some insight. And I hired a handwriting analyst, which I had never done before. Oh, interesting. Which was incredibly helpful. It was amazing. She gave me a full chart.

And she led me to some really good conclusions about this story. The most interesting part is that, I think, is that this was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne to write The Scarlet Letter. So this is the story of the real Hester Prynne. I'm going to take a wild stab and say you've never read The Scarlet Letter. You think that's a wild stab? Is that a lock? No.

That is a lock. I am not one to read the so-called classics. We've talked about that before. I'm not going to go down that road. That's it.

That's a sad road. The Scarlet Letter is an incredible book. And so Sarah Cornell is the real Hester Prynne. And I think when you see the parallels of the story of the woman who wears the letter A and is publicly humiliated and everything that goes into that, I think we just learn a lot about our lives now, how we view women, how much has changed, how much has stayed the same. So I'm surprised.

Super excited to have this book come out in the dead of winter, ready to roll, starting a new year. And this book gives me so much great joy. And I'm really grateful that you were able to be a part of it, Paul. Hey, no, I appreciate you including me as part of the book. You know, of course, I think it's the best book ever. I asked you.

You got that from me. I asked you to give a recommendation for a good little, like a little thing to say about the book, and you said you would say the best book ever. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate that.

And to reward you, I am going to offer you one of the most complicated, hefty, tragic cases I think we've ever covered on this show in the several years that we've had this show on. It is a two-parter. It is something that warranted a series, a TV series, and it was a really big case, and I'll see what you think about it. It's really something. All right. Bring it on. Okay. Let's set the scene.

I'm going to, listeners, tell you where this story came from because many of you probably have heard about the case or saw the TV series. And I'm going to see if Paul has seen the series or heard about this case. And then I'm going to give you some caveats. So if that weren't cryptic enough, here I go. This is the story that is based on the TV series The Keepers. Did you ever see that, Paul? I did not, though I do remember seeing it.

It being advertised, I believe. So it's the story of a Catholic nun who was murdered in 1969 at an all-girls Catholic high school in Baltimore. Does that case, does that ring a bell, Kathy Sesnick? Nope, not at all. I'm going to disclose something right from the beginning, especially if people have read about this case or have seen The Keepers. It was a really difficult series for me to watch.

And it involves very, very graphic accounts of rampant sex abuse at this all-girls Catholic high school by male priests. I am not going to go through all of that. I don't think there is any doubt whatsoever that there are several men who are main characters that we'll be talking about today.

who sexually abused young women at this high school and, frankly, at other places where they had been before. So I am not going to go through all of that. I am going to avoid graphic terms that I really we could talk about because what I want to focus on is the probability that our victim was murdered and she was murdered

because she knew about this abuse, because there are many other suspects in this. But that is a viable route to go down. So I considered when I was going to do this story, I was going to say, well, if he doesn't know the story, I was telling myself this. If Paul doesn't know the story, then I'll reveal all the sex abuse that happens. I just don't want people who know this case to

to be fearful that I'm going to disclose a lot of details. There was stuff in our research packet that I just cut loads out of because I just don't want to go through all of that. So just know this is documented, this abuse happened, and it could have been a motive for why this woman ended up dead, but there are a lot of other motives too. So let's get going here. We're in Baltimore in 1969.

And as I said before, this involves a Catholic all-girls high school called Archbishop Keough High School. The Keepers, you know, along with a lot of the other resources that were used here, does an excellent job digging up a lot of sources, a lot of witnesses. I will warn you, Paul, this is very heavy with witnesses. I mean, there is little to no forensics. Of course, I say that, and then sometimes you're like, you don't know what you're talking about. There's lots of forensics here, right?

You said that a couple of episodes. I'm never going to forget that. But this really, at first blush for me, is really witness heavy. So, you know, and contradictory stuff. So know that going in. Does that make you nervous about cases in general where everything seems to rely on eyewitnesses or earwitnesses or, you know, memories that are fuzzy from years before and there's not a lot else? No.

No, I think the more witnesses that you have that are able to provide details, as long as there isn't contamination between the witnesses, you know, they're not getting together and collaborating before being interviewed.

It gives greater confidence in terms of, okay, the details that each of these witnesses are able to provide must be correct. Having, you know, worked cases, particularly like Golden State Killer, where, you know, you have this huge case and tons of witnesses, I've seen where information can be misconstrued and can lead the investigation down the wrong path. That's where I'm always...

wanting to see that objective physical evidence, such as the DNA, you know, if you're dealing with trying to place somebody at a certain location or with a particular victim. But it sounds like in this case, it's in a high school, so I'm assuming that you have a lot of witnesses, either students, teachers, religious authorities that are all present within this structure.

Yes. There are a lot of people at the high school, and the victim in our case, Sister Kathy, has a very wide circle of people she's exposed to. But the night that she disappears gets complicated, so let's jump into this. It's a Friday night, November 7th, 1969.

There is a woman who is a nun named Sister Helen Russell Phillips. We will call her Sister Russell. That's how she went. She's worried because it's close to midnight, and her roommate, who is her close friend, is another nun named Sister Kathy Sesnick, and that's our victim, Kathy Sesnick. She's not home, and she's left the house around 7 to do some shopping in a nearby shopping center, and there's no way this woman, this nun, is out until midnight.

Beside the fact that she said, you know, I'll be home shortly. They know each other really well. Sister Russell is even more concerned because she knows of Kathy's, you know, character and everything in her habits. They both teach at the All Girls Catholic High School. Sister Kathy and Sister Russell are currently taking off this school year because they're on like a church-sanctioned leave of absence from nun life.

And this year they're teaching at a public high school. So Sister Kathy at either school is popular and young. She's an English teacher. Her students love her. So, you know, all of this is to say that this is not a what you would call a quote unquote high risk victim already. It's midnight and a nun is not back home when she should be.

All right. And remind me, where does Sister Kathy go that evening? She's doing a little bit of shopping at a nearby shopping center. So she's not far off. But it's night. You know, it's November. It's probably gotten dark early.

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Let's go back a little bit because right now Sister Russell is worried and she's sort of reviewing what happens earlier in the day. So let's just talk about what we know about what happened earlier before we figure out where she disappeared and why she disappeared. So earlier in that day, there was a student named Juliana Farrell, and she is lingering for a few minutes after English class to talk to Sister Kathy.

Sister Kathy says she's about to go buy a present for her sister who just got engaged. So that's part of the shopping trip is to get this engagement present. After school, about 3 o'clock, we know Sister Kathy goes back to her apartment. This is a complex of garden apartments with several three-story buildings. And about 7 o'clock, Kathy leaves her apartment and drives to the bank, and she goes to a bakery where she buys some dinner rolls.

And she goes to a shopping center called the Edmondson Village Shopping Center. So we have witnesses all over the place who kind of track her in a way. It's good to know with this timeline. According to one witness, she goes back to her apartment building and parks her car in its normal parking space, but she never enters the building.

This witness says that she saw Kathy sitting in the parking lot in her car until 8:30. So, you know, between 7:00 and 8:30, she's out shopping, and Sister Russell is sitting at home, you know, waiting for her to come back, which 8:30 would have been reasonable. But one witness says that she sees Kathy sitting in her car in the normal parking spot outside the apartment, not going back in and saying, "Hey, how's it going, you know, Sister Russell?"

So we know somebody saw her who knew her sitting in the car. This is a neighbor who was going back and forth unloading bags of grocery and bringing them up to her own apartment. So again, if this witness is correct, then Kathy had driven her own car back to the complex and parked it.

We don't know what she was doing in the car, according to this one witness, but there are lots of people so far who are talking. Yeah, so this neighbor, does she indicate over what span of time she sees Kathy sitting in her own car? It sounds like, to me, the amount of time was however many trips it took for her to go, this woman, to go back and forth,

taking her groceries from the car to her own apartment. I would imagine it's just a few minutes. I don't think it was a long time. Sure. You know, I mean, I don't think that she thought there was anything unusual about it, so it wasn't alarming. So she was unloading groceries. Okay. And I was just kind of curious if this witness, you know, like later in the evening looked out and saw Kathy still sitting in a car. It doesn't sound like that's the case. No, I don't think so.

So let me tell you about their apartment complex. Their apartment is on the ground floor, up a few outdoor steps from the parking lot, and then through a little gate to an outdoor hallway with a couple of other doors. So plenty of single women live on ground floor apartments. They scare me to death. But obviously, that increases vulnerability. I know that in this case, it doesn't sound like she even made it into her apartment.

But there's still that, that I'm sure there wasn't security really. And, you know, they're on the ground floor already. I feel a little bit vulnerable for both of those women. Of course, with the ground floor, whether it be an apartment or a house, you know, you have multiple access points and an offender could potentially enter the residence or observe the

the victims, where they are at within the residence. So there is an increased level of vulnerability, you're correct. But in this case, does Kathy make it back into her apartment or no? Nope, she never makes it back in. That we know of.

You know, I mean, Sister Russell's sitting there at home waiting on her. So more witnesses, Paul. There is a young woman who's a sophomore, and she is near Kathy's apartment complex. She's just a few blocks away. Sometime that evening, she couldn't give an exact time. She and her friend, who also went to the same high school where Kathy taught...

are in the area. They hear a very loud sound that this witness describes as a man yelling, coming from the direction of Sister Kathy's complex. We don't know when this happened,

That's all they heard. That might not have anything to do with the story I'm pretty sure you're about to say, right? Yeah. You know, right now it's a random observation, ear witness. And this is where if there's corroboration with other witnesses within the apartment complex, then it becomes a little bit more significant. Yeah. Okay. Now...

Now we get complicated because now we get more characters. So, you know, for now, we had just had Sister Russell and Sister Kathy. Now we're going to get into more of the inner workings of this all-girls Catholic high school. At 11 o'clock, Sister Russell is really worried because this is way out of her character. At midnight, she finally calls...

someone, but it's not the police. She calls a priest named Father Jerry Koob, and he's good friends with Sister Kathy. So Father Jerry lives in Annapolis, Maryland, which is about 30 miles away. He has a friend who they refer to as Brother Pete McKeon, who is with him that evening. So Brother Pete is a Christian brother, a layman who participates in the church. And

These two men are at dinner. They go see Easy Rider. They go back to Jerry's house in Annapolis at about 1030, and they sit and talk about this movie for a few minutes. And then they get the call from Sister Russell that Kathy hasn't come home yet. And, you know, of course, the police eventually will talk to Jerry. And it sounds like Sister Russell is asking if these two men have seen Kathy yet.

Everybody's friends, you know, and Jerry and Pete McKeon said they haven't seen her and now they're worried. So they drive the 30 miles to Sister Russell and Sister Kathy's place. Jerry says that they talked to Sister Russell for about an hour before they called the police at 1 a.m.,

This all seems late. I hate judging people when they call police late, but she was starting to worry around, it seems like 10 o'clock, and they waited until 1 a.m., and she's deferring to this male priest. You know, I think when I think about Sister Russell's actions in calling Father Jerry, I'm wondering, did she even look out in the parking lot to see if Sister Kathy's car was present? No.

Doesn't sound like it. And part of Sister Russell's actions may be attributed to maybe the culture within the Catholic Church. You know, this father, this priest who's a friend of Sister Kathy, he may be seen as somewhat of an authority figure, and she's looking for guidance from Father Jerry. However, it is odd. If she's that worried, reaching out to somebody who's 30 miles away versus somebody

trying to figure out, you know, where is Sister Kathy? You know, if Kathy has gone over to Father Jerry's place, then Kathy would have driven her car there. And a simple glance out into the parking lot would answer that question. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not sure why she decided to call them first. Maybe we'll have some more information later.

In the Netflix series that came out in 2017, The Keepers, Sister Kathy's younger sister Marilyn calls brother Pete. So he's 85 in 2017. And he says, you know, that they drove together to Sister Kathy's from Annapolis. And, you know, they come and they talk to Sister Russell for a while.

Now we get into the evidence. So the police come. They're there. They don't apparently see her car, which we've been thinking about. The police officer takes down Sister Kathy's information and leaves. At about four o'clock, the men are still at the apartment. So this is Jerry and Pete. They go for a walk and directly across the street from her apartment, they see a woman.

They see her car and it looks out of place. And I have a photo of it. It's parked by the side of the road at a corner and the back of the car is sticking out past the corner into the perpendicular street. And there are some weird details about it. So it's a 1969 Ford Maverick and the driver's side door is unlocked.

Now, do you want to see a photo or do you want me to tell you the weird stuff they found inside? No, I want to see the photo, but it sounds like Kathy's car has now been moved at some point after the neighbor who was unloading groceries saw the car parked in the normal spot. You got it. Good interpretation. Okay. Let me show it to you. Hang on. Hopefully this is a good angle. It's a good photo. There's the car parked illegally. And then you see her apartment. Wow. Look at that. Okay. Okay.

So I'm looking at a photograph

The car is in the foreground with the front of the car facing the photographer. And then in the backdrop is Kathy's apartment complex. And there is a red X showing the location of her apartment in that complex. In between the car and the apartment complex appears to be a road. And so this vehicle, this Ford Maverick, which is Kathy's, has pulled onto Kathy's.

It looks like a driveway or an entrance to another building, but it hasn't pulled all the way off the road. So the trunk side of Kathy's car is somewhat jutting out into this roadway. This obviously is not a normal way for the vehicle to be parked. It looks like somebody in haste abandoned this vehicle.

Yep, I think that's a good description. Let me tell you what they found on the inside, which is really interesting, really weird, I would say. The driver's side door is unlocked, and these two men open it. They are not police officers. They're not wearing gloves. They just look at it. They open it. They see a twig hanging from the left side of the steering wheel.

And Father Jerry says it looks like the twig has been tied to the turn signal. The whole car is full of leaves and twigs, and the tires are muddy. It clearly looks like it has been in a muddy, swampy area, which is not anywhere around the apartment complex. And there's mud on the gas pedal, but not on the brake pedal. And eventually investigators are going to wonder if the driver, you know, of the car drove with both feet or what happened.

So, what do you think about this layout in general? I was a little confused about the twig tied to the turn signal on the steering wheel. Why would somebody do that? Well,

Well, first, I think, you know, addressing the soil, the mud, as well as the vegetation, that's significant. Anytime I am processing a crime scene, of course, I'm looking for evidence that places, let's say, the offender at that crime scene. But I'm also looking to see what's at that crime scene that the offender is

could have taken with them. It's a two-way street in terms of physical evidence transfer. So this vehicle has mud and vegetation that is not from the location where found. So after Kathy was seen by the neighbor in her parking space...

This vehicle has gone to a separate location and, of course, now has brought this mud and this vegetation with it back to across the street from the apartment complex. So I'm going to be paying a lot of attention to that evidence. Is there anything about...

this vegetation or the soil that I can use to figure out where this vehicle went. Is there something unique about it? You know, and I've processed vehicles where I'm not just restricting myself to vegetation and soil. I'm looking at bugs on the windshield or in the grill. Are there insects that could be from a very specific area that can help place that vehicle at that location?

pollen out of the air filter, you know, if you have things that are being trapped within the air filter. So there's so much that could potentially be done. The twig tied around the turn signal is

I would want to see a photo of that. Was this a purposeful act, or was this just something that randomly occurred because whoever's now sitting inside this vehicle has maybe this vegetation stuck to sleeves and the twig just gets wrapped around as the person is driving?

Or is this a mechanism to keep the turn signal on, to keep the turn signal off? You know, right now it seems pretty vague. But if it's purposefully tied, any time an offender does something, especially if it's not to get away with committing a crime, you have to pay attention to that. I think it's unclear. Father Jerry is the one who's saying this. He's the source, you know, who looked at it. And he says it looked like it had been tied. Yeah.

but we're not seeing anything from investigators and I haven't seen a photo. So let's say that the police are now interested that Jerry and Pete are the ones who found this car. And it sounds like, you know, Sister Russell had never looked to see if the car were there or not. It's right across the street. They give Pete and Jerry polygraph exams, which we know how we feel about that, and they pass. I know how they feel about that.

They have ticket stubs from Easy Rider, but there's no eyewitness. I don't know if anybody even knew them. So sounds kind of squishy as they're each other's alibi, but...

You know, at the same time, we don't know of a motive just yet for what would happen. We don't even know where she is at this point. Yeah, but aren't Jerry and Pete with Sister Russell in the apartment till 4 a.m.? They are, yes. Okay, so they can alibi each other out, but they also have Sister Russell who's saying, well, they were here. She called them at 4.

11 p.m., they arrived probably 45 minutes later to an hour later. They're only 30 miles away, and they call the police at 1. So she disappears way before then. So in theory, they could have driven up, taken her, killed her, gone back to Annapolis, and then gotten the call from Sister Russell, worried.

and then gone back. Yeah, the neighbor who's seeing Kathy sitting in her car, that was around 8:30, right? Correct, yeah. Yeah, so now we basically have this time gap. Kathy is last seen at 8:30. Law enforcement arrives at 1:30. So assuming that Kathy is, you know, she's reported missing and she's not still sitting in her car in the parking lot,

But there's that three-hour window that something happened to Kathy. And then now you've got Jerry and Pete showing up. What time do they get to Kathy's apartment? Sister Russell calls them at 11. I mean, I would bet 11.45 to midnight, and they don't call the police until 1. It doesn't sound like they went outside until 4 a.m., and that's when they make the discovery of the car. And assuming that they are in Annapolis with a 30-minute drive...

to Sister Russell's place, now we have this 8:30 to roughly 11:30 gap in which we can't necessarily alibi Jerry and Pete out because as you mentioned before, they're kind of in cahoots with each other. Right.

So we have another witness. So remember we had the teenage girl, the sophomore, who said she heard a man scream kind of in the direction. That could have been anything, though. And she couldn't even give an accurate time. Yeah. So there's a witness who says that they saw a man driving Kathy's car that evening and

and Kathy was in the passenger seat. According to this witness, it looked like she was trying to get out of the car. This sounds like the only person who said this, and we don't have a lot of information about this person, even if it's a male or a female. I think it's just another person that had information for the police. No, but it's critical information because it is matching up with the circumstances. You know, Kathy was seen alone in her car. She never makes it into her apartment.

We know the car has been moved. We know there had been somebody inside that car, and they had gone to a different location based off of the mud and the soil. I would say the kind of the physical evidence that we have is at least in line with what this witness seeing a man driving the car and Kathy trying to get out of it, which adds up because we know Kathy is a victim. I'm putting some weight on that observation. Yeah.

Well, the police assign a detective named Louis Romer. Everybody calls him Bud. So I'll just say Detective Bud Baltimore. So the next few days, we've got 35 people and five dogs scouring the area. They cannot find Sister Kathy. So Detective Bud gets this case. He immediately...

He immediately says it is bizarre that Sister Russell calls Jerry and, you know, Pete and not the police. They all gather together and it's several hours before they even bother to call the police. And of course, these are the two men who discover Kathy's car and contaminate it in whatever way they might have contaminated it.

They are suspicious of Jerry. Bud pulls him in. But before they can really press him, representatives from the Baltimore Archdiocese come in and basically convince the police to release Father Jerry and stop looking in that direction of the church. How would that even happen? What kind of pressure could the archdiocese put on the police to stop them from looking at a potential suspect and a woman who's gone missing? That is unbelievable.

There's no way law enforcement would cave to something like that under normal circumstances. I would speculate that there is some sort of political aspect that the archdiocese leveraged

over this detective's bosses. Basically, you know, back off or we're going to withdraw our support. We're going to withdraw, you know, being donors to your campaign or whatever, whatever the relationship is. There is something shady about that from my perspective. Oh, gosh. Well, get ready. There's a lot more shadiness from the police.

First, let's talk about the forensics. So there's a reporter for the Baltimore Sun named Robert Erlandson. He says the police had always insisted that there was no forensic evidence that could be recovered from Sister Kathy's car. So what? Anyway, I mean, I know. Give me a break. Let me tell you what they do bother to find. They find the dinner rolls that she had bought that afternoon,

They find evidence that she had cashed a paycheck for $255, but it doesn't sound like they found money. And they don't find whatever this gift was that she bought for her sister.

So there's that. So I guess it could have been robbery, but the mud part of it seems really weird, right? If you're going to rob someone, you're just going to take the stuff and go. You're not going to drive them to a muddy area and then the person's gone missing. You know, the offender probably had multiple crimes in mind. You know, first, you've got a woman who is isolated. Right.

And then the offender gets in the vehicle and sees that there's some assets that he can take with him. Who knows what the initial intent was, but fundamentally, Kathy and her car are taken away, and then the car is returned without Kathy.

It seems like Kathy is the target. Well, things get even weirder. Kathy's sister, Marilyn, is in college. About a week after Kathy disappears, she gets a letter in her mailbox at the dorm, and it's from her sister a week after she disappears.

She calls her dad, who is a postal worker, and he says, don't open it in case there could be some kind of evidence in the letter. And to read the postmark aloud to him over the phone, and the postmark says November 8th, the day after Kathy was last seen. It was sent from Baltimore, which is where she lived. Marilyn calls the police. Okay.

Okay, the Baltimore police, the ones that we think are sketchy already, and a man who is not wearing a uniform comes to pick up this letter. She tells her dad that he wasn't wearing a uniform and he says, this is probably a detective. Could have been Bud, I don't know.

She never finds out what was in the letter. And when this is reinvestigated in the mid-2010s, Marilyn goes to the Baltimore police and says, can I see this letter? And they said, we've lost it probably. I don't know where it is. So the day after she disappears and it's postmarked and it says it's from Kathy and the letter's gone. So there's no handwriting analysis or DNA or anything. In terms of the postmark, and this is where I would be talking to postal inspectors,

think about mailing something from, whether it be from your house or from, you know, the standalone mailboxes. You know, the letter goes in and then it's in there for a period of time. Now, if the letter went in, let's say November 7th, when Kathy, whose whereabouts were known, but the postman didn't

has already picked up the mail from that mailbox, then that letter is going to be postmarked the next day when the postman picks it up and it now gets through the mailing system. So that's where I'm looking at this postmark, and I'm not necessarily agreeing with the idea that

Kathy mailed this the day after she went missing. Okay. Well, that's good to know. So that is another thing that was one big mystery. Who is the person in the plainclothes that came and picked this up? We don't know. Now we have some information about one of our two suspects. The only suspects we have as of right now. So that is Father Jerry L.

and Brother Pete. Ultimately, it comes out that Sister Kathy and Father Jerry were more than friends. They were in love. At least that's what Father Jerry says. He says that he wanted Sister Kathy to not take her final vows, and he was not going to become ordained to be a priest.

They were both at early stages in their career when these things would have happened. He wanted to marry her. She said no to marriage. But there are lots of letters, and it sounds like she really loved him. She was conflicted, it sounded like. When they search Jerry's apartment, the police find a letter dated November 3rd, which is four days before Kathy disappeared.

She says, you know, I love you and I want to marry you and have children four days before she disappears. And now we have a priest turned boyfriend in the mix of all this. Yeah. And was Sister Russell a confidant of Kathy's? It sounds like it. So now, Paul, we're going to circle back to why did she call him instead of the police? And now I think we know why. Because she would have likely been with him, most likely. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's making a little bit more sense to me. Yeah. And if there is this written proof of Kathy's emotional attachment to Jerry, you know, then, okay, here we've got some victimology. And it sounds like, you know, initially when you said Kathy had spurned Jerry...

You know, then it's like, okay, now do we have motive? But it seems like the last correspondence, Kathy is expressing that she wants to be with Jerry. She wants to have kids with Jerry, and that would be what he wants. So from that relationship perspective, it doesn't appear that that would be motive, but that was November 3rd, and she goes missing November 7th. Was there any interactions between these two where things went sideways? Yeah.

Not that Sister Russell has indicated. Okay. It doesn't seem like it. So the last interaction that we know of between these two was positive. Now we're going to go down a little bit of a different road, only briefly, because we have another disappearance. So four days after Sister Kathy disappears, so this is November 11th,

There's another young woman who disappears under similar circumstances. This woman's name is Joyce Malecki. She's 20 years old, and her body was found on federal land, and the case ends up being handled by the FBI. We don't know much about this information yet, but we will know more later on.

So she went missing and then her body was found. You know, just know that the press has really attached itself to this because now you have two women kind of the same demographic, you know, attractive young women who have disappeared within days of each other and one's found murdered. Now we're going to find the other one. So Sister Kathy is found, finally.

So she went missing November 7th. She is found two months later, January 3rd of 1970. She is found in a small dump in Lansdowne in southwest Baltimore County. She's found lying on her back about 20 yards away from the road. This is not a well-known place, and people say you would have to be very familiar with the area to even know where it is.

She's found with her skirt pulled up and her shirt open. She's found in an area that a local would have had to have known about, and I believe...

I have kind of a photo of the area. I'm not sure how. I don't know. It's a dump. So you want to see the photo or do you want to hear more autopsy stuff first? No. Let me see the photo because I kind of, when you say dump, is this like a landfill area? Yeah. It's literally a dump. Okay. So you see Kathy's body. So I'm looking at an aerial photograph. It appears that there is a...

very large arterial road, if not freeway, that is on the southern part or the lower part of the image. There's a commercial business establishment. And further back, there's an X marking where Kathy's body was allegedly located at. It's in a clearing. You know, there's a large clearing, which I'm assuming is

this landfill or dump aspect. And so maybe this commercial structure that I see down in the lower part of the photograph is the, you know, the office, et cetera, for the dump. I'm not sure about that. You know, one of the questions that I would have is that if this is an active dump where people are coming, flowing through here, you know, all the time,

Was Kathy's body in plain view? And then why did it take two months to see it? Or was Kathy's body obscured enough to where even with an active business going on with, you know, people flowing in and out of this dump space, she would have been...

hidden from view. Do you have any information on that? The notes say this is not a well-known dump. This is not a place where people have gone before. Okay. And it looks like it's kind of tucked away in a corner away from the main road, unless I'm wrong. I mean, you could actually see like a little car down. I think that's a car down kind of traveling on the road. So this is not as well-known. And also, I'm

I'm sure she must have been covered up with snow January in Baltimore area. So, and I guess the other question is, I may have made a false assumption when you said it was a dump that it was like an active business, you know, as a landfill or dump. Or is this just a...

kind of a dump location where people are illegally dumping their trash or items. Do you have a sense as to what's going on there? No, I don't have a sense for that. I'm sorry, Paul. It is not a well-known dump. It's 20 yards away from the road. So, I mean, it just says it seems like isolated. I mean, her skirt was pulled up and her shirt was open. Well,

Well, this goes to now, okay, I'm going to make the assumption that since they're saying only somebody who knew about this location, you know, has local knowledge, it's not an area that you'd have a lot of people flowing in and out of. So her body could have been put there the night that she went missing and just, you know, finally somebody observed it two months later. Mm-hmm.

Of course, now her car has this vegetation, has this mud on it. Does this vegetation and mud appear that it could have originated from this dump location? So that's one of those things that I would really want to know very quickly in the investigation. Can I place Kathy's car where her body is found? Or was there a different location where that car had gone for some reason either with Kathy or after Kathy was killed?

I think next I'm going to need to know autopsy results because I'm kind of curious. How was she killed? Could she have been killed in the car? Does she have bleeding injuries? This is where this statement that there's no forensic evidence in this car, well, that's absurd. There's a huge amount of forensic evidence in the car. We know somebody who's in that car. We're going to try to place somebody in that car, and Kathy could have been killed in that car. So I need to know more.

Okay. So let's continue on. We are very lucky because we have probably in this time period the most famous medical examiner on earth in this time period. It's Maryland's deputy chief medical examiner, and his name is Dr. Werner Spitz. Yeah. Okay. He had already worked on JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations.

So he is our medical examiner. He says the cause of death is beating on the head, neck and other parts of the body, but mainly on the head. There is, and I have a photo of this, him looking at the photo. That's the best I can do. There is a perfectly round hole in the side of Sister Kathy's skull.

Detective Budd, who's the detective on this case, reports to the scene. He says it looks like it could have been made by a ball-peen hammer. And he said that a priest's ring could have also made such a hole if she was hit with enough force. The hole is about the size of a tennis ball. Dr. Spitz just said, I don't know, it just would have been a dense, heavy object.

And like I said, I have a photo. So as far as the autopsy, all we know right now is that she's been hit in the head. And this photo, Paul, is, I think, crazy. So this is Dr. Spitz looking at Sister Kathy's skull.

So, yeah, of course, I see Dr. Spitz there, and he's holding up a black and white photo that shows a skull that is completely devoid of flesh, at least anything that I could discern as flesh. There is some discoloration across the face of the skull as well as the back, but the skull is turned to where I can see the left side of the cranium as well as the left side of the face. And

This hole, which appears that it's a significant depressed skull fracture, is irregular. It's from top to bottom longer than side to side. And just guesstimating based on the, you know, the typical size of the human skull, this

this hole appears to be roughly three inches from top to bottom and maybe one and a half inches side to side or smaller. But this is a significant injury. Now, when I've had cases involving, let's say, hammers, where you have, let's say, the face of the hammer that is being used to inflict damage

wounds to a person's head, you see very classic, very circular depressed skull fractures or if the hammer face is, you know, kind of when it hits in a particular area, you almost get this lunar, semi-lunar type of injury, laceration and or depressed fracture.

I wouldn't eliminate something like a hammer maybe being used and inflicting multiple blows at this location enough to where it's causing this large hole. But this looks more akin to something like an irregular massive weapon, like a rock, significant rock,

or other type of massive weapon, this is not in any way, shape, or form consistent with a ring somebody's wearing at all. I don't understand that. How anybody would even think that? You know, so what this informs me is that, okay, Kathy has received a significant blow or multiple blows to the left side of her head. This most certainly would be fatal.

And this would result in significant bleeding, you know, wherever she's located at, wherever this occurred, whether it be in her vehicle or at some sort of other death scene. You know, there's a death scene out there, and her blood and possible brain matter would be present at that location. Mm-hmm.

Well, that's all good to know. So as we move forward, you know, we'll be able to see what other kind of evidence we have because I don't know how much the autopsy is

is going to help at this point. So Baltimore County surrounds Baltimore City. These are separate jurisdictions. And Landown is in Baltimore County, and that's where her body is discovered. So the case is handed over from Baltimore City Police to Baltimore County Police. So when that happens, I'm sure this happens now, when that transfer happens, evidence that is important never gets passed from one of these jurisdictions to the other.

And in the documentary series, a representative from Baltimore County Police say that the city police had that letter that Marilyn had received, and it was never given to them when Sister Kathy's body was discovered in Baltimore County. And so in the middle of an interview with the Keepers, the Baltimore County police officer realizes that possibly no physical evidence from the period was

when Sister Kathy was missing, was turned over to the county. You know, he just says, I don't even know if we got any of it. The series was taped decades after this case happened. So is that something that happens commonly when you're, you know, having to pass on a case from one jurisdiction to another? Does that surprise you that there might be missing evidence when you're passing over from one to another? No, nor is it unusual for when you have, you know, one agency who's responding to a missing person's case and then,

Now you have a body found in a different jurisdiction. So now you have another agency who is handling the homicide. Oftentimes, you do not see this transfer of evidence. It is not necessarily a standardized process. Agencies that are well-experienced and organized, of course, would try to consolidate that evidence, and there would be

tracking mechanisms of evidence flowing from one agency to another, where it's now integrated as part of the evidence list for the agency that is handling the homicide. However, I've seen cases over and over again where you don't see that type of transaction. So you have to be aware that there's different repositories of evidence.

Now, for Baltimore PD who has a missing persons case, over the decades, I absolutely can see and have experiences where now somebody in the property room, a technician in the property room is now going through the routine destruction of evidence in order to free up more space.

for new evidence that is coming in every day. And they just see a missing person's char. It was just a missing person's case. And they go, well, we don't need to keep this anymore. You know, evidence from 1969, boom, gone.

Technically, there needs to be documentation of property destruction. But oftentimes with some agencies that aren't very organized, there is no documentation. So this is just so typical. You know, it's not surprising at all like this letter from Kathy postmarked November 8th can't be found. That was collected under a missing persons document.

case at Baltimore PD. So no, in all likelihood, unless that evidence is just tucked away in the property warehouse somewhere, nobody's actually put forth great effort to find it.

There's a good chance it just got destroyed during routine processing out of that property room. Okay, so we don't know ultimately why this evidence doesn't come out, but it sounds like it's not something that is totally shocking to you. So that's good to know. I mean, that's good to have that kind of information moving forward. Essentially, this case goes cold.

You know, they re-interview Father Jerry. Father Jerry says they were really putting high pressure on him. And he says something really weird that at one point when the police are questioning him, they throw something wrapped up in a newspaper on the table and he opens it and he says it was one of Kathy's like sexual parts.

Now, of course, the police are going to deny that. It seems weird. But if it happened, I guess the consensus is they were trying to get him to talk to scare him. It doesn't work. He doesn't look at it closely. So something wrapped in a piece of newspaper is one of Kathy's sexual parts. Are we talking about...

something has been excised from her body. That's what he's saying. So the reason I bring that up is I don't know if that's true or not. Does that say anything about Father Jerry? It's weird. I mean, that's weird. Okay. Do you have the autopsy, more from the autopsy in terms of the dissection, what the condition of her body was? I mean, after two months, it's going to be, even though it's wintertime, there's going to be a level of decomposition.

But outside of the disruption of her clothes, when you start saying, you know, her sexual part is removed from her body, well, is that the way her body was found? That's becoming hugely significant to me. That is not something that Spitz has said was really true. Either she was buried after this happened and he didn't say anything. I think he said it in The Keepers, which happened 40 or 50 years after this. So there was no way to prove it.

I don't have the autopsy results. There was never anything like that noted from what I saw that Dr. Spitz said. So he's either making it up or something. Jerry's making it up. Yeah. To me, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, to me, it doesn't make any sense, especially because this is something Spitz would have said. Oh, yeah, there's a removal of her vagina. Yeah.

But at the same time, my point of bringing this up is it's weird. If he lies about this, that's weird. I mean, why would you even say something like that, you know? You know, unless the investigators were doing some sort of ruse with Jerry in order to...

press him, you know, to make statements, but that's absurd. You know, if that really happened, then that tells me a lot about the law enforcement investigation and the quality of the individuals involved with it. But I'm not sure I can put any weight on Jerry. He

He may have just been completely misinterpreted what he was looking at. Right. And I think that was the point, is that if this did happen, I think people think it's the police doing exactly what you said. They had a stake or something in there instead, you know, and it was a ruse to put pressure on him. Yeah. Or he's making it up and it's a weird thing to make up. Regardless, Paul, this goes cold.

For 25 years, as does Joyce Malecki's case, both of these go cold. They have no suspects. They don't have enough to charge, you know, Father Jerry. They can't figure anything else out. They don't have clues. Any evidence that they had was lost in a transfer, apparently.

So this goes cold until 1994. So we're going from 1969 to 1994. There's a former Archbishop Keough student, high school student, who comes forward with another student. And this is where the horrific abuse at the hands of several priests at this school, where she worked, where Sister Kathy worked, in the 60s and the 70s, took place.

This is a woman who is known as Jane Doe, and she says this, and this is what really blows up this whole investigation. So 25 years later, she says that before Sister Kathy's body was discovered, a priest who was abusing her, one of the priests at the school,

had driven her to where Sister Kathy's body was and showed it to her. He said, the same thing is going to happen to you if you tell anyone about the things I've done. When this happens in 1994, the newspaper The Baltimore Sun confirms this woman knew details about the crime scene, the dump, that had not been known to the public before. So this is where I probably need your interpretation because Jane Doe and another student said,

have a lawsuit against the school that had been dismissed because their testimony depended on what is classified by the state of Maryland as quote-unquote recovered memories, which are inadmissible. In this case, her memories, Jane Doe's memories, did come back to her later, not with the help of like an outside person or a hypnotist or anything, but that she said she just pushed them all back. She disassociated for about 20 years and

And the other student, who was Jane Roe, that's who they named her, doesn't really sound like she ever forgot it. She just didn't come forward. So they labeled these as recovered memories, which are inadmissible, but it sounds like these are just people who couldn't or wouldn't come forward until 25 years later.

But the big headline here is, this woman says she was taken to Sister Kathy's body before it was discovered. Yeah, you know, this is significant. And of course, I'm wanting to drill down to really get a feel for the veracity of what Jane Doe is saying. You know, could she take the investigators to that dump location? Or if they take her into that general area, because she may not, you know, as a kid...

Not, you know, know how to drive to that location, but okay, take her to that location and say, okay, where did this guy show you Sister Kathy's body? And then tell us what you saw. Does that really add up?

with the actual facts of this dump location of Kathy's body. I'm going to assume that Jane Doe is spot on with what she's remembering, okay? Of course, this idea of recovered memory not being admissible, well, that's for trial purposes, but that is an investigative lead. You know, you could still use it as an investigative lead. So now it's like,

well, who is this man who drove this Jane Doe to where Sister Kathy's body was found? Now I'm, you know. You're all in. It's a dog after a bone. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of details here. Before we get to what she says and who the man was, let me give you a little bit of background. In 2017, so this is not very long ago,

Jane Doe reveals her real identity. She speaks on camera in the Netflix documentary series The Keepers. It is harrowing to listen to her. And I find it very difficult. And I've told you a million times, these are the stories, particularly like teenage girls, young girls, sexual abuse. These are the stories. I can almost always take any kind of murder perspective.

But this sexual abuse is really difficult. So I made it through it, but it's an absolutely astounding series, and her recounting of this is really difficult. So I'm not getting into the details, but I will tell you this. Her name is Jean Hargadon Wehner, and she had actually first come forward to the church about the abuse in 1992, but the story came out

in the press two years later after she gets to run around for the church for two years. She was a freshman. She went to confession and all of these people I'm about to name are important. And boy, I'm just going to try to skip through this. She goes to confession and she tells a priest who is a man named Father Neil Mangus who taught religion that she had been sexually abused as a child. He starts sexually abusing her.

She's a freshman in high school. And after several months of this, another priest who works at the school is a guy named Father Joseph Maskell. He also abuses Jean. He is the school's chaplain. And this is the man we're going to be focusing on. He's young, relatively. He's been ordained for just four years before Sister Kathy died. He had been transferred to Archbishop Keough in 1936.

1967. So it's awful. I mean, Father Maskell brings other men to abuse her, including police officers. It sounds like at least one police officer. His brother, Maskell's brother, is a police officer with the Baltimore City Police Department. He is also, Paul, the chaplain for the Baltimore County Police, the Maryland National Guard and the Air National Guard. He's friends with a lot of cops, including the first officer who responds saying,

when Kathy's body is found, they're all over the police here. You just let me know how the archdiocese could tell the police department to back off. If you have officers that are committing the same type of abuse on underaged kids, now, yes, that is something that they could exploit in order to just bury this in the investigation. Yeah, you know, Gene is...

is feeling constantly threatened by Father Maskell. And on one occasion, she says that he produces a handgun and threatens to kill her if she ever said anything. There's another kid-- well, now he's a man, but he was a kid at the time--

who had been an altar boy for Father Maskell, who also said he saw him carrying a gun, that this priest was carrying a gun. Of course, this is not the only young girl that this is happening to. Her story first comes to light at the beginning of a larger reckoning about abuse at this school, which we now know was part of a much, much bigger systemic pattern of abuse within the Catholic Church.

And it sounds like the abuse at Keough was rampant and unchecked. And according to a 2023 report from the Maryland Attorney General's Office, Maskell already had a history of suspected child abuse by the time he was given the job of chaplain at Keough. The report says he was moved from two parishes in the 60s because of reports of troubling behavior with children. So Jean is not the only one. She is talking about this now.

And as I said, Father Maskell is the one who takes her to the dump where Sister Kathy is and says, if you say anything, this is what's going to happen to you. Scares her to death.

so much so that she doesn't talk for almost 25 years. And I will give you more details about this case because it is way not over. I mean, we are under, we're so not over this case. But you're going to have to wait a week. I told you it's big, I warned you. You're going to have to wait a week. We'll do part two next week. Yeah, you know what? There's a lot of moving parts in this case. I'm going to have to, I've got my notes. I'll have to review my notes before we move forward during the next episode.

Okay, well, get ready. I'll see you next week. All right. Sounds good, Kate. Thank you. This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbonessources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashan, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Talladay. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogle. Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at BuriedBonesPod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.