Original subtitles

Synced & corrected by PopcornAWH - www.addic7ed.com -

[objects clanking]

[Tom] I've spent the last 30 years as a freelance writer...

going wherever I could to do my job and make a living.

It's been a life of wandering around...

and finding a good story, getting an editor to agree to cover it...

and assign me to it.

As soon as, uh, it was done and over, "Thank you very much,"

I'd throw it in a box like these boxes you see...

There are other rooms downstairs.

...and start cranking on the next one.

Damn it, where the hell did I put it?

Basically, this story, "Who Killed Sister Cathy?"

It's a 6000-word monster review of the whole thing.

I would not ever hear the name Sister Cathy Cesnik

until 1994 when the first stories began to emerge.

And that they included a woman who said she had witnessed

the body of the dead nun.

Of course, I was interested on a lot of levels.

There's an on-the-record public story

of what happened to Sister Cathy,

and then there's the world beneath that was actually being lived.

And to get at that mystery,

I think, is our greatest journalistic responsibility.

"Who Killed Sister Cathy?"

One of Maryland's Coldest Murder Cases Heats Up,

"by Tom Nugent."

"She lies buried on the side of a steep hill"

in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania,

a threadbare suburban town

directly across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh.

Her granite headstone offers the eye only four stone-carved words,

"Sister Catherine Cesnik, S.S.N.D., 1942-1969."

And so, we find ourselves, what, 47 years after the murder?

The case is unsolved...

we all go on day after day,

and the boil continues to swell,

and the people who were injured most

deeply continue to struggle and suffer.

And the public continues to ask, "What happened?"

But these clues to what it was linger on in a place like this attic.

Those objects hold that energy and they twist you...

and turn you in the wind,

and you start asking, you know, "What was...? What is the past?

What was it?"

[motorcycle engine running]

[Gemma] Hey. Can we just sit down?

[woman] Yeah, wherever you'd like. I'll be right over.

[Gemma] Okay.

[rock music playing over speakers]

[server] Can I get you all started with something to drink?

Um...

- What kind of chardonnay do you have? - [server] I have Yellow Tail.

Oh, that's fine. [chuckles] That's what I drink at home... only.

Hi. Um, I had a quick question.

We've been using your excellent services for about two years.

We're looking into an old unsolved murder case.

My high-school teacher, Sister Catherine Cesnik, in '69.

- Hello. - [Tom] Hello.

Come on over.

- Here, come on. I'm Gemma. - So, they tell me... I'm Tom.

You know where Keough is?

- No. Why? - Next to Cardinal Gibbons.

K-E-O-U-G-H.

It's called Seton Keough now. Anyway...

in 1969, a nun at Archbishop Keough was murdered.

- In 1969? - [Gemma] Mm-hm.

[Gemma] And then her body was found about two months later.

- Wow. - [Gemma] She had been murdered.

- This is my e-mail address. - Uh-huh.

'Cause you're not on Facebook,

- but you have e-mail? - [Tom] Yeah, I do.

Okay. So, I'm not hitting on you, okay?

- No, that's okay. - I seriously am not.

- Do you have much baggage? - No.

I'm one of the least...

[Tom chuckles]

[Gemma] My personality is such that I'm really driven

to find answers from other people.

I will go out and talk to people, knock on doors,

calling, questioning and asking them if they can help.

I'd asked once in the past.

Sometimes I find if I ask twice, they find them.

Sometimes we have to dig a little deeper.

But this... This is an old open warrant.

Okay, let's take a look.

Now, we looked at them maybe a year ago,

and they said that there was a box of evidence that was missing

and there were supposed to be three file folders.

So, we're sort of hoping maybe they might have found their way back.

If it's not there, we'll put a request in

- for them to get that refiled for you. - I can come back. Thank you.

- Great. - We're gonna keep our fingers crossed.

Gemma Hoskins... bulldog.

She's the bulldog.

Abbie Schaub is the intellectual.

They're feisty, tough women.

I've asked both of them:

"Don't you guys wanna become investigative journalists?

Let's have some real fun." And they...

They tell me, "We'll do it our way."

[inaudible dialogue]

The first day she walked in and said,

"We're gonna read The Scarlet Letter,"

I couldn't believe it. I was 13 and this really cool nun was

gonna read The Scarlet Letter with us?

I have never ever had a teacher like that before.

[Deb] Sister Cathy could have been looked at as, like, a big sister.

She exemplified this spirit of compassion and kindness.

You felt like you were an individual with her

and she was, like, encouraging you to bloom as a person.

[Abbie] When we started doing Romeo and Juliet,

I thought, "Oh, this... "

You know, "I'm barely gonna survive"

sitting through hours of Romeo and Juliet."

But it got to the point where I began

looking forward to going to English class.

Who would've thought such a thing?

[Deb] I guess because she was so close in age to us,

everything she said was romantic.

You know, English literature, how you

can express yourself through poems.

When you're an adolescent and you're a girl,

that resonates with you.

And she was able to touch a lot of people in a short amount of time.

[Abbie] She was murdered our senior year.

And it's always haunted many people in

the community. We're not the only ones.

People pop up from 45, 50 years ago

who say, "I have a story I'd like to tell you."

So, it's been an ongoing urban legend almost.

[Gemma] Abbie and I found each other

because we had not been in contact

with each other since we graduated.

Gemma's been the Nancy Drew, I think.

She's good at getting people to talk to

her, calling them up and talk to her.

Abbie does amazing research, like no one I've ever met.

I like to get on the phone, talk to people, draw pictures...

And I hate to talk to people, so, that works. [laughs]

[Gemma]...of what... Of what's going on.

Our mission, we were driven to find out who hurt Sister Cathy.

We have people telling us to be careful.

[Abbie] Our concern was that she fell into something evil,

something bad, and got caught up with it.

We're told that the story is not the nun's killing.

The story is the cover-up of a nun's story.

It worries me whether or not we're looking

at something bigger than what we know of.

[Gemma] It's a 45-year-old cold case,

and I think we probably have more information

than any police officer or detective has had on this case ever.

[Abbie] We're in our 60s.

Time is getting short for us to be able

to figure out what happened to Cathy.

I don't think there's any shame in not succeeding,

but it would be wrong not to try.

[students chattering]

[school bell rings]

[Juliana] Sister Cathy was my 11th-grade English teacher in 1969.

November 7th...

it was a Friday.

We had discussions after class.

Just talking about what was going on

in my life and that kind of thing.

She was standing behind her desk and I was standing next to her desk

and... just talking.

Um, I don't even remember what we were talking about

until she said that she had to go shopping that night for a gift...

for someone in her family.

She seemed really happy about it, about this person, whoever it was.

She was excited that they were getting married.

And then I went on to my next class.

[car engine starts]

[Abbie] Cathy left high school after her normal teaching day.

She was back at her apartment at some point.

Uh, might have been... I would assume around three o'clock or so.

[Bob] Sister Catherine and Sister Russell...

they were roommates.

They taught together at Keough and they...

were the two nuns who left the order, became public-school teachers.

They rented an apartment over on North Bend Road

in the southwest part of the city.

I interviewed Sister Russell...

at her home in Carroll County.

A very nice lady, but she was also very reluctant to talk.

[Chris] Sister Russell was, um...

She was my algebra teacher.

She was also the cheerleading coach.

She was Cathy's friend. Everybody knew that.

They laughed together a lot.

You'd see them in the hallway

and you see them at different places together.

But Russell was more of the left brain and Cathy was the right.

[car engine starts]

[Abbie] As far as we know, she left the apartment parking lot

somewhere around 7.

Sister Russell, her roommate, said

that... this was a routine they did.

She was gonna go shopping to pick up some bakery buns.

She was gonna buy an engagement gift for her sister.

She went from her apartment to the Edmondson Village Shopping Center.

It was very safe at the time.

It was a local attraction considered upscale.

[Tom] Sister Cathy went to the local bank,

cashed her paycheck, bought some dinner rolls.

Now, accounts vary here.

Several witnesses have told the newspaper and the police

there's no doubt that the nun returns to her parking space

but no one has proved that she ever came back to her apartment.

Instead, she vanished.

We don't know exactly where Sister Catherine... was taken.

You know, was she on her way back from Edmondson Village?

Did she get back to the block where she lived

and then this person grabbed her?

She might have been grabbed right

outside her own door for all we know.

All we know is that she never came home from that trip.

[Abbie] We have a witness.

An airline stewardess had gone grocery shopping

and was going up and down from her car

carrying bags of groceries in and out.

But on the third trip, about 8:30,

she remembers seeing Cathy sitting in her car in the parking lot

as if she was waiting for something.

One of the Keough girls,

who was... embarrassed, I think, initially to admit it,

was in the neighborhood of Sister Cathy's apartment that night.

Um, she had a little bit of a crush

on one of the male teachers, I think,

and was sort of hanging around by his apartment,

which was apparently a block or two away from Cathy's apartment.

It was the beginning of November,

and around that time...

our, um, new phonebooks came out for the year.

The... It was called back then the C&P Telephone Company.

I was a sophomore in high school.

It was a Friday night, and my girlfriend and I said:

"Let's look in the phonebook, find out where all our teachers live."

In that house lived Mr. Noone,

and the light was on, on the second floor.

And we said, "It's Mr. Noone! He's got his undershirt on."

I believe he was in the room there above the door.

He was standing in front of a mirror, combing his hair.

The light went off.

We ducked down and, you know, trying not to giggle.

Before we knew it, we heard this yelling.

And I would say it came from that direction.

That's where Sister Cathy and Sister Russell lived.

It was a man's voice.

Loud, booming...

garbled with emotion, anger.

We really thought it was some kind of

violence that was going on up there.

And that's when we took off and went home.

[phone rings]

[Abbie] Sister Russell, her roommate and friend, became concerned

when Cathy never came back from the shopping trip.

Around midnight, she became concerned enough

that she... called... Gerry Koob.

Father Koob and Cathy had met.

Cathy was teaching English,

and Father Gerry Koob was teaching religion.

They apparently developed a friendship.

That troubles us a bit, looking back.

Why didn't Sister Russell call the police?

[Gerry] Now, the Carriage House Apartments...

- [Gemma] Right here. - ...are here, yeah. Okay.

Okay. Keep going. All right.

[Gemma] Down here?

[Gerry] Hmm.

Go up a little further. Yeah.

Before five o'clock that afternoon, it

was a typical day at the retreat house,

and I didn't have a retreat going on,

so, I have little or no recollection of anything.

But I knew that then-Brother Peter...

Pete McKeon and I had decided

there's a movie playing in Baltimore tonight that we both wanna see.

It was Easy Rider.

I would venture it must have been about

10:30 or so by the time we got back.

And we were sitting and talking about it

and the phone rings, and it's Sister Russell Phillips.

"Have you seen Cathy?"

She tells us that Cathy went out around 8:00 or 8:30.

She was gonna get an engagement present

for her sister and she's not home yet.

So, we got in the car and drove up to Catonsville immediately.

This is... This is the apartment we were in.

And, uh...

we were on that ground floor.

So, our approach was up those steps and right into this apartment.

We spent maybe 45 minutes to an hour listening to Russell.

And... since it was now three hours after what she expected,

I said, "I think it's time for us to call the police."

So, a single policeman responded to our call.

He came to this apartment.

We were describing her as a missing person.

He wrote everything down, he left.

The three of us gathered around a little table.

And I said Mass.

We did a little bread and wine, and I did the Mass, a consecration.

And we saved some of the communion bread for Cathy.

We were still hoping against hope that she would show up.

After another hour or two, Peter and I left

and went down those steps to take a walk.

We're coming up this way...

and when we get about here... we spot the car.

This door was unlocked.

[Abbie] Right.

- We went in. - Uh-huh.

And the famous twig was sticking... Hanging down from that.

[Tom] There are leaves, twigs, muddy tires.

This car had been into a swampy area, unquestionable.

The car had been into swampy, muddy ground.

And why is that car found

with its rear end sticking out in the street

right adjacent to the Carriage House Apartments, where the nun lived?

Whoever put that car there wanted it to be found.

My elevator inside me is dropping down very rapidly,

because up here, I know Cathy did not bring this car back here.

Somebody else brought the car back and didn't bring her with them.

Then where is she?

[Abbie] Around this same period of time,

Joyce Malecki is a young woman

who was abducted three or four days after Sister Cathy was abducted.

Back then, abductions and murders of random young women

were almost unheard of.

For two young women to be abducted within four days of each other,

what are the odds?

Same scenario, car was found, side of

the road, door open, she was gone.

Her family are charming people.

She has several siblings still alive. We've met with them.

So, we said, "As long as we're spending this time looking around",

let's see if we can find any information to help the Maleckis."

[Don] This is where it had first came out

where she was missing and where she was missing from.

"Joyce Helen Malecki,"

a pretty young 20-year-old Lansdowne

girl who lived less than two miles

from the apartment where Sister Catherine Cesnik

was reported missing late yesterday.

Similarities in the two cases. Both girls were young and attractive.

Packages were found in both cars.

Both cars were found abandoned with no apparent signs of struggle,

"keys were still in the ignition, and both girls had went shopping."

You know, where we grew up, we had no keys to the house.

The house was not locked, so, we could come and go as we please.

There was no crime rate. There was no trouble.

Never had any problems. Everybody was there to help you.

It was a nice neighborhood to grow up in.

[Darryl] In November 1969,

I was working at Gino's, which was a fast-food restaurant,

probably within five miles from the house.

I was working in the evening, and Joyce came up to Gino's

and asked me to switch vehicles.

She left her car, and she took my parents' car.

I was probably the last one to see her.

This is the exact parking lot where her car was found.

Once we converged here and met here, we contacted the state police.

They responded rather rapidly, secured the area

and told us, you know, "Hey, don't go in, don't touch nothing."

The car is parked just the same as we're parked right now,

and it was unlocked, and the keys were in the ignition.

The day that my sister went out shopping that evening,

it was all over the local news about Sister Cathy's disappearance.

"My mother told her," Joyce, be careful out there.

The nun is missing. Make sure you come home safe."

But she didn't.

It's always like an interview getting into your e-mail.

I sit right where I'm sitting now in the evening,

whether I'm eating or watching TV,

and I read everybody's posts.

Abbie's the researcher.

She and I are on here every night in the middle of the night.

This Facebook page,

Justice for Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki...

Abbie Fitzgerald and I are the administrators on this page.

And the purpose of the page is to collect information

from anybody who might have information

about what happened to Sister Cathy.

We have journalists, law enforcement, retired police officers.

People know that they can private message us.

If I ask a question tonight on this page,

all we have to do is post it and we get so many responses.

[Abbie] This is my very inelegant file system, very low-tech.

But it became clear fairly early that so many names were coming up

that I needed some way to try to store

the information, find it again.

Let's see.

I have the letters to the City of Baltimore Police,

to the... CIA, the FBI, Freedom of Information Act request.

[Gemma] Okay.

This Facebook post is from May.

"We went on a field trip trying to better understand the events"

the evening Sister Cathy was abducted.

Picture is attached. Tan brick building was Cathy's apartment.

Parking lot next to that is where her car would have been parked.

A silver SUV is parked where her car was found,

"parked illegally with back of car protruding into the street."

Facebook has been such an integral part of our investigation.

There's power in numbers,

and we're all feeling driven to find out who hurt Sister Cathy.

Sister Cathy and Joyce went missing in the same area

of southwest Baltimore in the same week.

So, we've been working with the Malecki family

to try and get information about Joyce

and to try and make connections between the two murders

and the people that we think were responsible.

Okay, Buddy, let's go.

[Don] After we found Joyce's car,

it was the next day that two hunters found her body.

Well, you can see how secluded this is.

And like I said, at the time, it was a dirt road,

so, somebody had to know

where they were going and what they were doing.

And in my opinion, she was placed back

here not to be found any time soon.

And somewhere... Somewhere back in here,

you go back about 25, 30 yards,

and there's the Little Patuxent River,

and that's where her body was found.

[Pat] And they asked if someone would identify.

And my mother and father, they were too upset.

So, I said, "Well, I'll go back."

So that they would be spared that.

The hunters found her.

She was facedown in the stream with her hands tied behind her back.

And her throat was cut.

They had her body on this gurney and a sheet over her.

And just the one thing I'll never ever forget,

when they pulled the sheet back,

her face was all dirty and muddy, and... her hair had sticks in it.

But I could still tell it was my sister.

So, that's when I went back and I... told my mother and father

and Donald and Darryl that it was her.

But when it comes to my sister,

the only thing I can see is what I saw when

I... When they pulled that sheet back.

That's terrible. That's the only memory

that I have, and it never ever goes away.

It's just like it was yesterday.

So, that's...

That's what you have to go through, I

guess, in a situation like that, but...

That's why I would like to see somebody pay for it.

Somebody did it.

[Tom] "City police search for missing nun,

26 officers combing area with K-9 corps dogs."

It was a huge public event in 1969.

We've got a terrible... Nun disappeared.

It's all over the front page.

"And five days later," Oh, my God, what's happened to Malecki?

Are they connected?"

And the FBI commissioner, the head guy in Baltimore, anyway,

"tells the press," Rest assured, your Federal FBI is hard at work.

We will find out if there's a connection

between Malecki and Sister Cathy."

You start asking, "Who ran that investigation?"

And that's Captain John Barnold.

He's the chief of Homicide, Baltimore City cops.

[John] "We're coming in here a minute, hon, and take a few pictures."

[chuckles]

That was me in my good days.

It was just a photo taken with my new

captain's hat and badge and all.

I was 38. I was the youngest captain on the force at the time.

And at that time, they only had...

I think it was 18 captains in the whole force, and I was one of 18.

I was fortunate. I had a good career.

People are missing every day.

They wander off, you know, and... And, usually, nothing comes of it.

As a matter of fact, in the newspapers, they quote me...

No foul play was known at the time.

And they kept coming to us, "Did you

hear anything? Did you do anything?"

Uh, they'd come to me and I'd say,

"The investigation is still on. I..."

That was all I could tell them.

[Tom] From day one, Barnold is essentially telling everybody:

"We don't think it's kidnapping. We don't

see a problem. We're okay. We'll be fine."

"What's going on here? Where is she?"

"We can't find her. We don't know. Nobody knows."

[John] I didn't wanna seem evasive,

but as I said, I was supervising robberies, homicides.

We were averaging 200 homicides a year even then in Baltimore City.

So, with 200 homicides, numerous assaults, sex offenses,

I couldn't really devote my time to one specific case.

I just had to trust my supervisors, my lieutenants and sergeants

to get the work done.

The longer she was missing, the more we suspected foul play,

but you don't wanna advertise it either.

With the disappearance of Sister Cesnik

and the disappearance of Joyce Malecki,

and both of them being young white females, attractive, shopping,

and nobody could give an excuse, under those circumstances,

you have to... go with the possibility

that there has been serious consequences,

that there may have been a kidnapping or a murder.

I remember going back to school and

everybody just shaking their heads,

because nobody could believe that she would disappear.

It's hard to describe how you feel

when you know somebody's in trouble

and there's nothing you can do about it.

Like, how can Cathy be kidnapped?

That doesn't make sense.

None of it made sense.

As school went on from November into the Christmas time,

I kind of think we all thought she'd never be found.

We knew there was an investigation going on,

but it wasn't visible to us anymore.

We didn't see pictures of people looking in the fields

and people with dogs out looking for the presence of Cathy Cesnik.

We had so many questions, and we didn't

think we were gonna get any answers.

[Gerry] From November the 7th until mid-January,

I had no idea what happened to Cathy.

And...

what I learned from that is the imagination goes crazy...

'cause you imagine it two different ways.

You imagine in a way that keeps her

alive, because you want her to be alive.

But then what do you plug into that?

She's being held captive. She's being tortured.

She's being repressed. And that gets too hard to bear.

So, then you start going the other way.

"Let's imagine that she's dead."

I don't want... I don't want that.

So, that was a very black period in my life.

[Tom] "The body of 26-year-old Catherine

Cesnik was found January 3rd, 1970,

in southwest Baltimore County.

She was lying on her back on the slope of a little hill.

"Sister Cathy wound up on the garbage dump with her skull caved in."

[Gerry] I can remember I was leaning against a wall

when somebody was telling me that they found the body.

And I remember sliding my back down the wall to sit on the floor.

And mostly, the feeling was relief.

Now...

Now the waiting to find out what happened is over.

[Gemma] James Scannell is a retired

Baltimore County policeman, okay?

Wonderful reputation.

Was involved

at the time that Sister Cathy's body was discovered in Lansdowne,

took the call from the hunters who reported it and went out.

He was the first officer on the scene.

He has agreed to take us to the spot where Cathy's body was found.

Alan Horn contacted him.

[Abbie] Yeah, Alan Horn is a very helpful man

who approached us through our public justice Facebook site.

Um, he told us that he was mostly retired,

that he didn't like to go fishing,

and that as a hobby, he helped groups by doing research for them.

[Gemma] We didn't know much about Alan.

He came onto our Facebook page and started posting.

Alan is great with talking to families, making cold calls

to find out who's connected to whom and

to reach out to people that we were...

really felt like would be instrumental

in giving us information and...

But we weren't sure how to do it.

I have a lot of doubts about Scannell,

but he doesn't need to know that.

[Alan] I'm Alan Horn.

Thank you.

[dog barking]

[Gemma] I will do my part to make him feel comfortable

and honor what he's sharing with us.

Hi, I was one of... I was one of Cathy's students.

- [James] Oh, okay. - So, it means a lot to me to meet you,

and I can't tell you how much that means, so, thank you for...

- No problem. - For sharing with us.

- Yeah. - I really mean that.

She meant everything to me, so...

But I'm actually looking and listening for other signs...

so, I will know what I'm going to do and say and...

When I get there.

[dog barking]

[James] I'm Jim Scannell, law enforcement for 38 years.

I worked just about all over Baltimore County.

Well, I was the lieutenant on duty...

in Halethorpe at the time the body was found.

And as the lieutenant, I responded.

I met the officer at the scene.

He took me to an area to the right side of the road.

It was a small plot where they probably

burned trash or something like that.

And it wasn't a big dump

or anything like... Just what would you find in a normal household

or community where, you know, they get rid of debris.

I can still...

Still see the...

Her laying on the ground, laying on her back.

It stays with you, you know? You never forget it.

But it...

It's part of your job, and you accept it, I guess.

And the question is, was she dumped there? Was she murdered there?

What transpired?

Prior to that, it was, I guess, almost two months, but, uh...

If they haven't changed the terrain,

I think I can get back there again.

This one here.

Right here.

We were here.

So, it was a good 20 yards off the road, where the body was.

She was just laying there on her back,

and her clothes were stripped down to her waist.

Her purse was laying alongside of her.

Condition of the body indicated that she was there for a while.

No fresh blood.

She wasn't shot. She wasn't stabbed... that I could see.

I think probably she was dumped there,

just dumped out of the car and laying there on her back.

She hadn't deteriorated.

No maggots or anything like that.

[Gemma] I just wanna say goodbye to you

- and thank you for your help today. - [James] Oh, okay. No problem.

We're really sorry we dragged you all over tarnation.

Sorry it didn't turn out better.

No. I mean, it's not a happy thing to do.

- Because I was one of her students... - Uh-huh.

...I just feel like I need to know as

much as I can about what happened to her.

Well, between... her disappearance and there,

that's where the answer lies.

Everything in between is only known by the guy who did it.

- Can I ask you one more question? - [James] Yeah.

Was it your gut instinct that she had been moved several times maybe

before she was left there?

They would probably know once they moved the body.

They what?

Once they moved the body.

Other words, I... I could just base my observation on what I've seen.

- Because she was laying on her back? - Yeah.

- Bud Roemer was there. - Right.

- Baltimore City detectives were there. - Right.

Do you remember any of their names?

- Just Bud Roemer, and he's dead. - [Gemma] Bud, and he's gone.

When we were at your house,

you told me some information. I wanted to ask you about it again.

You said it might be possible to get

the report from the patrol officer.

And who would we call to do that besides you?

[James chuckles] Have to call headquarters.

Do you know anybody that we...?

Do you have any friends in the police department?

[James] Most of them are retired, dead.

You wouldn't wanna make that call for

me if I treat you to a crab cake?

[James] I don't think they'd know me.

Truthful, they wouldn't know me.

[Gemma] I bet they would.

The people would.

- [Gemma] You look like Paul Newman. - Is that what it was?

[Gemma] The blue eyes and the beard. Yeah.

- Okay. - [James] That's all.

- Gory stuff, huh? - Yeah.

- Again, thank you. - Okay.

- I appreciate your help. - Alrighty.

Okay.

[Tom] "Bud Roemer always drank his coffee black.

He was in the middle of his third or fourth cup

on the morning of January 3rd, 1970,

when the telephone rang.

Roemer picked up the phone.

Talking fast, James Scannell told the M squad captain

that two hunters had just called to

report what looked like a woman's body

lying near a garbage dump off Monumental Avenue.

Moments later, Roemer and several members of the M squad climbed

into one of the department's unmarked black Plymouths

for the 20-mile ride to Lansdowne.

Bud Roemer. He was in charge of all criminal investigations

at Baltimore County Police Headquarters

as chief of the M squad, the homicide squad.

M for murder.

'It was snowing when we got to the dump

and cold as a son of a bitch, ' the detective recalled.

'When I walked up on that dump, I said, "Hello, Cathy Cesnik."

We worked that crime scene all day long.

We called in the medical examiner and

we asked for an autopsy right away.'

The nun had died of blunt-force trauma to one side of her head,

"along with a blow that had left a

round hole in the back of her skull."

"Mulling the autopsy, Roemer soon found

himself contemplating a likely scenario."

A stranger had probably abducted Cesnik

from the Edmondson Village Shopping Center

on Edmondson Avenue near her apartment.

In all likelihood, the unknown assailant had then killed the nun

and dumped her body about five miles away.

But his hypothesis was contradicted by one troubling fact.

The nun's car, a green 1969 Ford Maverick,

had been parked at an odd angle,

illegally, near her Carriage House apartment complex

only a few hours after she drove off to the shopping center.

How had the dead woman's Ford gotten back to her apartment complex?

In that situation, the killer wants to get the hell away from there.

Last thing he wants is to return to the area

"where he might be spotted driving the victim's car."

[John] Yeah, with the Sister Cesnik case,

until the body was found two months later...

during the interim, we investigated numerous people,

anybody that could have been involved with her.

Students, friends, her roommate, the place she worked at.

She was an attractive woman.

It could have been somebody just living in that area... followed her

or stopped her car or waved her down where her car was found.

Somebody put the car there.

And, yeah, it would have been so much easier if whoever killed her

just dumped the car somewhere in the woods where she was.

With homicides, time is a destroyer.

In other words, you could see the bodies decompose.

Blood work disintegrates. Weather washes things away.

And the longer you wait, the harder it is to get good evidence.

There's so many scenarios.

You know, you can really go wild trying to find out different things.

[Bob] We have two facts.

She was abducted and she was killed.

Beyond that, I don't know exactly what we have.

And the cops always told us that there

was no forensic evidence in that car...

but the fact of where the car was parked...

combined with the fact of where her body was found

some months later...

is a detail that's always been stuck in my throat.

Because where her body was found...

was not an area where you would just casually drive by it

and say, "Oh, here's a good place to dump a body."

But this was a very out-of-the-way area...

which led me to believe that it was

somebody who knew that area very well.

[Abbie] We went into this collecting information.

"We said," We don't know what happened.

Let's collect every little bit of scrap,

listen to every story somebody tells us,

and when we feel like we've hit a dead end,

we'll sit down and go through all this and say:

"What direction is this pointing us in?"

This is not Abbie and Gemma sitting at a

table being detectives or playing Clue.

It's wrong. It's wrong what's happened, but they're still unsolved.

We need justice for Cathy Cesnik and Joyce Malecki.

I have this image of myself in a room

with all these wires hanging down, all these electric wires,

and none of them are connecting.

I'm tentatively optimistic, but I'm impatient for connections.

[Don] I've been pursuing this for the last 15 years.

I've been calling FBI and...

Time in and time out. And I get the same answers.

I visited them. I went and knocked on their door.

"What have you done in the last 15, 20 years?"

And the only thing they tell me is:

"It's an open case and we cannot discuss it."

It almost leads me, personally, to believe it's a cover-up,

because I can't get any information.

You know, and here's two big flags that go up,

and both of them are unresolved.

It's awful coincidental.

Even if they come out and say, "We don't have anything,"

at least they would be talking.

They won't even do that.

You know, Baltimore is...

Has its level of corruption, and it's got its hierarchy.

[Tom] A retired detective that I interviewed frequently

who worked on it often says to me:

"Nugent, the real problem here is the cover-up itself.

The cover-up itself is the cancer inside Baltimore."

This is where she's buried.

My sister Joyce and Sister Cathy.

They were put on this Earth same as the rest of us.

Somebody needs to come out in the open and acknowledge the fact

that this is how they were taken away.

[Deb] This was somebody's life,

and people are ready to just say, "Oh,

well," and move on to the next thing.

It's never sat right with me.

So, when I saw that there were other women that were like:

"We wanna find out who killed Sister Cathy,"

you know, retired women, grandmothers that haven't let go of this...

And Tom Nugent, who...

This has been his lifelong pursuit,

right, since he first heard about it.

We're at a point now where we're not gonna let it go.

We're gonna do whatever it is we need to do to get justice.

[Tom] So, how does this story begin?

There are two key characters in this sad story.

One is a murdered nun, Sister Cathy.

The other is the witness, Jane Doe...

a student at the Catholic high school where Sister Cathy taught.

There was a mystery around Jane Doe's identity.

Everything starts there, and everything still hinges there.

Jane Doe probably knows exactly what happened,

and it has taken her 45 years to gradually

confront the full horror in herself.

Who is Jane Doe?

Jane Doe?

I'd love to talk to her now...

'cause she had a story to tell, but we never got to hear it.

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