Synced & corrected by PopcornAWH - www.addic7ed.com -
[Bob] It was like a puzzle trying to put this thing together.
You know, you heard some pretty wild stories.
For the most part, I believed
that something happened.
You know,
where there's smoke, there's a fire.
And the quantity of smoke that had been built up
certainly suggested that there was some fire underneath.
But we had no... Nothing really... No facts to back that up.
Because so much of it was he said, she said.
But in this case, it was he said, she said, she said, she said, she said.
[Beverly] Father Maskell, I wanted him charged.
I wanted to see him sitting in jail for what he had done.
And the only way for that to happen
would've been for the prosecutor to indict him.
[Jean] Sharon May, she was the chief of the Sex Offense Unit
for the prosecutor's office.
I... I don't know why she didn't. It was out of our hands.
I didn't know what to do.
The state's attorney...
the police...
the archdiocese...
they did nothing.
This man was, you know, back out in a parish.
I... I felt they had no other choice but to say yes to the lawsuit.
[Teresa] They asked if I wanted to be a plaintiff,
and I said yeah.
It made me really happy
because I wanted the world to know what horrible things he did.
And, um, I became Jane Roe in the Doe/Roe-Maskell case in '94.
[Beverly] It was determined that we would file suit against Father Maskell,
the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who were the nuns who oversaw the school,
the archdiocese, and the gynecologist, Christian Richter.
[Teresa] It was a huge, huge deal to take on the Church in Baltimore.
It... We were up against a giant.
[Deep Throat] Somehow it got in the media
that we were investigating this thing.
And a lot of girls started calling me and talking to me.
And they wanted us to know there's credibility,
but they didn't want their names used.
Didn't want their families, husbands, knowing anything's going on.
Then we started rolling from there.
We interviewed... I interviewed over a hundred girls myself.
- Because... - Firsthand or first on site?
- [Deep Throat] What happened... - Firsthand?
[Deep Throat] As we were getting into this, we had to cut it off
because, I mean, we had so many victims.
We were gonna go work on the best cases.
"Maskell had a police officer pick me up."
"Maskell was running around with police, put me in the car."
"Maskell pulled me into his office and examined me on his desk."
And those were the cases that we felt we could really do something with.
We believed them, we had a credible case.
This is what we call a red ball case.
A red ball case is any case that's gonna cause national media attention.
You have to work with the state's attorneys.
So, we were taking it directly to...
Sharon May's office. To Sharon May.
My... My concern with this is I'm still stuck
on why didn't the state's attorney's office charge Maskell?
You say you had a hundred women coming in in '94
with complaints that they were...
That they knew of or that they were involved with sexual abuse.
[Deep Throat] I'm telling you, Sharon May ran interference for the Church
any time we got a priest case.
- [Tom] She just killed it, then. - [Deep Throat] She'd kill it.
[Gemma] From what I understand after our meeting, our source, Deep Throat,
shared with us that he knows
almost a hundred women came forward,
and that they all came to the police department
and at the very same time,
Joseph Maskell was still performing the Sacraments
at St. Augustine's in Elkridge.
[Bob] August, 1994...
Beverly Wallace and I... went to church.
A nice suburban couple at church.
Maskell delivered Mass, and he had a voice
that was very soothing and very calming.
Even knowing what I knew about him, I found his voice very reassuring.
Bob and I discussed when we left
how we thought if you had gone to Father Maskell
and were upset or rattled,
that would be a welcome voice to talk to you.
That's terrifying.
[Lee] I met Joe Maskell
at Hopkins University.
And I think it was somewhere around 1982.
The time that I met him, I was in charge of the counseling program.
I was a professor there...
and they had a program that trained school and community counselors.
And he came into that program as a student.
So, I remembered him because of two things.
One, he was a priest,
and the other that he was extremely bright.
Joe wrote like few students can write,
and his speech was wonderful,
so, he was just extremely good as a student.
I saw him as both a colleague and later on, actually, as a friend.
The things that I thought were unusual, but I understood, he...
He liked guns and he... He told me that,
and he had a collection of them, I think.
So, I thought he might be interested in playing cops and robbers.
I didn't know him.
I never questioned that very much, but I thought...
well, if that was his thing, that was his thing.
I also remember visiting him once when he was...
I was supposed to visit him at a certain time
and he said he was busy in a cemetery, he was digging in a cemetery.
He said it's a very old cemetery and it was unkept.
It was not kept very well.
And besides, he had to bury some psychological papers there.
I did not question that overtly to him,
but it sounded strange to me.
[Abbie] Eject button.
I guess maybe this is my eject button.
We could be the last generation who knows how these work.
[laughing]
All right.
So, this is the day after the cemetery dig.
City and county police are teaming to investigate the murder of a nun
more than 20 years ago.
Police dug up a box of records buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery
after an employee told them Reverend Maskell ordered the documents buried.
[Deep Throat] We get this anonymous thing.
Well, the guy turned out to be this guy named Storey. Mr. Storey calls up.
He says, "Know where the farmers' market parking lot is?
Be there at midnight. Come alone.
I got information that'll blow this case wide open."
So, we go down there on the parking lot.
When he gets in the car and says, "Start driving." So we do.
We start driving.
And we get to Holy Cross Cemetery.
Oh, it's dark as hell. It's midnight.
He goes, "Go to the back."
"I wanna tell you where I buried the stuff from Father Maskell."
Well, we got a call from the caretaker...
that the cops are down there, digging up the records.
So, we hopped in the car and sailed down there...
and where they were digging was in the back of the cemetery.
Like, coming over the brow of a hill. Like over a hill and they were...
They are, down at the bottom,
putting these black trash bags full of records into a van.
"The papers exhumed yesterday were buried in the cemetery in 1990
at the direction of Father Maskell.
Baltimore Assistant State's Attorney Sharon A.H. May,
head of the city Sex Abuse Unit,
directed yesterday's excavation, but declined comment on the operation."
[Deep Throat] One of the boxes that I saw had girls with their shirts open,
exposing their breasts.
And there was records in there talking about...
this individual girl, like a profile.
Clearly in high school.
So, that's a lot of boxes.
And they're in plastic bags.
And that's typical pedophile.
A pedophile cannot separate with his collection.
He can't do it. Even though he knows he can't get to it, he knows it's there.
[woman] You saw pictures yourself, correct?
[Deep Throat] I saw pictures myself, yes, I did.
[woman] Enough to arrest Maskell?
[Deep Throat] We could've done it right then and there.
But what I'm saying is... every damn time we had a case involving a priest,
Sharon May ran interference for the Church.
The division chief of the Sex Offense Unit.
- She ran interference. - How did she run interference?
[Deep Throat] Ask for a warrant. "I'll have to look at it right now.
If you got information,
and you don't get it within the first 48, it's gone.
The red tape.
[Deep Throat] It's gone.
[Sharon] So, we went to the cemetery...
and as it turned out, it was a bright sunny day
and I had recently bought a red convertible,
so, I rode there with my top down, you know,
'cause this is just... I mean, we were gonna find
such great evidence, okay?
So, I was pumped up for that.
And we got there and, you know, they were digging.
And I'm just waiting as they pull all this stuff out of this hole.
And it was wet, it had to be dried out, um, you know, and...
And sorted through,
but to my recollection,
there was nothing found that went right to,
"Oh, Maskell molested these kids."
[man] We've heard of one source who says
that they saw pornographic material of teenage girls in there.
You're saying no?
I don't have any recollection that we found pornographic material.
Maybe we did, I just don't remember that.
[man] The version that we've heard
is not that it's, like, produced pornographic material,
- they were photographs. Original... - That it was like magazines
- or some things were... - [man] No, like actual photographs.
- Oh, photographs? - [man] Yeah.
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I know I would remember photographs.
No. There were no photographs. Mm-mm.
In 1990, I was chief of the Sex Offense Division.
I handled the TNT cases.
Ones where you wouldn't want to be very open
about the investigation until you had something solid.
Assuming you ever got something solid.
[man] We've heard supposedly that 30 to a hundred people came forward
in the Maskell case.
Would you have yourself heard those statements?
I don't remember the number.
I know there were quite a few, but it's been a little while,
and of course, at this point, I don't have files or anything.
Um, the fact that we had a number of victims come forward
was enough to make us look at the situation,
but prosecutors have a very specific obligation
in terms of their conduct.
All lawyers do.
Every case has to stand on its own merit.
So, if I charge the case with respect to Mary Smith
and what happened to her,
I cannot, as part of my case in chief,
bring in Betty Jones and Arthur Robinson
to say he's guilty as to the victim charge
because he also did something to these other people allegedly.
You can't do it.
I remember one incident where,
you know, we have a subpoena to get Maskell's records.
So, we went to his office space.
There was a secretary connected with the church.
Um, she let us know
that Maskell had taken all the stuff out and things were gone.
Now, did somebody tip Maskell off or...? You know, I don't know.
But he wasn't there.
And remember, too, the Catholic Church isn't stupid.
They had a lot of things that they could do.
They could move him, they could give him little sabbaticals.
He was apparently hospitalized.
And given the nature of the facility,
that wasn't some place that we would have access to him.
Maskell was... I guess the best word is elusive.
[man] Did you feel like Maskell was guilty of child sex abuse
even if you couldn't prosecute him?
I didn't disbelieve the victims,
but I just didn't have enough to go forward.
So... you know, maybe in the deep recesses of my mind,
yeah.
He did it, you know.
And then why else did the Church move him around,
why else was he unavailable,
why else did he get rid of his records?
But if all you have is the statement of the victim,
that isn't enough.
And so as painful as it may be...
that case perhaps does not get prosecuted.
[man] There's an off-the-record sex crimes detective
who goes under the name Deep Throat
who claims, uh, that the state's attorney's office
ran interference in favor of the Church in these cases,
and what would your response to that be?
I was not one to be intimidated, okay?
If an allegation is made, the investigation was done.
I never experienced any pressure
from the Catholic Church not to investigate.
I didn't always get, necessarily, the level of cooperation
that I would've liked.
I wasn't and still am not Catholic,
so, I didn't have any issues that, you know, challenged my faith
or upset my idea of right and wrong.
No. You know, no.
The allegation was made, I looked at it.
If I had had the goods, it got charged, okay?
That's as straightforward as I can be.
I don't care what Deep Throat says.
[Tom] Somebody's not telling it like it was.
Sharon May, she said, "We found no incriminating photos,
and we found no problem with the files that were in the box."
Deep Throat says, "I looked at girls, nude.
I saw photos of girls with their tops off.
I saw it with my own damn eyes."
Somebody's lying for sure.
[news jingle playing over TV]
[man] This is Eyewitness News.
With Don Scott.
Best be advised.
[Randy] Why don't you fast-forward it some more?
Not doing... Usually, you can hear it go: [Randy mimics VCR whirring]
- I hear it now. - It's very... Yeah.
Hit play.
No, you gotta stop it and then play or it'll snap the old tape.
All right.
Oh, there's...
Here...
- [Richter] To suggest... - [Randy] That's that old doctor.
-I'm totally innocent of anything - That's...
that they're accusing me of. That's it.
- [woman] Did you know Maskell...?
[Teresa] Dr. Richter was
the gynecologist where Maskell took me on several occasions.
When I went to the gynecologist and I got on the table,
they had the stirrups.
And I remembered trying to put my legs through the stirrup
because I didn't know how to get on the table, and...
Then Maskell was more than eager to show me how to get on the table.
Maskell raped me.
And Dr. Richter was, like, at the top of the table, um, feeling my breast.
Richter said, "He really must love you to be in here,
[chuckles] with us."
I interviewed the doctor that Maskell sent some...
I'm not sure how many girls to him for examination.
The doctor admitted to me he allowed Maskell to remain in the room.
As a woman, I was appalled at Dr. Richter's involvement.
He made a statement... With a chuckle, said,
as a priest, it was his only opportunity to see a woman in that position.
That comment incensed me.
That was clearly a violation of medical ethics.
But because he was a priest and a friend...
You know, there was apparently a lot of that kind of stuff going on.
[man] Dr. Richter denies the charges.
I'm totally innocent of anything they're accusing me of. That's it.
[woman] Did you know Father Maskell?
Twenty-five years ago, that's all.
Okay. Da-da-da-da-da.
It takes months to maybe years, sometimes, between filing a case
and actually getting it into a courtroom.
First thing I knew of it was there had been a little bit of coverage
about a case, but I didn't really know details.
They just talked about Jane Doe and Jane Roe
and the abuse at Keough that had happened in the early '70s.
[Kathy] I used to read the articles in the paper when they first came out.
I wondered a lot about who Jane Doe was.
Is it someone I knew?
Did they have a worse experience than me?
[woman] The anonymous Jane Doe and Jane Roe
claim the abuser was Father Joseph Maskell, a counselor at the school.
[Teresa] We started the civil lawsuit as Jane Doe and myself, Jane Roe.
I mean, there's a lot of people that...
That go berserk when they feel like they're being attacked.
And a lot of people thought that they were being attacked personally
by this priest being brought out to the open.
I was afraid for my family.
[Donna] They were ridiculed, they were not believed.
I can even remember adults in my own family talking
of how terrible those girls were for saying that.
So, how am I gonna come out and talk when I...
I'm hearing this from my own family?
I was certainly not one
that would come forward at that time.
I did a complete media blackout.
I stopped reading newspaper.
I stopped watching the television.
I felt really guilty, but I felt so self-protective, you know,
that I just didn't want anybody to touch my happy little life.
[Teresa] Jane Doe.
I never met Jane Doe, still I haven't met her to this day,
but with someone else saying things that Maskell did,
I was strong enough to come forward and to go into court.
[Jean] Jane Roe...
I made a point not to meet her. I made a point not to talk to her.
I was remembering things,
and I was very aware that I did not want anyone
and their memories to get in the way of what I was remembering.
[Teresa] Before the case in '94...
we had depositions,
and the Church lawyers, they asked me questions for six days.
The depositions were...
I'm sure, what people would say... necessary.
But the experience that I had in these depositions by these lawyers
was... devastating.
[Teresa] They were questions designed to beat me down.
What I did with my high school boyfriend.
Whether I was sexually active.
It's very, very hard for an abuse victim to go through those kind of questions.
[Jean] The kinds of questions, the intensity of the questions,
the continuation of the questions of answers that I had already given...
And then to start feeling stupid.
Because I couldn't say it in any other way than, um, at that...
I can only say what I have remembered.
I couldn't give them any answer that would make them satisfied.
And it's like being back in the room with Maskell.
I couldn't do that exact thing
that would finally get me the forgiveness
that I had gone into the confessional looking for.
And here I am, sitting in this room, with a wall of lawyers,
and I can't seem to give them what they were pressing me for.
They agreed to let Mike sit in...
but he had to sit behind me.
And if he opened his mouth, he would have to leave.
And Mike knew if he left, I left.
So, he sat behind me, and you could feel like it was a lion,
and I just was waiting for him to go over my head
and grab one of these guys by the throat.
[Beverly] We wanted to depose Father Maskell...
but... he disappeared.
He was taken out of his church, but we weren't sure where he was.
I just know that after the night Bob Erlandson and I went to Mass,
I never saw him again.
[Lee] Somebody called me and said, "Joe, he wasn't doing well."
The question was, "Can you go see him?
Not as a psychologist, but as a friend?"
I did go down to the rectory where he was being housed.
He looked sick.
He was reading these papers that were accusing him of priest's abuse.
The acts that were described on the papers were...
I was in shock.
I couldn't understand how anybody who was religious could do those things.
This was atypical of my friend Joe, as I knew Joe.
I remember asking him directly, "Joe, how could you do these things?
How could you keep your silence with this?
How could you?"
He didn't answer and I said, "Do you think it's moral?"
He told me that he thought it was moral
because he was protecting the Church at the time.
I think the worst moral thing for Joe
would have been to get the Church in some kind of problem.
And that was the turning point for me.
He was a very manipulative guy.
[Beverly] Maskell's attorney,
a man named Michael Lehane, was a friend of his.
And when we would ask him where Maskell was,
um, his response was that he had... He was living in Ireland.
[Abbie] We have no idea what he was doing in Ireland,
whether or not he was working in some sort of religious facility,
whether he had access to children there.
That's all a bit of a mystery.
[woman 1] Today, in Baltimore, a pretrial hearing begins
in the case against Father Joseph Maskell.
[woman 2] The new memories are really key here.
That's because the statute of limitations on alleged assaults
that occurred more than 20 years ago has long since expired.
But if the judge accepts that the women only recently remembered
other instances of abuse,
he could clear the way for the case to go to trial.
I think this was the first time
anybody in Maryland delved into recovered memories.
The concept of recovered memories
came out in the '80s and were generally accepted.
I think at the time we filed our suit in '94,
28 states had ruled they were gonna allow
recovered memory cases to go forward
and only three states or something in that neighborhood had said no.
However, in the '90s, there became a certain skepticism...
[woman screaming on video]
[Raphael] What you're seeing is a therapy session of a young girl
who remembered a gang rape.
The only problem is they never really happened.
She says these memories were pure figments of her imagination
that her therapist helped her create.
[man] This past decade has seen
a skyrocketing number of molestation claims.
[woman] Adult children holding the false
belief that horrible sexual abuse
occurred to them as children.
[Beverly] You know, somebody may go to a therapist and say,
"I have trouble with interpersonal relationships."
They'll go, "Maybe you were abused,"
and so you start planting suggestive seeds, and then you...
You fabricate an entire fact pattern
to fit something that has no... veracity at all.
And that hurt those people who really did have a memory
that they had repressed and then recovered.
Two decades ago, a former chaplain at Archbishop Keough High School,
stands accused, but as John Riddell reports,
today's hearing rekindled a debate over repressed memory.
[man] Today a psychiatrist testified that one of the women
suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder.
It is a medical condition in which painful memories of abuse
are suppressed for years.
[Sipe] Jane Doe...
her lawyers wrote and asked me to consult with her.
You have to say, is this person credible or not credible?
I did interview her, talked to her.
And I believed her.
There are things that have the ring of truth,
even if they're hard to believe.
And, uh... she was believable to me.
[crowd applauding on video]
Thanks, heaps.
[Beverly] The defense, they brought in Paul McHugh,
who is a heavy hitter to bring into a courtroom.
Can you hear me, by the way?
Is my voice, uh, carrying?
My voice, my mother used to say, shatters glass.
So, usually...
I mean... And he is a giant in the field.
In this arena, uh, of the false memory phenomenon
and the false memory syndrome, and the recovered memory business,
I believe... firmly, that these are artifacts,
these are artificial productions.
And it's very important that we, uh... we don't equivocate on this matter.
[Sipe] Paul McHugh is always on the Church side.
He... He is a professional Catholic.
He's a man of high reputation.
And he gets picked as Mister Catholic Psychiatrist.
I was on the staff of Hopkins at that time.
Yeah, we were colleagues.
He asked me specifically about the case with Jane Doe...
and what I thought.
Part of all of the controversy around sexual abuse of minors...
has to do with the understanding of trauma.
Some things we experience are so unbearable and so painful,
that we shut them out.
The major systems for protection of the self,
the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal fight-flight response,
the vagal response, to play dead, to dissociate,
to be, um... unaware of something,
they'll come right into play.
In order to pro... protect the self from harm.
Naturally, we know so much more about this
because of men and women coming home from war
and being traumatized and, uh...
We have all sorts of knowledge now about how the person handles those,
how the brain handles those.
So, I told McHugh that, yes, I... I believed her story.
And he dismissed the whole thing...
because he dismissed what he called false memory,
and he felt that that was all...
made up.
In my mind he has a blind spot,
and I will say that with all due deference
when you're criticizing somebody who's that powerful.
[Beverly] The defense, they never had an expert actually examine our clients.
Dr. McHugh, he just basically poo-pooed the whole idea
of repressed memory and recovering memories.
Somebody is always saying, "Well, you haven't seen everybody."
I say, "No, I haven't seen everybody."
But then again, I haven't been at the upper tributaries of the Amazon
where there may be a unicorn after all.
[crowd laughing]
Uh, there may be one out there.
[woman] It's been a real battle of the experts today
on the case of repressed memory.
And now, the judge will hear testimony from the alleged victims themselves.
Going to court for the hearing was, um, terrifying for me.
I knew it was gonna be open court.
My husband Randy had one arm and my brother Mark had the other arm,
and they would escort me into the courthouse to...
To make me feel safe.
[Jean] The feeling that I had when I walked into that courtroom...
I was ready to be devoured.
There is really no demonstrated scientific validity
- to the theory of repressed memory. - Whether an event occurred,
whether an individual's description of that event is reliable...
Each and every one of those witnesses will be subjected to investigation
and rigorous cross-examination.
The credibility of their story will be very much an issue.
[Jean] I was scared of the lawyers at that point.
I couldn't even look at them.
And my lawyers decided
that I would just look at the judge
and not look at the lawyers as they questioned me.
[Teresa] It was, like, so many thoughts going through my head...
but I just took the stand and... And they questioned me.
[Jean] And one of the lawyers said, "I request that this plaintiff looks at me
while I'm asking her questions."
It felt as if at some point...
that terrible terror of doing this...
s... turned into something else.
I just turned, I stared him right in the eyes.
It was this feeling of...
"Go ahead, ask me your questions."
[Teresa] It was very brutal.
They asked about the actual sexual acts.
I mean, after a while, I got to the point where, "I don't give a damn.
You ask me anything you want because this happened,
and now the world's hearing it and that's a good thing."
Mike said to me later, he was in, like, the front row.
And later... That's all he said to people.
He said, "I was so proud of her when she just turned her head
and looked right at him, like, "Go on, ask me your questions."
And probably inside what I was really thinking is,
"Let's get this over with 'cause I gotta get out of here."
You know? I mean, it's, like...
But it was that feeling, like, "I can do this."
[man] According to Jane Doe, who testified yesterday,
not only was she raped by Maskell, she also recalled an incident
when Maskell allegedly took her to see the body of Sister Cathy Cesnik,
a nun, whom she said she confided in and whose murder remains unsolved today.
Now, police did interview that woman about the murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik
and they believe that she is not connected in any way to the murder.
They do not believe that what she saw really was the body.
So, that crime really remains unsolved.
However, the sexual abuse suits against the archdiocese...
[James] The top one is my credentials.
My badge.
Here's my retirement.
Summation on my 38 years in Baltimore County Police.
Came on in 1955 and then retired in '92.
[man] When the rumors started circulating in the 1990s
about the sexual abuse at Keough,
what was your personal reaction to that?
I find it hard to believe.
In our society, they go for the deep pockets.
And once you open the door, a flood could come in.
I would say, prove it to me.
Not...
Not with recalled memory.
With facts.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
[Gemma] Did you ever have the opportunity
to talk with Maskell after it happened?
After she was murdered?
- No. - [Gemma] Like, guy-to-guy?
Would you say you had a good relationship?
- [James] I would say so. - Yeah.
I was just curious 'cause he seemed to be
so involved with the police all the time.
[James] He had a brother with the police department.
- [Gemma] Right. - Yeah.
[Gemma] When Cathy's body was found...
James Scannell was the first officer on the scene.
I don't really think he sees any connection between Cathy's death
and the abuse at Keough.
Plus, he was a personal friend of Maskell's.
So, he clearly saw a different side of the man...
- [Gemma] Mm-hm. - ...than others did.
[James] Joe Maskell.
He was a friend and fellow officer.
He was the chaplain of Baltimore County, state police,
and the Air National Guard.
Yeah.
He used to come in ride-alongs.
He used to come down and I'd let him shoot when I was working.
We'd have a little target practice.
I know he...
He had a friend in Dundalk.
He went out on a boat with him.
In fact, I fished with him on a couple occasions.
[Abbie] So, when he has only good things to say about Maskell,
I think, "Was Maskell able to have such a dual-sided personality
that he could consistently flip to be charming?"
Or this guy must have seen the other side of him.
He wasn't... He wasn't a typical...
you know, saint.
I know if I got in a fight...
and he was riding with me as a chaplain, he'd be there by my side.
And, uh...
That's the type of individual he was.
He's a priest, but I think he really wanted to be a police like his brother.
He was just like...
any other member of the police force to me.
[Abbie] Maybe he was a good guy and had nothing to do with this.
They had some beers, went out and fished.
And that was the extent of it.
Um... I don't... I don't know.
I don't think his name ever come up...
until all that recalled memory come about.
And, uh... that's when Maskell's name...
That's when I started getting inquiries...
about Sister Cesnik.
But, you know, I... I tried to be objective on...
I think like a police.
If I thought it was him...
he wouldn't have been walking free.
Because... I would've did what I was supposed to do.
[Beverly] At the time we filed our suit,
Archbishop Keeler was up to become a cardinal.
And we used to say this could interfere with Keeler getting his red hat.
This was real bad timing for him.
Catholic bishops from across the country are meeting in Washington.
They're talking some explosive issues like pedophile priests.
The bishops' committee has recommended the needs of victims should come first.
Abuse victims are pleased with the statement,
but say the Catholic Church is notorious for saying one thing and doing another.
[Teresa] The pope was supposed to come to town.
And I thought it was really neat that our hearing came up
right in the spring there,
and that, um, people were interested.
People wanted to know what this was about.
I wanted to blow this thing wide open and say this has got to stop.
[woman] Today in Baltimore, Judge Hilary Caplan is expected to rule
in the Jane Doe lawsuit against Father Joseph Maskell.
When... When we filed our lawsuit, we felt like if we could get to...
If we could get our case to a jury and we could march in
witness after witness after witness after witness after witness,
that we had a very good chance of having a favorable result.
And we never got there.
[man] Their request to file a $40 million civil suit has been denied.
Judge Hilary Caplan ruled the case did not meet criteria
for waiving the three-year statute of limitations for such suits.
[Lehane] So, I think we have, um,
the two plaintiffs who are very confused, very disturbed,
and who have brought this action, um,
not out of malice, but, uh, out of confusion, distortion.
And, uh, I think it's appropriate for the court to dismiss this case
under the circumstances.
But how can one reasonably expect a witness in a... a case of this type
to testify to events that took place 20 to 25 years ago with accuracy?
[Teresa] We never got our day in court.
Losing on the statute of limitations was a technicality
that the Church ran with and got this thing thrown out.
The judge at the time said, "Let the chips fall where they may,
but the statute holds and these women came too late."
[Beverly] The Archdiocese and the Catholic Church are a business.
It was all about making these women who were damaged
look... uncredible.
Archbishop Keeler got his red hat.
[inaudible dialogue]
They're still down on Cathedral Street.
Life goes on.
It's just that we now know so much more about memory.
It's scientifically accepted that memories can be compartmentalized
and... And not known to the conscious ego.
I think Jane Doe was a victim of bad timing.
And Paul McHugh, or any of us,
who used our blind spots in the judgments of others...
can certainly do harm.
[Jean] I felt like I wish I had never done that.
Because everything that I originally thought
when I took the first step, now I've lost everything.
I lost my faith.
I lost a sense of where I belonged.
And my family, it was like they were excommunicated.
You know, as if it were like...
someone cut a cord.
I felt that the Church was saying
that I should never have opened my damn mouth,
that I was supposed to keep the secret,
that I was supposed to stay silent.
And that's what I did...
until now...
20-some years later.
- Hi. How are you? - Hello, dear. Good to see you.
Good. You, too.
[Gemma] So, the reunion was fun.
We had the Archbishop Keough 45th Reunion.
Oh, I didn't go to that one, yeah.
On Saturday.
You said you talked to a couple survivors?
- Yup. - That you knew or they...?
- That we know. Yeah, that we know. - Okay.
Statistics say only three to five percent
of abuse victims will ever talk of it.
They're more likely to talk of it as they get older...
That many in their 40s
begin to have more psychological difficulties ignoring it.
So, we don't know...
how many students in total he had inappropriate contact with.
Um, we know the amount... The number that have come forward.
We're sure there are more out there. But they are still coming forward.
People are hearing through alumni meetings
and applying to join the Facebook group and reaching out.
They're not looking at this through a child's eyes anymore.
- They have wisdom, experience, families... - Yeah.
...grandchildren, and they're like...
They... They want their life back.
[Abbie] In September of 2013, people wanted to talk about it more.
Victims wanted to talk to each other,
people who didn't know wanted to find out what had happened.
So, we started the Justice for Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki page.
And it just sort of snowballed.
[Lil] The Facebook movement is a very grassroots movement
that is led by some very strong women
doing their own detective work,
doing the work that the police should have done.
[Kathy] In 1994, Jane Doe and Jane Roe...
I saw how they were shut down by everybody of authority.
It's been so many years since that...
Gemma and Abbie, they started that Facebook page
and I think they got, uh...
They got more than they bargained for, I think.
[Gemma] It's not just the investigation.
It's become a network for a lot of abuse survivors.
Where before, everybody was separated and afraid,
people are now talking together.
And where something may have seemed insignificant at the time,
um, has relevance now.
[Teresa] I think it's very telling to see retired Keough grads in their 60s,
a bunch of women getting together to try to solve this.
Where... Where everyone else has failed us, they failed Sister Cathy.
I want justice for all of this.
[Gemma] Teresa Lancaster came forward on our Facebook page of survivors
and said, "I'm Jane Roe."
And the reaction she got was like...
It brought tears to my eyes because all her friends
just wrote, like, one-liners, like, "We had no idea."
"Thank you for finding us." It just was overwhelming.
[Teresa] After my lawsuit,
I wanted to prove to myself that I did have a brain
and that I could do something with my life.
So, I went back to school.
[Randy] I made a little study for her down in the basement.
There was a bed in there also.
When it was before a big test, she would stay down there all night long
and finally crawl into that bed and go to sleep maybe six in the morning.
It was very impressive for someone to take courses that hard
while she was raising four kids, cooking them dinner,
tucking them in at night.
In your middle or late 40s, that's not an easy thing to do.
[Teresa] I became a lawyer when I was 49. [chuckles]
[Randy] Teresa wasn't doing all this to make a lot of money.
She was doing all this to help people that needed help.
[man on TV] ...peacefully.
This is a much more aggressive tactic than the police used last night.
And you can see one person, she...
She engaged in this civil disobedience because it was...
[Teresa] Over the past week, there's been protests going on in Baltimore
to try to get to the bottom of how Freddie Gray was indeed murdered
when he was taken by the police.
Your neck just doesn't break by itself.
I've lived in Baltimore all my life.
I remember the riots of 1968.
And still, there is no change.
[man on TV] ...the result of something that would constitute a crime,
then the people who did that...
Last year, I represented a young black boy
who was just shuffling his pockets around on the corner
and he got arrested for drugs.
I realized that there's a lot of people in the police department
that are good and are laying their lives on the line,
and I very much thank them for that.
But all he had in his pocket was some change.
I did get that thrown out, but I told him,
you have to stay off the corners in Baltimore
and not look suspicious.
And... And how do you explain that to a young... a young boy,
not to look suspicious, you know? It's just really not fair at all.
[man] We're tired of this.
We're tired of the brutalities.
We're tired of the pains. We are tired of the lies.
We want the truth.
Y'all don't understand? Y'all don't hear our voice? We are tired.
Where is the justice?
[Gemma] See, I didn't know who Jane Doe was before this past year.
I have not spent time with her.
She is not one to seek the spotlight.
I don't think she would be really comfortable...
spearheading a movement to... to find Sister Cathy's killer.
But Jane is the link between Joseph Maskell,
the abuse at Keough, and Cathy Cesnik's murder.
This is really her story.
[Jean] When the Facebook group started, when the two ladies decided
they were just going to start a conversation
about the death of Cathy Cesnik...
I waited.
Back in 1992, '93, I was using my voice and I thought it was going somewhere.
And instead, they silenced it.
I've never been a part of the Justice for Cathy Facebook group.
Even though it's a positive, legitimizing community,
I'm actually very scared to be in that conversation.
Because I don't remember a whole lot about the other classmates.
I'm afraid someone will remember
something about me that I don't remember.
And there's an awful lot that I still don't remember.
You know, when you go back to that question:
"Why didn't you tell somebody?"
I probably have beaten myself up on some level for a very long time...
that I didn't.
I never wanted to look at what I did when I was 16, 17 in the senior year.
I never wanted to look at what I did after Cathy was killed.
I often wonder what was Maskell doing that he would let me leave that school
and believe that I would never say anything?
That... That wasn't just... I repressed it.
I think some of it was purposely done.
There is one memory I can't look at.
One person I don't wanna go anywhere near.
Brother Bob was a man who had been in the room before.
He was the one that Maskell needed to keep... Keep reining him in.
So Maskell leaves the room.
My protector standing by the door was gone.
And Brother Bob, he proceeds to tell me that, um...
That he killed Cathy Cesnik,
that he didn't want to.
But she was gonna go to the police.
And he tells me it's my fault that she is dead,
that she was the good person, I was not.
And it should've been me.
And, so, then he rapes me and Maskell comes in.
Then he says to Brother Bob, "Well, did you take care of it?
Is she going to stay quiet?"
And he says, "Yes, she's not gonna tell anybody anything."
And to this day, I'm more terrified of Brother Bob
than I have ever been of Joseph Maskell,
because I don't know who this Brother Bob is.
I don't remember the man's face.
And I have no idea if he's still out there and alive.
[Tom] The mystery of Brother Bob looms large.
I do believe she...
She knows more than she might even know she knows herself.
Who killed Sister Cathy?
Why Sister Cathy was killed.
The key to the puzzle could be in the question:
"Who is Brother Bob?"
Synced & corrected by PopcornAWH - www.addic7ed.com -