Catherine Anne Cesnik (born November 17, 1942; disappeared November 7, 1969) was a Roman Catholic religious sister and a teacher at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland. On November 7, 1969, Cesnik disappeared. Her body was discovered on January 3, 1970, near a garbage dump in the Baltimore suburb of Lansdowne. Her unsolved murder served as the basis for the Netflix documentary series The Keepers in 2017.
Biography
Catherine Anne Cesnik was born on November 17, 1942, in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was the eldest child of Joseph and Anna Omulac Cesnik. Her paternal grandparents, John (Jan) and Johanna Tomec Česnik, were Slovenians who emigrated from Yugoslavia, while her maternal grandfather, Joseph Omulac, came from Yugoslavia and maternal grandmother, Martha Hudok, came from Austria. Cesnik had three siblings.
Cesnik attended St. Mary's School on 57th Street and St. Augustine High School, both in Lawrenceville. She was valedictorian at the graduation of her high school class in 1960, after being the May Queen and the president of the senior class and the student council.
She joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame when she was 18.
Disappearance and death
In the fall of 1969, Cesnik was teaching drama and English at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland, a private Catholic school for girls opened in 1965. On November 7, 1969, she left the apartment she shared with Helen Russell Phillips at the Carriage House Apartments, at 131 North Bend Road in Catonsville, en route to the Edmondson Village Shopping Center to purchase a gift for her sister's engagement at Hecht's jewelry store. She cashed a paycheck at First National Bank in Catonsville that night. She may have made a purchase at Muhly's Bakery in Edmondson Village, since a box of buns from that bakery was found in the front seat of her car. At 4:40 the next morning, Russell's friends, Peter McKeon and Gerard J. Koob, both Catholic priests, found Cesnik's car, in muddy condition, and illegally parked across from her apartment complex. Residents at the apartment complex noticed Cesnik in her car that night at approximately 8:30 , and others spotted her car illegally parked across the street about two hours later.
Search and discovery of body
Immediately after Cesnik's disappearance, police searched the area for her body without success. On January 3, 1970, her body was found by a hunter and his son in an informal landfill located on the 2100 block of Monumental Road, in a remote area of Lansdowne. The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the head.
Background
Teresa Lancaster and Jean Wehner (née Hargadon), former students at Keough, say that they were sexually abused by Keough's chaplain, the Catholic priest Joseph Maskell. The first public allegations that Maskell was connected to the murder were made in 1994. In 1995, they filed a lawsuit against Maskell, the school, gynecologist Christian Richter, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and Cardinal William H. Keeler. The trial court dismissed the action as time-barred by the statute of limitations. The plaintiffs appealed. A writ of certiorari was granted by the Maryland Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court decision, ruling in part, "... that the mental process of repression of memories of past sexual abuse does not activate the discovery rule. The plaintiffs suits are thus barred by the statute of limitation."
Wehner said that Cesnik once came to her and asked, "Are the priests hurting you?" Both women have said that she was the only member of the school's staff who helped them and other girls abused by Maskell and his confrères, and they believe she was murdered prior to discussing the matter with the archdiocese of Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun reported in late 2016 that since 2011 the archdiocese has paid out settlements to Maskell's alleged victims.