SISTER KATE NETFLIX SERIES

But some of The Keepers’ subjects share anecdotes of Cesnik knowing about the abuse and running interference for some of Maskell’s victims, which allowed them to avoid interacting with Maskell.

SISTER KATE NETFLIX SERIES

If there’s any shakiness to The Keepers, it’s that the series never fully establishes how Cesnik was a looming or imminent threat to expose Maskell - at least more so than any other nun teaching at Archbishop Keough.Ĭesnik, like the other nuns at the school, didn’t come forward to authorities about the abuse. Why Father Maskell would want Sister Cathy dead makes sense, but the series doesn’t show us anything definite Further, the documentary suggests that because of the Catholic Church’s powerful presence in Baltimore, and Maskell’s relationships with authorities and the police - he had a brother on the force - Maskell was able to orchestrate a perfect cover-up. Maskell, at the time, was abusing teenage girls at the school, and The Keepers advances the idea that Cesnik knew about his abuse and was seen as a threat who might uncover it. The murder of a nun is no doubt peculiar, but The Keepers posits a shocking theory: that Father Joseph Maskell, a counselor and chaplain at Archbishop Keough from 1967 to 1975, either killed her or had her killed. An expert interviewed in The Keepers explains that she was killed by blunt-force trauma to her head. Cesnik’s car was found parked strangely a block and half from the apartment, and police found twigs and mud in the car.Ĭesnik’s mutilated body was found on Januin Lansdowne, Maryland.

Koob - Koob was a friend and secretly a love interest of Cesnik - who came to the women’s apartment. Phillips was distressed that Cesnik did not return home and around 1 am called Revs. She did not return home that night, and she was never seen alive again. Records show that Cesnik cashed a $255 paycheck. The Keepers opens with the basic facts of Cesnik’s case: On November 7, 1969, Cesnik drove to a nearby shopping center around 7:30 pm, telling Phillips she was buying an engagement present for her sister. Cesnik was teaching at Western High School, also in Baltimore County, when she disappeared. She left the school in the fall of 1969, and was living in an off-campus apartment complex (called the Carriage House) with another nun, Sister Helen Russell Phillips. Sister Cathy Cesnik’s disappearance and murder remain an unsolved mystery.Ĭesnik was born in 1942 and grew up to become a nun at the all-girls Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, where she began teaching in 1965. Sister Cathy Cesnik might have been killed to cover up sexual abuse Here are the major components of the documentary series, where the case stands, and why it ultimately might not matter that it doesn’t find Cesnik’s killer. But it does an important service in showing the long-term effects that sexual abuse has on victims, and how easily society disregards the voices of women who need help most. The Keepers doesn’t solve Cesnik’s murder, nor does it completely tie its main villain - the man behind the sexual abuse at Archbishop Keough - to Cesnik’s death. But Cesnik’s murder and the abuse at Keough happened during the 1960s, when victims had fewer resources than they do today and were up against a powerful entity at a time when publicizing accusations against that entity would have been met with much more scrutiny in the public eye. Today, nearly 50 years later and in the aftermath of sex abuse in the Catholic Church becoming a major news story - and in turn being chronicled in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight - it’s easy to see how the church mishandled its documented cases of sex abuse and how it evaded responsibility over decades.Īs we now know, the church habitually moved predatory priests from one parish to another and covered up cases, instead of caring for the church’s children. Netflix’s new true crime doc, The Keepers, isn’t Making a Murderer.

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