The Keepers

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?"

Hey. Can we just sit down? Yeah, wherever you'd like.

I'll be right over. Okay.

Can I get you all started with something to drink?

Um...

What kind of chardonnay do you have? I have Yellow Tail.

Oh, that's fine. 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. 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... Yeah.

in 1969, a nun at Archbishop Keough was murdered.

In 1969? Mm-hm.

And then her body was found about two months later.

Wow. She had been murdered.

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

'Cause you're not on Facebook,

but you have e-mail? 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...

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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