The Keepers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was a huge, huge deal to take on the Church in Baltimore.

It... We were up against a giant.

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?

What happened... Firsthand?

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.

I'm telling you, Sharon May ran interference for the Church

any time we got a priest case.

She just killed it, then. She'd kill it.

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.

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.

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.

Eject button.

I guess maybe this is my eject button.

We could be the last generation who knows how these work.

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.

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."

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.

You saw pictures yourself, correct?

I saw pictures myself, yes, I did.

Enough to arrest Maskell?

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?

Ask for a warrant. "I'll have to look at it. I don't know."

If you got information, and you don't get it within the first 48, it's gone.

The red tape.

It's gone.

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."

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.

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... No, like actual photographs.

Oh, photographs? 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.

We've heard supposedly that 30 to a hundred people came forward