Death of Catherine Cesnik

Catherine Anne Cesnik was born November 17, 1942, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame at age 18. By the fall of 1969 she was teaching drama and English at Archbishop Keough High School, a private Catholic girls' school in Baltimore, Maryland.

On November 7, 1969, Cesnik left the apartment she shared with Helen Russell Phillips in Catonsville to run errands, including cashing a paycheck and possibly stopping at a bakery. Later that night, witnesses saw her car parked illegally across from her apartment complex; two priests found the muddy, illegally parked car early the next morning. Cesnik did not return, and a search for her began immediately but did not locate her.

Her body was discovered on January 3, 1970, by a hunter and his son at an informal landfill in Lansdowne, a Baltimore suburb. The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the head. The case has never been solved.

Years later, former Keough students Teresa Lancaster and Jean Wehner (née Hargadon) came forward publicly in 1994 alleging that they had been sexually abused as students by the school's chaplain, Father Joseph Maskell. They further alleged that Cesnik had been the only staff member who tried to help students who were being abused, and they believe she was killed before she could report the abuse to the Archdiocese of Baltimore. In 1995 they filed a lawsuit against Maskell, the school, a gynecologist, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and Cardinal William H. Keeler; the suit was dismissed as time-barred under the statute of limitations, a ruling upheld on appeal by the Maryland Court of Appeals.

Wehner has also alleged that Maskell showed her Cesnik's body at a wooded site near Fort Meade shortly after the disappearance, an account that has drawn both scientific scrutiny and some corroborating testimony regarding insect evidence and weather conditions. Separately, the body of 20-year-old Joyce Malecki was found in the same wooded area on November 13, 1969, though Cesnik's body was ultimately found in a different location, the Lansdowne dump site.

In 2016, the Baltimore County Police Department reassigned the case and reopened the investigation into abuse allegations at Keough. With permission from the state's attorney's office, police exhumed Maskell's remains, but the DNA did not match evidence from the crime scene; investigators stated this did not exclude him as a suspect. Maskell had died in 2001. Allegations of trafficking and additional abuse by a second priest, E. Neil Magnus, were also reported by media outlets in 2015 and 2017.

The case, along with broader allegations of abuse connected to Keough and the Archdiocese of Baltimore, contributed to the Archdiocese's 2023 bankruptcy filing. The case remains the subject of academic study and was the basis for the 2017 Netflix documentary series "The Keepers."