What did Sister Cathy know? The sinister true-crime story behind Netflix's The Keepers
Like all the best murder mysteries, Netflix’s The Keepers – the latest slow-burning, uber-slick series reopening a true-life criminal case – begins with a simple whodunit. Specifically, who killed Sister Cathy Cesnik? And like the very best in the genre, that question is only the start of something much, much more complicated.
On a late autumn evening in 1969, Cesnik, a popular, 26-year-old Catholic nun who taught English at the all-girls Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland, left her apartment to go shopping and never returned. A search, conducted by priests at the school and the local police force, proved fruitless.
Two months later, in January 1970, Cesnik’s semi-clothed body was discovered at a rubbish dump on the outskirts of the city. She had choke marks around her neck and a blunt trauma – thought to be from a hammer or brick – to the back of her skull. The killer was never found, and nor did the police receive any substantive information: no witnesses, no evidence, no leads. The trail simply went cold.
Almost five decades on, The Keepers – all seven episodes of which are released simultaneously on Netflix on Friday – seeks to re-evaluate the case by focusing on two of Cesnik’s former students, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Schaub (now in their sixties), who have spent years piecing together precisely what happened to their favourite teacher.
That ‘whodunit’ premise would make for a gently addictive series on its own, but as Schaub says in the show’s trailer, “the story is not the nun’s killing. The story is the cover-up of the nun’s story.”
What unravels across the series is a case far broader and more gruesome than that of this solitary unsolved murder. In 1994, another former student of Cesnik, Jean Wehner, then approaching 40 and working as a reflexologist, came forward with accusations she had been raped, abused and harassed by the school’s psychological counsellor, Father Joseph Maskell. Having suppressed the memories, Wehner recalled the abuse when she saw a photograph of Maskell in 1992.
When another woman, Teresa Lancaster, revealed a similar story, they filed a $40m lawsuit but ultimately lost when the Catholic church brought a 'false memory' expert in to successfully argue the women must have made it up. It was enough to start an investigation into Maskell, though, and many other women came forward with similar testimonies.
Their records implicated not only Maskell, who died in 2001 after fleeing to Ireland for several years, but various other clergy members, establishment figures and even the local police force in a murder cover-up. Wehner and Lancaster both said they had told Sister Cesnik about their experiences, Wehner doing so just before the summer holidays in 1969. Cesnik said she would speak to the priests about it. Within months, she was dead.
Among many gruesome details linking Maskell to the murder is Wehner’s allegation that Maskell led her to see Cesnik’s body a week after she was killed – months before the 'official' discovery. According to a 2015 Huffington Post article about the case, Wehner remembered Maskell whispering in her ear: “You see what happens when you say bad things about people?” as they looked at the nun's corpse.
The Keepers draws on interviews with numerous reporters and police officers, as well as friends and family of those involved, and furthers the now widely-held belief that Cesnik was killed in order to silence her.
As the narrative develops, the sheer scale of the abuse ring and institutional cover-up grows and grows (not unsubtly, the title of the series evokes the Biblical story of Cain and Abel: when Cain kills his brother, Abel, he denies knowledge of the crime by declaring: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”), throwing up dozens of potential suspects, some of whom could still be alive, and unearthing a scandal comparable to the Catholic abuse cases unearthed by the Boston Globe’s investigations team in 2002 – a film of which, Spotlight, won Best Picture at the 2015 Academy Awards. Given the Sister Cesnik case remains unsolved, there is no knowing where the new attention will lead, but no new arrests have been made recently.
The Keepers is as frustrating a watch as it is chilling and addictive, especially as the full truth remains heartbreakingly elusive for Cesnik's former pupils, who have dedicated years to cracking the case. But much of its effectiveness comes from its status as a true, open case – the events really occurred and the murder remains unsolved to this day – adding an extra dimension for armchair sleuths, who can play real-life detective for once.
The producers will have been more than aware public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for ‘true crime’ over the past few years. But whereas this used to be seen as tabloid fodder, these new, deeply researched and sympathetically-told productions have even changed the legal course of cases recently.
In December 2015, Netflix’s Making A Murderer, a documentary series exploring the case of Steven Avery, who served 18 years in prison on a wrongful murder conviction, became one of Netflix’s most talked about shows, and led to a petition asking for Avery to be pardoned being delivered to the White House. In the same year, HBO’s The Jinx, another episodic reinvestigation of a historic murder case, led to the show’s primary suspect, Robert Durst, being arrested the day before the finale aired.
“There’s probably two main reasons for the ‘true crime’ trend on television, in our experience anyway” says Ralph Lee, the Deputy Chief Creative Officer & Head of Factual at Channel 4, which will has two true crime series, The Trial and Catching a Killer, beginning in the next three weeks. “The first is simply that the police are a lot more open to the idea of us showing their workings these days, meaning we can tell the stories behind investigations in detail. But it's also a reflection on the advances of the form. Crime stories are able to be told as compellingly as drama now, as documentaries have come on. Less voiceover, less on process and more emphasis on people.”
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It’s arguably even more successful in audio. The first series of Serial, an investigative podcast first broadcast in 2014 which looked into the murder of a student in 1999, was downloaded more than 80 million times in a year, while last month, Serial’s third series, S-Town, broke records when it had more than 10 million global downloads in just four days.
As some of the programmes have proven, however, there are dangers in dredging up traumatic cases for entertainment purposes, no matter how laudable the investigation appears. Last year, critics questioned the ethics of BBC3’s Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared, a serialised investigation into the 1996 disappearance of Isle of Wight schoolboy Damien Nettles, while S-Town has been accused of crossing into voyeurism after an early, tragic plot twist.
It’s something The Keepers needn't worry about. Ethically, digging in to Sister Cathy’s past alone could have proven an unnecessary waste of time. But by drawing viewers in with the whodunit, only to kick open the door to a far wider complex web of intrigue, they have created a compelling series which can’t be ignored. In all likelihood, you’ll be hearing all about it around the water cooler on Monday.
The Keepers is available on Netflix on Friday
