On November 7, 1969, Sister Catherine Cesnik — a 26-year-old nun, and a teacher at an all-girls school in Baltimore — disappeared. She left her apartment to buy her sister an engagement gift and never returned. Her car was spotted the next morning parked oddly across the street from her apartment. Three months later, Sister Cesnick’s half-clothed body was found near a garbage dump. Her head had been bashed in. Her murder has never been solved.
The murder of Cesnick is the jumping off point for Netflix’s new true crime docuseries, The Keepers, which premieres on the streaming network Friday, May 19th. The series begins by focusing on Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins, Cesnick’s former students at the Archbishop Keough High School. Now in their 60s, Hoskins and Schuab take an interest in the cold case and they’ve spent the better part of the last few years digging up clues and interviewing those involved, from friends to family members to police officers, reporters and school officials.
The Keepers takes its time setting up the case, painstakingly recreating the night of Cesnick’s disappearance and the discovery of her body three months later. It’s so thorough that by the end of a slow-moving opening episode it feels as if no rock has been left unturned, that every piece of evidence has been examined and re-examined, that the investigation has run cold, and that these two women — extraordinary, charming, and dogged in their pursuit — will have to return to their quiet, retired lives no closer to solving the murder than police were in 1970.
The second episode, however, sees a seismic development, and The Keepers finally comes into focus. This isn’t an ordinary unsolved murder. It’s ground zero in a massive molestation scandal and cover-up by the Catholic Church and, possibly, the Baltimore Police Department. This is a Spotlight-sized scandal, and fresh evidence from the investigation has the potential to rock the Catholic Church all over again.
To wit: More than 20 years after Cesnick’s murder, the repressed memories of a woman named Jean Wehner resurface. In 1994, Wehner — another former student of Cesnick’s — reveals in often disturbing detail that she had been repeatedly molested, abused, raped, and harassed by the counselor at the school, Father Joseph Maskell. Another woman, Teresa Lancaster, soon comes forward with a similar story. Both had apparently informed Sister Cesnick of the abuse. The film suggests that Cesnick was killed because she was about to expose the scandal.
But it’s not that simple, or The Keepers would have run its course after two or three episodes. Cesnick’s murder is just the tip of the iceberg in what appears to be a scandal that damaged, ruined, or even prematurely ended scores of lives. Many of the secrets from that night in November 1969 took decades to come to the surface, and more remain hidden.
The Keepers is a chilling documentary series, and its horrors extend far beyond the death of one woman. Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins follow the clues, and rather than zeroing in on one suspect, each turn in the case portends another horrific possibility, or another plausible theory. By the time the series concludes, the number of suspects has multiplied. Viewers will be left reeling, as frustrated by the elusiveness of the truth as the investigators, police officers, friends and family members that have been following this case for nearly 50 years.
It’s a riveting series that has the potential to match Netflix’s Making a Murderer in popularity. It does, however, lack a few key ingredients that made Making a Murder, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, and the first season of Serial so wildly successful, namely a compelling figure like Steven Avery or Adnan Syed at the center of the story. It’s been five decades since Cesnick’s death, so many of the suspects and those who might hold clues have passed away. Consequently, the main focus of the series are the two amateur investigators and a few of the women who were abused by Father Maskell. This is their story, too, and it’s a powerful, unflinching one, but the perpetrators here are often institutional — the justice system, or the Catholic Church — rather than personal. From a purely storytelling standpoint, it lacks characters in whom viewers can invest, and there aren’t any living villains — like Ken Kratz, the district attorney in Making a Murderer, or Serial’s Jay Wilds — upon whom we can direct our anger and outrage.
The Keepers should, nevertheless, kick up plenty of interest from internet sleuths, and by this time next week, there will be no shortage of Reddit threads devoted to the investigation. The problem, unfortunately, is that the internet may run into many of the same dead ends that plague Schaub and Hoskins. Evidence has disappeared, memories have faded, participants have died, and — most frustratingly — the Catholic Church and the Baltimore Police Department have buried the case beneath 50 years of lies. Hopefully, The Keepers can shine a bright light on this case and exhume justice from the wreckage.
