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Sister Catherine 'Cathy' Cesnik, a pretty and popular 26-year-old nun who taught at an all-girls Catholic school in Baltimore, was last seen by her roommate, another nun, going off to shop on the evening of Friday November 7, 1969. When she was reported missing later that night, several dozen cops and half-a-dozen dog teams unsuccessfully searched a wide swath of Baltimore's southwest neighborhood searching for clues to her whereabouts.

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Intracerebral hemorrhage caused by skull fracture

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On January 3, 1970, the decomposed body of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik was discovered at a dumping area on Monumental Avenue in Halethorpe, 21227.

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Allegations of sexual abuse were first made against Father A. Joseph Maskell in 1992 by two former female students of Archbishop Keough High School, where Sister Cesnik had also worked.

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On Nov. 13, 1969, six days after Sister Cathy Cesnik vanished, not to be found murdered for two long months, a second young woman—20-year-old Joyce Malecki—was found strangled and stabbed to death in a small creek located on the U.S. Army’s Fort Meade military base in Anne Arundel County, only a few miles from where Cesnik’s body would later turn up. That crime also has never been solved.

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Clement Church is located less than a mile from where Cesnik’s body was found, in a very remote area. Says one former high-ranking Baltimore County Police investigator who preferred not to be identified: “Whoever dumped the nun’s body there had to know the area well. That dump was difficult to get to, if you didn’t know your way around, and the nun did not vanish until after dark.”

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“There was something wrong at the Catholic high school where Sister Cathy taught,” Roemer said while reviewing evidence previously unknown to him. “What you had there was a whole lot of sex going on among priests and students. Can you imagine the scandal, in 1970, if that stuff had ever come out in a trial? Hell, it could have blown the lid right off the Church!

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“It was snowing when we got to the dump, and cold as a sonofabitch,” the detective recalled in the spring of 2004. “The body was pretty much covered by snow, but it didn’t take us long to figure out who she was. When I walked up on that dump, I said, ‘Hello, Cathy Cesnik.’

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“She was lying on her back, on the slope of a little hill, with her purse and one shoe a few feet away. As soon as we opened the purse, we found a prescription bottle with her name printed on it.

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Koob was dating Sr. Cathy Cesnik in 1969 when she disappeared and was later found murdered.

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They used k9 dogs to search the area where they found the body and found nothing.

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“You gotta remember, she’d been laying out on the dump all this time, and the varmints had gotten to her,” Roemer added. “So whether she was raped or sexually molested, I don’t know. And I don’t think anybody ever will know, because the [Baltimore County] medical examiner reported [in his autopsy] that it was impossible to determine if the nun had been sexually assaulted.”

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“Sister Cathy was a nun,” Armacost said earlier this month. “So the theory that she was killed because of something she knew in the Catholic Church was something we’ve been looking at. However, we’ve never proven that’s why she was killed. So there are other theories we are looking at as well.”

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