“Oh, God,” Cesnik allegedly said. “I suspected as much.”

Jennifer says Cesnik hugged her and told her to enjoy the summer; the nun would take care of everything. But when Jennifer returned in the fall, Ces­nik had changed jobs. Maskell, though, was still at Keough, and Jennifer claims he told her someone had approached him during the summer and accused him of “hurting the girls.”

That November of 1969, Sister Ces­nik left the apartment she shared with another nun in Southwest Baltimore, went out on some errands, and never came back. The following January, hunters found her body—bludgeoned to death and partly consumed by ani­mals, her clothes in such disarray as to suggest sexual foul play. The field where she lay was four and a half miles from her apartment, but not far from Maskell’s former parish, St. Clement, in Lansdowne.

In November of 1969, Sister Cesnik left her apartment to run some errands and never came back.



Jennifer claims she now remembers a cold day—Maskell was wearing gloves; she, a coat—when he took her to visit Cesnik’s corpse. It lay in an open, barren place, next to a dump­ster. As she bent over the body, she claims she heard him say, “You see what happens when you say bad things about people.”

“When I first remembered Sister Cathy,” says Jennifer, “I felt that I had killed her. I know now that I was led to believe that I killed her.”

She says Maskell and a religious brother would show her items—a neck­lace, for example—that had supposedly belonged to Cesnik. The men pretended to have discovered the items in Jennifer’s school locker, she says. Eventually, Jennifer claims, she was able to recall the religious brother telling her that he had beaten Cesnik to death.

A private investigator hired by Jennifer’s attorneys contracted county police and asked to look through the old Cesnik file, but was denied access. After police met with Jennifer in the spring of 1994, they reactivated their investigation, but were unable to verify her account, which differed from the original crime scene, says Homicide Commander Captain Rustin Price. There was no dumpster in the field where Cesnik’s body was found, for example, says Price. A news­paper account from the time, however, describes the field as a “dump.”

And county detective Sam Bower­man, an FBI-trained expert in criminal personality profiling, believes Cesnik’s murderer was a stranger. “Father Maskell would have been more meticulous,” he maintains. “I don’t think Father Maskell’s connected to her death in any way.”

The newspaper ad mailed to Keough alumnae arrived at the Howard County home of Tracy* in the fall of 1993. She cried. She laughed. She ran around her yard. “I was confused,” she says, “yet excited that someone out there was going to take action.”

Unlike Jennifer, whom she claims never to have met, Tracy says she has always remembered some of her encounters with Maskell but that certain graver abuses she recalled only recently. But even the things she says she’s always remembered were bad enough that, for part of her adult life, she kept track of Maskell’s where­abouts with the thought of killing him.

Petite, blonde, with doe-brown eyes and a hawk nose, at 41 Tracy recently graduated from community college with honors and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree. She wants to go to law school and become a criminal prosecutor. Her face has changed since high school: Her features are sharper, her gaze more penetrating.

Tracy first went to counseling with Maskell on October 5, 1970. Her par­ents were upset at finding drug para­phernaIia in her purse, and Tracy hoped the priest would talk with them. She was crying when her friend Lisa* brought her to Maskell’s office, she says, adding that the priest then led Lisa out the door and locked it.

Tracy claims Maskell hugged her and told her that, although he wasn’t supposed to touch the girls, they found it calming. He pulled his chair around to the front of his desk and allegedly removed her clothing, piece by piece, until she was completely naked, she says. The priest then massaged her breasts and asked if her boyfriend touched her similarly, she claims. Allegedly, Maskell reassured her: “I am touching you in a Godly manner.”

This session led to a series of meetings in which, Tracy claims, she was naked, sometimes sitting on his lap. On one occasion, she says, her friend Lisa was present while Maskell conducted an explicit anatomy lesson with Tracy as the model. (Baltimore magazine’s efforts to contact Lisa have been unsuccessful, though Tracy’s attorneys say Lisa corroborates their client’s account.)

Maskell also took Tracy to a gynecologist, Tracy asserts, and watched her examinations. When the doctor prescribed a thrice-weekly douche, Maskell offered the private bathroom adjoining his office for that purpose. She claims the priest watched her administer douches, as well as enemas.

She says she implored a different priest at Keough to take over her counseling, because Maskell “was a pervert.” “Please help me,” she remembers saying. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” he allegedly replied. The priest advised her to stay away from Maskell and shut the door in her face, she says.

Years later, after her mother died in early 1993, Tracy claims she had several new memories about Maskell, in which the priest had not merely observed her gynecological exams and treatments, but had allegedly helped administer them.

Within a week of receiving the lawyers’ anonymous ad in the fall of 1993, Tracy wrote to them, and got a letter in return explaining that the attorneys were seeking corroboration of alleged sexual abuse at Keough.

Tracy called Dantes associate Beverly Wallace late one afternoon and asked, “Who are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Wallace asked.

“Joseph Maskell,” Tracy said. “Bingo,” replied Wallace.

Tracy offered to be a witness, she says. Her next alleged memory came to her in early March 1994, as she was lying in bed at night. Remembering the second time that Maskell had taken her to the gynecologist’s office in 1970, she suddenly came to believe she had been raped by both men, she says. “I screamed that I had been raped and woke up my husband,” she recalls.

The next morning, Tracy called Beverly Wallace and asked for the name of a therapist.

New alleged memories continued to surface: Maskell and two police men raping her in the back seat of his car; Maskell hypnotizing her; Maskell spraying her and himself with a femi­nine hygiene product before raping her as Irish music played.

Tracy says she had talked to friends back in high school about Maskell, even about going to the police, but abandoned that plan because Maskell was a “police priest.”

“I had been warned sternly by Father Maskell that I would not be believed—that I was a druggie slut and no one would believe me over a priest,” she says. “He also slapped me about the face, and he showed me his gun.”

Not only did Tracy’s growing cache of allegedly recovered memories support those of Jennifer, but she also decided to become a plaintiff herself.

The Dantes legal team assembled their civil case while sharing information with the state’s attorney’s office for a criminal investigation. And by summer of 1994, they were ready to play hard­ball with the archdiocese. They gave the Church one month to come up with a serious monetary offer, or they would file the civil suit.

At St. Augustine, as the deadline approached, Maskell drew withdrawn. A tabloid TV show was rumored to be interested in the story. Despite his earlier declaration to parishioners, he asked the archdiocese if he could return to the Institute of Living, citing stress from the ongoing ordeal. In August 1994, with Maskell back at the Connecticut facility, the archdiocese waited out the attorneys.

The hammer came down in two seven-count complaints, asking for a total reward to Jennifer and Tracy of $40 million.

Word of the Maskell lawsuit quickly became a hot topic in the Catholic community, and it even prompted some tongue-clucking one afternoon among four middle-aged women at a parish crab feast. “Do you believe those girls trying to accuse Father Maskell of such outrageous behavior?” one of them said.

Overhearing this, 38-year old Eva Nelson Cruz felt rage, and she snapped back: “Don’t be surprised if someone right here at the table had a problem.”

The group fell silent. Later, during the car ride home. Cruz asked her mother, Babe, what she remembered about Maskell.

Babe Nelson brought up the time when Eva, at age 12, had collapsed at school. Taken to St. Agnes Hospital, she drifted in and out of a coma for two weeks, while doctors struggled to come up with a definite explanation.

One day, Nelson opened the door to Eva’s hospital room to find Maskell, bent close over her daughter, his arm resting on the edge of her bed. Nelson claims Maskell jumped up and said he was hearing the girl’s confession.

But Babe Nelson doubted her daughter was lucid enough to make a confession; the girl even seemed to be asleep. And there was something about Maskell’s posture and his surprise that made Nelson uncomfortable. She didn’t quite believe the priest, but she didn’t want to disbelieve him.

Jennifer testified in the trial that there were other Keough teachers who’d abused her as well, as had two of the nuns.



“I wonder why I didn’t say something earlier,” Nelson now said on the car ride home, crying quietly.

“Yeah,” her daughter said numbly as she drove. “It would have been helpful.”

Over the next few days, Eva Cruz became consumed with the sound of water slapping against the hull of a boat and the idea that something had happened between her and Maskell.

Even before age 12, Eva Nelson had been tormented by two thoughts whose origins mystified her. She was certain that God didn’t love her, and sometimes, at random moments, she would hear a little voice in her head, her own voice, imploring Jesus to have sex with her. Immediately after hearing this little voice, she says, she would briefly pass out.

The parish crab feast called up a series of fragmented impressions: Maskell’s car, the floor of a boat, water slapping. Physical pain. Being dropped off at the St. Clement rectory.

At the urging of a priest friend, she arranged to meet with archdiocesan officials in her therapist’s Columbia office in October 1994. Cruz brought her mother. Father Richard Woy and attorney Thomas Dame represented the archdiocese.

Cruz told the group that Maskell had taken her to a boat and that she was convinced the two had had intercourse, and also that he had penetrated her with an object she couldn’t picture.

Woy was quiet and a bit awkward as Dame took furious notes. They asked whether Cruz intended legal action.

Cruz told them that she wasn’t planning to sue, but she was interested in some empathy, which seemed to her in short supply. “You’ll never understand the hurt, the pain, the anxiety, the loss of self-esteem that’s happened for most of my life,” she shouted at Woy.

The church administrator appeared unsure how to best respond; nonetheless, he told her to contact him if she remembered anything else.

Efforts by Baltimore magazine to speak with Woy and the other church administrators have all been referred to diocesan spokesman Blaul, who generally refrains from comment in matters of ongoing litigation.

By May 1995, neither the city’s criminal investigation of sexual abuse—limited by the narrower laws of 1970—nor the country’s investigation into the murder of Sister Cesnik had brought any indictments against Maskell. But he faced the multi-million-dollar civil suit filed in city circuit court.

In his search for relevant information, Judge Hilary Caplan, a 12-year veteran jurist, had personally sorted through the load of papers that Maskell had ordered buried four years earlier in Holy Cross cemetery—ostensibly to protect parishioner privacy without violating a ban against outdoor burning. Most everything, however, was water logged beyond recognition.

This first week in May, Caplan was holding a preliminary hearing to consider whether so-called “recovered memories” constituted justifiable exception to the state’s three-year statute of limitations in civil suits. To focus on the narrow legal issue at hand, both plaintiffs’ allegations were to be accepted for now as truthful, and no corroborating witnesses were to be called. What was on trial now was memory itself.

None of the defendants—Maskell, the archdiocese, Tracy’s gynecologist, or the School Sisters of Notre Dame who operated Keough—were present except for a quarter of charcoal-suited attorneys.

At the plaintiffs’ table, Phil Dantes, sporting a mustache-in-progress, was accompanied by Maggio and Wallace.

They called Tracy to the stand, where she carefully recited her old, then new alleged memories of Maskell.

During cross-examination, the attorney for her high school gynecologist portrayed Tracy as an opportunist with a history of drug use. After some wrangling over the dates in which Tracy’s new alleged memories occurred to her, the lawyer argued that all but one of them were remembered after Tracy’s first meeting with attorneys.

“Were you told that you couldn’t sue for your abuse because it had happened such a long time ago?” the lawyer asked in a series of questions.

Tracy regarded the attorney coolly. “I don’t recall,” she said.

Jennifer testified in the afternoon, reciting a number of alleged memories of abuse by Maskell. There were other Keough teachers who’d abused her as well, Jennifer said, as had two of the nuns, including a high-ranking administrator of the school, who “was with Father Maskel, and they were using the vibrator, and she went down on me.”

During the 10-minute break that followed, Sun reporter Robert Erlandson buttonholed Dantes in the back of the courtroom. Could these new allegations possibly be true? the reported wondered.

“I just ask the questions,” Dantes replied, his back near the rear wall of the courtroom.

“You know whether she’s telling the truth,” Erlandson insisted, towering over Dantes. It had been Dantes, after all, who’d brought Jennifer to The Sun in the first place.

During Jennifer’s cross-examination, a defense lawyer pointed-out that Jennifer could not recall any teachers from Keough who had not abused her. He then referred to Jennifer’s memories of abuse outside of school, at a pub to which her uncle had taken her. “At the same time that you remember these eight or nine people, you began to have the recollection of Father Maskell.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer.

“Then there was a Brother [Ron*]. Was he on more than once occasion?”

“Yes, quite a few.”

“You also mentioned Brother [Fred*]? Was that on more than one occasion that [he] abused you?”

“Three that I remember,” she said. “One occasion he just spanked me.”

“OK. Now, there was Brother [David*] also?”

“It’s Brother [Gavin*]. . .”

The silver-haired lawyer went on to list six additional male abusers, including the city politician who Jennifer claimed had given a pretend political speech while she was required to perform oral sex on him.

Moving on to the next claim, the lawyer asked if the two nuns Jennifer had named “were merely present? Or did they participate in the abuse?”

“They participated.”

“Didn’t you testify that you found that memory absurd and almost impossible to accept?”

“Yes.”

“Lastly we have the Bishop. What was his involvement?”

Jennifer recalled visiting Father Maskell’s office only to find a bishop there instead. “And he gave me final absolution,” she said. “He spit in my hand. He told me that was my bond with the devil and before I was to wash my hand, I was to consider breaking all bonds with the path that I was on. And to go on a new road.” That was Jennifer’s last memory of her high school days at Archbishop Keough.

As she left the stand, Dantes gave her a supportive hug.

Later in the hearing, psychotherapists testified that Tracy and Jennifer were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from their alleged abuse by Maskell. But neither mental health professional who testified for the plaintiffs was an expert in memory.

In contrast, the defense had four expert witnesses, three in the field of memory and at least two national power hitters, including Dr. Paul McHugh, director of the Johns Hopkins department of psychiatry. McHugh is on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a national support and advocacy group that helps parents whose children are purportedly misled in therapy into believing they were abused. In recent years, the mutability of “memory” and the related legal implications have ignited tremendous controversy among researchers and the public.

Chronicling one of the most infamous such cases, Lawrence Wright, in his gripping 1994 book Remembering Satan, goes so far as to argue that a Washington state policeman “remembered” abusing his daughters in a series of bizarre cult rituals only because overzealous interrogators convinced him of it.

Judge Caplan, after listening to the experts on both sides, did not believe there was sufficient scientific foundation to support the contention that Jennifer and Tracy had lost and then somehow recovered their memories of abuse. “It is a leap of faith that this court cannot make,” Caplan concluded.

At the pronouncement, courtroom 201 became very still. Beverly Wallace frowned openly.

Caplan continued that he was not judging the plaintiffs’ credibility—merely the empirical evidence of repressed memory. “The court is going to grant a motion to dismiss, welcome an appeal, and let chips fall where they may.” (As of this writing an appeal has been filed and will likely be heard in early 1996.)

Outside on the courthouse steps, Maskell’s lawyer and friend J. Michael Lehane said the ruling clearly “vindicated” his client.

Others remain unimpressed. One Finksburg woman, a friend of Jennifer’s who had abandoned Catholicism over the Maskell case, wrote bluntly to Cardinal Keeler: “Through a technicality in the law, this archdiocese has succeeded in avoiding any responsibility to the victims of Joseph Maskell…May God’s justice be visited upon you.”

During the year after her first meeting with Father Woy and diocesan attorney Dame, Eva Nelson Cruz says she avoided media accounts of the Maskell case because she didn’t want to contaminate her own memory. She had been having additional revelations about Maskell.

She recalled that he had encouraged the children of St. Clement to come to him with their “deepest problems,” and that she’d given him her first confession, around age 10. In the confessional, she’d revealed that she used to sit on her grandfather’s lap while he would masturbate her in front of neighborhood children. Maskell asked her to explain the abuse in detail, she says, and prescribed five Hail Marys and two acts of contrition. He also allegedly made this unorthodox pronouncement: “He told me that God did not love me anymore. But that he would make it so that God would love me again through him. But that we’d have to do it alone. No one else could be around. And that he would have to take me somewhere.”

She remembered meeting him in front of the small green rectory on First Avenue and driving out to his boat, a cabin cruiser. (A friend of Maskell’s says he used to lend his 22-foot cabin cruiser to the priest around the late 1960s and later sold it to him.)

Cruz believes there was a second man on the boat: stocky, with a round face and thinning hair. “I remember kicking somebody in the mouth. Hard.”

While recently walking along First Avenue in Landsdowne, she recalled visiting Maskell at St. Clement. In her mind’s eye, she saw him wearing the black clerical cape that he often favored during the winter, and she claims that he asked her to look deeply into his eyes and told her: “You won’t remember. You won’t remember. If you remember you’ll die.” She could picture him twirling fiercely—the cape flapping around his head.

Taking Father Woy up on his earlier invitation, Cruz called him at the archdiocese to say she had additional memories and wanted a second meeting in her therapist’s office. They scheduled one for June 2. Dame was present again, and this time so was Beverly Wallace, even though Cruz still had no intention of suing.

For one thing, her therapist had cautioned her against it. “A lawyer would have a field day arguing that she’s confusing issues of her grandfather with Father Maskell. And that’s possible,” concedes her therapist, Kenneth Ellis. However, Cruz’s memories about her grandfather were very accessible, Ellis says, and yet “there was always something else that was bothering her that she could never get to.”

He brings up some of her dreams from the 1980s: a soldier shoots a nun and then rapes her while Eva watches numbly; Eva skates through a cathedral and is taken aside and raped. “It’s not unreasonable to interpret Eva’s dreams as tapping into repressed memories of her experiences with Maskell,” says Ellis.

Since the previous group meeting in Ellis’s office, Cruz concluded that it had been on Maskell’s instruction that she would ask Jesus to have sex with her. It was part of Maskell’s prescription for re-establishing her in God’s grace, she says. Maskell had insisted that in order for her to be completely cleansed of the incestuous sins with her grandfather, it was necessary for her to disrobe, she says. Allegedly, the preist then opened a vial of holy water and sprinkled some on her vagina, reciting a blessing in Latin. “The final cleansing process was for him to penetrate me with his penis, because Jesus worked through him,” says Cruz. But first he penetrated her with some object—she felt sure, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She remembered pain and bleeding.

County Detective Sam Bowerman believes Cesnik’s murderer was a stranger.



As she tried to figure out what the object might have been, her breathing became heavy and panicked. She needed to pause for several minutes to regain composure. Then, it appeared to her: wooden, perhaps 12 inches long, an inch and a half thick, with a metal figure attached to it. “A crucifix,” she announced.

After the meeting, Cruz asked Wallace to linger an extra moment. “Are other people remembering things like this?” she asked the attorney.

With the exception of the cape, everything Cruz brought up had been reported to Wallace by someone else.

“Pedophilia” the sexual attraction to pre-pubescents, and “ephebophilia,” the attraction to young adolescents, are often regarded nowadays as biological compulsion—no more changeable than, say, adult heterosexuality. As sexual orientations, they are not curable, only containable, usually through a combination of drug and talk therapies as well as eternal vigilance. Certainly many cases of sexual abuse by priests are committed by certifiable pedophiles acting out an unchecked craving.

But other cases are better explained as the consequence of narcissistic personality disorder, according to some experts. “A wise man once said, ‘We’re born selfish and we grow out of it,’” quotes Dr. Frank Valcour, medical director of St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland, one of the country’s leading facilities for priests with sexual problems. But narcissists don’t grow out of it and can become “a law unto themselves,” he says.

Often the object of abuse in their own childhoods, abusers with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely difficult cases, because they are unable to see their own actions from another’s point of view. The narcissist tends to develop a self-concept as entrenched as it is deluded. One priest who admitted to intercourse with a girl saw the act merely as a “reserved embrace,” because he did not ejaculate or display passion, according to Burkett and Bruni. Through reinterpretation the priest was able to maintain that his action was not “a sin.”

The priesthood can provide a dangerous domain for the narcissist, who might be overeager, for example, to embrace his appointed role as the sign of Christ’s presence in the world.

One especially perilous aspect of the vocation, according to Richard Sipe, is confession. Because sexual deeds outside of marital intercourse (and even “impure thoughts,” in some cases) are met by damnation unless confessed, the priest becomes the repository of a tremendous number of sexual secrets. Week in, week out, he is exposed to the lusts of his congregation. This puts men who often lack sexual self-knowledge or perspective, and who are barred from any sexual life, in the dangerous position of having to interact with other people’s sexuality.

The priest who is apt to be corrupted by this process might rationalize that in the service of cleansing other of their sins, he needs to examine that sin in great detail, Sipe postulates. Or even, for therapeutic or other reasons, he might need to recreate that sin—as though his priestly presence would somehow transform the act.

There is yet another path of thought down which a narcissistic or otherwise maladjusted priest can be led astray, according to Sipe. And it goes something like this;

To be male and celibate, as seen through the long lens of traditional Catholic perspective, is superior to being female and sexual, says Sipe. In fact, female sexuality is the scapegoat for a lot of earthly misery, from Adam’s fall on, acknowledges Catholic University’s Fr. Collins.

“When you blame one group for something,” asserts Sipe. “and you declare another group superior, and then thirdly you reserve the power to this superior group, it lines up the inferior group to be used at the service of the superior group.” The temptation for members of the elite, he continues, is to hold themselves blameless for breaking certain codes of behavior, and even for thinking themselves above such codes.

While Catholic University’s Collins is amply willing to accept this as a sociological truism, he is uncomfortable with the next extension of Sipe’s argument, calling it “inflammatory.”

Sipe raises the extreme analogy of S.S. officers who, after a busy day of killing homosexuals, purportedly indulged in homo-erotic behavior amongst themselves. “Sexual abuse is just a symptom of a system of declared superiority, power, the use of other people,” Sipe maintains. “I do believe that there is a connection between this and the roots of the Holocaust.”

In his 1986 study The Nazi Doctors, noted psychiatrist Robery Jay Lifton turned to the Holocaust as well in his quest to understand how evil can function in a presumably moral soul. Lifton coins the term “doubling” for the mechanism through which a person, especially one of elevated moral standing, is able to reconcile his misdeeds with his conscience by creating an additional perspective. This new perspective does not deny the act itself, but reinterprets its meaning as benign or even heroic. The Nazi doctors killed, but, by their lights, did not murder. Any daily atrocities were reinterpreted as part of the larger, supposedly higher, mission of cleansing and healing Europe. As the Nazi doctor in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow puts it, “Because I am a healer, everything I do heals, somehow.”

Through this warped looking-glass, anything a priest might do is, by default, holy—a view that often has been adopted by parishioners. And in 1960s Baltimore, as elsewhere, many Catholic children were conditioned to accept this simplified distortion, sometimes at their own peril.

To the victims of sexually abusive priests, mere explanations such as “craving disorder” or “narcissism” or “doubling” surely provide thin solace indeed, and a wholly inadequate foundation upon which to repair one’s spirituality. Sadly, the long-term damage to religious faith remains the cruelest irony of abuse by priests. As one alleged survivor pointed out in a recent confrontation with the archdiocese: “God’s not happy about that.”

As the Maskell case approaches winter unresolved, the beleaguered priest remains largely invisible. Some rumors have placed him abroad. His sister Maureen says he’s simply “up north.”

Wherever he is, Maskell feels tremendously isolated, reports his longtime friend Rev. Robert G. Hawkins, until recently pastor of St. Rita’s in Dundalk. Hawkins took Maskell in for several weeks last year, and got scolded by the archdiocese for doing so. Says Hawkins of Maskell’s plight: “You’d be surprised how your phone stops ringing. People who you knew, all of a sudden they’re not talking to you. I guess people figure it’s like a death.” He pauses to catch his breath and dry his eyes. “I think he’s really a casualty of the times. He’s dead. He can’t function as a priest around here anymore.”

Nonetheless, Maskell is hoping that, after the civil appeal, the Archdiocese of Baltimore will reinstate his priestly faculties, so that he can once again shepherd a flock in some faraway place and reclaim his youthful ideal of being the one to say: This is right; that’s wrong.

Update 12/4/17: The source known as Jennifer in this story is Jean Hargadon Wehner, featured in the Netflix documentary The Keepers. Wehner contacted us and wanted to amend the story from her point of view: Before coming in to give an official statement, Wehner was encouraged by the diocesan representatives to get an attorney. Her first official statement of abuse was held at her attorney’s office, with two diocesan representatives. After giving graphic details of her alleged abuse, she was pressed for the names of witness­es or other victims. Jennifer emotionally told them they should take the responsibility off of her and do something.

A couple of months later, Wehner called a follow-up meeting at her attorney’s office to share names of alleged abusers she had been remembering. Wehner gave the two diocesan representatives names of a number of adults who had allegedly abused her sexually while she was a student at Keough—including a former Baltimore City politician.

Later, Wehner states her attorney was upset with her for sharing names of alleged abusers and not victims. She and her husband fired him. She requested a meeting with one of the diocesan representatives without lawyers present and was told no. Wehner says this action was her final personal interaction with the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Asterisks denote pseydonyms. Paul Mandelbaum is a former Baltimore senior writer and a contributor to The New York Times. This article is the result of more than 100 interviews conducted over a nine-month period. Accounts from legal plaintiffs are taken from their court appearances and public documents. Research assistance provided by Baltimore intern Wil Hylton.