When Satan Wore a Cross (11 page)

Sister Marlo particularly remembered what happened after her beloved pet Lab Smoky died. She told the panel the story of Smoky’s mutilation at the hand of her father’s cult. Adding further detail, Warren allegedly told Sister Marlo if she really loved Smoky, she would be able to put him back together again and make him come back to life. Utterly confused, she cried uncontrollably. Then a cult member strode in from an adjoining room with a dog on a leash.

Warren allegedly told her of a little girl who had brought a dog back from death. “I learned that anything I loved would be annihilated and that everything was my fault.”

There was a further charge that she was the victim of another ceremony at Calvary Cemetery when she was five. She was placed in a box, that to her seemed like a coffin, and cockroaches were set upon her. “They told me the bugs were marking me for Satan. I learned that I belonged to them.”

Most of the rituals Sister Marlo was forced to go through included some type of sexual abuse. When she was six, she was initiated into the cult, or so she claimed. Cult members beat drums.

“Chet carried me to a table and vaginally raped me. I learned that I had no power. At age nine, Chet took me on different occasions to an old house where the cult members killed dogs. They made me crawl on the floor and pick up the dogs’ innards. I learned that no matter how hard I tried, there was no way out.”

In still other fantastic rituals, cult members dismembered a stillborn baby “and made me pick up the limbs.” The cult also killed. After the eyeball incident, Sister Marlo claims the cult killed a little girl who was about three. After she was dead, the adults left Marlo alone “in a sea of blood and stench.”

At age twelve, in yet another initiation ritual, she was given to Satan. “They used a snake and inserted it into my mouth, rectum and vagina to consecrate those orifices to Satan.”

When they told her to call aloud to God, the abuse got worse. But when they told her to call aloud to Satan, the abuse stopped. She remembered and had written even more, claiming that between the ages of eight and nine she was taken someplace she didn’t recognize. It was in the middle of the night. Her father, Warren, and others she did not know were there and shot pornographic pictures of her.

When she was a teenager, she was in the sacristy when a priest forced her to take off her bra, blouse and underwear, leaving on her cute uniform skirt. “He pushed me back against the sacristy counter, fondling, mouthing and kissing my breast. Then he knelt, put his head under my skirt and performed oral sex.”

Chet Warren left St. Pius X suddenly in the middle of the year when Sister Marlo was in fifth grade, returning to Toledo as chaplain at St. Vincent’s when Damon was in high school. “The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I volunteered as a candy striper at St. Vincent’s. Chet sexually abused me in his chaplaincy quarter several times that summer.”

The abuse took place, she said, in Warren’s chaplaincy quarters. Men would come and pay Chet to have sex with Damon. “These experiences included slapping, span-king, being cuffed or tied up during sex, being masked/blindfolded and having my breasts and genitals pinched or bitten during sex…One of these S and M perpetrators was Father Gerald Robinson, a diocesan priest. I do not know who the others were.”

As a result of this repeated sexual abuse, Damon became pregnant at the age of fifteen. “The satanic group performed a cult abortion.” She gave as locations for these satanic activities both some back areas of St. Pius X property and an abandoned house on Rabb Road further out in the rural section of the county.

Sister Marlo then went on to state her medical problems and as a result of this trauma to be suffering from dissociative disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. “I have been in therapy since 1993. In 1998, my mother was in the hospital and I went home to help my dad with the laundry. While there, Chet arrived and raped me in the guest bedroom. My father also sexually assaulted me.” She claimed to have “completely cut this experience off from my consciousness for several months.”

Sometime during the first quarter of 2000, “I again went to my apartment, this time in a dissociated state. Again, Chet was there and again I was sexually assaulted.” Later she came out of this state. When she realized she’d been assaulted, she “cut contact with my family members completely. My experiences of the past five years show me clearly that the cult is still active and dangerous.”

She signed the letter “Sister Marlo Damon, SVU, 6/11/03.”

Damon’s recollection of her alleged rape by Father Warren is consistent with the use of the female body as the altar during the Black Mass. But what is even more interesting is that in her letter, the nun accuses her father, Robert Damon, of not only being part of the satanic ring abusing his daughter, but later selling her sexual services.

Who was Robert Damon? On April 8, 2000, the
Toledo Blade
published a human interest story about his lifelong fascination with trains.

“Some folks like to play golf or sail a boat,” he told the
Blade
during the interview. “Trains just happen to be my hobby.”

The article went on to describe how Damon, a retired executive with the Tana Corporation, could usually be found hanging out in his car at the Holloway Road railroad crossing, at Holland near McCord Road in Toledo. He liked to watch the trains go by.

“I’ve been a railroad buff since I was 5 years old,” said the seventy-seven-year-old former Tana Corporation employee in the article. “I’ve been a train devotee for more than 70 years.”

Damon enjoyed riding the rails even more, especially when accompanied by his wife, Doris, Marlo’s mother. He estimated that they had taken 150 Amtrak trips since their marriage in 1948.

All this information was available to anyone in that room interested in the character of Damon’s father, the alleged Satanist. All they had to do was a simple Google search; they did not. Once Damon departed for the review board to consider her evidence, review board member Dr. Cooley said that he wanted to report Damon’s charges immediately to police because they included the murder of people used as satanic sacrifices.

Instead, the board voted five to one that Sister Marlo Damon’s charges of rape, torture, and satanic abuse were not only incredible, but there wasn’t cause to bring the cops in. Only Dr. Cooley thought there was. The lone holdout who believed in Damon’s credibility, he had backbone.

Vercellotti and Cooley got together with Damon and told her she should go public with her charges. Still believing the Dallas Charter would get her the fifty grand and guarantee her justice, Damon refused. The diocese dragged its feet. The case languished all through the summer of 2003. In the fall, Sister Marlo Damon’s patience finally wore out. The Toledo Diocese’s intransigence to her problems was no longer tolerable.

She gave her champions Vercellotti and Cooley copies of her statement delivered months before to the diocese’s review board. She also gave them what they had been waiting for—the green light to take her case forward to the authorities. The real question was whose trust Damon’s situation would engender, or perhaps more importantly, whom Vercellotti and Cooley felt they could trust not to bury the case. The Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office was low on the list and, in Vercellotti’s opinion, never a viable option. Instead, Cooley and Vercellotti went directly to the state.

In September 2003, Vercellotti and Cooley met with Special Agent Phil Lucas of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in Bowling Green. During the hour-plus meeting, they handed over to Lucas a copy of Damon’s statement to the review board. Lucas requested more documentation. While Vercellotti was putting together the package of papers for the state investigator, the diocese fired Dr. Cooley from the review board. That was not surprising. After all, Cooley had refused to go along with the program. He had to go. But then, just when it seemed darkest, the system worked.

On December 2, Special Agent Lucas of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office faxed a copy of Sister Marlo Damon’s review board testimony to the Lucas County prosecutor, Julia Bates. He included his recommendation that an investigation be commenced immediately. The state needed to determine the veracity of Damon’s charges. And just like that, Damon’s charges had new life.

Since 1997, Lucas County prosecutor Julia Bates had maintained a cold case squad. Their charge was primarily to examine unsolved homicides. Using contemporary technology and old-fashioned police work, the idea was to see if they could bring resolution to these crimes. The squad was composed of personnel drawn from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification; the TPD; the county coroner and prosecutor’s offices; and the FBI.

Of all the sleuths put on the case, it would be the DA’s man, Tom Ross, who put the pieces together. An investigator for prosecutor Julia Bates, Ross was also a retired TPD cop. Spotting Robinson’s name in Damon’s letter as one of the priests accused of raping her, he immediately consulted with his colleague, Sergeant Steve Forrester of the TPD.

Ross remembered that Robinson had been the prime suspect in Pahl’s murder.

Now his name had surfaced again. This time, a nun was charging Robinson raped her during years of satanic abuse that included human sacrifices. There was also a possibility of a link in some way between Robinson and Chet Warren, the main subject of Damon’s charges.

Satanism was another matter.

What had stymied the TPD in its first investigation of the Pahl homicide was the deal made with the Toledo Diocese to stop before they could begin building a case against the prime suspect, Father Gerald Robinson. Despite any public statements covering their ass, the TPD was “that close” to indicting Robinson when Schmit and Vetter walked into the interrogation room and shut things down cold.

During the first years of the millennium, Dave Davison sat with his menagerie in his home on Toledo’s margins, watching as a new group of young Turks took over the Toledo Police Department and replaced the old guard. That didn’t mean there weren’t still lots of Catholics in the TPD; there were. But the idea of masking a murder suspect, simply because he was a Catholic priest, was now abhorrent.

Because of the sexual abuse scandals across the country, Catholic priests were no longer seen as the holy men of yore. Now they were seen as
men
, just as capable of murder, child abuse, or sexual abuse as any other person. The cold case squad decided to reinvestigate the unsolved 1980 homicide of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. The detectives were coming after Jerry Robinson. If they didn’t make the case this time, the Pahl murder would probably remain unsolved forever.

On December 15, 2003, Ross and Forrester went to the diocese. In their hands was a search warrant. They met with Father Michael Billian, who functioned as the diocese’s chancellor, or front man for dealing with the authorities. It happened that he and Forrester, a Catholic, were acquaintances. The warrant, they explained, was for the personnel file of Father Gerald Robinson. Robinson had been the prime suspect in the 1980 unsolved murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, a case they had just reopened.

Billian went outside his office. A few minutes later, he came back in with a thin folder. It was the entire personnel file the diocese had on Robinson. Opening it, Forrester saw a personnel form with Robinson’s particulars on it. A second form summarized his assignments since entering the diocese in 1964. Last was a head shot of Robinson, smiling. That was it; nothing else.

The detectives were rather surprised that after more than four decades of service to Toledo’s Catholics, there wasn’t more detailed information, like comments from parishioners regarding his priestly abilities, peer reviews, and some comments from the man at the top, the bishop who was Robinson’s overall supervisor. For a personnel file it was pretty bare, but Billian acidulously assured the police officers that was all they had.

Something else was happening. Damon’s charges of satanic abuse brought in the supernatural. While she did not place Robinson at any of the alleged satanic ceremonies in which she was the alleged victim, she did place him, and quite persuasively, in Chet Warren’s room at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where Warren, she claimed, prostituted her.

But it wasn’t until Detective Terry Cousino examined the altar cloth lying over her chest that anyone made the charge that the murder of Margaret Ann Pahl was ritualistic. “Ritualistic” is the label homicide detectives and prosecutors like to assign to cases where they suspect satanic involvement.

Like just about everybody in Toledo who went to college, Cousino’s alma mater was the hometown University of Toledo, where he got his bachelor’s in art education. A member of the TPD’s Scientific Investigation Unit, Cousino was a jack-of-all-trades forensic specialist. He could draw accurate composites of suspects and age them, or make a plaster of a person’s face that had been shot off by a shotgun.

Cousino had more recently taken courses in a new field of forensics, bloodstain pattern transfer analysis. The theory behind bloodstain pattern transfer analysis was logical enough. A blood-soaked knife, other murder weapon, or anything at the scene coated in the red stuff, will make a distinct pattern when set down on, or when covered with something. While the field held great promise for the future, it has yet to be proven significant in obtaining regular convictions for two reasons.

First, there are only five people acknowledged worldwide as bloodstain pattern transfer analysis experts. Unless they worked for a super-secret crime-fighting organization like S.H.I.E.L.D. created by Stan Lee, they wouldn’t be able to cover all the cases in one state, let alone fifty of them where their testimony could make a significant difference.

Second, unlike DNA typing, which is an objective science born out of more than fifty years of steady, dedicated research and results, bloodstain pattern transfer analysis (BPTA) is new and decidedly subjective. No matter how well-trained the specialist in this area might be, the expert must interpret, just as a frontier scout interpreted imprints in the dirt.

No matter how reliable subjectivity might be, it is not the scientific fact that DNA typing is. While law enforcement organizations try to implement standards in this new area, credible research studies need to be developed and published to answer how a subjective technique can even compare to science in weight given at trial.

This must all be taken into account, and then thrown out.

No one knows what a jury will do, and anyone who says he does is lying. A jury can be smart, like the one that convicted Harry K. Thaw in 1906 for murdering Stanford White, the first “crime of the century”; or it can be stupid, like the jury that voted to acquit O. J. Simpson in 1995 for the last “crime of the century.” Despite still being a theory, BPTA could easily be accepted by the jury and lead to conviction. Just as possible was that a good defense attorney could bring out “reasonable doubt” by arguing BTPA was not science but science fiction. Convince even one juror of that and the jury would hang.

DNA typing is 99.9 percent accurate. Bloodstain pattern transfer analysis is not. But it was all the cold case squad had. Examining the altar cloth further, Cousino noted the grouping of puncture marks in the center. There were eighteen in total, but it looked like the cloth had actually been folded over when the stabbing took place. That meant there were actually nine punctures grouped in the center of Pahl’s chest.

CSI work sometimes includes using old technology. Taking a piece of tracing paper, Cousino positioned it carefully over the nine holes in the cloth. He drew lines, literally connecting the dots on the cloth that represented where the knife, he figured, had passed through and into the nun’s chest. When he was finished, he announced his results to the cops.

“It’s a cross,” he opined.

Cousino figured the killer had used a crucifix as a template. But the stab marks were not just any cross. It was Cousino’s opinion that the stab marks formed an inverted or upside-down cross, and that meant only one thing: Satan.

Devil worshippers mock Christianity using various symbols to demonstrate their displeasure with Christianity. One of these satanic symbols is the inverted cross. To a Satanist, it represents rejection and mockery of Jesus.

If such a cross were pierced into Margaret Ann’s chest over her heart, the case could easily be seen as a satanically inspired ritual. Damon’s charges of human sacrifice by the satanic cult could be borne out by hard evidence.

There is nothing unusual about ritual killing. It is carefully documented in a variety of cultures and is literally as old as time itself, or at least since humans first walked the earth more than one hundred thousand years ago. Many cultures that have long since become history, including the Mayans, the Incas, and others, ritually killed human beings, usually for some sort of sacrifice to appease one god or another.

The Catholic Church crystallized the concept of the Devil or Satan in Mathew 25:41, “the Devil and his angels,” giving their chief or head fallen angel the name Lucifer. Thereafter, ritual killing involved in many instances worshipping Lucifer. But as time passed and cultures became more and more educated and enlightened, such ideas fell by the transom of history.

By the twentieth century, ritual killing was practically nonexistent in the United States. Public perception changed with the publication of Ira Levin’s 1967 best-seller
Rosemary’s Baby
, which brought devil worshipping to the masses. It was a frightening story of a devil-worshipping cult in modern-day Manhattan, composed of people just like you and me, who just happened to implant a nice girl named Rosemary with Satan’s spawn.

Under Roman Polanski’s absolutely brilliant direction, the 1968 screen version became an instant classic that transcended the bounds of its own horror genre. Through Rosemary’s travails, it indelibly stamped images of ritualistic sexual abuse on the American consciousness. Then, as if to prove out his own thesis, Polanski showed how easy it was to become a victim of devil worshipping in his own life.

Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was the most well-known victim of Charles Manson and his devil-worshipping cult that killed six people on two consecutive nights, August 8 to 9, 1969. The subsequent trial lasted from 1970 to 1971, and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s 1975 account of the case,
Helter Skelter
, focused the public’s attention once more on ritual killing.

As the Manson case showed, Satanism is about sex and power. Under the guise of worshipping Satan, felons rape, beat, and psychologically abuse those they make part of their ritual. Charlie Manson, for example, controlled his cult by making them believe he was the Devil incarnate. Yet he was nothing more than a charismatic, insane con man who had spent more than half of his miserable life behind bars.

David Berkowitz, who in 1977 was arrested in Westchester, New York, for being the self-described serial killer the Son of Sam, admitted he was part of a satanic cult. Though police played this down at the time, evidence developed later that there could have been more than one “shooter,” from Berkowitz’s cult. As late as 1997 during a nationally televised interview, Berkowitz told Larry King that he had belonged to a devil-worshipping cult.

Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s death could have been part of a satanic ritual performed by Father Robinson. Evidence of the rituals themselves would help corroborate Damon’s statement. Confusing matters, there were some writers and cops who considered themselves self-styled Satanism experts. If there was even a hint of satanic activity, they never failed to seize the media spotlight and flog the Satanism angle to death in order to sell themselves and their points of view.

Homicide cops don’t like to admit it, but more often than not, they form a theory of the crime. Then they gather the evidence with an eye toward supporting that theory, rather than going where the evidence leads. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Right from the beginning in 1980, the TPD cops formed the theory that Father Gerald Robinson had killed Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. He was the only suspect. The cops figured he strangled her with his hands and then used his letter opener to stab her to death, having laid the altar cloth over her chest first. Tying the letter opener and the altar cloth to the crime was therefore essential.

Forrester and Ross pulled all the evidence from the 1980 homicide. They asked Daniel Davison of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to see what he could find out about the letter opener. Using contemporary science, Ross could not connect the letter opener to Pahl’s body. He could not say one way or the other whether it was Robinson’s letter opener that punctured Margaret Ann Pahl’s skin.

“I had Steve Ross call me for a DNA test,” says Dave Davison. “I asked him why and he said they were trying to rule out everyone who was at the crime as being the perpetrator.”

Davison, though, didn’t trust Ross or the TPD.

“I refused. He said if I didn’t get my ass down there and give them a swab, he would get a court order. I told him to go ahead.”

As part of the case he was building against Robinson, assistant prosecutor Dean Mandros subpoenaed the following from St. Vincent’s Hospital Pathology Department:

“…you are hereby commanded to release tissue in paraffin block and glass slides from the 1995 medical treatment and surgery at Mercy Hospital of Father Jerome Swiatecki to the Lucas Count Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.”

Father Swiatecki had had some surgery in the mid-nineties at the hospital, which had stored his tissue samples inside paraffin for long-term convenience. The prosecution could use it to type his DNA and compare it to any gathered at the crime scene, and thus rule him out. The cops then asked for voluntary DNA samples from as many of the people who were at the 1980 crime scene as they could find.

Davison’s reticence to allow the TPD access to his genetic code was well-founded. The department needed to prove to honest veterans like Davison that the go-to boys no longer controlled the department, that everyone, including Catholic priests, was subject to criminal prosecution for felonious acts that not only defied common criminal law, they defied canon law as well.

None of the DNA typing made a difference anyway. What little blood that was on the letter opener, under where the medallion used to be, had been tested back in 1980, and had proved too little to even blood type, e.g., A, B. By the time they came to Cousino, the TPD cops were running out of options.

With Cousino’s information regarding blood pattern transfer analysis in hand, they proceeded to get two of the five world experts on bloodstain pattern transfer analysis to agree to testify for the prosecution: T. Paulette Sutton and Dr. Henry Lee. Both experts would say that Robinson’s letter opener pierced the altar cloth, the blood leaving a distinct pattern of an inverted cross on the cloth.

The meaning of the stab wounds was crucial to the prosecution of the case. If Cousino was right in his interpretation, they needed an expert on ritualistic killings. TPD detectives found themselves traveling to Chicago, just three and a half hours away from Toledo by car, to ask for the assistance of the one man who could help: the exorcist.

Father Jeffrey Grob is the assistant exorcist and director of canonical services for the Archdiocese of Chicago.

“I sort of backed into it because of the dissertation I was working on at the time on the rite of exorcism,” says Father Grob.