When Satan Wore a Cross (2 page)

That day she was especially upset.

“One of the priests wants to change the Good Friday service, and make it shorter,” Sister Margaret Ann shouted in horror, breaking down and crying bitter tears.

“Why did they cheat God out of what was
his
?”

To a devoted Catholic like Sister Margaret, any change from established orthodoxy was heretical. The Church was her whole life. To see even a portion of it altered by someone, let alone a priest, was blasphemy!

The priest she was referring to was Gerald Robinson. Only he could make the changes to the Mass because he was the head priest. Margaret Ann’s feelings toward Gerald Robinson were as close as she ever came in her life to hating someone.

For sixteen years since his ordination in 1964, Jerry Robinson had been a popular priest in Toledo, a blue-collar city of about three hundred thousand, where a quarter of the citizens are Catholics. The Polish community especially liked Robinson, who sometimes spoke Polish during sermons and heard confessions in Polish. He had been educated at a seminary in Michigan that trained priests especially to minister to the Polish Catholic community that dominate many of the northern cities of Ohio and southern ones of Michigan.

Jerry Robinson was a local Toledo kid who had to make good. Ordained in 1964 at age twenty-six, he was a strikingly handsome man with a receding hairline of wavy, dark blond hair, dark piercing eyes, a straight nose, and a determined mouth and chin. Unfortunately for Robinson, it was 1964, not 1864.

Toledo’s Polish-speaking Roman Catholics were in a decline that mirrored the society that had changed dramatically around them. Keeping the old ways alive was a fine idea, but in practice assimilation takes over. Pretty soon even the newest immigrants are anxious to speak English. That was Robinson’s first problem—a shrinking clientele.

The second was that just like everywhere else in the country, Toledo was seeing its white urban population shrinking. Once again there was the modern version of the Oklahoma Land Rush, “white flight” to the suburbs. Even social circumstances were conspiring against him.

By 1980, Jerry Robinson was forty-two but looked fifty-two. His face had a puffy look it didn’t have before, probably from his regular drinking. Jerry Robinson’s once wavy, dark blond hair was now a crescent of gray. His eyes seemed hooded and sad. His mouth was creased into a slight, sarcastic smile. As the Polish Catholics disappeared through whatever social process was at work throughout the 1970s, Robinson had been transferred from one church to another. Never did he rise to head priest at any parish, until finally he found his way to the backwater duties as the head chaplain at Mercy Hospital.

On Good Friday, 1980, the television in the nun’s communal room was turned on.

At 8
P.M
., the choice was Bill Bixby’s brilliant take on Dr. Jekyll in CBS’s
The Incredible Hulk,
with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite doormat, Lou Ferrigno, as the big green guy. Or ABC’s
Fantasy Island
with Ricardo Montalban and Herve (“Da plane, boss, da plane”) Villechaize.

Nine
P.M
. was even better. There was the
Dukes of Hazzard
with a blond guy, a brunette guy, a brunette girl in shorts, and a car that was the star of it all, the General Lee. The real gem was on NBC. The nuns’ favorite (and everyone else’s) was James Garner in
The Rockford Files
. To a nun from Toledo used to poverty and dreariness in her surroundings, having a trailer on Malibu Beach and solving murders with charm and guile in the pursuit of justice, like Rockford, was extremely appealing.

No one afterward recalled the time Margaret Ann went to bed. No one could say for certain what was on her mind except for one thing: just as she had been taught back in Edgerton, she had responsibilities in the morning that she needed to fulfill. She was an “old school” nun and everyone knew it.

Routine is something that a smart murderer relies on. If he knows where his victim is going to be and when, working backwards it becomes easy to plan the crime. The essential point is to have enough time to do what is necessary, to kill at the right moment, literally when no one’s looking, especially the victim. It also helps if you plan out how you are going to do it. Will you use your hands, for example, or rely on a weapon?

A gun perhaps? Guns were pretty messy. It was easy in that part of Toledo to obtain one on the street. But that cost money. Besides, he was not a professional; he had no idea where to go to get a Saturday night special. Anyway, a gun was too loud and would attract attention. He decided he wouldn’t need one.

No, something easy to stab with.

That was how he finally decided he was going to do it.

But so what if he killed her? It wasn’t enough. He wanted
to get her.
He made up his mind to do something
special,
just for her, for Sister Margaret Ann whom everyone knew and loved. Something special, to celebrate her union with Christ.

April 5, 1980

Holy Saturday is the only day in the Catholic calendar when there is no morning Mass.

In Toledo, Margaret Ann awakened that morning in her seventh-floor Mercy Hospital dormitory room to the sharp ring of her electric alarm clock. Reaching out with a small, wrinkled hand, she pushed in the off button. Settling back, she did not get up until the second clock, a wind-up, went off at 5:30.

Even one day shy of her seventy-first birthday, Margaret Ann was as meticulous as the young girl who had labeled her belongings and left them behind for her siblings in Edgerton so long ago. But the years had taken their toll. Margaret Ann’s hearing was failing, causing particular friction with Father Robinson, who resented having to continually repeat his instructions to her. She also could be forgetful, especially if she had something else on her mind. It was Robinson, as the hospital’s chief chaplain, who had decided—and God only knew for his own reasons—to shorten yesterday’s Good Friday service, causing Margaret Ann to cry.

Outside, it was a cloudy day. Audrey Garraway arrived for work at the usual time, about 6
A.M
. She entered through a side door that had to be opened from the inside; she didn’t have a key. Sister Margaret was always there to open it. Today for some reason she wasn’t there. Surprised, Audrey went to the kitchen to get a key that would allow her to enter the dining area to start her workday.

At about the same time, Margaret Ann, now dressed in the traditional Sisters of Mercy habit, took the elevator down from the seventh floor. Turning left on the ground floor, she said, hello to Sue Bentley at the switchboard, continuing on to the hospital cafeteria. At about 6:15
A.M
., Audrey ran into Sister Margaret in the sisters’ dining area. She was carrying a green cafeteria tray.

“How’d you get into the kitchen?” Margaret Ann asked, remembering the duty she had forgotten to do that morning.

“I got the key from dietary,” Audrey answered.

A few seconds later, Audrey saw Sister Margaret go out into the hallway. Drifting out of Audrey’s view, Margaret Ann stopped at a supply closet. Using a key, she opened the padlock and took out cleaning cloths and incense. She placed them on the green tray, locked the closet again, and set off down the twisting halls of the hospital.

When she arrived a minute later at the twin wooden doors of the hospital chapel, they too were locked. That was expected at such an early hour. It was her job to prepare the chapel for the morning service. Even though there was none this morning, Margaret Ann remained a creature of habit. Opening the doors with the set of keys she carried, she switched on the chapel lights.

At about 6:20
A.M
., Audrey saw Margaret Ann come back into the cafeteria. She was still carrying an empty cafeteria tray that she quickly filled up with raisin bran, grapefruit, and coffee. Margaret Ann ate the repast alone, seemingly lost in thought, which Audrey interrupted.

“Sister Margaret,” she said brightly.

Margaret Ann looked up from her thoughts.

“Could you please tell me, Sister, when services are going to be scheduled for Holy Saturday?”

“They will be at seven o’clock,” she answered. “Tonight.”

Outside the hospital, Glenn Thomas expertly tooled his ambulance up around the hospital’s circling driveway and parked. He had just finished his ambulance run to nearby St. Vincent Hospital. Hungry, he decided to go over to Mercy to get something to eat. Parking close to the entrance, he walked into the building just as the sun was coming up.

Glenn looked at his watch. It was 6:30
A.M
. Inside, he headed straight for the cafeteria. Walking through the swinging doors, he ran into Sister Margaret. She was leaving and carrying an empty green cafeteria tray.

“Good morning, Sister Margaret,” he said respectfully.

Glenn knew Margaret Ann as the sister who took an interest in his work and always talked to him when he had problems with his ambulance runs. This morning, she hustled past him and out the exit door, barely acknowledging his presence.

Once out of Glenn’s view, Margaret Ann walked straight back to the chapel. At about 6:48
A.M
., she opened the chapel doors. The pews were still empty. With no service scheduled until the evening, the only people in today would be the occasional sister saying her daily prayers, and perhaps relatives of patients. They would get to know the terrazzo floor intimately.

It was fitting that the chapel had a terrazzo floor. As a flooring material, it’s two thousand years old. It became popular just about the time Jesus Christ walked the earth. Since then, it has become known as a mosaic type of flooring, made by the unique combination of embedding tiny pieces of marble in mortar and then polishing them. The mixture consists of two parts marble to one of cement. During the installation process additional marble chips are sprinkled on the surface so that at least 70 percent of the exposed surface is marble.

Terrazzo flooring is particularly good for high-traffic areas, like a chapel or sacristy. The marble, unlike the cement in the mixture, is almost nonabsorbent. Most things that stain just about anything else will not stain terrazzo.

Margaret Ann went up to the altar. She began polishing it with the cleaning cloths she had dropped off earlier. At some point, she needed to go into the sacristy to get the hosts for the evening’s service. Holy Saturday is one of only two days on the Catholic calendar when the Holy Eucharist is stored in the sacristy.

The door into the sacristy was to the right of the altar. The sacristy in the hospital chapel was especially small. Only five hundred hosts were stored in the room. Margaret Ann took out her keys again and inserted one in the lock of the door, placed at the right of the altar.

Inside, the killer listened as the tumblers clicked into place. He had planned well. Holy Saturday was the only morning of the year when he would have a guarantee that no one would be there early in the hospital chapel. Plenty of time to do his work.

Margaret Ann pushed the door open. It was dark inside. Her small, frail figure was momentarily silhouetted by the chapel lights behind her. Killing her didn’t exactly require a .44 Magnum. But planned murders require restraint. Pounce too early, and it attracts attention. Do it too late, and there was always the chance the victim could get away. It had to be timed well to work.

He chose to remain quietly in the shadows, until the door was closed behind her. Once she was safely in the room, the killer began the death work with his hands. He had confidence they could do the job, especially considering he got her neck from behind. If he strangled her from the front, it gave her a chance to defend herself by striking out at him. The last thing he needed were scratches on his face to identify him as the killer. He also had the weapon in his clothes to be used at the right time.

Strangling is a particularly personal way of killing a human being. As an additional benefit, nothing would be left behind, like fibers, if he had worn gloves. On the negative side, if his nails dug into her skin, there’d be some of her skin beneath them. At some point, he lowered her to the ground, the life all but squeezed out of her. Margaret Ann Pahl was still alive but only moments away from meeting her maker. He took out the weapon that he had carried with him. She was still alive when he began the ritual.

About 7
A.M
., hospital worker Wardell Langston heard noise in the general area of the chapel. Then all was quiet until Sister Phyllis, the hospital administrator and the only one with a phone in her room, arrived at the chapel sometime between 7:45 and 7:50
A.M
. The chapel doors were unlocked; one stood open.

Sister Margaret Ann likes to get up early and get her work done in the chapel
, Sister Phyllis thought.

Phyllis walked over to a front pew. She knelt down and said her morning prayers. A quick glance at her watch told her it was 8
A.M
. No hurry. Phyllis said some more prayers.

Fifteen minutes later, Sister Madelyn Marie came down the hallway leading to the chapel. The chapel’s organist, she was going to help Sister Margaret Ann get ready for evening services. Madelyn Marie also figured to consult with Father Robinson regarding the music for the Holy Saturday evening Mass. She saw what she thought was a small man in a hurry as he went down the hallway to the exit. Thinking nothing further of it, Madelyn Marie kept walking.

That’s when she spied the cloth. It looked more like a pillowcase. She actually couldn’t be sure what it was except a cloth of some kind. It had been neatly folded by someone and placed against the wall, just a few feet away from the executive director’s office door, which was immediately adjacent to the chapel entrance.

Not thinking twice about it, Madelyn Marie picked it up. Without unfolding it, she entered the chapel and placed it on one of the pews. Then she knelt down in a front pew and began saying her morning prayers.

Where is Sister Margaret Ann? Probably in the sacristy,
Madelyn Marie thought.

Madelyn Marie spied the used cleaning cloths on top of the altar. The work to prepare the altar for tonight’s service was obviously incomplete. That was odd. Sister Margaret Ann was a perfectionist who did not leave a job half done. Getting up from her pew, Madelyn Marie strode to the sacristy door. She tried the knob; it was locked. That was curious. It was self-locking. Normally it would have been left open when someone was preparing the altar for a service.

Producing a key from her pocket, Madelyn Marie slid it into the lock. Turning gently, the lock disengaged with a click. The Sister of Mercy pushed the door open to a dark room suddenly flooded with light. Walking into the sacristy, she saw at first what she thought was a CPR mannequin on the terrazzo floor. There was no blood.

Bending down to look further, she realized that she was looking at her friend Margaret Ann, and that she had been murdered. It had been a matter of seconds since she had been in the room, but Madelyn Marie knew that life as she’d known it was over. Then she ran out of the sacristy and screamed.

Then, a moment later, she shouted:

“Sister Margaret Ann has been raped!”

Sister Phyllis came running down the aisle, up to the altar and over to the sacristy door, where she pulled up. Madelyn Marie turned to look at her in shock. Phyllis brushed past her and saw Sister Margaret. She was posed across the room, nearer to the second door. Her underwear and girdle had been pulled down around her ankles. Her habit had been pulled up to her neck. There was a black smudge of blood on her forehead, but very little elsewhere.

“Get help!” Phyllis shouted behind her to Sister Clarisena, who had just come in.

Phyllis helped Madelyn Marie to a pew, and then went back inside the sacristy. Searching desperately for a phone with which to summon help, she found none. Instead, she ventured closer to the body. Phyllis noticed that Margaret Ann’s habit was pulled up over her chest. Margaret Ann’s face was swollen. A nurse, Phyllis knew that if she was stabbed in the chest and air was sucked out of the body, her face would indeed swell like that.

There were wounds over her heart, quite a few, but surprisingly, very little blood. Most curiously, Margaret Ann’s arms were at her sides. Her legs went straight out. Phyllis had already seen quite a few deaths, but none like this. There was weirdness to it all, like something unnatural had been done.

People usually don’t die so straight,
Phyllis thought.

She had slept in and gotten up at 6:45
A.M
., breakfasted quickly by herself on cold cereal, orange juice, and coffee in the nuns’ kitchen area, and come back upstairs to do some chores. After that, she relaxed, listened to some rock on the radio, and then decided to take a shower. Sister Kathleen had been in the shower for maybe five minutes, and was just about finishing up, when she overheard a conversation in the hallway between Sister Patricia Ann and one of the other sisters. The shower door was open so that the room didn’t steam up. That made her hearing even better.

Sister Patricia said she had just heard a Swift Team call to the chapel. Kathleen thought it might concern Sister Philip, because of her age and medical condition. A few seconds later, a phone rang someplace. There was a pause, the kind of moment that goes on for a lifetime.

“Sister Margaret has been murdered in the chapel,” said Patricia, suddenly appearing outside the shower door like the Grim Reaper.

“Go ahead without me,” yelled Kathleen, grabbing her towel.

She put on her robe, returned to her room, and dressed quickly, leaving her hair up, and then went directly to the chapel.

Dr. Lincoln Vail was tired. Vail had caught the midnight shift at Mercy Hospital. That sort of figured since he was a second-year resident without much pull. The evening of April 4 into the early hours of April 5 was very busy at the hospital. Vail was a good doctor. He took extensive notes for his morning conference with two colleagues. Vail was in his morning report at 8
A.M
. with two other MDs discussing the previous evening’s activities when the PA system came alive.

“Emergency, emergency, Swift Team report to the chapel. Repeat, Swift Team report to the chapel!”

Vail was part of the Swift Team, a group of nurses and physicians who responded to medical emergencies within the hospital considered dire. Running down the stairs, he emerged into a rapidly crowding hallway. He saw Sister Kathleen Marie crying and Sister Phyllis Ann comforting her. He entered the sacristy.

“She’s already dead,” said Dr. Ben Piazza.

Piazza was standing next to the body. He had been walking nearby when he heard the Swift Team alert and responded more swiftly than the Swift Team.

“She may have been raped,” Piazza added.

Vail looked down and saw that her girdle and underwear were down around her ankles. Bending down, he held Margaret Ann’s wrist. The skin was cold, the pulse, gone. He felt her chest; her heart had stopped beating. Moving back from the body, he noticed the stab wounds over Margaret Ann’s heart, then the stab wounds in her neck.