When Satan Wore a Cross (3 page)

It was at this point that the crime scene was completely compromised. Suddenly a trio of doctors, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard, and Dr. DeRita, appeared at Vail’s side. Then a nurse entered the sacristy. Then two or three of the girls from Respiratory Therapy came in.

“Gloria,” said Vail, turning to the nurse. “Cover her with a blanket.”

Vail had made the same mistake so many others before him did when they entered the realm of murder. For Vail, Margaret Ann was a dead patient entitled to propriety. But Margaret Ann had forfeited that right when she became a murder victim. Vail’s sincere attempt to protect Margaret Ann’s modesty transferred a whole lot of fibers to the body that the forensic team would have to sort out later.

Judy Johnson had a daughter who was in the hospital overnight. Like any good parent, she had stayed with her daughter, to be near her side. Despite what little sleep the hospital couches supplied, by morning she was exhausted. Going down to the cafeteria, she was at the cashier purchasing a wake-up coffee.

“Something’s wrong in the chapel!” someone screamed.

Johnson looked over. It was a woman who had just run in from the corridor outside. What happened next was pure mob mentality. Everyone but Johnson ran for the door at once. Johnson waited until the rush died down, long enough to notice a man, about five-six, 140 pounds, light complexion, perhaps Mexican, in his early twenties, curly dark hair, wearing a hospital-type jacket with dark clothing underneath. He stood there with a frightened look on his face. The description, of course, could fit every second worker in the hospital who was Hispanic or light-skinned black.

At about that moment, coming down the connecting passageway to the chapel, was Sister Kathleen. Outside the chapel, Sister Kathleen saw Sister Phyllis in the doorway. There were people crowding around inside.

“What happened, Sister?” Sister Kathleen asked, suddenly feeling anxious.

“Sister Margaret has been murdered and possibly raped,” Phyllis replied with a calm she really didn’t feel.

“Damn it!” said Kathleen under her breath.

Kathleen ignored several members of the Emergency Medical Team who came running down the chapel aisle, and just kept going. Kathleen came into the narrow room close behind them and saw the body of Sister Margaret Ann on the floor. Father Swiatecki stood to her left. He was uncorking a small vial of olive oil blessed two days before at Holy Thursday’s Mass by Bishop Donovan himself.

Since Margaret Ann’s birth, one of the changes in the Church dealt with the sacrament of extreme unction. “Extreme,” of course, meant the dire circumstances under which the sacrament was given—impending death. “Unction” means oil. Under Vatican II, the sacrament became known as anointing the sick.

Under the old Church rules before Vatican II, the last rites—this included extreme unction, the Holy Eucharist, and penance—were given to those close to death. Vatican II changed that so that the so-called last rites could be commonly given not just to those facing death, but to those who were sick and needed the power of Christ to help them heal. For Margaret Ann, though, it was too late.

“Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit,” said Father Swiatecki.

The big priest dabbed his finger quickly on the bottle’s neck, getting it wet with the holy oil. Then he made the sign of the cross on the cooling skin of Margaret Ann’s forehead. At that moment, the police didn’t know it, but they got a big break. For some reason, he took particular care not to touch the bloodstain on her forehead.

Looking up, Father Swiatecki noticed Sister Kathleen.

“Come stand near me,” he invited Kathleen.

Doing as Father asked, Kathleen proceeded to step over Margaret Ann’s cooling body. She stood next to Swiatecki. He was using the oil to anoint Margaret Ann’s hands. He then repeated the ancient prescription meant to remind all Catholics they die with Christ so that they may live again through him.

“May the Lord who frees you from sin, save you and raise you up.”

“Amen.”

Margaret Ann’s life, which began seventy years and 364 days earlier in an Edgerton, Ohio, farmhouse, ended on the cold marble floor of that Toledo church.

Suddenly Father Gerald Robinson, the hospital’s head priest, appeared in the chapel. Swiatecki saw him, came and stood over him. Robinson was a stocky, handsome man, but the larger priest menacingly dwarfed him.

“Why did you kill her?” Swiatecki demanded.

Before Robinson could reply, Swiatecki asked for the second time in the presence of witnesses, “Why did you kill her?”

In the cafeteria, thirty-year-old Patrolman Dave Davison and his partner Hank Brackett were eating breakfast. They heard a “Code Blue” over the cafeteria loudspeaker and thought nothing special about it. In Mercy Hospital, codes, as hospital insiders referred to them, were called all the time.

A gangling six-footer with a drooping, Rollie Fingers–type mustache and the ace Oakland Athletic relief pitcher’s intense black eyes, Davison was the senior man. Both Davison and Brackett were police officers in District 111—four all African-American housing projects. It was a high-crime area, where most of the criminals were residents preying on their own.

Davison was a real believer in the Atkins Diet before it ever became popular. He was eating bacon and eggs. It was a lot of food and a good deal because the sisters fed the cops at the employee rate. Someplace a telephone rang. A few moments later someone shouted to Davison.

“It’s for you!”

“Don’t answer,” said Brackett. “It’ll be work or a female.”

The problems for Dave Davison started right there.

Brackett was right, of course. Listening to Brackett and not taking the call would have saved Davison his career and a good part of his life. Unfortunately, Davison literally felt a weight on his chest. It was that damn cumbersome badge he wore. Davison wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, quickly stood up, and strode to the cashier, where someone else handed him a phone.

“Come up to the chapel, there’s a dead nun up here!” shouted an anxious female voice.

A dead nun?!
Davison thought. After he hung up the phone a nurse ran up to him.

“You’ve gotta come to the chapel. There’s a dead nun!”

“I know,” said Davison, taking off out of the cafeteria and into the hospital’s labyrinth, Brackett at his heels.
It’s got to be a heart attack, maybe a stroke victim
, Davison thought, while his feet ran. Davison realized that the code he had heard earlier was for the nun. A few minutes later, he came through a crowd of people jamming the chapel. He and Brackett fought their way through the crowd of gawkers around the narrow sacristy door.

Once inside, Davison saw people milling around the body. He saw her only from the knees down, the legs bent oddly to the sides.
Some idiot covered her with a hospital sheet.
While it was a respectful gesture, he knew it was an easy way to transfer fibers that would contaminate the evidence. Davison heard the people who had worked on the nun say that she was “dead.”

The crime scene is completely blown,
he thought, and just as quickly turned to Brackett.

“Rope off the crime scene,” he told Brackett, certain he didn’t get his sarcasm. Davison looked down.

It could be my own grandmother
on that floor, he thought. Davison was not Catholic; his mother was. He had promised her that before she died, he would get baptized. He figured that left him plenty of time, so he hadn’t bothered to yet.

He pulled his two-way radio off his belt and flipped it on.

“Ten-four, ten-four, this is Patrolman Davison calling dispatcher.”

After a moment, he heard the crackle, then the reply, “Dispatcher here.”

“Reporting a homicide at Mercy Hospital Chapel. Requesting homicide detectives, coroner’s office, and crime lab all be notified and dispatched.”

“Roger, Patrolman Davison, acknowledged.”

Davison turned back to the crowd.

“Please come this way.”

Davison’s job now was to sucker all the people who surrounded the body to stay so he had a chance to question them. It was important to get their immediate statements before they were contaminated, that is, before they had a chance to talk among themselves about what they had seen and heard, or to make any calls to outside parties.

A few seconds later, the last person was escorted out of the sacristy.

While Brackett went outside to their squad car for some yellow crime scene tape, Davison herded the remaining witnesses, the doctors, nuns, nurses, and hospital workers who had gathered around Margaret Ann’s body, into an outside corridor.

“All right, tell me,” Davison said to no one in particular, keeping careful to modulate his voice, “who’s capable of doing this?”

“It’s the priest,” someone said.

“They argued,” said another person.

A few of the others concurred. Davison took notes of all their statements.

“He liked to shake nuns,” another added. “He’d shake the shit out of them.”

Davison knew Swiatecki. He was a great big guy, jowly, an alcoholic, a police “groupie.” Swiatecki would frequently hang with the cops on duty in the hospital, shoot the breeze, and smoke cigars. The senior priest, Gerald Robinson, a distant man, was also a drinker. He knew the answer before he asked the question, but Davison was a dedicated cop and had to ask it anyway.

Davison asked the witnesses if Robinson was “the priest” they were referring to. They all said yes. Davison jotted all this down in his “supplemental report” that he later submitted to his departmental superiors.

To the beat cop, it was looking pretty good. Within an hour after the commission of the murder of a nun, they had a viable suspect.

Vincent Lewandowski didn’t get kicked out of Poland by just anybody. The Franciscan priest had managed to incur the ire of the chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire himself, Otto von Bismarck. That pretty much cut off being a priest on that continent. Faced with ostracism at home or going to America, he chose the latter.

In 1874 when Lewandowski immigrated to Toledo, Ohio, he did what so many immigrants do when they come to America: he reinvented himself by becoming Toledo’s first Polish-speaking priest to minister to the city’s growing Polish-speaking, Catholic community. Lewandowski served the Polish neighborhoods at opposite ends of the city: in the north, on and around LaGrange Street, “LaGrinka” in Polish; and in the south, on and around Junction and Nebraska Avenues, aka “Kushwantz.”

It didn’t take long for the Polish Catholics to get their first combination church and religious school. Christened St. Hedwig, it opened in LaGrinka on October 16, 1875. Six years later in 1881, St. Anthony Parish opened its doors in Kushwantz. As the century turned, the Toledo Polish Catholic community had phenomenal growth.

St. Adalbert’s in 1907 was established and then St. Stanislaus in 1908. By then it was obvious that Polish Catholics could wield substantial control over the life of the city and its surrounding community if their political, economic, and religious clout were organized under one banner. The Vatican supplied the banner.

On April 15, 1910, the Catholic Church established the Diocese of Toledo. Encompassing 8,222 square miles, the diocese was, and is, a combination of rural and urban areas stretching out across nineteen counties, including Lucas County. The diocese established three more Polish-speaking churches—the Nativity in 1922; St. Hyacinth in 1927; and Our Lady of Lourdes on Hill Avenue in 1927.

Like any minorities who got smart, the Polish Catholics became a united front with the other Catholics in the city. Even with the urban upheavals of the 1960s, and the “white flight” to the suburbs in the 1970s, in 1980 Toledo had grown to a population of 354,635. One out of every four citizens, fully 25 percent of the city’s population, was Catholic. This gave the Diocese of Toledo an incredible amount of influence not just in the police department, but in the entire way that government within Lucas County functioned. The
Toledo Blade
would later describe the Toledo Diocese as a “social service powerhouse—an institution that urged young Catholics to seek careers in public service, including law enforcement.”

There were enough nuns present who knew what the protocol was in case of an emergency that
not
to expect one or more to notify the diocese immediately would be naïve. The Toledo Diocese probably knew about Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s murder minutes before the Toledo Police Department homicide detectives did. They certainly knew about it hours ahead of the public and had time to plan on how to deal with the unusual situation of a nun being killed in a sacristy. While the diocese pondered its next actions, the infrastructure of Ohio’s justice system had kicked in.

The city of Toledo prosecutor handles misdemeanors and traffic tickets. The Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office, of which Toledo city was a part, handled felonies, including murder. Investigating homicides within Toledo city limits was the job of the Toledo Police Department (TPD).

Davison’s call for homicide detectives was routed by the police dispatcher to Toledo Police Headquarters, where Detective Sergeant L. Przeslawski assigned Detective Art Marx to “assist the officers at Mercy Hospital on a Code 18.”

“Code 18” was police jargon for a homicide.

It was explained to Marx that this was an unusual case—the victim was a Catholic nun. While it somehow seemed likely that someplace in American history a nun had been killed, no one could recall such a case immediately. Marx was told “that the nun had been stabbed to death and possibly sexually assaulted.” Because of the possibility of sexual assault, Detective Jodi Deele of the Sex Crimes Squad was also dispatched to assist Marx at the scene. Deele and Marx rendezvoused with evidence technician Steve Bodie at the hospital’s old emergency entrance on Twenty-third Street. The time was 8:40
A.M
. Sister Phyllis Ann and Sister Kathleen escorted them to the chapel.

So far, everything was going by the book. A homicide had been committed. Detectives and crime scene technicians had been dispatched. The officers on the scene would be debriefed by the detectives. As the beat cops, they would know the hospital and its personnel best. It was also Toledo Police Department standard operating procedure for every police officer to file reports on every person interviewed by him at the crime scene. That included “supplemental reports,” which contained detailed interviews with witnesses at the scene.

In his report, Detective Marx noted correctly that after Davison and his partner arrived at the crime scene, “The officers then requested that the scene be cleared and they contacted 212 [headquarters] for assistance. After clearing the scene and contacting 212, the officers interviewed personnel at the scene.”

These were the people Davison interviewed at the scene who directly implicated Father Gerald Robinson.

“The names of these individuals are listed in the original crime report and the officers’ supplemental reports,” Marx continued writing in his report.

Everything was standard operating procedure, and perhaps for the TPD, it was. But it was also at this point that the investigation into Margaret Ann Pahl’s murder began its slow, twenty-six-year derailment. The train got off the tracks when Detective Marx failed to note in his report that when he arrived at the scene, he ordered Davison and his partner to leave.

“I argued with Marx about leaving,” says Davison passionately. “I looked over at my partner and Brackett gave him a look that said, ‘You’re not going to win this one, buddy.’”

Davison looked back at Marx.

“They booted us out the door,” Davison continues. “It made no sense from an investigative perspective. We knew the people at the hospital. They had already implicated Robinson.” Marx wanted them to check out the bus stations for any suspicious characters that looked like they might have just killed a nun. “Just dismissing us like that struck me as bizarre behavior,” said Davison.

The police department is a paramilitary organization. Patrolmen follow detectives’ orders. Davison and Brackett got back in their Chevy Capri police car that they’d parked outside the hospital. Davison readjusted the .357 Magnum on his belt and they took off to check out the bus stations. When his shift was over, Davison would type up both his primary and supplemental reports, including his interviews at the scene, and submit them to his bosses.

Back in the chapel, Marx and Bodie were processing the crime scene. That meant searching the body and the area around it for anything that might bring some enlightenment. Soon, coroner’s investigator Abe Heilman arrived. He took one look at the body and picked up the nearest phone. He called his office to make arrangements to have Margaret Ann Pahl’s body taken to the county morgue for autopsy. Marx, meanwhile, was making an examination.

“The body was covered with a white sheet-type of blanket. It was later determined that the body was covered by one of the members of the Swift Team. The blanket was partially removed to check the body for signs of life,” he noted in his report.

Common law in the United States is for a physician to officially note time of death in order to supply a death certificate and to move the whole process of death legally forward. Whether homicide or natural, death means you have to do something with the body: autopsy, burial, or cremation. For any of that, you need that death certificate to get the ball rolling.

“After finding no signs of life, the time was noted to be approximately 08:45 hours,” Marx continued in the cold-sounding prose of a veteran cop. That was the time of death that would officially be listed on the death certificate.

Marx bent down. He felt the body; cold to the touch. He raised her arm. It fell like it was attached to a rag doll. Rigor mortis, the stiffening of the limbs immediately after death, had not set in yet. That meant she had been dead for a very short time. Examining further, Marx noticed that Margaret Ann’s black veil, worn as part of her uniform, was lying under the back of her head with the end of the veil extending out and to the right.

There were visible traces of what appeared to be dried blood on the bridge and tip of her nose. There were also numerous puncture wounds in the right side of her face and neck. The blood that had seeped from these wounds appeared to be still wet and dark in color. Someone had wrapped part of a white altar cloth around Margaret Ann’s right forearm. The remaining part of the altar cloth was lying along the right side of the body, extending just below her right knee.

There were several red stains visible on the lower section of the cloth that appeared to be blood. Upon looking closer, Marx saw that there were several punctures in the cloth in the area near the right forearm. It appeared that Margaret Ann’s right arm had been resting across the front of her chest when she was stabbed. This could be determined by comparing the punctures in the altar cloth with visible punctures in the dress in the area of the chest.

The right upper arm was extended slightly outward to the right, with the forearm in a horizontal position with the body. The arm formed almost a forty-five-degree angle at the elbow. The hand was lying on the floor, palm up, with the fingers forming a loose fist. There was no visible injury to the right hand. That meant a distinct lack of defensive wounds. Whatever had happened to Margaret Ann, she had not been able to defend herself.

When Margaret Ann had gotten dressed that morning, she had put on a blue jumper knit dress, with a silver cross pinned on the left side. Now the dress had visible red stains down the front that could only be blood. The blood was still wet, the stains concentrated around the left side of the upper chest, just over the heart. Neither Marx nor anyone else at the scene noted anything unusual regarding the punctures.

An examination of Margaret Ann’s lower body showed that both legs extended downward and straight out. They were spread apart at the ankle, about twelve inches apart. Her jumper was down, covering her vagina. Below that, her legs were naked, gray pantyhose and a white elastic panty girdle pulled down and resting around her right ankle. It was that state of undress that had so alarmed Sister Madelyn Marie when she first saw the body that she literally cried “rape.” Inventorying the rest of her undergarments, Marx coolly noted that the nun had been wearing a white bra and a blue slip.

Margaret Ann was also wearing blue oxford-type shoes, laces both tied. Some killers take the shoes off and even find ingenious uses for the laces. This guy just left them as is. Margaret Ann’s eyeglasses, with their cheap gray plastic frames, were found lying on the floor approximately eight inches from her right hand. The right lens had “what appeared to be smudges of blood.”

Bodie was taking photos of Margaret Ann’s body when the morgue attendants arrived to take her to the next stop on her journey to the grave. As the attendants lifted her up, Bodie spied a pool of dried blood on the terrazzo floor, under the right side of Margaret Ann’s head and shoulders. Bodie bent down to examine the stain closer. It looked oval in shape, about nine inches in diameter.

The body was finally removed at 10:30
A.M
. But that made it much easier to minutely search the floor. Sister Margaret Ann was a stickler for spotless ones. The area where her body had lain yielded nothing—no stray cigarette butt, no hairs, no fibers, no spit, no blood,
nothing.
Without one piece of physical evidence pointing in the direction of the killer, it was the kind of case that not only would be difficult to solve, it would be difficult to prosecute.

There was also no evidence Margaret Ann Pahl had been killed someplace else and then transported here. The sacristy itself was the crime scene. Standard operating procedure on homicide investigations is to measure the area where the crime is committed. Marx produced a tape measure and engaged it. The room’s dimensions came in at eleven by seventeen feet.

The sacristy had two windows and two entrances. Both doorways were located on the south wall. The first solid oak door entered from the right side of the chapel, in back of the Communion rail that fronted the pews. This door was closed and locked when Margaret Ann was found. A key was needed to unlock this door from the outside, which Sister Madelyn Marie used to get in. Bodie dusted the doorknob for prints. He came up with nothing; same with the door.

The second door to the sacristy had an older type of lock that required a skeleton key. The door was found closed, and unlocked with the skeleton key inserted from the inside of the sacristy. This door led to a narrow passageway that in turn led to the stairwell. Bodie checked the second door. Again, no prints. Whoever the guy was, he had been careful not to leave anything behind. He was either forensically aware or damn lucky.

One of the two windows in the sacristy was located on the north side of the room, facing the parking area for the old morgue. The second window faced Twenty-third Street. Both windows had off-white window shades that Margaret Ann kept halfway down. While the window shade on the Twenty-third Street window was in the normal position, the window shade on the window overlooking the morgue parking area was pulled all the way down, just below the bottom section of the window. A large wooden armchair that usually sat in front of the window was pushed against the right side of the window shade.

The killer had probably pulled the shade down and put the chair against it to be sure it stayed in place while he went about his cowardly business. The morgue parking area saw a lot of passenger and car traffic.

Marx wrote this in his report:

“It is this investigator’s opinion that a stranger to the surroundings in the chapel/sacristy would not normally have the incentive or initiative to lower the window shade to avoid being detected.”