When Satan Wore a Cross (7 page)

Vetter had Marx and Kina take their case to the Lucas County prosecutor, who was decidedly unimpressed with the evidence. The prosecutor claimed that since the lie test was inadmissible, and the results of the tests on the letter opener were inconclusive, it was too weak a case to take forward. In a crazy way, it made sense. The prosecutor was viewing the suspect not just as any suspect, but as a priest. The prosecutor knew that since Toledo was 25 percent Catholic, he could expect about three Catholics on any jury that tried Robinson. If any of them was so devout he refused to convict a priest for murder, that meant a hung jury every time.

As far as continuing to investigate Robinson, the TPD detectives had their proverbial hands tied behind their proverbial backs. If there’s one good thing about the crime of murder, it’s that a case stays open until it’s closed. Unlike other crimes, there is no statute of limitation. Sure, the seventy-two-hour rule always applies—if you don’t solve it in seventy-two hours when the clues are fresh, you may never solve it. Conducting a murder investigation when the prime suspect is off-limits is a particularly difficult job.

Essentially, Marx and Kina were in the position of laying off their prime suspect and instead following up every false lead that came their way as if there was something true about them. With the murder still unsolved, “leads” did pour into police headquarters, and the cops had to go through the motions of following up every one.

On March 22, 1981, less than a month before the one-year anniversary of the murder, Marx drove north to Ypsilanti State Hospital. Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ypsilanti was the site of the Center for Forensic Psychiatry. Marx had an appointment with Dr. Harley Stock. Stock was a psychiatrist at the center who had offered the TPD a psychological profile of the hypothetical suspect involved in the Pahl homicide.

Dr. Harley Stock had quite a background. He was considered an expert authority in criminal profiling, hostage negotiation, and interview/interrogation methods. He had worked at the forensic center for the past four years and taught at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia.

“Criminal profiling is not an exact science,” Stock cautioned the detective. “That must be fully understood by those who intend to use the service.”

That said, having viewed the case file and discussing all available information on the case, Stock was prepared to offer a profile of the hypothetical suspect responsible for the death of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. Stock told Marx that the suspect was “a non-white male, mid-20’s, possibly Spanish. He is extremely strong and he has a tenth to eleventh grade education.”

Stock believed, “There is a history of family violence with the suspect possibly being the abused party. The suspect is heterosexual and he has very poor social relations, especially with women.”

Gee, there’s a surprise.

“The suspect is very repulsive, he can be violent and he is easily provoked. He does not [hold] himself responsible for his behavior. In this sense, he is mentally ill, but definitely not insane because he is sophisticated enough to blame others for his acts.”

According to Stock, the original motive for Pahl’s murder was robbery and not sexual assault or rape. After Marx asked him for some suggestions on how to approach and interview this type of suspect, Stock said it depends on the situation, as well as the conditions at the time of the interview. Stock felt that the interviewer should be “well rested, thus giving him a definite advantage.”

“The best approach to interviewing the suspect,” Stock added, “would include the concepts of time, space and the application of subtle pressure…”

Pressure was something the Toledo Diocese had used to protect one of its own to good effect. Sometime in 1981, Father Gerald Robinson, still the prime suspect in the Pahl homicide, packed his few bags containing his meager possessions—he had taken a vow of poverty as well as chastity to the Church—and said good-bye to Mercy Hospital for the last time. The Toledo Diocese had decided to transfer him to the Nativity, the Polish-speaking parish in another part of the city.

The idea was to bury him within the system of parishes run by the diocese, in exceedingly low-profile positions. No one within the diocese gave any indication that they feared a repeat incident. But this was not a case of priestly pedophilia, which would fill headlines in decades to come.

The Toledo Diocese had already reached out many times to the go-to boys in the TPD. Working together, the cops and the Church had already rescued pedophiliac priests from prosecution. But while pedophilia is a major felony and a tragedy for the victim and his family, it is nevertheless a felony that does not rise legally or morally to the level of murder. Murder is a whole other ball game, and that is what the Toledo Diocese did not count on.

Gerald Robinson was the prime suspect in a particularly heinous murder. If he killed once, what’s to say he wouldn’t kill again? No one knew for sure. They were just betting that if Robinson was innocent, they were doing the right thing, and if he was guilty, they were still doing the right thing because he was a priest. Regardless, the Toledo Diocese had gotten Robinson out of a pickle.

Watching over all this was the man at the top of the Toledo Diocese, Bishop John Anthony Donovan. A Canadian by birth, the sixty-nine-year-old priest had been created a bishop in 1954. Since 1967, he had served as the Toledo Diocese’s fifth bishop. Donovan’s titular headquarters was Our Lady of Most Holy Rosary Cathedral on Collingswood Boulevard.

Completed in 1931, Our Lady of Most Holy Rosary Cathedral is the central church of the diocese. According to the diocese’s self history, “In 1979, Bishop John Donovan, our fifth shepherd, re-dedicated the altar (now brought forward to the people) amid a grateful throng who prayed, praised, and applauded with great gusto on the evening of September 18, opening a fresh chapter in diocesan history.

“As the mother church of the over 160 parishes of our diocese, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary leads the way as a twentieth century, renovated house of worship, while remaining an American-Medieval Cathedral of Spanish Plateresque style—an album of art; a sacred site; a story of faith in stone, paint, precious metal, glass, and wood.”

Seven months later, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was murdered, Father Gerald Robinson became the prime suspect, and Bishop John Anthony Donovan wasn’t celebrating anymore. Nothing happened in Toledo without Bishop Donovan knowing about it, and nothing happened in the Church without him signing off on it. On July 29, 1980, Donovan did some signing of his own and suddenly resigned. In the history of the diocese from its inception in 1911 until 2007, Donovan is the only bishop to have resigned.

Perhaps he had a twinge of conscience. It is hard to tell, because Donovan died at age eighty on September 18, 1991, before anyone deposed him. No matter. With the clock forever stopped on the statute of limitations for murder, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl might still get justice.

Growing up in postwar Toledo, the child of Polish parents, Jerry Robinson was raised multilingual in English and Polish in Kushwantz, one of Toledo’s two Polish neighborhoods. He had a brother, John, who was eighteen years older.

As a child, Robinson attended Nativity Elementary, at the Polish-speaking Nativity church. His domineering mother was as proud as any devout Catholic would be when her teenage son Jerry chose the priesthood as his vocation. By the time Jerry Robinson came along, the machinery was already in place to help a young Polish boy like him to become a priest and serve the Polish Catholic community he grew up in and loved.

The SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary was founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1885, eventually moving to the more rural Orchard Lake. The seminary’s stated purpose was “to prepare candidates for the Roman Catholic priesthood primarily to serve Polish American immigrant communities.” Its affiliated under-school was St. Mary’s High School, also in Orchard Lake. Robinson attended St. Mary’s in the early 1950s, a time of terrible political paranoia contrasted with
Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet
, and other TV shows that extolled good, wholesome American values. People bought into this fantasy.

“I wish there was some way I could tell kids not to believe it—the dialogue, the situations, the characters—they were all totally false. The show did everybody a disservice,” said Billy Gray, circa 1983, and quoted on IMDB.com. Gray played the character of Bud, the son on
Father Knows Best
.

“The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today…I think we were all well motivated, but what we did was run a hoax. ‘Father Knows Best’ purported to be a reasonable facsimile of life. And the bad thing is that the model is so deceitful…” Gray continued.

Robinson, the high school projectionist, censored the films he showed during high school to his fellow seminarians, only picking the ones that were totally benign. People also bought the fantasy that priests were totally benign. In Kushwantz, they were sacrosanct.

As he studied for the priesthood at the SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, there was nothing about Robinson to distinguish him from his fellow seminarians, save, perhaps, for a cold, wintry manner and lack of emotion. The latter is consistently mentioned in printed accounts by those who knew him then, and just shrugged off as, “Oh, that’s just Jerry.”

All his friends noticed Jerry’s “mild manner.” He hated direct conflict; it made him ill. An emotional display just got to him. People said Jerry showed no emotion, that he was a quiet man, not in the John Wayne sense. Meek was more like it. Jerry Robinson showed all the classic attributes of
flat affect.
Something about his makeup made him unable to show emotions on his face, in his voice or manner. Everything was just flat-out the same in all those areas regardless of the circumstances.

When Sister Margaret Ann was murdered, it struck the detectives that Robinson showed a distinct lack of emotion regarding the crime. To them, that pointed at guilt, which of course made sense. If someone you worked with is suddenly murdered, you are supposed to show emotion of some sort: grief, anger, whatever. Never mind that shock can cause a seemingly emotionless reaction in the most emotional of persons. Cops think more in absolutes. Their job isn’t to diagnose mental illness.

While some seminarians still dated women, having not yet taken their vows of chastity, Robinson never went out. It is quite possible that he never dated. That doesn’t mean he never had sex. Many seminarians did. But Jerry Robinson had no intimate friends. He wasn’t just a loner. There was something about him that made it seem he couldn’t feel empathy.

It would be too easy, based just upon the observable details of his personality, to characterize Robinson as a sociopath. But if every sociopath in America committed murder, the police wouldn’t have time to give out traffic tickets. Sociopaths, those who can’t feel normal human emotion, especially empathy, are a lot more common in society than the average citizen realizes. Unfortunately, the word “sociopath” and its commonly used synonym “psychopath” are usually followed by the noun “murderer.” That implies that one cannot exist without the other which is just plain bunk.

There are many individuals encountered in daily life who do not feel emotion as a normal human being might. We all know them—the boss who won’t let up on us; the sadistic teacher; the storeowner who enjoys price gouging. These are people without consciences, sociopaths in everyday life. But for every one of them who winds up committing murder, the overwhelming majority live out their lives without anything more serious than a parking ticket. That’s why the whole process of labeling criminals, especially by contemporary standards, can get dicey.

What gets even more confusing in the Pahl case is that once a man enters the Catholic priesthood, he literally disappears on record. The diocese itself maintains an internal personnel file on every priest. If a priest were reported to be a pedophile, for example, that report should theoretically repose in the priest’s personnel file. If not, then it should be found in the diocesan secret files, which each diocese is obligated under Church edict to maintain. If it wasn’t in either place, then it had to be in somebody’s pocket file.

Before Jerry Robinson disappeared into the priesthood, a few things were evident. He had a domineering mother who clearly influenced his choice of the priesthood as a vocation. He did not stand out in any way. Superlatives were never attached to his name. He was bound, as a century of Polish-speaking priests before him, to serve out his time in Toledo’s Polish-speaking parishes.

Jerry Robinson was not especially charismatic, bound for greatness, or any of that “great” stuff. He had shown himself to be a controlling person in the way he censored films he showed his peers. As for his sexuality, he appeared to have no interest in any sex. On May 30, 1964, Gerald Robinson was ordained a Roman Catholic priest at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Cathedral in Toledo. He got off to a resounding start at St. Adalbert’s, where he was hired as the fourth pastor out of four.

Despite his flat affect, Robinson still spoke Polish and conducted services and confessions in the language. That alone endeared him to his parishioners. Many became lifelong supporters. The parish school’s enrollment was up to 771 children during Robinson’s tenure there, which lasted until 1973. Then the Toledo Diocese offered him a step up the ladder, a promotion to associate pastor at Christ the King. Transferred there, he held the post for three years and then inexplicably was transferred back to the dying St. Adalbert’s.

For the good of his career, Robinson needed to get out. He didn’t have the luxury of “white flight” but he did appear to have a guardian angel. The Toledo Diocese came through for him once again. The peripatetic priest was transferred in 1974 to St. Michael’s, where he was, once again, associate pastor. Something had to have happened at St. Michael’s, though, because by year’s end, Robinson had already been transferred to the post of second listed chaplain at Mercy Hospital in 1974. He would eventually rise to first listed pastor.

At Mercy’s chapel, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s efficiency made it easy for him to perform the priestly rituals, from consecrating the host to giving the last rites. Bishop Donovan blessed the olive oil and made it holy every Thursday. Jerry Robinson, the extreme introvert, was forced to meet lots of people. Many of them were in dire emotional straits just by the nature of the chapel’s location in a hospital.

After the murder, it was an entirely different matter. Like the Jews who had been cast out into the wilderness by God to pay for the sin of worshipping the Golden Calf, Jerry Robinson was cast out into the greater Toledo area by Bishop Donovan and the Toledo Diocese for the sin of being the prime suspect. For the Jews, their wandering in the Sinai Desert took forty years before God allowed them to enter the Promised Land. Jerry Robinson’s time in purgatory would be closer to twenty-four years.

Robinson’s first stop on the way to redemption was the Polish-speaking church of his youth, the Nativity. No more, however, was there a thriving children’s school where congregants’ kids were steeped in Polish Catholic culture. In fact, the school had long ceased to exist. Soon after Robinson’s arrival in 1981, the church was shuttered for good in 1982. There Jerry Robinson was, a forty-four-year-old priest whom some people in Toledo were pretty certain had murdered a nun and gotten away with it. Now what? Once again, the diocese to the rescue. The diocese simultaneously assigned Robinson to two more of the dying Polish-speaking parishes, St. Stanislaus, where he was listed as “pastor,” and St. Anthony’s, where he was listed as “administrator.”

“He and my dad became very good friends when Father was pastor of St. Stanislaus and Nativity,” Barbara Ann Hall would later write. “I remember how happy my parents were when he brought a beautiful crucifix to them after Nativity closed. Since that time, the crucifix has a place of honor in our hallway. When you enter our home, your eyes go right to the crucifix.”

Father Robinson was a special member of the Hall family.

“Speaking of generosity, he always gave Dad and me very generous gifts, always choosing
just the right gift
—Every Easter, a lily arrived. Every Christmas, a poinsetter [
sic
]. I know we were not the only recipients of his generosity,” Hall continued. “He was very devoted to his mother taking her on trips, treating her like a queen. After her death, he visited the cemetery every day.”

Robinson’s travels took him in 1989 to the Toledo suburb of Sylvania. Talk about a low profile; he was the number three pastor out of three in Nowheresville, USA! He lasted there all of one year. But Father Gerald Robinson must have taken his time in the wilderness to reinvent himself. That is the only plausible explanation for what happened next.

Robinson had been serving out his time in the 1980s at parishes without schools. Though there is no criticism on record at the time that Robinson abused minors, the Church chose to post him at parishes where he had no contact with them. The Toledo Diocese eventually decided they could let him out on parole, to minister at churches with schools that held underage kids.

Father Gerald Robinson’s wanderings were over. They had lasted a grand total of nine years. The state penalty for murder was considerably more than that—that is, if he was guilty. Regardless, the diocese moved Robinson up the ladder, making him in 1990 the second priest out of two serving the Polish-speaking parish faithful at St. Hedwig’s. During his five years there, the parish school had 334 children listed in the church directory.

Elsewhere in Toledo, Marlo Damon lived with her mother, Doris; father, Robert; and older sisters, Ellen and Mara. Marlo was a dark-eyed brunette child who loved to write. She had a pet Labrador she called Smoky, played with dolls, and did all the normal things little girls do growing up. They lived in a small house, and spent summers in Shenandoah National Park. They fondly remembered the deer, which were as plentiful in the park’s timberland as they were nonexistent in Toledo’s urban jungle.

Unfortunately, Marlo had more than a little difficulty in her childhood. Like many millions of Americans, her mother, Doris, suffered from depression, which was serious enough to keep her homebound. Father Chet Warren used to stop by to counsel her. Father Warren, a tall, good-looking, broad-shouldered man, belonged to the priestly order of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.

Originally founded in the seventeenth century, the Oblates died out at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It would take another two hundred years before it was officially revived four days before Christmas in France, on December 21, 1875, by Pope Pius IX. In 1903 the Oblates control was decentralized and Westernized, with branches opened in England and the United States. It was in this order that Father Chet Warren served. Unfortunately, Warren had some problems too. It started with what he thought was his charm.

“After these counseling sessions with my mother,” Marlo would later write, “he would encourage her to go upstairs and rest. When that happened, he’d watch me. On those occasions, he began sexually abusing me,” Marlo would later write in a letter to the Toledo Diocese.

The abuse escalated, she later claimed in court documents.

“By the time I was in third grade, he [Father Warren] became physically violent as well. Sexual contact was becoming rougher and I would cry. Once he pulled my pigtails, slapped me across the face several times and told me this was just the beginning. Another time he sodomized me.”

But that was nothing compared to the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of the cult. Marlo would later recall her father and grandfather being members of a satanic cult that included three Toledo priests, including Chet Warren. This cult met regularly, performing satanic rituals to honor their god, the fallen angel Satan. Marlo had been a part of many of them. Children were not only sexually molested during these ceremonies, they were ordered to observe as the adults abused other young victims.

One day when she was five, her father took her to Calvary Cemetery. There, the cult members were waiting. Marlo was put into a coffin and cockroaches put in to keep her company. Even for a healthy adult, such an experience would be mind-blowing, but for a child, it could have put Marlo into a catatonic state. Instead, her resiliency kept her going. After what had only been a few minutes but felt like forever, she was taken out of the box and the cockroaches crawled away.

That same year, Marlo’s pet lab, Smoky, died. She loved Smoky. Like most kids, she was sad, but lo and behold! Marlo’s dad woke her up a few nights later with the good news.

“Darling, we are going to see Smoky!”

That’s what Marlo’s father promised. The five-year-old got all excited at the prospect of seeing her beloved Smoky again. Like most kids, she had no understanding that death was final, and besides, she believed her dad.