https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6792200/ It is a series on Netflix that focuses on the murder of a 26 year old woman(Catherine Cesnick) in suburban Baltimore. She had been a nun for a time and taught at a girls catholic high school where a couple of priests were abusing the girls. The piece is a bit dishonest. To start Catherine Cesnick was not a nun at the time she was murdered. Is this fact important? Perhaps it is just amazing that even the wiki for the story refers to her as the nun that was murdered and the promotion art for the show shows her in her habit. Story 1 evil priests molesting girls. Story 2 young 26 year old woman abducted and murdered. What they have done is take 2 stories and merged them to make something spectacular and powerful but perhaps not intertwined in fact. They push the narrative that the priest who ran that school and had abused so many girls must be the murderer of holy sister Catherine. Problem is Joseph Maskell(I will not call him father) has been dead for 20 years and there never was any evidence he was involved. It sounds good. Heroic nun about to tell it all murdered by the evil priest. There just not many facts to back it up.
A few key facts. 1. Sister Cesnick no longer a sister. Catherine Cesnick left her order and stopped teaching at that high school. She was living as a lay person in town and took a job teaching at a public school. A friend of hers in the order also left and was teaching a a public school and they were sharing an apartment. Yeah they might have been a lesbian couple and it would certainly matter in a murder investigation. That said the fact she was not in the order and not even teaching at the Catholic high school makes it less likely Maskell killed her because there is less motive. She was not really a threat to him. 2. Joseph Maskell has been dead for 20 years. There cannot be justice in this case if you think he did it. He certainly cannot speak for himself or defend himself. 3. Maskell had friends in the police force. He was in fact police Chaplin. His brother was in the state police so he knew many of them. Again this goes to motive. How big a threat could she be to him if he had such deep connections? 4. Catherine did not witness abuse first hand. Unless I missed something nobody knows how much she actually knew about this sexual abuse. It is never mentioned that she actually saw it happening which means her only knowledge of it would be from the girls but that is hearsay not direct testimony. so again how much of a threat to him was she?
