The FBI is planning to exhume the body of a 20-year-old woman whose unsolved 1969 killing has been the subject of widespread speculation, and was featured in Netflix true crime docuseries The Keepers.
The 2017 docuseries focused on the slaying of a Baltimore nun days before Joyce Malecki was found dead, but raised questions about whether the two deaths were linked, as they unfolded under eerily similar circumstances.
Malecki, a young woman from the Baltimore area, was Christmas shopping in November 1969 when she vanished from a suburban mall. Days later, she was found dead inside a military base, nearby Fort Meade. An autopsy determined she had been strangled to death.
Malecki is tentatively scheduled to be exhumed from her resting place in Loudon Park Cemetery on Thursday. Her family has asked for privacy and the general public will not be permitted to enter the cemetery while the exhumation takes place.
Four days before Malecki was reported missing, Sister Cathy Cesnik, who taught at a nearby Catholic high school, also vanished after she went shopping and never returned. Cesnik, 26, was found dead from blunt force trauma.
The Keepers looked into whether Malecki and Cesnik’s deaths could be linked to Father Joseph Maskell, who was the chaplain and guidance counsellor of Archbishop Keough High School, where Cesnik worked.
Maskell was accused of sexually abusing multiple students at the high school. According to the Netflix docuseries, Cesnik may have learned about the alleged sexual abuse after students came forward to her days before she was killed.
A woman interviewed in The Keepers claimed Maskell showed her Cesnik’s body in the days after the nun disappeared as a warning about “what happens when you say bad things about people.”
The Archdiocese of Baltimore has since paid settlements to a dozen people who say they were abused by Maskell.
In 2017, just before The Keepers was aired, investigators exhumed Maskell’s body to see if his DNA could be matched to evidence found at the scene of Cesnik’s slaying. Maskell died in 2001.
Ultimately, the DNA testing could not connect him or rule him out in Cesnik’s death.
The latest source of speculation came earlier this year, when federal and local authorities announced they had solved the case of yet another young woman’s homicide: 16-year-old Pamela Conyers, who went missing in 1970 from the same shopping mall as Malecki and similarly died from strangulation.
Investigators used relatively new DNA technology and genealogy research to identify a suspect in Conyers’ death: Forrest Clyde Williams III, who died in 2018 of natural causes after spending most of his adult life in Virginia. He incurred nothing more than a couple minor criminal charges over the subsequent decades.
When they pinned Conyers’ killing on Williams, officials said they didn’t have evidence connecting him to either of the other unsolved homicides. They also said they didn’t believe Conyers knew Williams.
Kurt Wolfgang, executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center, said it appears investigators are now looking to extract DNA from Malecki’s body, although it’s unclear what they’re seeking to determine. He said the FBI has shared little information with the family about recent developments in the case, but the timing could suggest a link to Williams.
“They want justice out of this thing,” said Wolfgang, whose nonprofit has been working with the Malecki family. “Even though it was 54 years ago, it would certainly help them to know what happened.”
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office declined to comment, citing “respect for the ongoing investigation.” Federal investigators are in charge of the case because Malecki’s body was found on military property.
When Malecki was growing up, her family attended a Catholic church outside Baltimore where Maskell served as priest. They lived down the road while Maskell was living in the St. Clement Catholic Church rectory. He was later assigned to Archbishop Keough High School, where he was accused of abusing numerous girls.
Wolfgang said Malecki told her relatives “she did not like him one bit and told people to stay away from him.” But Wolfgang said the family doesn’t have any direct evidence suggesting she was one of Maskell’s abuse victims and they’re hesitant to jump to conclusions about linking the various cases.
Earlier this year, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office released a report detailing decades of child sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore that identified Maskell as one of its most prolific abusers, saying he targeted at least 39 victims. According to the report, Maskell was transferred to St. Clement after being accused of abuse at his prior assignment — one of several times the archdiocese turned a blind eye to his misconduct.
He denied the allegations before his death in 2001 and was never criminally charged.
— With files from the Associated Press
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