When Satan Wore a Cross

by Fred Rosen

  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.

  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 Swiateck
i. 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Inside Job

  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.