When Satan Wore a Cross

by Fred Rosen

  At 10:45 A.M., on April 18, 1980, evidence technician Shirley Sparks delivered a letter addressed to “Art Marx, Toledo Police Homicide Investigation.” Upon opening it, the detective noticed that it was from an anonymous source and concerned the Pahl homicide. He attempted to protect the letter for fingerprints; he had touched only the top of it. He immediately notified his lieutenant, William Kina, and captain, James Navarre, that he’d received an anonymous letter with information regarding the Pahl homicide.

  Mindful of the chain of custody necessary for a conviction, Kina asked for Sparks to dust the letter for prints and then put it with the other evidence logged into the property room. Steve Bodie came to the Homicide Desk per Marx’s request to process the letter. At 11:30 A.M. Bodie took possession of it.

  Here’s what the letter said:

  Here’s a tip on the Mercy hospital nun murder: Try [name blacked out by police].

  he has a perverse hate for the Catholic Church and especially nuns (a bitter and imbalanced ex-Catholic himself)

  he’s very sick and needs help—a psychopath with a great potential for violence

  he’s a woman hater—also sexually deviant he’s into devil worship

  Many times, he has “jokingly” threatened exactly this type of crime

  I hope you can help him and stop this before it happens again—it’s in your hands!

  There is nothing in the police files that points to the identity of the person whose name is blacked out in the police report. Nor is there anything in the files indicating that police took the note any more seriously than the psychic and the dreamer. Marx, though, had a better idea than the psychic and the dreamer. He would interview the priest, Father Gerald Robinson. But he wasn’t the only one thinking about him. Robinson was very much on the minds of the people back at Mercy Hospital.

  To say that the place had been shaken up would be putting it mildly. Murder not only ripples through generations, it ripples through the society in which it has been committed. For those working in Mercy Hospital, they had to come to work knowing a human life had been deliberately taken in a place dedicated to saving life. It was an irony that produced not only sadness, but anger.

  “The staff at the hospital knew,” Dave Davison says bluntly. “Every time we went in there to question people, the hospital workers would tell me off the record, ‘Robinson pounded on nuns.’ But no one would give a statement on record saying that. The hospital workers were afraid to talk openly. They told me, ‘You talk, you’re fired.’

  “The order came from on high.”

  CHAPTER 5

  An American First

  What was unfolding in Toledo, Ohio, in April 1980 was a first in American criminal law, yet it came in under the national news radar.

  The country was concerned with freeing American hostages in Iran being held by Islamic fundamentalists at the U.S. embassy. Who cared what happened in a northern backwater town? With only three television networks, Toledo was a lowly network affiliate that rarely saw national coverage. Yet the Toledo cops were dipping their feet into history.

  No priest had ever been charged, let alone convicted, of murdering a nun in the United States. Even going back to colonial times in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there are no recorded instances of such a bizarre event. When priests do show up in pamphlets of colonial accounts of crimes, they appear as pristine father confessors to the murderers in question. As the United States spread across the continent in the nineteenth century, priests found themselves in all kinds of situations on the American frontier. Their brethren back east ministered to the poor and infirm in northern tenements.

  In the twentieth century, a new element entered the mix that would eventually complicate the Pahl case. Motion pictures would forevermore color the public view of priests as honest, virtuous, and godly men, making it that much more difficult to believe any one of them could be capable of committing murder. When motion pictures became the chief disseminators of priestly values, it wasn’t just Catholics who thought of priests this way, it was everyone who went to the movies.

  Whether a Methodist child in Oregon, an Episcopalian tomboy in Arizona, a Jewish kid in Brooklyn, or an agnostic in Toledo, they all saw the same movies about priests and thought of them in the same way. Television’s introduction to the general public in 1948 and the subsequent videotapes and DVDs of these same films shaped public opinion about priests for generations, more than real-life events. They still do. The reason is, the men who directed these films weren’t the kind of film directors who relied on kinetic cutting, special effects, graphic bloodletting, sadism, or nihilism.

  They were, for better or worse, directors out to entertain. Unlike others, their goal was not social realism. On the contrary, their job was to create a fantasy, in this instance regarding priests, to be consumed by the masses. The three directors who would have the most profound influence on how generations to come looked at priests were Michael Curtiz, who made his first film in Hungary in 1912 and knew how to use a camera; Norman Taurog, a journeyman film director who would take his game to the highest plane; and Leo McCarey, who would have, perhaps, the most influence on how future generations thought of priests.

  More than any other movie studio in the 1930s, Warner Bros. used priests as major characters in its classic gangster films. In all of them, the tough-guy priest was a key character. The idea was to contrast the saintliness of the priest, usually played by Pat O’Brien, with the evil of the gangster, usually Jimmy Cagney. Of course, in the end, saintliness always won. This theme reached its zenith with Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). With a script doctored by the great screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Curtiz produced a hit movie that became the apotheosis of the godly priest. The plot went something like this.

  Rocky Sullivan (Cagney) and Jerry Connelly (O’Brien) were tough kids who grew up together in Hell’s Kitchen, the toughest part of New York City. Rocky gets sent to reform school, where he learns how to be a first-class criminal. Jerry, who had escaped from the law, goes straight and becomes a priest. As adults, they reunite in the old neighborhood. Jerry works with the children (the Dead End Kids) who, like he and Rocky, could end up on either side of the law.

  Rocky returns looking for a safe place to stay till he can get back into his old racketeering organization, something Jerry is determined to prevent. When Rocky is convicted of murder and sent to the chair, Jerry visits him right before his execution. He pleads with his old friend to “turn yellow” when he dies. This way, the Dead End Kids won’t want to emulate him. Rocky turns his old friend down, finishes his last meal, and is escorted on the last mile.

  As he walks to his death, Cagney performs a remarkable acting feat, suddenly going from tough, hard-as-nails gangster to whimpering coward as he’s strapped in the chair. Then the electricity is turned on and he is no more. When the Dead End Kids read of their idol “turning yellow,” they realize the criminal life is not for them and decide to go straight forever.

  Father Pat O’Brien has just won their souls and ours. Priests are only capable of helping young boys out chastely.

  Hollywood never does anything in “ones.” That same year, 1938, another film about a priest didn’t become a hit—it became a massive hit and a classic. In an era where people paid a dime to see a movie, Boys Town (1938) took in millions of dollars. It told the dramatic tale of the legendary Father Edward J. Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town, who coined the phrase, “There is no such thing as a bad boy.”

  Despite the sentimental nature of the material, Dore Schary’s story and script emphasized the humanity in Flanagan’s character. Journeyman director Norman Taurog hit a home run before even getting to the set when he cast the one actor who could perform a sentimental part unsentimentally—Spencer Tracy. Tracy didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. He made you believe in the two-fisted but always virtuous priest and won the 1938 Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Then in 1944, Leo McCarey made film history
by humanizing the rapidly developing archetype of the virtuous priest. A silent film director, McCarey specialized in comedies. It was McCarey who had teamed Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy for the first time on screen. Effortlessly bridging into directing sound films, in the 1930s he directed such disparate screen comedians as the Marx Brothers and Cary Grant.

  In 1944 at forty-six years of age, McCarey was at the height of his creative powers. He decided to use everything he had learned along the way to write, direct, and produce a film that would reduce its audience to crying tears of laughter one moment and flat-out tears of sentiment the next. McCarey’s idea was to refine the American priest myth to its ultimate conclusion. He called it Going My Way, and his premise was simple.

  Father Chuck O’Malley, a young, golf-playing, happy-go-lucky priest, is sent by the New York Archdiocese to a broke Roman Catholic parish in the slums of Manhattan. There, O’Malley clashes with crusty Father Fitzgibbon, an old-school Catholic priest with a secret heart of gold. Throw in an extraneous love plot where O’Malley plays cupid and sings a few songs, and pretty soon, everything works out.

  Working through his own devices and of course the grace of God, Father O’Malley saves the parish; reunites Fitzgibbon with his beloved Irish mother flown over especially from the ol’ Sod; gets Romeo and Juliet together, and then moves on like the benevolent angel he really is.

  That was the script McCarey the screenwriter wrote. Then McCarey the director took over. To play O’Malley, the key role, he cast popular radio crooner and light screen comedian Bing Crosby. Besides the classic Road movies he did with his friend and golf partner Bob Hope, Crosby’s other films always made money. He had an easy screen presence. You just trusted him, even when he was duping Hope in the Road movies. So perhaps it was natural, then, that McCarey, who understood human nature better than most directors, decided to cast the scene-stealing character actor Barry Fitzgerald as Father Fitzgibbon.

  On set, the two leads clashed, just like their characters. It made their screen scenes that much more real. When the time came for each to show the other chaste, priestly devotion, their bickering with each other made their acting that much more compelling to watch. Most importantly, Crosby and Fitzgerald’s performances, as the smart young priest and the wise, crusty older priest, both godly men, became the public’s perception of who and what priests were until almost the end of the millennium.

  McCarey’s film was a huge, huge (did I say huge?) hit. It topped the year’s box office, but in the Pacific Northwest, it was even bigger. Bing Crosby came from Spokane, Washington, and the film played particularly well in Washington and Oregon. Years later Beulah Rose, who along with her husband George “Bud” Rose operated movie theaters in Milton and Freewater, Oregon, would remember that the film played there for a very, very long time, and with good reason.

  Going My Way made Hollywood history when McCarey became the first person to win three Oscars for the same picture as writer, director, and producer. But more important to the public that relates better to the stars, Bing Crosby trumped his good friend Bob Hope by taking home the Oscar for Best Actor.

  Behind the scenes was a different matter.

  Gary Crosby, Bing’s eldest of four sons by his first wife, actress/singer Dixie Lee, would later write in his 1984 book, Going My Own Way, that his father was abusing his four kids while playing Father O’Malley. That made Crosby’s Best Actor Oscar a well-deserved award. Costar Barry Fitzgerald had actually been nominated in both Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor categories because of a nominations anomaly. Fitzgerald won the Best Supporting Actor award.

  Father O’Malley proved so popular a character that McCarey, in the best Hollywood tradition of ripping yourself off, immediately penned and directed a sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). This time Father O’Malley (Crosby) winds up at some cool inner city Catholic school where he meets the gorgeous and chaste Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman). Once more, McCarey had a hit, and Father O’Malley went straight into the Zeitgeist.

  So deeply was this impression of the “good” priest imprinted on the American subconsciousness that Francis Ford Coppola paid homage to it in The Godfather (1972). In the scene when Michael (Al Pacino) is on the phone and finds out that his father has been shot, behind him is the Radio City Music Hall marquee. Emblazoned on it in bright red neon is The Bells of St. Mary’s.

  As the 1970s developed, priests in fiction and film became more complex, guilt-ridden characters who find themselves up against satanic forces. While the theme was different, the priests still acted like everyone expected priests to act. In 1971 William Peter Blatty had a huge literary and popular hit with his novel The Exorcist. It told the story of a tormented priest who finds redemption exorcising a demon from a young girl. Among other things, the book featured a very dramatic ritual killing.

  The 1973 film version became nothing less than a popular phenomenon. Director William Friedkin, an action director who knew character, made sure to put in enough stultifying shocks to grab repeat audiences. It scared the crap out of people when fourteen-year-old Linda Blair’s head swiveled 360 degrees and out of her mouth came Oscar-nominated actress Mercedes Mc-Cambridge’s voice. People screamed in fear.

  The public interest in those who would mock the Church and shake it to the ground reached its apex in the most popular, frightening, and influential film featuring satanic worship and ritualistic killing, 1976’s The Omen (forget the 2006 remake). The plot, once again, is simple.

  In David Seltzer’s totally believable script, a secret cabal of Satan worshippers mock Catholicism in all kinds of ways, not the least of which is killing at birth the child of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James (Gregory Peck), and then substituting Satan’s spawn in its place. That he just happens to be a nice little dark-haired boy named Damien, helped make the story believable, including the ritualistic killings of said baby, a courageous Catholic priest, and a crusading though eccentric reporter. What really sold it was that under Damien’s dark hair was the sign of the Devil, “666,” a reference to Revelations 13:16 through 13:18.

  Except, of course, it is not true. From the Book of Revelation:

  Rev. 13:16. “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.”

  Rev. 13:17. “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

  Rev. 13:18. “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

  The number 666 is the mark of the “Beast” not Satan. Satan, however, sells better than the Beast. The public bought this stuff hook, line, and sinker. People lined streets in Manhattan in the middle of the winter of 1973 to see The Exorcist. The Omen? Only five other films made more money in 1976, including Rocky at number one.

  Cut to Toledo, 1980. Thanks to the media, ritualistic killing was still very much on the public’s mind. Anyone with a motive could exploit those fears. As for how the public thought of priests, Father O’Malley was still the template. Priests might be guilt-ridden, like The Exorcist’s Father Damien, but they were still thought of as men of God who simply repress their emotions in order to do God’s work.

  As for pedophilia, most Americans in 1980 had never even heard of the word, let alone understood its meaning. Even if they had, no one could imagine Crosby or Fitzgerald sodomizing a little altar boy. Priests being involved in ritualized murder? That was film and fiction. To believe anything else would make you insane. Inside the Diocese of Toledo, it was another matter entirely.

  No priest alive believed in any of that crap, least of all Mercy Hospital’s second chaplain, Father Jerome Swiatecki. Swiatecki might have been destroying his liver with all the booze he drank, but his commitment to the Church was unwavering, and more so to his parishioners. He didn’t countenance sexual abuse, by anybody. But he w
as realist enough to know exactly how the Church dealt with such matters.

  Inside the Church, priestly pedophilia was old news. It could be an altar boy, the young daughter of a parishioner, anyone they had power over. Some priests sexually abused those in their charge. That was a fact. As for protection, in the true sense of the word, the Diocese of Toledo had struck deals with the go-to guys within the TPD as far back as 1959. To call the agreement between the Diocese of Toledo and the TPD a conspiracy, though, would be giving it more merit than it deserves.

  This wasn’t a conspiracy in the classic sense of the word. It wasn’t as if the diocese and the cops had regular meetings to decide what to do, just in case. It was more an irregular policy that developed along the way, based upon the movie premise that a Catholic priest could never commit a felony.

  If a priest got caught sodomizing an altar boy, every effort was made to stop charges from being pressed and to keep the police out of it. To protect the sodomizer, the diocese would reassign him to the next parish…and the next…and the next. If he actually got caught doing something publicly, like soliciting homosexual sex, the diocese called the go-to guys and the priest was released into the custody of the diocese, which reassigned him to the next parish…and the next…and the next.

  Both institutions, the TPD and the diocese, feared their waning influence. Perhaps it was New Age philosophies; perhaps it was the lure of other religions, or simply assimilation by Polish Catholics. Whatever it was, fewer people were being raised like Margaret Pahl to regularly take the sacraments. It was easy for souls to be corrupted.