When Satan Wore a Cross

by Fred Rosen

  The TPD cops took their lives in their hands every time they went out on the street. Bulletproof vests were not common street equipment, but were usually reserved for SWAT teams, making beat cops like Dave Davison that much more vulnerable to a bullet to the torso. In such an environment, the Church was looked at as the ultimate stabilizing influence.

  Instead, what had really occurred was that the souls of the Toledo Diocese and the TPD had been corrupted enough that it wasn’t too far of a stretch to cover up a murder next. Covering up a murder, though, was truly unknown territory, even for a diocese skilled at manipulating civil authority, and a police department more than willing to acquiesce. In the diocese’s favor was that the media had done part of their job—the very idea of a priest killing a nun was odious, let alone the way it was done.

  Aware it was a high-profile case, the TPD invited Father Gerald Robinson in for a little chat. On April 18, 1980, at 8 P.M., Father Robinson showed up at police headquarters to be interviewed by Art Marx and his lieutenant, Bill Kina. Accompanying Father Robinson was Father Swiatecki, who was functioning under diocese orders as the former’s escort. While Swiatecki stayed outside in a waiting area, Father Robinson was ushered into an interrogation room with institutional furniture. It smelled like most interrogation rooms from stale cigarette smoke, coffee, sweat, and something else that was hard to define. Following then current procedure, the interview with Robinson was not recorded.

  Like most cops going into a situation like this, Kina and Marx hoped for a confession. Their job was to find a way to pierce the priest’s psychic armor and get him to trip up on some important detail. If they could do that they would build on it. With Kina playing the part of “good cop,” leaving Marx the better role as the villainous “bad cop,” they peppered the priest with questions, trying to trip him up on essential details. Finally, feeling the pressure, Father Robinson confessed that shortly after the murder, he himself heard the confession from the man who killed Sister Margaret Ann! He could not violate the sanctity of the confessional by telling the police what the man said.

  Marx’s response might have been cynical had he known that Robinson had just recited the plot of the 1953 Hitchcock film I Confess. In that film a priest played by Montgomery Clift hears the confession of his church’s caretaker. The caretaker confesses that he just committed murder. The difference is that in the film, Clift refused to violate the confessional’s sanctity, even when circumstantial evidence pointed to his own guilt. Monte had more ethics than Jerry.

  Without referencing the film, Marx pointed out that Robinson had already violated the confessional’s sanctity by even mentioning his conversation with the alleged murderer. What he was really saying to the priest was, I don’t buy that Father O’Malley crap! Robinson’s response was to admit he lied, but only because he didn’t know what to do to stop the cops from pressuring him.

  The cops pressured him for four hours, and the guy was running down. What they still didn’t have was any physical evidence tying the priest to the nun’s murder. The easiest way to do that was to get a suspect to voluntarily sign away his constitutional rights and let the detectives search his home. At first glance, a suspect would have to be out of his mind to sign such a document. After all, you are signing away the right to challenge the results of the search in court. If anything incriminating is found, implicating you in a murder case, the state of Ohio has the death penalty.

  You could fry.

  Surprisingly, the innocent and the guilty sign away this right with frequency. The innocent are naïve. They believe they have nothing to fear and agree to cooperate. After all, all the people in prison are guilty, aren’t they? The guilty agree in order to look innocent, especially if they have disposed of any evidence. What, then, is there to fear? Many of the guilty can even beat a lie detector. Having no conscience, sociopaths see nothing wrong with having committed murder. Though they are lying freely, the machine will say they are telling the truth.

  Father Robinson was tired. Forget being “interviewed,” he had been under interrogation for four hours. Perhaps his judgment was impaired by fatigue or stress. Whatever it was, Marx produced a feat of legerdemain. Innocent or guilty, Reverend Gerald Robinson signed a document Marx presented to him: a “Waiver of Search Warrant” that “allowed members of the Toledo Police Department, to wit Detective Arthur Marx, to search my living quarters at Mercy Hospital, for a weapon, clothing or cloth materials that might contain blood, and/or any other evidence that might prove to be connected with the death of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.”

  The next paragraph was actually the most powerful legally in the document. It was Robinson’s last chance to back out.

  “I also understand that I have a constitutional right to refuse to have my quarters searched, and there have been no threat or promises made to me, and that I am giving permission free and voluntarily.”

  Robinson signed it. It was witnessed, “Detective Arthur Marx.” Thus did Robinson allow Marx and the state of Ohio the opportunity to legally search his apartment for literally anything that could tie him to Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s murder.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Fixers and the Smoking Gun

  On the morning of April 19, 1980, Detective Arthur Marx went to Reverend Gerald Robinson’s apartment adjacent to Mercy Hospital. Father Robinson was home. Marx was accompanied by another TPD detective and Tom Ross, an investigator for the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office. If they found enough evidence to prosecute, it was Ross’s office that had jurisdiction.

  There really is an art to conducting a good search. The detective has to be aware of how something, however common in a household, can be used at the crime scene as the murder weapon. He also needs to have physical latitude to poke into as many nooks and crannies as a residence has, and know that if he finds something that implicates the suspect, the court won’t throw it out on a constitutional technicality That’s why cops try to get the judges who sign search warrants to give them a Grand Canyon’s worth of leeway in searching a suspect’s home.

  It soon became apparent that this was not going to be a difficult search. Robinson’s quarters were only two small rooms. Located on the second floor of the dormitory wing, Robinson’s digs were right next to an exit door, giving the priest easy access to the stairway and therefore the hospital.

  If Robinson was the murderer, the immediate question was what he had been wearing at the time he committed the crime. It was only logical to assume that since he had duties in the hospital that morning, Robinson had worn his priestly cassock. That would have made an interesting scene: after Robinson committed the murder, running through the stairway with cassock flying. On the other hand, that was the type of thing people would notice. The cops noticed that the priest’s cassock had a dark stain on it. They asked Robinson how it had gotten there.

  “It’s a gravy stain,” Robinson answered. “It’s not blood,” insisted the priest.

  He was but a poor servant of the Lord, with only one cassock. He had given his life to the Church. Take it away and he had no vestments. How could a priest be a priest without his vestments? The cops took it anyway. If the cassock came back positive for Margaret Ann Pahl’s blood, it would be worth the inconvenience to Father Robinson’s parishioners. They also took a pair of shoes that Robinson said he had worn the day of the murder.

  In the medicine cabinet, they found a bottle of Valium, a commonly prescribed medication for anxiety. The prescription date was April 5, 1980, the day of the murder. The cops had to wonder if perhaps Robinson felt some acute anxiety that day and decided to deal with it chemically. They confiscated the Valium bottle too.

  They rummaged through the priest’s battered wooden desk and found what would later be described in the Toledo Regional Crime Laboratory report as “Exhibit 1—Saber Style Letter opener (8½").” It had a curved blade like a real saber, attached to a medallion and above that a Roman-style faux gold filigreed handle. Realizing that the pointed end of the letter opener
could have been used to inflict the wounds on Margaret Ann’s body, they bagged it as evidence. The lab would test it for blood and prints. Of course, being that it was Robinson’s, it would make no difference if his prints were on it. Blood was another matter.

  Later that afternoon, Robinson returned to police headquarters, accompanied by Father Swiatecki. In another masterful feat of persuasion, the cops got Robinson to agree to a lie detector test. The priest, who seemed to be doing everything he could to put himself in the electric chair, was brought into a room where the polygraph operator, Lieutenant James Wiegand, had already set up his equipment. Standard operating procedure in the Toledo Police Department, and every other police department in the country worth its salt, was for the polygraph operator to chat for a few minutes before the test with the subject. Wiegand’s speech went something like this:

  “Hi, my name is Lieutenant Wiegand and I’m a polygraph operator for the TPD. A polygraph is just a series of measurements. We use pneumographic tubes to measure respiration. Then there are two plates to record galvanic skin responses. As you can see, there’s a blood pressure cuff that will record blood pressure and pulse as we proceed through the questions.”

  What the operator was doing was tapping into Gerald Robinson’s autonomic nervous system. There, Robinson has no physical control over his responses to a series of questions designed to test his knowledge of the event in question, in this case the Pahl murder. Questions that make him want to lie will create a sense of emergency to his psychological well-being. The fear of being found out in a lie, in turn, causes the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system to respond, which the machine records as “deception,” or put more simply, lying.

  Most cops tend to rely on the machine much too much, especially considering the results are not admissible in court precisely because the science it is based on is theory and not fact. The proven fact that a sociopath can beat the machine shows that it is not infallible. Justice still depends on “reasonable doubt,” not, “It looks like he’s lying and therefore he’s guilty.” However, as an investigative tool, the machine can be invaluable.

  If someone flunks a lie test, it points the finger of suspicion at him. It makes the cops look at him with more intensity. It makes detectives work that much harder to find hard evidence of guilt. It was with that hope that Kina and Marx departed while Wiegand produced a form for Father Robinson to sign.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Wiegand read. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you by the court. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?”

  “Yes,” Reverend Gerald Robinson answered, and signed away his constitutional right to have an attorney present while Wiegand questioned him.

  Wiegand hooked him up to the machine in the aforementioned manner, and Wiegand went about asking him innocuous biographical questions. The idea was to get a baseline reading and have Robinson settle down for the real stuff. That took about twenty minutes, at which time Wiegand began the real questions about Robinson’s involvement in the homicide of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.

  Most of the questions had to do with where he was at key points in the murder timeline the police had constructed. Near the end of the session, Wiegand asked Robinson if he knew anyone who wanted to kill Margaret Ann Pahl. Robinson replied that he knew of no one. Wiegand’s response was to ask him why anyone would have wanted to kill her.

  “She had a dominant personality,” Father Robinson replied.

  “She was a dominant woman,” Robinson reiterated, almost nonchalantly.

  Robinson had just unknowingly supplied cops with what to that point had been missing: a possible motive for the crime. While motive is not necessary to convict, it helps if the killer has a reason to kill the decedent, and you can convince a jury of that. If Robinson felt Sister Margaret Ann had a “dominant personality,” one that he found threatening, well, murders have been committed for less.

  After the interview was over, Robinson was unhooked from all the doodads, and the cops got him something to eat. Back in the polygraph room, Wiegand went over the results of the lie detector test. Filling out his report for Marx and Kina, he noted that based upon the results of Robinson’s polygraph, “It is the opinion of this polygraph examiner that truthfulness could not be verified. Deception was indicated on relevant questions concerning the murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.”

  It’s interesting how many different ways cops can write in reports that a suspect is lying through his teeth and make it sound almost like a compliment. Informed of the results of the lie detector test, Marx and Kina figured they had the priest. While it would take a while to get the analysis of the letter opener, it seemed logical that it could be the murder weapon. Armed with all that, the cops had a lot to pressure Robinson into a real confession.

  Robinson found himself in an interview room once again at police headquarters with Marx and Kina. It was Father Gerald Robinson’s darkest hour. Just as their interview was getting started, there was a sharp knock at the door. The guy who threw it open looked like he was John Wayne charging the Indians in a John Ford Western, only this was more like an episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

  Deputy Chief Ray Vetter cut an imposing figure. He looked like a Roman centurion, well-built and broad-shouldered, with wavy black hair. Vetter was in charge of investigations for the TPD. Not only was his usual style not to interrupt an interrogation, no one could recall the last time he had walked into a police interrogation room where the prime suspect in a murder sat, about to be given a new asshole by two determined cops.

  Everyone knew Ray Vetter to be a devout Roman Catholic who wore his religion on his sleeve. Schooled at a private Catholic school, he believed the seven holy sacraments were sacrosanct. He had six kids, and all of them had been born at Mercy Hospital. He knew the place well. It therefore wasn’t terribly surprising that the man who strode in behind Vetter wore a purple-trimmed black cassock with purple sash for all occasions, including police interrogations.

  It was probably another first, the first time in American history that a monsignor of the Catholic Church interrupted a police interrogation. Monsignor Jerome Schmit was one of Ray Vetter’s best buddies. Schmit had attained the high ecclesiastical title of monsignor for his previous good works. Yet his presence in that room was closer to the way “monsignor” is defined in the Devil’s Dictionary: “A high ecclesiastical title of which the Founder of our religion overlooked the advantages.” A popular Toledo priest, he knew the advantages. Otherwise he couldn’t get into that room.

  The third man to walk in behind the monsignor and the police chief was Hank Herschel. An attorney representing the Toledo Diocese and, by extension, Father Robinson, he was a 1967 graduate of the University of Toledo Law School (who isn’t in Toledo?).

  “Bill,” Vetter said to Kina, “would you step out of the room?”

  Kina left. Vetter, Schmit, and Herschel met privately behind closed doors with Father Robinson in the interview room. A short while later, the door opened. The detectives in the bureau watched as Toledo justice played out before them. Head held high, Father Gerald Robinson came out of the interview room.

  ”What are they doing?” Kina asked Swiatecki, who had also been watching.

  ”Well, they’ll put him out on a funny farm, and you’ll never hear from him again.”

  Escorted by the Debuty Chief Vetter, Monsignor Schmit, and attorney Herschel, Father Robinson was ushered out the front door of police headquarters.

  Shortly afterward, the chief decided to break protocol. All police reports were normally filed in color-coded triplicate. The yellow copy went to the investigating office, the pink to the department for its files, and the white copy to the records section. On the Robinson case, Vetter made it protocol that all copies of police reports be given to him directly. That meant that except for what Vetter had
, no other copies existed.

  Or so he assumed.

  This is the coat of arms of a monsignor with the rank of Chaplain of His Holiness

  Sometime after Robinson walked out of that interview room, or sauntered depending on who is telling the story, Edward Joshua Franks turned in the best piece of detective work on the case.

  Within hours of being bagged, the letter opener found its way to the right guy, TPD criminalist Edward Joshua Franks. Franks found the four-sided blade to be pristine. There were no smears of any kind, including fingerprints, on blade or handle. It looked like somebody had taken great care in wiping them clean. Franks next turned to the wax medallion that showed the U.S. Capitol in relief. It would later be established that Father Robinson picked up the letter opener as a souvenir from a Washington, D.C., wax museum he had once visited. Franks decided to pry up the medallion and see if there was anything underneath.

  A few weeks later, Franks had completed all his forensic tests and sent his report, dated April 25, 1980, to the detectives. The shoes turned up negative for blood. Robinson’s contention that his cassock had gravy on it and not blood turned out to be correct. He also had a prescription from a medical doctor for the Valium. So far, there was nothing wrong. The letter opener was another matter. The forensics report on it stated the following:

  Objective: To analyze for the possible presence of human blood.

  Data: Analysis was performed by using bio-chemical techniques.

  Conclusion: The wax medallion affixed to Exhibit 1 (letter opener) gave a weak positive result to a presumptive screening test for blood, indicating the possible presence of blood.

  Remarks: There was insufficient material present for the conduct of confirmatory tests.

  Using then current forensic technology, the criminalist couldn’t say for sure there was blood under the medallion, just that it was highly possible. Still, as circumstantial evidence goes, it could be quite valuable in pointing an accusatory finger at the off-limits and protected Father Gerald Robinson. After all, the letter opener was his and had been in his possession at all times.