by Fred Rosen
In choosing to serve her Lord, Jesus Christ, Damon was choosing to fight the one Jesus called “‘a murderer from the beginning,’ who would even try to divert Jesus from the mission received from his Father. ‘The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.’”
Satan was behind her abuse. Satan needed to be fought, and defeated.
“It is a great mystery that providence should permit diabolical activity, but ‘we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.’”
In 2002, Sister Marlo Damon wasn’t questioning God. Not at all. What she was questioning was why she had to keep shelling out for expensive psychotherapy. It really didn’t make much sense. Shouldn’t those ultimately responsible for the actions of the priests who she says abused her be the ones who paid? With all the attention the public and media had given the cases of priestly pedophilia, wasn’t it right that the same attention be paid to the satanic abuse she had described? It was a perfectly logical argument.
While Sister Marlo Damon was going through this self-questioning process, she had flashbacks to her satanic abuse sessions. Simultaneously, the Church was having its own problems with flashbacks. The Vatican finally figured out that whatever policy they had in place to take care of clerical abuse just wasn’t cutting it. They needed to deal with the problem or face further defections from the ranks of practicing Catholics.
In 2002, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops held a convocation in Dallas, Texas. The document all the bishops agreed to came to be known as the Dallas Charter. The church refers to it formally as the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Primarily, it is a mea culpa for all the cases of priestly abuse.
“The Church in the United States is experiencing a crisis without precedent in our times. The sexual abuse of children and young people by some priests and bishops and the ways in which bishops have addressed these crimes and sins, have caused enormous pain, anger and confusion. Innocent victims and their families have suffered terribly.”
Then came the confession.
“In the past,” the charter preamble continued, “secrecy has created an atmosphere that has inhibited the healing process and in some cases enabled sexually abusive behavior to be repeated. As bishops we acknowledge our mistakes and our role in that suffering, and we apologize and take responsibility for too often failing victims and our people in the past. We also take responsibility in dealing with this problem strongly, consistently, and effectively in the future. From the depths of our hearts we bishops express great sorrow and profound regret for what the Catholic people are enduring.”
It was an astonishing document and if carried through to its logical conclusion, could revolutionize the way the church dealt with clerical abuse cases. Most importantly, to advance the promises to protect children, dioceses in every state would set up internal review boards to hear victims’ allegations and make recommendations on how to proceed.
Sister Marlo Damon took the charter seriously. Being a good nun, she believed in the system in which she served, that she could get justice from it without going to an outside body. Therapy had given her value as a person. That’s why she was angry.
Why should she have to continue paying for what those people had done to her? She had no money; she had taken a vow of poverty. Like all nuns, she was given only a pittance to live on. It was out of those meager funds that she saved for her therapy. Her order had helped with her bills, but they were tapped out. The financial burden was crushing.
Sister Marlo Damon believed in her Church, she believed in the Dallas Charter, she believed in her order, and she believed in the Toledo Diocese. After all, Sister Marlo Damon reasoned, she had God on her side. He was with her when she picked up the phone and called Frank DiLallo. Frank DiLallo was the diocese’s case manager. Damon asked for a meeting, to which DiLallo agreed.
At their meeting, Sister Marlo Damon quickly got to the point—she wanted the Toledo Diocese to pay fifty grand to cover her present and future counseling and medication expenses. Challenged to explain why the diocese should foot the bill, Damon told him that she had been raped by Father Chet Warren.
DiLallo reminded Damon that Warren had been an Oblates priest, outside the jurisdiction of the Toledo Diocese. Anyway, he’d been kicked out of the priesthood. Damon wasn’t a nun for nothing. She reminded him that any priest serving in the diocese did so at the pleasure of the bishop, putting said priest under the diocese’s jurisdiction.
DiLallo wisely deferred the matter until he could investigate further. It was, after all, an unusual situation. He promised to get back to her. Four months later, Damon once again called DiLallo. What was happening about her complaint? She wanted a second meeting. DiLallo agreed. He didn’t know that Damon, though she might have been naïve, wasn’t about to let the diocese slide on its responsibility.
At the second meeting, Damon came with compelling documentation. There was a copy of a letter from her mother superior demanding that the diocese grant Sister Marlo’s payment as requested—$50K. Also, she had a pharmacist’s statement regarding her considerable cost for medication.
As 2003 progressed, Damon and her attorney—she had smartened up and got one—pressed their case. Damon contacted Claudia Vercellotti, passionate victims rights advocate for SNAP (Survival Network of Those Abused By Priests), and told Vercellotti of her claim. Vercellotti began advising her. One year almost to the day that the Dallas Charter was passed, Sister Marlo Damon was invited to testify before the Toledo Diocesan Review Board. The latter consisted of the only non-Catholic, psychologist Dr. Robert Poole, and six Catholics of varying professional backgrounds.
On June 11, 2003, Sister Marlo Damon testified in private before the review board. Listening raptly, the board heard Damon’s tales of abuse she had suffered through as a child, including the alleged rapes by Chet Warren. She gave each board member a signed statement detailing charges of rape, torture, and satanic abuse that she had repressed for so long.
Damon read to the board a statement that began with personal details, explaining how her parents had moved to Toledo in her childhood years.
“We moved into St. Pius X parish where my paternal grandparents, Fred and Mary Damon were quite active. Chet Warren, then an OSFS [Oblates of St. Francis de Sales] priest and associate pastor befriended my family quite soon.”
She went on to detail her childhood abuse at Warren’s hands, charging that he made her fellate and fondle him.
“On one occasion after a Friday school liturgy, he led me into the sacristy, secured the doors and forced me to lie on my back beneath his exposed penis as he masturbated himself.”
How ironic that the sacristy was also the scene of this alleged crime. The abuse she claimed progressed to violence, and by third grade, sodomy.
Then came the bombshell. Not only was Warren sexually violent, Sister Marlo claimed something worse:
“Chet Warren was a leader of a satanic group (based at St. Pius) that performed rituals in honor of Satan on a regular basis. The rituals were horrifying and sadistic, designed to break our wills and internalize whatever cores programmed message they wished to use to further our powerlessness. Among the abusers were…my father and grandfather.”
Photographic Insert
Claudia Vercellotti, SNAP’s Toledo coordinator and prime mover in bringing the Robinson case to trial.
Vercellotti carries with her a display of photographs of children abused by clergy.
Dave Davison today, as he goes through the records he kept for twenty-six years before copying them at Kinkos.
Dave Davison as a beat cop at the time of the ritualistic murder of Margaret Ann Pahl.
Courtesy Dave Davison
The Lucas County Courthouse where Robinson was tried in April and May 2006. Note the modern, conservative addition of the Ten Commandments in the foreground.
Sister Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, as she appears on the Irish five-pound note. It wa
s recently replaced by the euro.
Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, right before her death.
The murder weapon, Robinson’s sword-shaped letter opener. Note the medallion, already removed.
A close-up of the place on the sword, under the medallion, where the forensic experts found a small spot of blood.
Autopsy photographs of Margaret Ann Pahl, concentrating on the chest wounds. Note the way the pattern of the cross on her chest veers to the left.
Margaret Ann Pahl as she appeared when cops first discovered her body.
Sister Marlo particularly remembered what happened after her beloved pet Lab Smoky died. She told the panel the story of Smoky’s mutilation at the hand of her father’s cult. Adding further detail, Warren allegedly told Sister Marlo if she really loved Smoky, she would be able to put him back together again and make him come back to life. Utterly confused, she cried uncontrollably. Then a cult member strode in from an adjoining room with a dog on a leash.
Warren allegedly told her of a little girl who had brought a dog back from death. “I learned that anything I loved would be annihilated and that everything was my fault.”
There was a further charge that she was the victim of another ceremony at Calvary Cemetery when she was five. She was placed in a box, that to her seemed like a coffin, and cockroaches were set upon her. “They told me the bugs were marking me for Satan. I learned that I belonged to them.”
Most of the rituals Sister Marlo was forced to go through included some type of sexual abuse. When she was six, she was initiated into the cult, or so she claimed. Cult members beat drums.
“Chet carried me to a table and vaginally raped me. I learned that I had no power. At age nine, Chet took me on different occasions to an old house where the cult members killed dogs. They made me crawl on the floor and pick up the dogs’ innards. I learned that no matter how hard I tried, there was no way out.”
In still other fantastic rituals, cult members dismembered a stillborn baby “and made me pick up the limbs.” The cult also killed. After the eyeball incident, Sister Marlo claims the cult killed a little girl who was about three. After she was dead, the adults left Marlo alone “in a sea of blood and stench.”
At age twelve, in yet another initiation ritual, she was given to Satan. “They used a snake and inserted it into my mouth, rectum and vagina to consecrate those orifices to Satan.”
When they told her to call aloud to God, the abuse got worse. But when they told her to call aloud to Satan, the abuse stopped. She remembered and had written even more, claiming that between the ages of eight and nine she was taken someplace she didn’t recognize. It was in the middle of the night. Her father, Warren, and others she did not know were there and shot pornographic pictures of her.
When she was a teenager, she was in the sacristy when a priest forced her to take off her bra, blouse and underwear, leaving on her cute uniform skirt. “He pushed me back against the sacristy counter, fondling, mouthing and kissing my breast. Then he knelt, put his head under my skirt and performed oral sex.”
Chet Warren left St. Pius X suddenly in the middle of the year when Sister Marlo was in fifth grade, returning to Toledo as chaplain at St. Vincent’s when Damon was in high school. “The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I volunteered as a candy striper at St. Vincent’s. Chet sexually abused me in his chaplaincy quarter several times that summer.”
The abuse took place, she said, in Warren’s chaplaincy quarters. Men would come and pay Chet to have sex with Damon. “These experiences included slapping, span-king, being cuffed or tied up during sex, being masked/blindfolded and having my breasts and genitals pinched or bitten during sex…One of these S and M perpetrators was Father Gerald Robinson, a diocesan priest. I do not know who the others were.”
As a result of this repeated sexual abuse, Damon became pregnant at the age of fifteen. “The satanic group performed a cult abortion.” She gave as locations for these satanic activities both some back areas of St. Pius X property and an abandoned house on Rabb Road further out in the rural section of the county.
Sister Marlo then went on to state her medical problems and as a result of this trauma to be suffering from dissociative disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. “I have been in therapy since 1993. In 1998, my mother was in the hospital and I went home to help my dad with the laundry. While there, Chet arrived and raped me in the guest bedroom. My father also sexually assaulted me.” She claimed to have “completely cut this experience off from my consciousness for several months.”
Sometime during the first quarter of 2000, “I again went to my apartment, this time in a dissociated state. Again, Chet was there and again I was sexually assaulted.” Later she came out of this state. When she realized she’d been assaulted, she “cut contact with my family members completely. My experiences of the past five years show me clearly that the cult is still active and dangerous.”
She signed the letter “Sister Marlo Damon, SVU, 6/11/03.”
Damon’s recollection of her alleged rape by Father Warren is consistent with the use of the female body as the altar during the Black Mass. But what is even more interesting is that in her letter, the nun accuses her father, Robert Damon, of not only being part of the satanic ring abusing his daughter, but later selling her sexual services.
Who was Robert Damon? On April 8, 2000, the Toledo Blade published a human interest story about his lifelong fascination with trains.
“Some folks like to play golf or sail a boat,” he told the Blade during the interview. “Trains just happen to be my hobby.”
The article went on to describe how Damon, a retired executive with the Tana Corporation, could usually be found hanging out in his car at the Holloway Road railroad crossing, at Holland near McCord Road in Toledo. He liked to watch the trains go by.
“I’ve been a railroad buff since I was 5 years old,” said the seventy-seven-year-old former Tana Corporation employee in the article. “I’ve been a train devotee for more than 70 years.”
Damon enjoyed riding the rails even more, especially when accompanied by his wife, Doris, Marlo’s mother. He estimated that they had taken 150 Amtrak trips since their marriage in 1948.
All this information was available to anyone in that room interested in the character of Damon’s father, the alleged Satanist. All they had to do was a simple Google search; they did not. Once Damon departed for the review board to consider her evidence, review board member Dr. Cooley said that he wanted to report Damon’s charges immediately to police because they included the murder of people used as satanic sacrifices.
Instead, the board voted five to one that Sister Marlo Damon’s charges of rape, torture, and satanic abuse were not only incredible, but there wasn’t cause to bring the cops in. Only Dr. Cooley thought there was. The lone holdout who believed in Damon’s credibility, he had backbone.
Vercellotti and Cooley got together with Damon and told her she should go public with her charges. Still believing the Dallas Charter would get her the fifty grand and guarantee her justice, Damon refused. The diocese dragged its feet. The case languished all through the summer of 2003. In the fall, Sister Marlo Damon’s patience finally wore out. The Toledo Diocese’s intransigence to her problems was no longer tolerable.
She gave her champions Vercellotti and Cooley copies of her statement delivered months before to the diocese’s review board. She also gave them what they had been waiting for—the green light to take her case forward to the authorities. The real question was whose trust Damon’s situation would engender, or perhaps more importantly, whom Vercellotti and Cooley felt they could trust not to bury the case. The Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office was low on the list and, in Vercellotti’s opinion, never a viable option. Instead, Cooley and Vercellotti went directly to the state.
In September 2003, Vercellotti and Cooley met with Special Agent Phil Lucas of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in Bowling Green. During the hour-plus meeting, they handed over to Lucas a
copy of Damon’s statement to the review board. Lucas requested more documentation. While Vercellotti was putting together the package of papers for the state investigator, the diocese fired Dr. Cooley from the review board. That was not surprising. After all, Cooley had refused to go along with the program. He had to go. But then, just when it seemed darkest, the system worked.
On December 2, Special Agent Lucas of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office faxed a copy of Sister Marlo Damon’s review board testimony to the Lucas County prosecutor, Julia Bates. He included his recommendation that an investigation be commenced immediately. The state needed to determine the veracity of Damon’s charges. And just like that, Damon’s charges had new life.
Since 1997, Lucas County prosecutor Julia Bates had maintained a cold case squad. Their charge was primarily to examine unsolved homicides. Using contemporary technology and old-fashioned police work, the idea was to see if they could bring resolution to these crimes. The squad was composed of personnel drawn from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification; the TPD; the county coroner and prosecutor’s offices; and the FBI.
Of all the sleuths put on the case, it would be the DA’s man, Tom Ross, who put the pieces together. An investigator for prosecutor Julia Bates, Ross was also a retired TPD cop. Spotting Robinson’s name in Damon’s letter as one of the priests accused of raping her, he immediately consulted with his colleague, Sergeant Steve Forrester of the TPD.
Ross remembered that Robinson had been the prime suspect in Pahl’s murder.
Now his name had surfaced again. This time, a nun was charging Robinson raped her during years of satanic abuse that included human sacrifices. There was also a possibility of a link in some way between Robinson and Chet Warren, the main subject of Damon’s charges.
