When Satan Wore a Cross

by Fred Rosen

  “Going back over my time on the police force has forced many issues to the surface,” he said. “In order to survive working for that department I had to learn to hate and I did. The people on the street were not the problem. It was the people I worked with and for. Not all of them were corrupt or incompetent but a good many were, especially in the command ranks.

  “That job cost me my emotions, feelings and maybe my very soul. Over time I became like an old draft horse going through the motions of a well known route. I’ll tell you what I have become. Well after I had left the department I took my McDonald’s lunch to the park across the street from me. As I was beginning to eat, a car pulled up into the spot directly behind me. I heard a gunshot.

  “I got out of my car and checked that car. Inside was a man who had shot himself in the head. He was obviously very dead. I yelled over to a woman who had also heard the shot and told her to call 911 and to stay away from the vehicle. Then I went back to my car and ate my lunch while waiting for the crew. I had two thoughts about all this. The man was dead and there was nothing I could do for him, and I had paid for that food.”

  “Get out, Dave,” I said. “Get out of Toledo.”

  “You think I ought to?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  And I meant it. Even for reporters, Toledo was a difficult place. More than one reporter told me of instances when they did not toe the Lucas County line. The result was a call to the editor, and the reporter reassigned. The guys who run Toledo do not fool around.

  “You know what, Dave, you won. The guy’s in prison.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said, the smile forming ever so slightly behind his droopy mustache. But after so many years of waiting for the case to be adjudicated, could he finally let it go now that it was?

  I paid the check and we left. Outside, a local radio station was doing a remote in the parking lot. The DJ was flirting with a few young women.

  “You know what,” said Davison, starting his car up. “The owner of my favorite place to eat asked me if there would be a big turnout for me when I died. I told him the turnout would be much larger for me than any other ex-cop because of the people wanting to piss on my grave. I would have the last laugh. At least I would not be in Toledo anymore.”

  Davison dropped me off at the courthouse. I sought out assistant prosecuting attorney Dean Mandros in his second-floor office but got only as far as the receptionist. Mandros came out to meet with me in the outer vestibule. Anyone walking by could hear the conversation. I guess his office must have been messy. Mandros’s handshake was politician-right, neither too hard nor too soft. But there was something familiar about him. It took me a few moments, and then I realized what it was.

  His performance at trial had been a disorienting sideshow. Sideshows and sideshow performers are something I am very familiar with. Mandros plopped down on the aged sofa across from me and gazed on me benignly.

  “I’m aware of your plight,” said Dean Mandros.

  I had been seeking a copy of the autopsy and police reports and been denied them. What Mandros didn’t know was that the documents Davison had just given me included not just the police reports and autopsy diagram, but also a witness list prepared by the prosecution before the trial.

  “The court no longer has jurisdiction,” Mandros explained, because the case was on appeal. If the appeals court wanted to give me the documents, “Fine, if not, God bless you.”

  “What do you think of Dave Davison?” I suddenly asked. “Wasn’t he the one that kept this case going?”

  “We did not…we had nothing to do with him. He is not a credible person.”

  I looked up from my note taking.

  “He’s not a credible person?” I repeated.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Then why was he at the top of your witness list?” I shot back.

  Mandros paused to think.

  “We had a hundred people on that list,” he replied.

  “Yes, but Davison was at the top. Why didn’t you call him?”

  When he said nothing more about it, I stood up to leave.

  “Well, thanks for your time.”

  “We’re finished?” Mandros asked in surprise.

  “We’re finished,” I reaffirmed.

  I needed to get the stink of the place out of my nostrils. I went over to the Dirty Bird to have some drinks and dinner. Then I called Father Jeffrey Grob, the assistant exorcist of the Chicago Archdiocese, who had testified for the prosecution.

  “Is it possible the pattern of the stab wounds on her chest were not inverted but instead off to the side?” I asked, knowing that they were.

  “It could have been. Like most crimes that have a length or history, with the passage of time it is open to different interpretations,” Grob answered candidly. “But, if Robinson didn’t do it, he certainly was involved.”

  “Did you say that at trial?”

  “No, I didn’t. What I presented I presented based on material I was given. I only came out to Toledo the day before. In all honesty, I didn’t pay much attention to the trial. Locally in Chicago, there was little coverage.”

  But the case had blossomed into a national one and stayed that way. True crime bloggers began to question the forensic evidence in the case, in the belief, quite rightly, that the prosecution and police’s claim that it was irrefutable was false. The bloggers were holding the authorities’ collective feet to the fire.

  Finally, I called a cab to take me back to the train station. It was 1 A.M.

  In the counties south of Lucas—Holmes, Wayne, Tuscarawas, Coshocton, Knox, Ashland, Richland, and Stark counties—are the world’s largest Amish/Mennonite settlements. It was therefore not surprising to see a little Amish boy asleep in his mother’s lap in the station. The boy’s broad-brimmed black hat was still on his head. He was not more than five years old. I thought of the boys Father Robinson and Dave Davison had been, and how they had turned out.

  When the train came in at about 1:30 A.M., I walked quickly across the tracks, anxious to get on board and get out of town. The conductor directed me to a car forward. It was dark, save for the safety lights, people dozing in seats, their limbs twisted into all kinds of uncomfortable positions while looking for a comfortable one.

  The train moved and I watched Toledo’s gray and battered skyline fade into the distance. But sleep wouldn’t come, only reasoning and questions. Did Gerald Robinson murder Margaret Ann Pahl? Was it part of a satanic ceremony?

  Despite the circumstantial aspects of the case, especially the blood transfer pattern evidence, there was enough corroborative testimony from reliable witnesses, especially Dr. Lincoln Vail, to show Robinson was lying when he said he was in his room when he got the call about the murder. He was actually coming back from having committed the murder. Robinson was a volcano; he kept all his emotions inside. And he was a drinker, a lethal combination.

  Robinson surprised her in the sacristy. Margaret Ann Pahl had the altar cloth with her; it was in her hands when she went down under his strangling hands. She dropped it. When he decided to stab her, he realized that if he did it without protection, he’d get his cassock full of blood. He wore, as the witnesses said at trial, a cassock the day of the murder. By placing the cloth over the chest, it protected his clothes from blood spatter. What he could not know was that it would have been minimal anyway because Pahl was close to death. That explains why none of Robinson’s clothes had the slightest presence of Pahl’s blood.

  That Jane Doe and Marlo Damon were sexually abused seems clear. But who and how was yet to be proven in any court and probably never would be. Unlike murder, the statute of limitations on rape for both women had long run out. That meant having to go with the available evidence, which indicates to me that Robinson made the murder look deliberately like it was a satanic act to throw the police off his scent.

  That blood on the forehead was a nice touch. But Robinson was so ill tutored in Satanism, he didn’t even know how to prop
erly pervert his faith and stab an inverted cross. Instead, he stabbed one that was tilted a little to the left. Then he ran, hoping not to be discovered. As for motive, it was well established that he was angry at Margaret Ann Pahl, the woman who bossed him around.

  Robinson had changed the Good Friday service, which left Margaret Ann in tears. Did they have words? Robinson will never say. But that day, he had too much and decided not only to kill Margaret Ann, but to humiliate her in death. Like most murderers, he never thought he would be caught. Perhaps he thought his god or his church would protect him.

  It had nothing to do with God and everything to do with fragile human impulses that Gerald Robinson could not overcome.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Left Hand of God

  October 8, 2006

  “The hatred was palpable,” said Claudia Vercellotti.

  She was referring to SNAP’s picketing of the “Free Father Robinson Dinner” that St. Hedwig’s and St. Adalbert’s sponsored at the Scott Park Banquet, a huge Toledo catering hall. Hundreds of people turned out to contribute their money in support of Jerry Robinson. It was a decidedly older crowd, as would be expected.

  All day Vercellotti and the SNAP volunteers stood on the sidewalk outside the catering hall. There Vercellotti and two SNAP volunteers were in the early evening chill of an October night, holding photos of Margaret Ann Pahl aloft and questioning those entering why they were supporting a convicted murderer.

  “Please remember the victims,” they shouted.

  When a priest was walking up the steps to go in, Vercellotti confronted the unsuspecting father.

  “How can you support a murderer?” she asked simply.

  People did not reply. Maybe they were too ashamed to admit that they were raising money to free a convicted murderer who was no longer part of the priesthood.

  “While this is still a homicide, what makes it like nothing you’ve ever covered is the institution of my church and their role—this is no single ‘actor’ or a few bad apples—it’s a bad pie. It took four and a half years of pounding here, to make this community even receptive to the idea that a priest could rape a child, let alone murder a Roman Catholic nun—we’ve seen a slight turn, ever so slight—since the conviction. But, not nearly enough,” Claudia Vercellotti says.

  October 18, 2006

  Back in June, the dogged John Donahue had appealed Father Gerald Robinson’s conviction and sentence to the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals. He did so, however, with a handicap—lack of money. It needed to be raised to pay for the transcript of the trial that Donahue had to have in order to see what specific trial issues were appealable. That meant paying the court reporter $15,000 to transcribe her notes. Robinson’s supporters were trying to raise that money.

  In the meanwhile, Donahue wanted to get his client out of prison. Robinson was serving his “bit,” fifteen years to life, at the Hocking Correctional Facility in southeast Ohio. The attorney filed a motion with Judge Osowik to free his client on a $250,000 property bond. While the motion was not unique, the substance of it was.

  “I do solemnly swear, as I shall answer to God, that I did not kill Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.”

  The motion included Robinson’s sworn statement that he did not kill Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. Further, Donahue questioned the validity of “circumstantial evidence” that the state presented at trial through their expert forensic witnesses. The motion pointed out that the priest did not have a criminal record, and claimed that Robinson had cooperated with police in the murder investigation. The judge should therefore grant Robinson bail. His movements in freedom would be tracked with an electronic device worn on his ankle. That was Donahue’s recommendation in the affidavit.

  Prosecutor Julia Bates’s verbal response was swift.

  “He was not subject to cross-examination when he said this under oath, and it was not said in the presence of a jury,” she told reporters.

  Replying in a twelve-page motion, Dean Mandros wrote, “A cynic might think that this claim would have carried more weight had it been made before the jury. But then, a cynic might think that Robinson wanted to avoid being cross-examined by the state. A cynic might believe that Robinson didn’t want to be forced to explain his many lies.”

  “It is precisely what I would have expected from Mr. Mandros. His view of the circumstantial evidence differs from mine,” Donahue told the Blade. “He calls it overwhelming when, in fact, it is insufficient as a matter of law to support Father’s conviction.”

  October 31, 2006

  Judge Osowik denied the motion.

  “The court cannot find that the jury lost its way,” wrote Judge Osowik. “The defendant has not presented any argument that would warrant any suspension of the sentence imposed.”

  Judge Osowik said that Donahue’s motion included misstatements regarding trial evidence. The appeals attorney had made two key points in the motion that the state had based its case on satanic worship allegations by an unidentified nun, and that the blade on the alleged murder weapon, the priest’s letter opener, was actually dull.

  “This is understandable as counsel was not one of the defendant’s attorneys at trial,” Osowik noted in his ruling.

  “The bond motion relied on Court TV television coverage in order to try to present to the judge with my view of what the evidence was,” Donahue then told the Toledo Blade.

  As for the prosecution, “The judge outlines very succinctly the misstatements in the defendant’s motion, and quite succinctly states the basis for his conviction and incarceration. We agree with it,” said Julia Bates.

  Election Day, November 7, 2006

  Judge Thomas J. Osowik had a very good day. The Lucas County Common Pleas judge, a Democrat, was facing appointed incumbent Dennis Parish for justice of Ohio’s Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He won. Mark Davis, Jane Doe’s attorney, was defeated at the polls in his effort to be voted a judgeship. What effect his representation of Jane Doe might have had on his election is hard to discern.

  There was one other defeat that day in Toledo for a Republican running for city councilman. Dave Davison had jumped into the contest at the last minute and gotten clobbered by his Democratic opponent.

  December 7, 2006

  Health is not something to take for granted, especially when you are in prison. Gerald Robinson began to have medical problems and was transferred from Hocking in Nelsonville, to the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus, and from there to the Ohio State University Medical Center.

  Robinson was having unspecified kidney problems that were considered non-life-threatening. Thirteen days later, he was transferred back to Hocking.

  January 19, 2007

  “In my opinion, Satan has won and God has lost,” said Mark Davis. “I have absolutely no doubt, if given our day in court, that we would be able to prove that this cult existed and the victim was abused.”

  Judge Ruth Ann Franks had just thrown out Jane Doe’s suit against Robinson and Mazuchowski that claimed she had been ritualistically abused by the two men. Davis, and his clients, were disappointed but not defeated.

  “From their [the Does’] point of view, the abusers are getting away with it and this satanic cult continues to be protected and remains festering within our community,” Davis continued, vowing to appeal.

  In dismissing all sixteen counts of the civil suit, which included charges of sexual battery and violation of Ohio’s civil racketeering law, Judge Franks cited the expiration of the statute of limitations for those crimes. Davis had hoped to counter that by saying that Doe had not remembered it was Robinson until the memory was triggered when she saw him on TV after his indictment.

  As for Jerry Mazuchowski, he told the Toledo Blade, “The irony of all of this is that I would have been 15 years old when all this started. I am exhilarated to be exonerated. Dare I say, alleluia, the strife is over and the battle is won.”

  And Father Robinson? As usual, he wasn’t talking.

  Epilogue

&
nbsp; March 2007

  Sister Marlo Damon was sweating. Since she worked as an administrator in her order’s executive offices, she wore “civvies,” but always with a cross pinned to her front, just like Margaret Ann Pahl.

  Her father had died the month before, his obituary published in the Toledo Blade. Needless to say, there was no mention of the satanic activities his daughter alleged he took part in. But because the obit was public, she was afraid Chet Warren would read it and show up at his funeral. He didn’t, but just as she was getting over that scare, I found out who she really was.

  That’s why she was sweating. She was afraid I would not keep her real identity a secret. I had discovered that the Toledo Blade had already written about Sister Marlo Damon, in some detail, under her real name. However, she never publicly mentioned her connection to Robinson and her charges of satanic abuse.

  “I don’t understand,” I asked Claudia Vercellotti over the phone. “She has no problem going public as an advocate for people claiming clerical abuse, but she won’t go public about her charges against another cleric that are even worse? I don’t get it.”

  Vercellotti said that Sister Marlo wanted her identity in that context kept secret. Yet, right now in Toledo, at least three reporters on the Blade, all the lawyers at the trial, an unknown amount of people at the diocese and the TPD who had access to Damon’s original letter, defense lawyers, prosecuting lawyers, and her own lawyers, are still keeping her identity a secret.

  Why? On the surface it is the respect reporters, in particular, religiously observe for alleged rape victims not to print their names. In this case, Damon’s real name has already been identified in public documents. What is fundamentally different here are her charges of Satanism, which remain unsubstantiated, and with which she does not wish to have her name associated. Nor does she want to be named as the person who got the cops to restart the Pahl murder investigation by alleging she engaged in forced sadomasochistic sex with the normally placid Jerry Robinson. That, of course, is the real point. Doesn’t a man convicted of murder have the right to face his accuser in a court of law?