Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Unholy Secret

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

In Toledo, Ohio in 1980, a woman's body was found in a chapel, covered only by an altar cloth. She had been stabbed 31 times. The woman's name? Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. Somebody had murdered a nun. Sponsors: Nutrafol: Take the first step to visibly thicker, healthier hair. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners ten dollars off your first month’s subscription and free shipping when you go to Nutrafol.com & enter the promo code FILES. Find out why over 4,000 healthcare professionals recommend Nutrafol for healthier hair. That’s Nutrafol.com, promo code FILES. Skims: Believe the hype - SKIMS has over 100,000 five star reviews for a reason The Cotton collection and more are available now at SKIMS.com. Plus, get free shipping on orders over seventy five dollars! After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you! Select 'podcast' in the survey and select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.  Angi: Download the free Angi mobile app today or visit Angi.com   

In Toledo, Ohio, in 1980, a man murdered a woman. While every death is tragic, and every violent death especially so, there's nothing inherently remarkable about that statement. A man murdered a woman. It happens all the time. He got angry with her, he stabbed her, and she died. Actually, he stabbed her over and over

in the chest, the face, the neck, 31 times in all. That's a bit more unique. But still, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know that it's not all that uncommon for us to come across

cases where a person dies from dozens of stab wounds. But what if I told you that woman was a Catholic nun with the full habit and everything? We picture nuns as being isolated from the anger and violence of the outside world. So what if I told you that her body was found not in the outside world, but on the floor of a chapel? And perhaps the most surprising fact of all, what if I told you the main suspect was a priest? From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. I'm Brooke, and this story, adapted from a classic episode of Cold Case Files, is told by the distinguished Bill Curtis. It's an investigation that begins with two detectives inside the cold case section of the Toledo Police Department.

We're headed to the Detective Bureau at the safety building here in Toledo. Tom Ross and Steve Forrester are cold case investigators. In 2003, they reopened the murder of Sister Margaret Ann Paul. This is Sister Paul, and this is Father Robinson. This was at the dedication of a new intensive care unit. On Easter Saturday, 23 years earlier, Sister Paul's body was discovered on the floor of a chapel with an altar cloth covering it.

Lieutenant Bill Kena was the original detective assigned to the case. She was stabbed 31 times in the chest and in the neck and face area, even in the ear. To slaughter a person in that manner, there had to be a deep-seated hatred attempt to defile the victim, besides killing her, to defile her. There were lots of people that they looked into. After the first week, the focus was clearly on the priest. Father Gerald Robinson was considered a prime suspect at the time of the murder. Found inside his quarters, a letter opener, shaped like a dagger.

We were at the desk, and I'm right next to Art, and he opened up the center drawer, and he said, oh, what do we got here? And he reached in there with his fingers and pulled out this dagger-type letter opener with a knuckle guard and a blade about 8 inches, 10 inches long. Father Robinson was given a polygraph in 1980 and showed signs of deception. Before charges could be filed, the Catholic Church, in the form of the local Monsignor, stepped in, and

the case was dropped. The deputy chief in charge of the detective bureau was standing there, and behind him was a monsignor from the Catholic Church diocese, and behind him was a defense attorney. And all of them walk out of the interrogation room arm in arm and out of the safety building. We had no charges against them at that time. And I asked Father Swiatecki, I said, hey, what are they gonna do with him? And Swiatecki says, they'll put him on a funny farm

someplace and you'll never see him again. He said, that's what they do with wayward priests. When we opened this up in 2003, we had access to both of these. We had known that this came from his room, and we knew that this was not looked at since 1980. Detectives Ross and Forrester pick up where Bill Kena left off two decades earlier, with the altar cloth that covered Sister Paul's body and the dagger-shaped letter opener

pulled from Father Robinson's quarters. When we made a comparison here, what startles at first was you can see this finger guard on this letter, or this dagger-shaped letter opener, matches this and the blade matches this. Now, obviously, we're not experts, but we can see that there's some great similarities there. It was startling, really. I mean, we looked at each other and said, you know, we were just shocked. Ross and Forrester bring in Detective Terry Kuzno, an expert in the analysis of blood transfer.

With this pattern, you have sort of a ribbed pattern. When you look at the letter opener, it has a ribbed handle. Size and shape are consistent. Right off the bat, eyeballing some preliminary measurements, I told Sergeant Forrester that these blood transfer patterns, to me, appeared to be consistent with this letter opener. Immediately then, I began to look at the puncture defects that were in the cloth.

The killer stabbed Sister Paul through the altar cloth. These puncture defects had a very distinctive shape to them. I call it a Y-type puncture. Rather than a straight slit or a rounded hole, they have a very distinctive Y shape to them. The Y shape is pretty unique. I measured these puncture defects. They are consistent in size and shape with the letter opener. Next, Kuzno turns his attention to the overall layout of the stab wounds on the altar cloth. To Kuzno's eye, they seem anything but random.

Random would indicate to me just free stabbing, no pattern. And looking at this, that's not random at all. The three sets of two pairs, okay? And then when you have these two on the outside that are exactly six inches apart and equidistant from these, not only are we talking about no longer being random, but I don't even believe they're freehand. In other words, this would indicate to me

that something was used as a template. The template, Kuzno suspects, might have been a crucifix. They would have been on her chest, basically with the cross in an upside-down position, going across her chest this way, up to her left shoulder. It was a startling find to be able to say that there's definitely a pattern. It appears to be a cross-type pattern,

and that an object was used as a template, it was surprising. It was a shocking find. The chapel altar cloth provides detectives with fresh insight into perhaps the ritual underpinnings of murder. The next step, exhume the nun's body and examine her bones. We wanted to see if any of the puncture wounds to her flesh would uncover any markings to her skeletal remains that we could perhaps use to firm up our theory that the letter opener was the murder weapon.

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I was really worried about what the condition the body was going to be in. She had been down about 24 years. So basically I didn't know what I was going to find. I didn't know if the body was going to be helpful. Once we got her here in good light, we saw that she was actually better preserved than I anticipated. Sister Paul was stabbed 31 times in the neck and chest. Dr. Barnett examines the victim's bones, looking for evidence of the wounds.

You could actually still see some of the stab wounds in the chest and neck area, which made me pretty excited because I didn't think we were going to be able to see that. When we brought the skin flaps back over the sternum, over the second right rib, there was a characteristic, almost triangular type stab wound. And then the anthropologist happened to pick this piece back up out of the body bag and examine it, and sure enough, right in the piece that we had cut out, there was a stelae, diamond-shaped defect right here in the mandible that one of the stab wounds had made. This was the defect in the bone, diamond shaped. The diamond shape appears to be consistent with the suspected

murder weapon, a letter opener found 24 years earlier in the desk drawer of Father Gerald Robinson. Barnett makes a physical comparison between the letter opener and the bone. I very gently placed the letter opener into the defect. It was a perfect fit. Sister Paul's bones have provided detectives with a tangible link to the suspected murder weapon. Meanwhile, investigators confront their suspect, Father Gerald Robinson. Between 1974 and 1981, you were one of the two chaplains assigned to Mercy Hospital. Is that correct, sir? Father Robinson is asked to come down to the station. At the time of the murder,

he denied any involvement in Sister Paul's death. Now he says he walked into the chapel just as another priest, Father Swiateki, was performing last rites on Sister Paul. He advised at this point that Father Swiateki looked up at him and asked him why he did this to the sister. He said that right in the sacristy. Yeah.

In front of everybody. The sisters and everybody else. He said, you did this. And I just looked at him. It's the first time I'm seeing a sister. And for him to say something like that, I had no idea what he was doing. When Father mentions it during the taped interrogation, I asked him how he responded to that, and he said that he was kind of a meek and mild type personality.

That was his character, and that he couldn't respond at all concerning that. Holy cow, you had to say, Father, what are you saying? Well, that's what, you know, but I'm not one to answer. I'm not a forceful person, and that's my trouble. Well, you didn't stand there and take that, did you? I took a lot. And we felt that that was quite unusual due to the fact that you just enter a murder scene and you're being accused of murdering a nun.

Why, when you respond to something like that... Detective Ross believes Father Robinson is lying, I couldn't answer him. I didn't have anything to answer him with. I had no idea why. Detective Ross believes Father Robinson is lying, playing a game with detectives, although the reason why remains unclear. Later in the interview, I asked him a direct question when he kind of had his mouth in kind of a smirking fashion. I says, Father, you're smirking, and this is quite serious. I wanted to see how he would react to that,

and he immediately came back to me. I'm not smirking. Father, why do you smirk at me? I mean, this is serious. I'm not smirking at you. I just, I don't know how this, how this is about. And I thought, okay, you responded to my question concerning smirking. Why wouldn't you respond to an accusation concerning a homicide? He's a hard person to explain because he's never fully really, I think,

showed himself to any individuals as to who he actually is. I think he's a secret. I'll be back. Father Robinson does not confess to killing Sister Paul, but he does not deny it either. The interview ends, and Father Gerald Robinson is arrested for first-degree murder. Father Robinson is not guilty. He's not guilty. And that's solely and simply because this table, the state of Ohio, has not proven to you beyond a reasonable doubt that this letter opener is the murder weapon. For Father Robinson's attorneys, this trial turns on one piece of evidence, the letter opener, and its alleged links to the wounds that killed Sister Paul. They talk in the language of cannot exclude.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is not reasonable doubt. And I would tell you, you don't need an expert to come in here and tell you about blood transfer. All you need is a pair of eyes, a pattern, an object, and a vivid imagination. Not one expert, not one with any credibility anyway,

came in here and said, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is the weapon. Not one. They can't make their case beyond a reasonable doubt, forensically. You listened to this evidence?

You heard what took place in that sacristy? Is this some sort of satanic cult killing? The prosecution offers a broader focus, including speculation on the motive behind this murder. We felt that the real reason was perhaps the most common reason for most of the homicides that occur in this country. A man got very angry at a woman, and the woman died. He had had enough.

The man had decided he had had enough. And he got behind her, and he choked her down, either with his arm, like Dr. Barnett had described, or with a ligature, that alder cloth that we find in the hallway. And he choked her, and he choked her down, and it would have taken a minute or two to get her to the point where she's very, very near death. What do you do over the dead or dying? You perform last rites.

And that's what he did. Oh, a bastardized version of last rites, to be sure, but that is what happens. He covers her with that blessed altar cloth, and he marks her with the sign of the cross, but an upside-down cross. Why? Father Grob told us why.

To degrade her, to mock her, to humiliate her, to bring her down to the lowest point he possibly could. And what's a more humiliating way for a nun to meet her maker than to be branded with an upside-down cross on her chest? What's a more humiliating way for a nun to be discovered than to be stripped naked in front of the Eucharist. And what is it that he has left there on the floor? He's left a message, a message to Sister Margaret Ann Paul, to be sure, maybe to the church,

maybe to God himself. See how angry I am. See what you have made me do. This is how angry I am see what you have made me do this is how angry I am and one of the things that I argue to the jury is that if Gerald Robinson believed anything in terms of what that white collar represented

is that he always knew that one day one way or another he was going to have to answer for what he had done and that he had been spending most of the past 26 years waiting to be held to account. And finally, the jury held him to account. The jury deliberates six hours and returns with a verdict,

guilty of first-degree murder. You always want people to be held accountable for their criminal conduct. You hope that that happens sooner rather than later, but later is better than never. That very same day, the judge sentences Father Robinson to 15 years to life in prison. Father Gerald Robinson was the second Catholic priest in the U.S. to ever be convicted of homicide,

the first since Father Hange-Smit, who was executed in 1916. According to an article in the New York Times, Father Robinson was also one of several priests in the Toledo area accused of molesting children. Father Robinson appealed his conviction in 2008 and again in 2012, and both times denied by the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals. Robinson likely would have continued with the appeals process, but on July 4, 2014, he died after suffering a heart attack a few months prior. A federal judge denied his request to be released to Toledo for the end of his life. He instead died in a prison hospice unit. Cold Case Files the podcast is hosted by Brooke Giddings, Thank you. series was produced by Curtis Productions and presented by Bill Curtis. Check out more cold case files at AETV.com and by downloading the A&E app. See what hit blockbusters are streaming free this month during Popcorn Summer Movies on Pluto TV.

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