by Fred Rosen
So far, everything was going by the book. A homicide had been committed. Detectives and crime scene technicians had been dispatched. The officers on the scene would be debriefed by the detectives. As the beat cops, they would know the hospital and its personnel best. It was also Toledo Police Department standard operating procedure for every police officer to file reports on every person interviewed by him at the crime scene. That included “supplemental reports,” which contained detailed interviews with witnesses at the scene.
In his report, Detective Marx noted correctly that after Davison and his partner arrived at the crime scene, “The officers then requested that the scene be cleared and they contacted 212 [headquarters] for assistance. After clearing the scene and contacting 212, the officers interviewed personnel at the scene.”
These were the people Davison interviewed at the scene who directly implicated Father Gerald Robinson.
“The names of these individuals are listed in the original crime report and the officers’ supplemental reports,” Marx continued writing in his report.
Everything was standard operating procedure, and perhaps for the TPD, it was. But it was also at this point that the investigation into Margaret Ann Pahl’s murder began its slow, twenty-six-year derailment. The train got off the tracks when Detective Marx failed to note in his report that when he arrived at the scene, he ordered Davison and his partner to leave.
“I argued with Marx about leaving,” says Davison passionately. “I looked over at my partner and Brackett gave him a look that said, ‘You’re not going to win this one, buddy.’”
Davison looked back at Marx.
“They booted us out the door,” Davison continues. “It made no sense from an investigative perspective. We knew the people at the hospital. They had already implicated Robinson.” Marx wanted them to check out the bus stations for any suspicious characters that looked like they might have just killed a nun. “Just dismissing us like that struck me as bizarre behavior,” said Davison.
The police department is a paramilitary organization. Patrolmen follow detectives’ orders. Davison and Brackett got back in their Chevy Capri police car that they’d parked outside the hospital. Davison readjusted the .357 Magnum on his belt and they took off to check out the bus stations. When his shift was over, Davison would type up both his primary and supplemental reports, including his interviews at the scene, and submit them to his bosses.
Back in the chapel, Marx and Bodie were processing the crime scene. That meant searching the body and the area around it for anything that might bring some enlightenment. Soon, coroner’s investigator Abe Heilman arrived. He took one look at the body and picked up the nearest phone. He called his office to make arrangements to have Margaret Ann Pahl’s body taken to the county morgue for autopsy. Marx, meanwhile, was making an examination.
“The body was covered with a white sheet-type of blanket. It was later determined that the body was covered by one of the members of the Swift Team. The blanket was partially removed to check the body for signs of life,” he noted in his report.
Common law in the United States is for a physician to officially note time of death in order to supply a death certificate and to move the whole process of death legally forward. Whether homicide or natural, death means you have to do something with the body: autopsy, burial, or cremation. For any of that, you need that death certificate to get the ball rolling.
“After finding no signs of life, the time was noted to be approximately 08:45 hours,” Marx continued in the cold-sounding prose of a veteran cop. That was the time of death that would officially be listed on the death certificate.
Marx bent down. He felt the body; cold to the touch. He raised her arm. It fell like it was attached to a rag doll. Rigor mortis, the stiffening of the limbs immediately after death, had not set in yet. That meant she had been dead for a very short time. Examining further, Marx noticed that Margaret Ann’s black veil, worn as part of her uniform, was lying under the back of her head with the end of the veil extending out and to the right.
There were visible traces of what appeared to be dried blood on the bridge and tip of her nose. There were also numerous puncture wounds in the right side of her face and neck. The blood that had seeped from these wounds appeared to be still wet and dark in color. Someone had wrapped part of a white altar cloth around Margaret Ann’s right forearm. The remaining part of the altar cloth was lying along the right side of the body, extending just below her right knee.
There were several red stains visible on the lower section of the cloth that appeared to be blood. Upon looking closer, Marx saw that there were several punctures in the cloth in the area near the right forearm. It appeared that Margaret Ann’s right arm had been resting across the front of her chest when she was stabbed. This could be determined by comparing the punctures in the altar cloth with visible punctures in the dress in the area of the chest.
The right upper arm was extended slightly outward to the right, with the forearm in a horizontal position with the body. The arm formed almost a forty-five-degree angle at the elbow. The hand was lying on the floor, palm up, with the fingers forming a loose fist. There was no visible injury to the right hand. That meant a distinct lack of defensive wounds. Whatever had happened to Margaret Ann, she had not been able to defend herself.
When Margaret Ann had gotten dressed that morning, she had put on a blue jumper knit dress, with a silver cross pinned on the left side. Now the dress had visible red stains down the front that could only be blood. The blood was still wet, the stains concentrated around the left side of the upper chest, just over the heart. Neither Marx nor anyone else at the scene noted anything unusual regarding the punctures.
An examination of Margaret Ann’s lower body showed that both legs extended downward and straight out. They were spread apart at the ankle, about twelve inches apart. Her jumper was down, covering her vagina. Below that, her legs were naked, gray pantyhose and a white elastic panty girdle pulled down and resting around her right ankle. It was that state of undress that had so alarmed Sister Madelyn Marie when she first saw the body that she literally cried “rape.” Inventorying the rest of her undergarments, Marx coolly noted that the nun had been wearing a white bra and a blue slip.
Margaret Ann was also wearing blue oxford-type shoes, laces both tied. Some killers take the shoes off and even find ingenious uses for the laces. This guy just left them as is. Margaret Ann’s eyeglasses, with their cheap gray plastic frames, were found lying on the floor approximately eight inches from her right hand. The right lens had “what appeared to be smudges of blood.”
Bodie was taking photos of Margaret Ann’s body when the morgue attendants arrived to take her to the next stop on her journey to the grave. As the attendants lifted her up, Bodie spied a pool of dried blood on the terrazzo floor, under the right side of Margaret Ann’s head and shoulders. Bodie bent down to examine the stain closer. It looked oval in shape, about nine inches in diameter.
The body was finally removed at 10:30 A.M. But that made it much easier to minutely search the floor. Sister Margaret Ann was a stickler for spotless ones. The area where her body had lain yielded nothing—no stray cigarette butt, no hairs, no fibers, no spit, no blood, nothing. Without one piece of physical evidence pointing in the direction of the killer, it was the kind of case that not only would be difficult to solve, it would be difficult to prosecute.
There was also no evidence Margaret Ann Pahl had been killed someplace else and then transported here. The sacristy itself was the crime scene. Standard operating procedure on homicide investigations is to measure the area where the crime is committed. Marx produced a tape measure and engaged it. The room’s dimensions came in at eleven by seventeen feet.
The sacristy had two windows and two entrances. Both doorways were located on the south wall. The first solid oak door entered from the right side of the chapel, in back of the Communion rail that fronted the pews. This door was closed and locked when Margaret Ann was foun
d. A key was needed to unlock this door from the outside, which Sister Madelyn Marie used to get in. Bodie dusted the doorknob for prints. He came up with nothing; same with the door.
The second door to the sacristy had an older type of lock that required a skeleton key. The door was found closed, and unlocked with the skeleton key inserted from the inside of the sacristy. This door led to a narrow passageway that in turn led to the stairwell. Bodie checked the second door. Again, no prints. Whoever the guy was, he had been careful not to leave anything behind. He was either forensically aware or damn lucky.
One of the two windows in the sacristy was located on the north side of the room, facing the parking area for the old morgue. The second window faced Twenty-third Street. Both windows had off-white window shades that Margaret Ann kept halfway down. While the window shade on the Twenty-third Street window was in the normal position, the window shade on the window overlooking the morgue parking area was pulled all the way down, just below the bottom section of the window. A large wooden armchair that usually sat in front of the window was pushed against the right side of the window shade.
The killer had probably pulled the shade down and put the chair against it to be sure it stayed in place while he went about his cowardly business. The morgue parking area saw a lot of passenger and car traffic.
Marx wrote this in his report:
“It is this investigator’s opinion that a stranger to the surroundings in the chapel/sacristy would not normally have the incentive or initiative to lower the window shade to avoid being detected.”
That was police speak for an “inside job.” Marx was asserting, however well politically, that an insider who knew the chapel and its environs well, especially the sacristy, had committed the murder.
The sacristy was bare of furniture, save for the aforementioned chair, three small wooden utility tables, and two portable kneelers. Normally found on the small table in front of the window, someone had deliberately placed the kneelers in an unusual place under the Twenty-third Street side window. Usually stored in the cabinet behind the table, a cardboard box containing altar decorations and draperies had been placed on a table in front of the storage cabinets. Margaret Ann had moved these items just prior to her murder.
Father Swiatecki came in to check that nothing was missing. He did a quick inventory. It appeared nothing had been stolen or tampered with. Marx wrote in his notes that the light switch was on when Sister Madelyn Marie found the body. While the murder had occurred in the sacristy, the killer might have come through the chapel to commit the crime. Time to check out the chapel.
Lying on top of the altar were assorted boxes of pins that had been placed there by Margaret Ann. A wooden chair, similar to the one found in the sacristy, had been placed in front of the altar. The chair was turned sideways to allow Margaret Ann to stand on it to reach the high draperies behind the altar. The altar cloth that was found wrapped around Margaret Ann’s arm had previously been attached with tape to the top of the altar where Margaret Ann had been working.
Searching the pews, on the middle right side, Bodie found a prayer book and small purse. At first, the cops thought they were Margaret Ann’s, until Sister Mary Clarisena appeared to claim them as her own. Not so the neatly folded altar cloth. Marx found it in the first pew, left side, at the extreme right end of the chapel. It was exactly where Sister Madelyn Marie had placed it, after finding it lying on the floor in the hall.
Marx gave it to Sister Kathleen. She unfolded it slowly. As she did, it became evident that it was bloodstained. After a few more questions, Marx determined how the cloth had gotten into the pew through Sister Madelyn’s actions. He gave it to Bodie for bagging as evidence. When it was brought into headquarters from the crime scene, the TPD would mark, tag, and place it the evidence safe. The crime lab would later examine the cloth and see what they could come up with.
The chapel’s highly polished terrazzo floor was pristine. There was absolutely no evidence to indicate that there was any type of struggle at or near the altar when Margaret Ann was working. Plain and simple, the killer had surprised and killed her in the sacristy.
Marx and Bodie then spent some time being escorted through the hospital to Margaret Ann’s dorm room. They searched it, finding nothing unusual. Walking back downstairs, retracing Margaret Ann’s movements to the sacristy, Marx interviewed the Sisters of Mercy who knew Margaret Ann and had been on the scene when she was discovered.
Sister Madelyn Marie explained how she had found the altar cloth in the hallway outside and placed it on the pew where Bodie found it. Marx asked her why she thought Sister Margaret Ann had been raped. It was a good question, considering that was, after her scream, her first verbalization of what she had seen, or thought she had seen.
“I don’t know why I thought that,” she answered. “I assumed it from what I heard the others saying.” Then, in the kind of cold, unemotional prose common to police reports, Marx wrote, “Sister seemed to become upset…that it may have not been a man and that there may have not been a rape.”
“It could have been me,” she said suddenly. “I have big hands. I could have done it. But I was in my room until after it happened.”
Madelyn Marie was suddenly suggesting herself as a suspect? It didn’t make any sense. But she continued with that theme: maybe it was a woman and not a man who had killed Sister Margaret Ann.
“Did you know what they say about nuns? What they do together, when they are alone? They will say this is what caused the death.”
The sister was clearly implying some sexual link to the crime. None of the interview made any sense. Kathleen’s movements prior to the murder were easily accounted for. So why was she “copping” to a crime she clearly could not have committed?
There would be plenty of time afterward to analyze why someone implicates himself in a crime that he clearly could not have committed. The immediate goal was to catch Margaret Ann’s murderer. Toward that goal, Marx finished his interview with the nun and left the hospital. He drove to the county morgue and consulted with assistant coroner Dr. Renate Fazekas, who had been assigned to the case.
“She was strangled prior to the stabbing,” Fazekas told Marx in his preliminary report. Fazekas’s basis for this conclusion was “visible petechia on the face.” Petechia is small red or purple spots on the surface of the skin or mucous membranes as the result of tiny hemorrhages of blood vessels. When a person is strangled, petechia of the face is common.
“It appeared the victim was strangled from behind by an individual with large hands,” Fazekas also stated to Marx, who noted, “This was the doctor’s opinion due to the fact that a rather large bruise was noticed on the back of her neck.”
Fazekas, however, cautioned Marx that they couldn’t determine the cause of death until a complete autopsy was performed. That, of course, was and is SOP for coroners. As for sexual assault, it was impossible to be determined until the results of the rape kit came in and Margaret Ann’s body was completely examined. The rape kit consisted of vaginal swabs, oral swab, rectal swab, fingernail clippings from the left and right hands, hair samples from the skull and pubis, and a blood specimen from Margaret Ann.
The idea was to group and type the blood on each item, and then compare it to the blood taken from Margaret Ann’s body. Police forensic specialists would also attempt to determine the presence of sperm in Margaret Ann’s vagina, mouth, and/or rectum. Rape could easily be proven if any foreign fluid matched that of a suspect. The coroner would also attempt to determine if there was any flesh or blood under the nails of Margaret Ann that could be compared to the killer’s, if and when they caught him.
Fazekas opined to Marx that while it was uncertain until after autopsy how the victim died, it was the doctor’s opinion that the victim had probably been strangled prior to being stabbed. That’s why there was so little bleeding—when a person’s heart stops, she doesn’t bleed.
Marx left to continue his investigation.
As the n
ew decade of the 1980s took shape, Toledo was going through profound social and economic changes.
With Japanese cars having successfully challenged and won the pockets of the American car-buying public with their superior products, cities like Toledo that relied on American auto factory employment for their livelihood saw production slow down. The city’s economy plunged.
The Diocese of Toledo was going through changes just like anything else. But one thing they still had were the go-to guys in the TPD. They were the staunch Catholic cops, like Sergeant John Connors, who were called by the diocese when someone charged a priest with sexually abusing a child in their care. That was when the tacit agreement between the TPD and the diocese to protect the priests so accused came into play. Suddenly any criminal charges against the pedophiliac priest would disappear as quickly as the diocese transferred the accused to some remote parish in the county.
None of this would become public until the Toledo Blade published an article on July 31, 2005, that said in part, “Over the past 50 years, those sworn to enforce the law and protect children repeatedly have aided and abetted the diocese in covering up sexual abuse by priests, a three-month investigation by The Blade shows.
“Beyond past revelations that the diocese quietly moved pedophile priests from parish to parish, The Blade investigation shows that at least once a decade—and often more—priests suspected of rape and molestation have been allowed by local authorities to escape the law.”
But this was 1980 and the agreement of concealment was still in place. Dr. Lincoln Vail was not a Catholic. He knew little about the religion. But that night, the night after the morning that Margaret Ann Pahl was murdered, he discussed the Swift Team call to the chapel with his wife, Colleen. He told her all about his encounter with the murdered nun.