When Satan Wore a Cross

by Fred Rosen

  Unfortunately, Marlo had more than a little difficulty in her childhood. Like many millions of Americans, her mother, Doris, suffered from depression, which was serious enough to keep her homebound. Father Chet Warren used to stop by to counsel her. Father Warren, a tall, good-looking, broad-shouldered man, belonged to the priestly order of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.

  Originally founded in the seventeenth century, the Oblates died out at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It would take another two hundred years before it was officially revived four days before Christmas in France, on December 21, 1875, by Pope Pius IX. In 1903 the Oblates control was decentralized and Westernized, with branches opened in England and the United States. It was in this order that Father Chet Warren served. Unfortunately, Warren had some problems too. It started with what he thought was his charm.

  “After these counseling sessions with my mother,” Marlo would later write, “he would encourage her to go upstairs and rest. When that happened, he’d watch me. On those occasions, he began sexually abusing me,” Marlo would later write in a letter to the Toledo Diocese.

  The abuse escalated, she later claimed in court documents.

  “By the time I was in third grade, he [Father Warren] became physically violent as well. Sexual contact was becoming rougher and I would cry. Once he pulled my pigtails, slapped me across the face several times and told me this was just the beginning. Another time he sodomized me.”

  But that was nothing compared to the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of the cult. Marlo would later recall her father and grandfather being members of a satanic cult that included three Toledo priests, including Chet Warren. This cult met regularly, performing satanic rituals to honor their god, the fallen angel Satan. Marlo had been a part of many of them. Children were not only sexually molested during these ceremonies, they were ordered to observe as the adults abused other young victims.

  One day when she was five, her father took her to Calvary Cemetery. There, the cult members were waiting. Marlo was put into a coffin and cockroaches put in to keep her company. Even for a healthy adult, such an experience would be mind-blowing, but for a child, it could have put Marlo into a catatonic state. Instead, her resiliency kept her going. After what had only been a few minutes but felt like forever, she was taken out of the box and the cockroaches crawled away.

  That same year, Marlo’s pet lab, Smoky, died. She loved Smoky. Like most kids, she was sad, but lo and behold! Marlo’s dad woke her up a few nights later with the good news.

  “Darling, we are going to see Smoky!”

  That’s what Marlo’s father promised. The five-year-old got all excited at the prospect of seeing her beloved Smoky again. Like most kids, she had no understanding that death was final, and besides, she believed her dad.

  “We arrived at an old house and down in the basement was a large table on which Smoky was laying. Dad and other adults changed into black robes.” Marlo’s sister grabbed a meat cleaver that someone gave her and proceeded to hack up Smoky. Arms and legs and head and blood seemed to be flying everywhere. When it was over, the cult had a message for Marlo.

  “Chet told me that because I was such a bad girl [my sister] had to hurt Smoky like this. He then told me if I really loved Smoky, I would be able to put him back together and make him come back to life.”

  If Marlo was to be believed, a satanic cult including members of the Toledo’s priesthood and other prominent Toledo citizens was operating within the Toledo Diocese. They appeared smart enough to use satanic mumbo-jumbo to instill guilt in an easily manipulated underage victim, the purpose being to avoid detection by the police. It is the kind of MO that so-called experts on satanic activity point to when saying there is an epidemic of this aberrant behavior.

  Had the abuse stopped with dog mutilation, it never would have become relevant to the Pahl murder case, but it didn’t. Five years later, things got worse.

  “At age 11, they made me ingest an eyeball,” she later told. “They wanted me to know they were always watching me.”

  Marlo claimed that her father had some sort of deal going with Warren. Her father would drop her off with Warren, who was working at St. Vincent’s Hospital. The priest would then take her to his room, where he’d sell her sexual services to men who wanted a bit of sadomasochism with the Catholic school girl. It was in this context, of selling Marlo’s sexual services, that the door to Warren’s room allegedly opened.

  In walked the grim figure of Father Gerald Robinson. Warren left them alone and closed the door. Like most childhood abuse victims, Marlo Damon said nothing to anyone. She felt ashamed, like it was her fault. She repressed the memories of what she claimed had been done to her by the cult and Father Robinson, forever, or so she thought.

  The kind of behavior Marlo Damon describes is an almost textbook definition of ritual abuse.

  Ritual abuse involves the sexual, physical, and psychological assault on a victim, by one or more “bad guys.” The idea is to bring a ritual to fruition, thus satisfying the demands of the deity in question. It’s important to understand that like most criminals, ritual abusers see nothing wrong with what they are doing. They are doing it to fill some inner, warped need. Since children are society’s most defenseless individuals, ritual abusers target kids who can’t fight back.

  While popular literature suggests that some religious rituals involve sexual activity, the evidence trotted out to prove this is usually either anecdotal or fictional. However, historical literature suggests that an infamous Black Mass was conducted for the Marquise de Montespan, Louis XIV’s mistress. The marquise’s body served as the altar. The host was consecrated by sticking pieces into her vagina, and then they were consumed.

  The idea of using the human body as an altar in a Black Mass was further described in detail in Anton Szandor LaVey’s Satanic Bible, first published in 1969. While it is very rare for a child to be included in such sexual activity, it has happened and is documented. According to a major study into ritual abuse in Great Britain, three cases surfaced there where children were ritually abused as part of a satanic ceremony.

  Considering his predilection for ceremony and ritual, it would not be hard to imagine a priest engaging in a satanic ceremony, especially during the time period in question when Satanism was a “hot” topic. The popularity of The Exorcist, The Omen, the Manson murder case in particular, LaVey’s book, and other totems of popular culture had opened people’s minds to the idea that Satanism actually existed in society and not just on screen or page.

  Believing Robinson was a Satanist was difficult to swallow, but was it any more of a stretch than believing him to be a murderer? While he looked totally benign, Dave Davison had interviewed witnesses at the scene of the crime who all claimed the priest shook nuns when he got angry at them. If that was true, then the Church had early signs in the 1970s that Robinson had problems. Couple that with Damon’s rape claim, and that made two major felonies Father Gerald Robinson was implicated in.

  No matter. The Toledo Diocese had now put Father Gerald Robinson back on a career path suitable for a midlife priest who still had a lot to give his parishioners.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Invisible Men

  In 1996, the Toledo Diocese gave Jerry Robinson a promotion. Bishop James Hoffmann transferred him to the top spot at St. Vincent de Paul. Of course, Robinson was the only priest there. That still meant he was the big kahuna. But somewhat curiously, the church directory lists him as “administrator,” rather than pastor.

  The St. Vincent de Paul self history notes:

  “In 1996, Fr. Thomas Gorman came to lead our flock. His sense of humor was wonderful and was a fine leader of our Parish. Fr. Gorman’s stay was brief, however. Later that year, a kind, caring Pastor came to St. Vincent de Paul. He was Fr. Gerald Robinson.”

  What had happened was that St. John the Evangelist, another church in the parish, needed the dynamic Gorman’s help. The parish was facing a contentious church renovat
ion project. Having served there before, beginning in 1959, “I remembered the people from then as good people who I got along with well. I had good memories of my time here in the 1960s,” Gorman later told a reporter.

  That left a vacancy back at St. Vincent de Paul. Into the breach came Father Gerald Robinson.

  “His gentle hand led us in worship for about nine months. In that time he made many friends in the parish. But, unfortunately, his stay at St. Vincent de Paul was brief…”

  Robinson served only nine months at the church. Even for him that was a brief time. Interestingly enough, when Robinson left St. Vincent de Paul, something strange happened. The church’s Web site just notes the superficial details:

  “We had the honor to have Bishop James Hoffman come to lead us in worship. He wanted to take an active role in the Central Cities Ministries of Toledo, which St. Vincent de Paul is a part of. Since he spent some time at our Parish, he figured we were his best choice. He fit in very well with us and it seemed he never left. He remembered a lot of our parishioners from when he was with us in the 1970’s. He then took a role in getting us our current Pastor.”

  What was not addressed in the church’s public history was the strangeness of it all. Not only did Robinson have a brief tenure at St. Vincent de Paul’s, a bishop—not another priest, not a member of the monsignori, the bishop himself! of the 300,000-plus member diocese—took the place of a lowly priest who was a whisper away from being indicted for murder.

  As if the case were not weird enough, the diocese decided to take a page out of H. G. Wells.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, “who I am or what I am. I’ll show you. By Heaven! I’ll show you.” That is what Wells wrote in his 1897 novel The Invisible Man. That stranger, it turns out, is Griffin, a chemist who tinkered with the unnatural at peril to his humanity. He does indeed get his life’s desire to become invisible, but the trade-off is that the invisibility formula he invented slowly turns him into a psychotic murderer. The Invisible Man had the hubris to think that because he was invisible, he was all-powerful, only to find he had the same weakness as all mortal men.

  “Then came a mighty effort, and the Invisible Man threw off a couple of his antagonists and rose to his knees. Kemp clung to him in front like a hound to a stag, and a dozen hands gripped, clutched, and tore at the Unseen. The tram conductor suddenly got the neck and shoulders and lugged him back.

  “Down went the heap of struggling men again and rolled over. There was, I am afraid, some savage kicking. Then suddenly a wild scream of ‘Mercy! Mercy’ that died down swiftly to a sound like choking.”

  Gerald Robinson had certainly not been proven a psychotic murderer, or anything close to it. The diocese he served, however, chose to treat him like Griffin after his brief stay at St. Vincent de Paul’s. From 1997 on, Robinson’s activities within the Church begin to get murky. There are inconsistencies in the Church’s own record over where Robinson was and what he was doing.

  By the millennium, Robinson had been taken off the official rolls. He was not listed or indexed in the Official Catholic Directory, 2000–2005. It was as neat a disappearing act as anything Griffin had done through his diaspora over the English countryside. Here in Toledo, the diocese had done well. The only times Robinson surfaced in an official capacity during this period were special guest appearances at St. Hyacinth’s, another of Toledo’s Polish-speaking parishes. Every Sunday during Lent, Robinson celebrated the Polish Lamentation of Our Lord’s Passion at St. Hyacinth’s.

  In most “cold” cases like the Pahl homicide, after a certain passage of years, witnesses begin to die, not the least of which are the suspects. In the Pahl murder, there was only one, Robinson. Despite those mysterious accounts of a strange Chicano/African American hanging out around the chapel at the time of the murder, none of those racist “leads” had ever panned out.

  By all accounts, Father Robinson was an alcoholic, though no one ever saw him drunk in public, which meant he imbibed in private. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t loaded when he was in public. Many alcoholics function quite well when they have a high blood alcohol level. Unlike most people, their tolerance for alcohol is enormous.

  Comparing photographs of Jerry Robinson from 1964, 1980, and 2004, the difference is startling. He goes from a robust-looking man in 1964 and 1980 to a sagging old man in record time. Alcohol breaks down tissue elasticity. There are signs that alcohol, and potentially murder, took an incredible toll on him. His face looks like it melted. If that were any indication of what his liver was like, the prime suspect in Margaret Ann Pahl’s murder had a pretty good shot, no pun intended, of avoiding prosecution by simply dying.

  Considering the effort that had gone into making certain Robinson avoided prosecution, a lot of people in Toledo were hoping that would happen. Forget about a cold case; they wanted this one in the deep freeze. The problem was Dave Davison wouldn’t look the other way.

  Davison felt terrible when he first saw Sister Margaret Ann Pahl on the terrazzo floor of the sacristy. Perhaps he identified too much. He felt that it could just as easily have been his grandmother.

  He knew what had happened in the Pahl case. He knew the department had dropped it deliberately. Any cop with half a brain knew that. How else to explain a “hands off” on the prime suspect? Davison went about his business, determined not to drop the case, regardless of what the department said.

  In 1988, Davison had worked his way up to acting sergeant. On a cold December 16, he stopped a kidnapping in progress without even getting out of his police car. Despite the cold, he had been driving around with the window down so he could hear if there was trouble.

  “If you keep the window up and the heater on you cannot monitor the outside effectively. Plus you have the radio traffic,” Davison continues.

  Suddenly, a car rammed into him.

  “When the lady made the correct decision to hit me she did the smart thing and gunned her engine. Because I had the window down I heard that engine pitch so I leaned forward so I could look behind me. That is how most of my injuries happened.”

  Moments before, inside that vehicle, thirty-two-year-old Selma Blair; her two sons, Abel, age eleven months, and Stuart, age three years; plus Mrs. Blair’s sixty-year-old mother, June Clayton, had been kidnapped by a knife-wielding assailant. The kidnapper held his knife to the throat of eleven-month-old Abel, and Blair was forced to get behind the wheel. Then she did something few mothers or fathers would have the courage to do. Knowing they had a better chance of dying if they kept going with the knife-wielding “bad guy,” she rammed into Davison’s police car, which was stopped at a light, to break up the kidnapping in progress.

  “Since my shoulder harness was stretched by my pulling forward to turn so I could look behind me, when she hit me I was pulled backwards hard. My head struck the headrest and I really did see bright flashes of light for a few seconds.”

  Davison eventually reached for his radio and called for a life squad.

  “The harness dug into my chest so hard I honestly thought I was having a heart attack. The wind had been knocked out of me. The lady who hit me ran up to my vehicle and opened my door.”

  “Aren’t you going to chase that man?” said Blair.

  “I undid my harness and fell out of the car and into the street. I remember there was a lot of snow and slush. I could not stand up at that point. I asked the lady to describe the man and to tell which way he had run. I put that information out over the radio and told the dispatcher to send the crews that were coming to go after the suspect. I also asked him to cancel the life squad because by this time I knew I was not having a heart attack.”

  Cops caught the kidnapper a few blocks away. By that time, the intersection was swimming with cops and ambulance crews. “By that time I was able to stand. I told the fire and rescue crews that I was fine so they left. Police crews kept coming over to me and saying that the dispatcher was calling me but I never heard him. I got into my vehicle and drove myself to the
hospital.

  “At the hospital I kept repeating, ‘A lady hit me with her car.’ The other people in the waiting room moved away from me quickly.”

  After Davison kept repeating himself, someone finally figured out that he had a big-time concussion.

  “While they were treating me on a gurney, a command officer walked into the room and told me that the amount of damage to me showed that I could not have been wearing my shoulder harness so all the injuries were my own fault. At that point, the doctor who was standing there lifted up my shirt and showed him the mark across my chest where the harness had dug in. The command officer stormed out of the room without another word.”

  His luck holding true, Dave Davison really became the accident’s only physical victim. Holding true to form, the TPD “Unusual Incident Report” contains more information on the condition of the damaged police car than Davison’s body. The injuries included broken vertebrae, partial hearing loss, and severe concussion. But the TPD in its infinite wisdom didn’t believe him.

  “They regularly sent a command officer out to my house to make sure I was at home and not running around. The command officer would knock on my door with his nightstick, ring the bell, and yell my name until I got out of bed and made it to the door. This kept up until I tried to go back.

  “The concussion kicked my ass for the holidays. I had little short term memory. I made out my Christmas cards and I went to put my coat on so I could mail them out. By the time I put my coat on and picked up my car keys I had no idea why I was dressed and ready to go somewhere. Just by chance I walked past the cards on the kitchen table.

  “I interviewed for the position of full time sergeant while I was still fuzzy. They turned me down for the job because I kept looking out a window at a pigeon on a wire while they questioned me about why I should be a command officer. I think that pigeon saved me from crossing over to the dark side because they turned my promotion down.