by Fred Rosen
What the police were left with regarding physical evidence of a satanic cult operating in Lucas County was nothing. That didn’t mean Damon’s abuse didn’t happen. It might very well have and Robinson could have been party to it. But a prosecutor would be tempting fate to put Sister Marlo Damon on the stand.
The troubling diagnosis was at the end of her statement. Damon says she suffers from PTSS, which usually goes with dissociative disorder. Dissociative disorder is best known under the layman’s term “split personality.”
The nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization, the National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI), reports that dissociative disorders “are so-called because they are marked by a dissociation from or interruption of a person’s fundamental aspects of waking consciousness (such as one’s personal identity, one’s personal history, etc.).
“Dissociative disorders come in many forms, the most famous of which is dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder [author emphasis]. All of the dissociative disorders are thought to stem from trauma experienced by the individual with this disorder.”
Given the nature of its barbarity, the abuse Damon claimed as a child and teenager would easily suffice to provoke a split personality, in order to just cope with the ongoing trauma.
“The dissociative aspect is thought to be a coping mechanism—the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self. Symptoms of these disorders, or even one or more of the disorders themselves, are also seen in a number of other mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder,” NAMI continues.
Damon was chief witness to Robinson’s alleged abuse and rape. Her anonymity would be blown if she was called as a witness at the priest’s trial. That assumed, of course, that he was eventually charged with murder and there was an actual trial. If that happened, the prosecution would have to make a difficult decision. Putting on the stand a witness who has dissociative disorder immediately opens up a defense challenge to the witness’s psychological competence.
A good defense attorney would first make it a point that the jury understand that the person making the charges, despite being a nun, was also a split personality. Who was making the charges? Personality A, Personality B, or someone else? A good defense attorney would raise this question with the jury:
“How can you believe someone who makes charges of satanic abuse that are not provable by hard evidence, let alone a charge against a priest that he raped her?” That, of course would be the danger in putting Damon on the stand. If the defense damaged her credibility, it would, in turn, damage the credibility of the charges against Robinson.
That, though, would be the prosecutor’s problem. For now, police needed to stick to building their case. They put cops on Robinson to tail him to make sure he didn’t try to leave town before being charged and to get used to his routine so that when they were ready to charge him, they would know where he was.
While all of this was going on, the ink-stained wretches of the media had finally glommed onto the case. On April 23, 2004, TV satellite trucks and newspaper reporters showed up at Robinson’s home. He had a small house on Nebraska Avenue, where he used to nurse his ill mother. When she died, he stayed on. With the media there now, their suspect might not just turn rabbit; he might destroy evidence if indeed he was the “bad guy” the cops were seeking.
Forrester got a search warrant from Lucas County Common Pleas Court Judge Robert Christiansen. Armed with that warrant, he and Ross drove over to search the priest’s home. Robinson opened the screen door of his home just enough to see the badges Forrester and Ross showed him. He let them in, and they chatted in his musty living room.
The cops explained they were there as part of a reinvestigation of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl’s homicide in 1980. Then they went through the usual litany of questions: “Do you know anyone who would want to harm her? Did she have any enemies,” et al. Of course, it was all a feint for the real stuff, which didn’t take long in coming.
For the next few hours, the cops did a back-and-forth with Robinson, peppering him with questions that made it absolutely clear that they thought he was the killer. After this questioning, they finally decided to formally charge him with first-degree murder, which was what the whole charade was about in the first place. Robinson was placed under arrest for murder and advised of his constitutional rights, aka the Miranda warning that every viewer of any TV cop show knows by heart. Making matters worse, Forrester showed him the warrant. While he was being charged with murder the cops would be shaking down his place. Without putting on the cuffs, Ross escorted him out the front door, leaving his partner behind.
During the search, the cops found pictures of dead people, but not just any dead people. They were death photos of people in their coffins. The photos ranged from daguerreotypes from the early part of the twentieth century to up-to-date digital shots. They also found a pamphlet entitled The Occult. Published by a Catholic group, it was found on one of the priest’s bookshelves.
The pamphlet was shopworn from overuse. Some passages were highlighted in yellow; there were handwritten notes in the margins. While the pamphlet was standard issue to priests in the 1970s, Robinson had kept it through many moves. That alone did not mitigate toward his guilt. Many other priests, of course, possessed the same booklet in their bookshelves. None of them, however, was the prime suspect in the murder of a nun with ritualistic overtones.
CHAPTER 11
Arrest…
April 23, 2004
Coincidentally, there was a police precinct next door to Robinson’s home. The cop and the priest suspected of murder walked the few steps to the old precinct house. Even Warner Bros. had never imagined that teaming. Inside the precinct, the desk sergeant got about the paperwork of charging a man for murder. He also freed up an interrogation room for the detective.
Cops like to call them interview rooms, but they’re not. Police techniques of interrogation have vastly improved over the years; not the least of the improvements is the regular absence of force. But any way you cut it, it was still an interrogation room. The third degree, the bright light shining in a suspect’s face while the detectives shout hostile questions, has been replaced by police officers who are specially trained in the art of interrogation. They have taken college courses; attended FBI special training seminars and Homeland Security Department interrogation briefings; and studied a wide variety of articles on the fine art of getting the suspect to give you what you want.
It all starts with convincing the suspect to sign a waiver of his constitutional rights, allowing him to be interrogated without a lawyer being present. Ross got Robinson to sign the document. That allowed Ross to proceed without having to worry that something the priest said could be excluded. With the waiver signed, unless Robinson verbally invoked his right to a lawyer, which would stop the interrogation instantly, anything else he said would be used to hang him.
Ross did a few preliminary feints with background questions—what was it like working at the hospital, what were his duties, stuff like that before getting to how Robinson found out Sister Margaret Ann had been killed.
“Well, I had just gotten out of the shower,” said Robinson.
He was toweling off when the phone rang in his small efficiency. Picking up the phone from its cradle, he put the receiver to his ear.
“Father, this is Sister Phyllis Ann. Sister Margaret Ann has been killed! Come to the sacristy and quickly!”
Robinson got dressed in his priest’s uniform of cassock, white shirt, collar, black pants, and black shoes. Walking as quickly as he could—he explained to the cop that he couldn’t run in a priest’s cassock—he got to the sacristy in time to see Sister Margaret Ann’s body.
“Father Swiatecki was already there and some of the nuns.” Then, Robinson volunteered, “Father said to me, ‘Why did you do this? Why did you do i
t?’”
Because it was a statement from left field, it left Robinson mystified; he failed to respond. Then, perhaps picking up on the non sequitur, Robinson attempted some blame of his own. He proceeded to state that Swiatecki was an alcoholic. Of course, he failed to divulge that he himself had a drinking problem.
Ross was a good interrogator.
“Was he [Swiatecki] drunk in the sacristy when he said that to you?”
“No,” Robinson explained, “he was in AA.”
In going over the old reports of the homicide, Ross explained that he had come upon statements from hospital employees who claimed they had heard suspicious footsteps running away from the chapel at the time of the murder. One witness even claimed the footsteps stopped just short of Father Robinson’s door.
Robinson just shook his head.
“I was in the shower, I couldn’t hear anything.”
Ross went for the kill. He pulled out a photo of the punctured altar cloth.
“We have experts who will testify that your letter opener fits the puncture marks in this cloth,” he said, passing the picture over to Robinson. “Father, your letter opener matches the puncture wounds through the altar cloth. Why is that?”
Robinson had no answer. Ross pulled out a photo of the bloodstains on the altar cloth over the chest. He passed that one over too.
“We have experts who will testify that those bloodstains match your letter opener.”
Again, Robinson had no answer.
After almost two hours of interrogation, the cops had gotten almost nothing. Robinson was not going to make some dramatic confession; that much was sure. His lack of emotion meant that he could not be rattled by conventional interrogation methods. It was therefore time to get down to it.
Ross finished the interrogation. He had Robinson stand, cuffed his hands, and had him taken downtown for formal booking and a little stint behind bars until, and unless, he made bail. Part of that process was turning over the contents of his pockets at the city jail. In Robinson’s case, in his wallet was the card of Hank Herschel, the diocese lawyer who had entered the interrogation room in 1980.
Surely the Toledo Diocese would have the decency to provide an attorney for one of its own. They had done so in 1980, and there was no reason they wouldn’t in the millennium. Robinson was certainly owed that courtesy. After all, priests take a vow of poverty to serve the church. Instead, the Toledo Diocese went into “damage control mode,” which is a synonym for lying.
On Saturday April 24, 2004, the Toledo Diocese publicly stated, “No sexual abuse allegations were ever made against Robinson.” Of course they had! Sister Marlo Damon appeared before the Toledo Diocesan Review Board on June 11, 2003, during which appearance she implicated Robinson as one of her rapists. That had been kept private.
The next day the diocese came back with the public statement that Damon’s allegations were “not formal.” In response, Claudia Vercellotti mobilized SNAP, which was keeping Damon’s identity a secret. The Sister of Cathedral was known to most of the media as “Sister Jane Doe.” A few select reporters on the Toledo Blade also knew her identity but would not divulge it.
SNAP refuted the diocese’s charge that Damon’s allegations weren’t formal by simply pointing out that when Damon appeared before the review board, it was with a written statement, copies of which were distributed to all board members.
On Monday, April 26, 2004, the diocese turned around and claimed that Damon’s allegations weren’t sexual in nature. That was a new one. Vercellotti pointed out that the whole purpose of the review board, according to the Dallas Charter, was not only to hear sexual abuse cases, it was to protect children per the bishops’ word-of-honor promise.
The diocese came back the next day, Tuesday, April 27, 2004, with the assertion that neither Damon nor her allegations were credible. SNAP responded: No one ever advised “Jane” as such. To reinforce the diocese’s position, on April 28, Bishop Leonard Blair, the current bishop, told the press that Damon never made “sexual abuse allegations that involved Robinson.”
The next day April 29, the bishop’s office issued a retraction, saying, “perhaps he’d been misinformed.” That’s what Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) tells Major Strasser in Casablanca when Strasser asks him why he came to the Moroccan town.
“For the waters,” says Rick.
“But there are no waters in Casablanca,” Strasser counters.
Rick, a cynical man, puffs his cigarette nonchalantly and says, “I was misinformed.” And you know he wasn’t; not this guy.
For its part, the Lucas County prosecutor, now convinced Robinson had killed Pahl back in 1980, would bring the weight of the state to bear on the impending contest. They would continue to make its case, and one of the good things about being the state is that you have a big public coffer from which to draw funds for your prosecution.
The prosecution already had something on Robinson that Ross had gotten during his interrogation of the priest. In the 1980 account of the investigation was a statement that Swiatecki had turned to Robinson and said, “Why did you do this?” Now Robinson himself not only verified that account to Ross, he had volunteered that incriminating statement, knowing full well anything he said would be used against him; he signed a waiver to that effect. He had no explanation for why Swiatecki thought him a murderer, nor was any necessary.
“Let others debate and conclude. I am just an instrument of the law,” said Lieutenant Philip Gerard, brilliantly played by Barry Morse in TV’s The Fugitive.
It was as truthful a statement as anyone could make about a police officer working on a circumstantial murder case.
Arresting a priest and charging him with the murder of a nun, even in a backwater Midwest city like Toledo, is big news. “Father Gerald Robinson” became a major search term on Google, bringing up 44,300 worldwide hits. The priest indicted for killing the nun was major news in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, England, and everyplace in between. And then came the cable news charge.
Court TV was ready to offer a modest form of sensationalism, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial. That, of course, meant ratings. Some executive must have been rubbing his hands somewhere, hoping the defense would be stupid enough to have the priest try on a glove that was left at the murder scene or some spectacle like that played out on live TV.
Over on CNN’s News Night with Aaron Brown, Brown, one of the most astute and compassionate anchors in television history, tried to offer a look at the crime in the context of the priestly abuse scandals that had rocked the country. At his regular mid-hour break, Brown offered real existential perspective—the latest list of the dead soldiers in Iraq, backed up by soft, somber music.
Brown didn’t get the ratings. He was drowned out by the other cable news channels, the tabloids, and the TV “news magazines” that flocked like vultures to feed off Margaret Ann Pahl’s flesh. If any of them were interested in actually bringing any answers to the case, or some sort of closure to Pahl’s family, it got lost in the big carnival.
DNA forensic technology had not existed in 1951 or in 1980 when it could have been used to match body fluids present on or in Margaret Ann’s body. In 2004, that technology not only existed, it was proven fact. The prosecution figured if they could find some DNA on Margaret Ann’s body that matched Robinson’s, they had him cold. Problem was, she wasn’t above ground.
There she was, buried under six feet of dirt in a coffin encased in an airtight concrete vault someplace in Fremont, Ohio. Whatever was left inside tempted the prosecutors with DNA heaven. Without first informing defense attorneys of their intentions, Lucas County prosecutor Julia Bates issued an order of exhumation.
She was playing the prosecution’s ace in the hole.
On May 20, 2004, a posse of lawmen led by Ross and Cousino, joined by civilians representing the Sisters of Mercy, descended on Margaret Ann’s grave in Fremont, Ohio. The last time she had been above ground, the weather had been wet and windy. That day was wet all ri
ght, with the air feeling like a damp wool coat, about to rain at any moment, but for some reason, holding off.
Cemetery workers turned over the six feet of impacted dirt with spades and shovels, working carefully. They did not want to take the chance of damaging the vault. Soon, their shovels struck something solid in the dirt. Ropes were thrown down and attached. The vault, with the casket inside, was lifted whole out of the ground by the workers and placed gently on the green lawn of the cemetery.
Using crowbars, the workers pried up the lid. Looking inside, they saw that Margaret Ann Pahl’s pine casket was barely intact. Placed on a wide flower tray, it was transported to the Lucas County Coroner’s Office, arriving there at 1 P.M. on May 20. At the beginning of her examination, Diane Scala-Barnett, M.D., forensic pathologist and deputy coroner who was performing the second autopsy, saw that the side rail handles had come away from the coffin body and were dangling off. Noting that the soft, fiberboard casket itself had collapsed, the ME added a further element of earthiness with the observation that black and yellow mold covered parts of the waterlogged casket.
Removing the lid, Scala-Barnett had a problem; it stuck under Margaret Ann’s right arm. Upon further examination, she found that the body had been propped up by an empty “All Purpose” Frigid brand container. Also in the coffin was a more thoughtful pillow someone had carefully placed under Margaret Ann’s head.
Margaret Ann’s face was covered by a black veil. Lifting it gently, the ME saw that Margaret Ann’s features were covered with thick white mold. She wore a pair of black framed glasses. Her gray hair was still attached to her scalp. For some of the tests, Scala-Barnett had in mind, she got a break.
Margaret Ann’s skin had not decomposed; it was, instead, thick and hard. The ME supervised as the body was removed from the coffin and placed onto a gurney in a body bag. Sister Pahl had been dressed for her funeral in a blue long-sleeved habit with a stand-up collar and veil. Rosary beads surrounded her hands, which were crossed over her abdomen. Carefully, the ME removed the rosary and found that it contained not one but two crosses. There was a tarnished metal ring on the fourth finger of her left hand.