[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to this repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]
[Laura E. Franey
is Associate
Professor of English at Millsaps College, where she teaches Victorian
literature, Communication Studies, writing, and much else. She’s the author of Victorian
Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855-1902 (2003)
and the editor of the first scholarly edition of the first novel published in
the United States by someone of Japanese descent—Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl
(originally published in 1902).]
On Serial
Killing and Netflix’s The Keepers: An
Unexplained Absence
Law enforcement officers sometimes wrongly consider a set of
individual murders the work of a serial killer. A strong incentive exists for
such a misinterpretation: Find the guy (and, yes, serial killers are almost
exclusively men) who committed one of the horrible crimes, and you’ve caught
the guy who committed all of them. On the other hand, could there be an
incentive for someone to downplay or ignore the possibility that a set of
murders could be the work of a serial killer? The way femicides (the killing of
women, specifically) are treated in The
Keepers, a seven-part true-crime series directed by Ryan White and released
in May 2017, suggests there may be. Here I’ll explore the way that ideological
fervor against patriarchal institutions may have encouraged White to ignore the
possibility that a serial killer was responsible for the two murders
investigated in the series.
The
Keepers offers an intriguing blend of two storylines that have been
popular in documentary storytelling in the last ten or fifteen years. The first
storyline is the unsolved-murder investigation (á la Someone Knows Something, a podcast, or Disappeared, a television series). The second storyline is the
discovery of a cover-up of sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests (examples
include Deliver Us From Evil [dir.
Amy Berg, 2006] and Mea Maxima Culpa [dir.
Alex Gibney, 2012]). However, The Keepers
does not bring together the two types of storylines all that smoothly. Brian
Lowry laments that the series “splinters off in several directions,” and New York Times critic
Mike Hale says that the “shifts back and forth” between the two plots “can be
jarring.” This failed intertwining may arise from the fact that the potential
link between the two types of crimes explored in the series, the murder of two
young women and the continuous sexual assault of high school girls, is tenuous,
resting almost exclusively on the statements
of one woman, Jean Hargadon Wehner, who came forward (as a “Jane Doe”)
in the 1990s to tell police and the Archdiocese of Baltimore that she was now
remembering having been raped and sodomized repeatedly at her Catholic
all-girls’ high school, Archbishop Keough High School, between 1968 and 1972.
She also communicated to them that she was now remembering having been taken by
one of the abusive priests to see the dead body of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a
former teacher at the school who had disappeared on Nov. 7, 1969, and whose
dead body was found on January 3, 1970, thrown on a kind of makeshift dump
site. Wehner said the priest, Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, leaned down close to her
as she knelt next to the dead Sister Cathy and said “See what happens when you
say bad things about people?”
You are likely wondering at this point what serial killers have to
do with any of this. Isn’t this clearly a case of motivated killing by someone
who wished to keep their own abuse from getting exposed? Well, maybe—or maybe
not. The first episode had already informed viewers that Sister Cathy was not
the only young woman abducted and killed in the Baltimore area in November
1969. Only five days after the 26-year-old Cathy disappeared, a 20-year-old
woman, Joyce Malecki, was also abducted. Her body was found the next day,
face-down in a stream out by Fort Meade, with her hands tied behind her back
with a knapsack cord. The Keepers
makes a somewhat weak attempt to link the two murders, but not through a serial
killer, as those who consume a lot of true crime media might expect. Instead,
the series links them, tenuously, through what one
commentator has called a “serial perpetrator”—the abusive priest, Maskell. Though
Malecki never attended Keough High School and did not seem to have known Rev.
Maskell personally, White pushes a conspiracy theory that has her death being
orchestrated by Maskell. The proof? Maskell’s name was printed with two other
priests’ names on the sympathy card that St. Clement Parish sent to Joyce
Malecki’s parents after her death.
What makes more sense, especially if we explore the simplest
explanations of crime first, would be to see a serial killer behind the deaths
of the two women. The phrase “serial killer” is never uttered in the series,
however, and the idea of a murderer attacking and killing women he had never
met before is dismissed. One of the two amateur investigators featured in the
series, Abbie Schaub, a former Keough student who enjoyed Sister Cathy’s
English classes, says that random killing seems unlikely. “Back then,” Abbie
Schaub says, “random abductions and murders of young women were almost unheard
of.” While it is true that the term “serial
killer” had not yet been coined when these two murders happened, it
is true that kidnappings and murders of young women did happen in the 1960s and
1970s. In fact, each fall for two years after these unnatural deaths saw
another young female Baltimorean disappear and
was wind up dead, with her body not concealed particularly well. In October
1970, the body of sixteen-year-old Pamela Conyers was found in a
wooded area, after she was last seen at Harundale Mall. (Both Sister Cathy and
Joyce were likely shopping when they were abducted.) In September
1971, the body of a 16-year-old girl, Grace (Gay) Montayne, was
found in a vacant lot in South Baltimore. It does not seem unreasonable to
think today that a serial killer may have been responsible for all four of
these deaths.
But Ryan
White’s series never mentions this possibility, because White is, ultimately,
less interested in exploring all possible angles on the deaths of the two women
than he is in telling a story of corruption and cover-up by a patriarchal
institution, the Catholic Church, that in his eyes sacrifices women’s and
children’s well-being for power, money, and the continuation of all-male
authority. This theme continues his politically-themed work in his previous
documentary, The Case Against 8,
which chronicled the story of same-sex couples and their lawyers struggling for
the right to marriage against the combined power of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints and the Catholic Church. White crusades to change systems
and to advocate for the individual’s freedom vis-à-vis institutions; he’s not interested in going down the
true-crime path of chasing a serial killer who may have killed a few women he
randomly met at a shopping mall. Of course, though, Cesnik’s and Malecki’s
deaths almost certainly emerged out of misogyny, whether that misogyny was the
kind that would allow a Church to cover-up the rapes of a priest or the kind
that pushed a man to kidnap, assault and murder girls and young women he didn’t
know. No matter who killed them, Cathy and Joyce and Gay and Pamela suffered
terror, pain, and death because they were women in a society that didn’t care a
whole lot about their lives.
[Memorial
Day series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? True crime stories you’d highlight?]
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