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Authors: Fred Rosen
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attempted to protect the letter for fingerprints; he had touched only the top of it. He immediately notified his lieutenant, William Kina, and captain, James Navarre, that he’d received an anonymous letter with information regarding the Pahl homicide.
Mindful of the chain of custody necessary for a conviction, Kina asked for Sparks to dust the letter for prints and then put it with the other evidence logged into the property room. Steve Bodie came to the Homicide Desk per Marx’s request to process the letter. At 11:30 A.M . Bodie took possession of it.
Here’s what the letter said:
Here’s a tip on the Mercy hospital nun murder: Try [name blacked out by police].
he has a perverse hate for the Catholic Church and especially nuns (a bitter and imbalanced ex-Catholic himself)
he’s very sick and needs help—a psychopath with a great potential for violence
he’s a woman hater—also sexually deviant he’s into devil worship
Many times, he has “jokingly” threatened exactly this type of crime
I hope you can help him and stop this before it happens again—it’s in your hands!
There is nothing in the police files that points to the identity of the person whose name is blacked out in the police report. Nor is there anything in the files indicating that police took the note any more seriously than the psychic and the dreamer. Marx, though, had a better idea than the psychic and the dreamer. He would interview the priest, Father Gerald Robinson. But he wasn’t the only one thinking about him. Robinson was very much on the minds of the people back at Mercy Hospital.
To say that the place had been shaken up would be putting it mildly. Murder not only ripples through generations, it ripples through the society in which it has been committed. For those working in Mercy Hospital, they had to come to work knowing a human life had been deliberately taken in a place dedicated to saving life. It was an irony that produced not only sadness, but anger.
“The staff at the hospital knew ,” Dave Davison says bluntly. “Every time we went in there to question people, the hospital workers would tell me off the record, ‘Robinson pounded on nuns.’ But no one would give a statement on record saying that. The hospital workers were afraid to talk openly. They told me, ‘You talk, you’re fired.’
“The order came from on high.”
CHAPTER 5
An American First
What was unfolding in Toledo, Ohio, in April 1980 was a first in American criminal law, yet it came in under the national news radar.
The country was concerned with freeing American hostages in Iran being held by Islamic fundamentalists at the U.S. embassy. Who cared what happened in a northern backwater town? With only three television networks, Toledo was a lowly network affiliate that rarely saw national coverage. Yet the Toledo cops were dipping their feet into history.
No priest had ever been charged, let alone convicted, of murdering a nun in the United States. Even going back to colonial times in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there are no recorded instances of such a bizarre event. When priests do show up in pamphlets of colonial accounts of crimes, they appear as pristine father confessors to the murderers in question. As the United States spread across the continent in the nineteenth century, priests found themselves in all kinds of situations on the American frontier. Their brethren back east ministered to the poor and infirm in northern tenements.
In the twentieth century, a new element entered the mix that would eventually complicate the Pahl case. Motion pictures would forevermore color the public view of priests as honest, virtuous, and godly men, making it that much more difficult to believe any one of them could be capable of committing murder. When motion pictures became the chief disseminators of priestly values, it wasn’t just Catholics who thought of priests this way, it was everyone who went to the movies.
Whether a
Mindful of the chain of custody necessary for a conviction, Kina asked for Sparks to dust the letter for prints and then put it with the other evidence logged into the property room. Steve Bodie came to the Homicide Desk per Marx’s request to process the letter. At 11:30 A.M . Bodie took possession of it.
Here’s what the letter said:
Here’s a tip on the Mercy hospital nun murder: Try [name blacked out by police].
he has a perverse hate for the Catholic Church and especially nuns (a bitter and imbalanced ex-Catholic himself)
he’s very sick and needs help—a psychopath with a great potential for violence
he’s a woman hater—also sexually deviant he’s into devil worship
Many times, he has “jokingly” threatened exactly this type of crime
I hope you can help him and stop this before it happens again—it’s in your hands!
There is nothing in the police files that points to the identity of the person whose name is blacked out in the police report. Nor is there anything in the files indicating that police took the note any more seriously than the psychic and the dreamer. Marx, though, had a better idea than the psychic and the dreamer. He would interview the priest, Father Gerald Robinson. But he wasn’t the only one thinking about him. Robinson was very much on the minds of the people back at Mercy Hospital.
To say that the place had been shaken up would be putting it mildly. Murder not only ripples through generations, it ripples through the society in which it has been committed. For those working in Mercy Hospital, they had to come to work knowing a human life had been deliberately taken in a place dedicated to saving life. It was an irony that produced not only sadness, but anger.
“The staff at the hospital knew ,” Dave Davison says bluntly. “Every time we went in there to question people, the hospital workers would tell me off the record, ‘Robinson pounded on nuns.’ But no one would give a statement on record saying that. The hospital workers were afraid to talk openly. They told me, ‘You talk, you’re fired.’
“The order came from on high.”
CHAPTER 5
An American First
What was unfolding in Toledo, Ohio, in April 1980 was a first in American criminal law, yet it came in under the national news radar.
The country was concerned with freeing American hostages in Iran being held by Islamic fundamentalists at the U.S. embassy. Who cared what happened in a northern backwater town? With only three television networks, Toledo was a lowly network affiliate that rarely saw national coverage. Yet the Toledo cops were dipping their feet into history.
No priest had ever been charged, let alone convicted, of murdering a nun in the United States. Even going back to colonial times in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there are no recorded instances of such a bizarre event. When priests do show up in pamphlets of colonial accounts of crimes, they appear as pristine father confessors to the murderers in question. As the United States spread across the continent in the nineteenth century, priests found themselves in all kinds of situations on the American frontier. Their brethren back east ministered to the poor and infirm in northern tenements.
In the twentieth century, a new element entered the mix that would eventually complicate the Pahl case. Motion pictures would forevermore color the public view of priests as honest, virtuous, and godly men, making it that much more difficult to believe any one of them could be capable of committing murder. When motion pictures became the chief disseminators of priestly values, it wasn’t just Catholics who thought of priests this way, it was everyone who went to the movies.
Whether a
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