Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins close out their reunion by going down the list of the people who appeared in the Netflix documentary The Keepers, where they are today, who is still fighting, who has found peace, and who the world has lost. It is a warm, reflective conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, and about the community of survivors, investigators, journalists, and filmmakers her case brought together.
The Investigators and Advocates
Gemma gives an honest update on her own life, recovering from a broken hip, stepping back from the day-to-day advocacy, and finding peace in a quiet home in the woods. She talks about her fellow amateur investigator Abbie Schaub, who remains active in the legislative fight and helps run the official Keepers community online.
The Survivors
Shane and Gemma share where the survivors are now. Jean Hargadon Wehner, known as "Jane Doe" in the case, is doing meaningful work and published her memoir, Walking with Aletheia. Teresa Lancaster, "Jane Roe, " became an attorney and a leading public voice for survivors, helped pass Maryland's 2023 Child Victims Act, and wrote her memoir, Safe in Socks. Donna testified in Annapolis for the Child Victims Act and helped get Father Neil Magnus added to a public list of credibly accused clergy. They also remember Charles Franz and several of Sister Cathy's former students, including Kathy Hoback, the student Sister Cathy once shielded from Father Maskell, who passed away thispast year.
The Journalists and Experts
They remember journalist Bob Erlandson of the Baltimore Sun, who covered the case as it happened and died this past year at 94, and renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz, who died in 2024 at 97. Shane and Gemma also revisit Delegate C.T. Wilson, the abuse survivor who championed the Child Victims Act, and journalist Tom Nugent, whose reporting first brought the case back into the light.
The Filmmakers
Gemma catches listeners up on the team behind The Keepers, director Ryan White, producer Jessica Hargrave, and cinematographer John Benham, whose work since the series includes the Oscar-nominated, Peabody-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light. And, of course, they give a nod to Kim, who edits this very podcast.
What Comes Next
Shane and Gemma agree to keep going as the story unfolds, and invite listeners to suggest the people they would still like to hear from.
Content Warning
This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Keepers about?
The Keepers is a 2017 Netflix documentary series about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a Baltimore nun and teacher, and the allegations of abuse at Archbishop Keough High School that may be connected to her death.
Who were Jane Doe and Jane Roe?
Jean Hargadon Wehner was known as "Jane Doe" and Teresa Lancaster as "Jane Roe, " two survivors whose accounts were central to The Keepers. Both have since written memoirs and become advocates for other survivors.
What is the Maryland Child Victims Act?
Passed in 2023, the Maryland Child Victims Act removed the time limits on lawsuits for survivors of child sexual abuse. Survivors featured in The Keepers, along with Delegate C.T. Wilson, were instrumental in its passage.
Is Sister Cathy's murder solved?
No. The murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved more than fifty years later. Crisis Resources
If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:
US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673
US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453
UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000
UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222

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Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins continue their first sit-down in over a year, working through the second half of the questions listeners submitted through the show's Facebook community. This is the follow-up to "The Mary Statue and Unanswered Questions, " a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions through the Netflix documentary The Keepers, Gemma has spent more than a decade investigating what happened to Sister Cathy, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School.
The Persons of Interest
Listeners asked about the figures who have circled this case for years. Gemma explains why "Brother Bob" has never been publicly identified, how the nickname came to stand for more than one man, and why she has stepped back from the theory she put forward in her own 2019 book. She and Shane talk through how a single murder sits at the center of a web of other abuse and other suspected crimes, and why that makes Sister Cathy's case so difficult to untangle.
New Questions Around Father Koob
Gemma describes the women who have come forward in recent years with accusations against Father Gerard Koob, and walks through why, in her understanding, charges have been so hard to bring, including questions of jurisdiction and corroboration, since only some of the accusers were abused in Maryland. She recounts asking Detective Josh Battaglia to put her questions to Koob directly. Koob, who was the subject of a 2023 Baltimore Banner investigation by reporter Justin Fenton, continues to deny wrongdoing and says listeners are thinking of a different man. He has not been charged.
Who Knew, and the Attorney General's Report
Shane and Gemma discuss how much the staff at Archbishop Keough may have known, and why so many people went quiet after Sister Cathy was killed. They place it in the context of the Maryland Attorney General's 2023 report on clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, a 456-page document detailing the abuse of more than 600 children across decades and the conclusion that "no parish went untouched. " That history is part of what is driving the Archdiocese's current bankruptcy.
Joyce Malecki and the Sealed Files
The conversation turns to Joyce Malecki, the 20-year-old whose 1969 murder near Fort Meade has long been discussed alongside Sister Cathy's. Gemma updates listeners on the 2023 exhumation of Joyce's body, the family's still-unanswered request for thousands of pages of FBI files first sought in 2014, and the letter Senator Chris Van Hollen carried to the White House on their behalf. Shane makes the case for why physical evidence in an unsolved murder should never be destroyed.
Cathy's Family
Gemma reflects on why Sister Cathy's family chose to step out of the spotlight after The Keepers, the heartbreak of learning their loved one's death may not have been random, and the dignity of their decision to protect their own peace.
Content Warning
This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Gemma Hoskins?
Gemma Hoskins is a retired Baltimore teacher and former student at Archbishop Keough High School. She has spent more than a decade investigating the murder of her former teacher, Sister Cathy Cesnik, and was one of the central figures in the Netflix documentary The Keepers. She was named Maryland Teacher of the Year in 1992.
Has anyone been charged in Sister Cathy's murder?
No. The 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved, and no one has ever been charged.
What is the Maryland Attorney General's report?
Released in 2023, the report documented decades of child sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore, naming Father Joseph Maskell among its most prolific abusers and identifying more than 600 victims across the Archdiocese.
Who is investigating Sister Cathy's case today?
Detective Josh Battaglia of the Baltimore County Police Department currently handles the investigation. He took overfrom Corporal Robin Teal after her retirement.
Crisis Resources
If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:
US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673
US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453
UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000
UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
* Check out Mood and use my code SHANE for a great deal: https://mood.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This episode contains descriptions of murder, mob violence, historical racial violence, and the execution of a convicted killer. If you need to skip this content, advance past the 18:00 mark. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.
This Episode
Season 40: Fifty states, fifty forgotten crimes, America's 250th year. Episode 9 covers California and Alabama — two cases, two communities that looked at the legal system and reached for something uglier. October 10, 1890. A woman named Helen Riche is playing cards in her tavern near a California quicksilver mine when ten men in flour-sack hoods crash through the door. She does not run. She reaches up and rips the mask off the nearest man's face, and in that single act she solves the crime that is about to kill her. This is true crime history from the American frontier, and the legal system that followed would leave you cold.
December 1888, Birmingham, Alabama. A railroad engineer named Richard Hawes boards a streetcar with his eight- year-old daughter May. He gets off with her at East Lake. He gets back on alone. The body of a young girl is found floating in the lake the next morning. On the same day, Hawes is across the state line getting married. When Birmingham finds out, two thousand people march on the jail.
The Victims
Helen Matilda Riche ran the Campers' Retreat tavern on sixty-two acres near the Bradford quicksilver mine, three miles south of Middletown, California. We do not know where she was born or how she came to run a mining-camp saloon in hard hill country — the historical record is thin on her life before October 10, 1890. What it preserves is a woman who managed a clientele of mercury miners in one of the most physically dangerous industries of the era. She was shot five times during the raid. She fought back, reaching for her husband's .44 Winchester with five bullets already in her body. She died four days later. Her husband J.W. Riche died less than three months after her, his own bullet wound never having healed.
May Hawes was eight years old when her father took her on a one-way train ride to East Lake on the evening of December 3, 1888. She had been doing the work of a parent since she could walk, looking after younger siblings in a household already coming apart. She was laid out for public identification at Lockwood & Miller's Funeral Parlor in Birmingham, unidentified for a full day. A local butcher recognized her. May, her mother Emma, and her six-year-old sister Irene — all three murdered by Richard Hawes — lay in an unmarked grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Birmingham for more than 135 years. In April 2024, they finally received a headstone.
The Crimes
The Lake County White Cap raid followed personal grudges that had been tightening for months. Blackburn, a mine foreman, had been thrown out of the Campers' Retreat after a brawl with the bartender Fred Bennett. Others in the group had boundary disputes, cattle quarrels, neighborhood debts to settle. They put flour sacks over their heads and called it a community morality action — the Whitecapping movement had spread from Indiana through the Southern states and into California by 1890. The plan was to flog Bennett and run him to the county line. Helen Riche unmasked Henry Arkarro the moment the men crashed through the door, and the plan collapsed into gunfire.
Richard Hawes murdered three members of his own family to clear the way for a new marriage. Emma and Irene Hawes were found bound with curtain cord and weighted with railroad iron curve-braces in a Birmingham lake on December 8, 1888 — the same day a mob of approximately 2,000 people converged on the Jefferson County Jail demanding to hang him on the spot. Sheriff Joseph S. Smith fired into the crowd. Ten men were killed. Approximately thirty were wounded. The historical murder case that followed Hawes would take fourteen more months and a formal trial to reach the same conclusion the mob wanted.
The Investigations and Legal Outcomes
In California, ten men were arrested within days. The mining community was small; Helen Riche had identified one attacker herself. The trial opened February 6, 1891, in Lakeport — *People of the State of California v. B.F. Staley et al.* Four men were convicted of second-degree murder: Blackburn sentenced to twenty-five years, Staley and Cradwick to twenty years each, Osgood to twelve years. All four were released from San Quentin within approximately three years. The Governor had commuted Blackburn's sentence to ten years following an extensive lobbying campaign. Three years, for a home invasion that killed two people.
In Alabama, Richard Hawes was tried beginning April 22, 1889, before Judge Samuel Greene. The prosecution built the case around May's murder — the strongest evidence available, though entirely circumstantial: eyewitness testimony placing father and daughter on the streetcar together, and only the father returning. The jury deliberated fifty-five minutes. Death. After multiple appeals to the Alabama Supreme Court, all denied, Richard Hawes was hanged by Sheriff Smith on February 28, 1890 — the same man who had fired into a crowd to keep him alive for this moment. Hawes wore a geranium in his lapel. The gallows were built by a man who had served on his jury.
Historical Context
Both cases sit at a specific American intersection: communities losing faith in institutional justice and reaching for extralegal violence, with consequences that fell hardest on people who had nothing to do with the original grievance. The Whitecapping movement was already documented across Indiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi before it reached California. In Alabama, the Birmingham riot of 1888 killed ten bystanders, including Maurice Throckmorton, thirty-three, the city's postmaster, who was reportedly trying to calm the crowd when he was shot. The legal system delivered the outcome the mob demanded — it just took fourteen months and cost ten additional lives to get there.
California's legislature responded to the broader wave of hooded vigilantism during this period with enhanced anti- vigilante and anti-mask statutes. For the Hawes case, Fannie Bryant — the family's cook and a key witness for the prosecution — was herself sentenced to death for allegedly aiding Hawes. She died in a prison riot before the sentence could be carried out. Her actual level of involvement remains contested. She was a Black woman in 1880s Alabama, easily targeted by a system that offered her no protection.

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This episode contains discussions of murder, execution, racial violence, and a botched public hanging. If you need to skip any section, the chapter markers below will help you find your way around. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.
This Episode
Season 40 of Foul Play covers America's forgotten crimes — fifty states, 250 years, and the stories that slipped out of the history books. Episode 8 closes out the season with a double portrait. One case from New Hampshire. One from Colorado. Eleven years apart. Two thousand miles between them. The same question at the center of both: when the law finally catches up with a killer, does it actually deliver justice?
This is historical true crime at its most uncomfortable.
Case A: The Great Falls National Bank Murder — New Hampshire , 1897
Joseph A. Stickney was sixty-eight years old when a man walked into his bank on Good Friday morning, April 16, 1897, and cut his throat.
Stickney was the cashier of the Great Falls National Bank in Somersworth, New Hampshire — a mill city of seven thousand people where the Salmon Falls River dropped one hundred feet over a mile and powered seven textile mills. The bank had operated since 1865. On a holiday morning, with the mills closed and families walking to Mass, Stickney was alone at his desk with $150,000 in money and securities behind him.
The man who killed him was Joseph E. Kelley, twenty-four years old, born in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Kelley had been convicted in Somersworth five years earlier for breaking and entering. He had studied the bank's routine. He walked in with a blackjack, knocked Stickney to the floor, cut his throat, and left with approximately $6,000 in cash — leaving $144,000 behind.
The historical murder investigation moved fast. Kelley hired a horse team from Whitten's Stable. The team was found the next day at Phoenix Stables. On April 29, investigators searched a boarding house in Berwick, Maine, where they found a box containing a false mustache and goatee. Kelley had already crossed into Quebec on a Boston & Maine train. He was caught in a Montreal brothel, seated between two prostitutes, still wearing a woman's dress he had purchased for $10 in gold from a hotelkeeper in Quebec.
At trial in Dover, New Hampshire, in November 1897, Kelley changed his plea to guilty — but only if the hanging could be scheduled for January 16, 1898. He had a contract with the Devil, he explained, that expired January 15.
Dr. Charles Bancroft of the New Hampshire State Asylum for the Insane examined Kelley multiple times and concluded he had the instincts of a man but the judgment and capacity of a child of nine. Expert after expert called him a "high-grade imbecile. " Chief Justice Alonzo P. Carpenter, who had served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court since 1896, presided over a bench that ultimately found Kelley guilty of second-degree murder — thirty years in state prison. Kelley was reportedly disappointed. He had wanted to hang.
Case B: The Trolley Murder of Joseph C. Whitnah — Colorado , 1886
On the night of May 19, 1886, Joseph C. Whitnah was driving a horse-drawn streetcar along the Broadway line of the Denver City Railway when two men approached his car at the southern terminus at Broadway and Alameda.
Whitnah was a streetcar operator in a city mid-boom. Denver's population tripled between 1880 and 1890, from roughly 35,000 to more than 106,000. The Denver City Railway operated forty-five coaches across sixteen miles of track.
Andrew Green, twenty-five years old, and his associate John "Kansas" Withers had been waiting for Whitnah's car. Green fired two shots from a .38 caliber revolver. The first shot was accidental — triggered when Whitnah screamed. The second was deliberate, close-range, through the heart. Whitnah died on the spot. The $14 in fares in his cashbox went untouched.
The true crime investigation broke in six days. On May 21, a private detective received a tip at the G.A.R. Saloon on Larimer Street — the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for Union veterans. Withers confessed almost immediately and identified Green as the shooter. Green was arrested and confessed on May 25. He told investigators he had been promised the death penalty would be taken off the table if he cooperated.
That promise was never confirmed or denied.
Green stood trial before an all-white jury. This was Denver six years after a mob of 3,000 attacked the city's Chinese quarter and lynched a man named Look Young. Defense attorney Edgar Caypless worked pro bono. He argued that no robbery had actually been completed, that Green's confession was coerced by a false promise, and that the first shot was accidental. The jury deliberated a little over an hour — was polled four times, one juror holding out for second- degree — and returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. Death.
On July 27, 1886, Sheriff Frederick Cramer of Arapahoe County cut the main rope at 2:24 PM before fifteen to twenty thousand spectators gathered between the Broadway and Colfax bridges. Vendors sold lemonade. Families had brought picnic lunches. Children were in the crowd.
Green's neck did not snap. Twelve minutes after the jerk-up, doctors could still feel a pulse at his wrist. At 3:45 PM — eighty-one minutes after Cramer cut the rope — undertakers removed Andrew Green from the gallows and placed him in a casket bound for the "colored" section of Riverside Cemetery.
The execution was condemned by nearly every Denver newspaper. In 1889, Colorado moved all executions to the state prison in Canon City, limited witnesses, and commissioned a new gallows design. In 1897 — the same year Joseph Stickney was murdered in New Hampshire — Colorado abolished the death penalty. It was reinstated in 1901.
Historical Context
Both cases arrived during the same decade, when American law was negotiating what justice was supposed to look like. In New Hampshire, a court grappled with whether a man who could plan a murder could simultaneously lack the mental capacity to stand fully accountable for it. In Colorado, a court asked whether a Black man could get a fair trial six years after his city had watched a lynch mob go unpunished.
Neither question has a clean answer. Both still echo.
This is Season 40 of Foul Play: America's 250th Anniversary — the crimes that didn't make the monuments.

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Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins sit down together for the first time in over a year for a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions through the Netflix documentary The Keepers, Gemma has spent more than a decade investigating what happened to Sister Cathy, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School. She was found dead two months after her disappearance. This episode is a Q&A, recorded live with questions submitted by listeners through the show's Facebook community.
The Investigation: Timeline Questions and New Doubts
Listeners asked about the timeline of the night Sister Cathy Cesnik disappeared on November 7, 1969. Father Gerard Koob, who was in a relationship with Sister Cathy, claims he called the police at 11:30 PM after arriving at her apartment. The police report says the call came at 1:30 AM, a two-hour gap that remains unexplained. Koob says he and Father Peter McKeon found Cathy's car around 3:30 AM during a walk, but the police report credits McKeon alone with the discovery.
Gemma corrects a long-standing detail from The Keepers: the car was not found directly across the street from Cathy's apartment at Carriage House. It was actually found one court up the street, on Carriage Court, around a curve and out of direct line of sight from Lantern Court. She also confirms that the image of Sister Cathy's car shown in The Keepers was digitally placed into the scene by producer Jessica Hargrave as a visual aid. The steering wheel appears on the wrong side because the original police impound photo was flipped to match the camera angle.
Shane and Gemma discuss the suspicious letter Father Koob claims Cathy wrote to him, a handwritten love letter dated 12:30 AM on the Monday before she disappeared. The letter was found in the morgue notes rather than the detective's case file. Shane points out this means it was likely turned over after Cathy's body was found in January 1970, not when she first went missing. A profiler formerly with Scotland Yard analyzed the letter's content and concluded it was not written by Sister Cathy. Koob did not pass his second polygraph examination.
They also examine a separate letter Cathy wrote to her sister Marilyn, postmarked after the disappearance, which was admitted into evidence with the Baltimore County Police but has since gone missing. Shane raises the question of whether Father Koob could have written the letter to Marilyn as well, noting the parallels to the other letter and the movie ticket alibi.
New Evidence: The Mary Statue at St. Clement's
Gemma shares a story that has not been widely reported. Approximately two years ago, Eva Nelson, a publicly identified survivor of Father Joseph Maskell's abuse, told investigators she remembered watching Maskell bury something in the backyard of the St. Clement's rectory in Lansdowne. Police obtained permission from the current property owner and brought in ground-penetrating sonar equipment. Detective Josh Battaglia, the current investigator on Sister Cathy Cesnik's case, was present at the dig.
After two visits and multiple excavations, they found a broken statue of the Virgin Mary buried beneath a large bush that had once been small when Eva was a child. Eva recognized the statue immediately. A nun at St. Clement's had given it to her for protection, telling her, "Mary will always protect you." Father Maskell found the statue, broke it in front of Eva, and forced her to watch him bury it. The discovery validates Eva's memory of events that took place decades ago.
Historical Context
Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik was a 26-year-old School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore. She disappeared on November 7, 1969 after leaving her apartment to run errands. Her body was found on January 3, 1970 in a wooded area in Lansdowne. Her murder has never been solved. Father Joseph Maskell, a Catholic priest and school counselor at Keough, was later accused of sexually abusing dozens of students throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Multiple survivors have said they believe Sister Cathy was killed because she was about to report the abuse. Maskell died in 2001 without facing criminal charges. The case was the subject of the 2017 Netflix documentary series The Keepers.
Content Warning
This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Gemma Hoskins?
Gemma Hoskins is a retired Baltimore teacher and former student at Archbishop Keough High School. She has spent over a decade investigating the murder of her former teacher, Sister Cathy Cesnik. She was featured in the Netflix documentary The Keepers and authored a book about herself and the case. She was named Maryland Teacher of the Year in 1992.
What happened to Sister Cathy Cesnik?
Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik disappeared from her Baltimore apartment on November 7, 1969. She had gone out to run errands, including a stop at a local bakery. Her car was found near her apartment that night. Her body was found on January 3, 1970. Her murder remains unsolved.
What was found buried at St. Clement's?
Police used ground-penetrating sonar to search the backyard of a former rectory associated with Father Maskell in Lansdowne. They found a broken statue of the Virgin Mary that a survivor remembered Maskell burying in front of her decades earlier.
Who is investigating Sister Cathy's case today?
Detective Josh Battaglia of the Baltimore County Police Department currently handles the investigation into Sister Cathy Cesnik's murder. He took over from Corporal Robin Teal after her retirement.
Crisis Resources
If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:
US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673
US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453
UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000
UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
* Check out Mood and use my code SHANE for a great deal: https://mood.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy