David Yonke's Book Delves into Priest's Trial for Nun's Murder
By Tahree Lane
Toledo Blade
February 3, 2008
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080203/ART02/821215331
A certain amount of romance surrounds the idea of writing a book.
But consider this: You've got two months to produce 80,000 words (this article is about 1,400). There are legal proceedings to explain and hundreds of details to triple-check. Not only is the subject matter terribly dark, it's intensely controversial.
Moreover, you live in the town where the grisly crime occurred: any mistakes, even misrepresentations, and your name is Mud.
Oh, and while writing the book, you're doing your day job, too. About as romantic as diving into a meat grinder.
"It was the hardest thing I've ever done," says David Yonke, who wrote nearly round-the-clock, handing his publisher a clean, 228-page true-crime story 57 days after the May 11, 2006, conviction of the Rev. Gerald Robinson for the murder
of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.
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| David Yonke, Blade religion editor, at his desk. He will discuss his book, Sin, Shame, & Secrets, Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Stranahan Theater. |
Yonke will discuss the investigation of the 1980 murder that was reopened in 2004 after another nun divulged her own sexual abuse, the trial, and his writing process at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Great Hall of the Stranahan Theater. He's the first speaker of the year in the Authors! Authors! series, presented by The Blade and arranged by the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library.
Sin, Shame & Secrets: The Murder of a Nun, the Conviction of a Priest, and Cover-up in the Catholic Church has sold out of its initial run of 5,000 hardcover copies; a newly-released paperback edition may be available at Thursday's event.
From the beginning
Yonke, 53, is soft-spoken, easy-going, and sports stylish salt-and-pepper hair and beard. A 27-year-veteran of The Blade, he's been religion editor for seven years and also regularly writes about the local music scene. His was the first of three books to be published on the sensational crime.
He began the undertaking by building a mostly-chronological outline that included a few flashbacks. The opening chapter describes the murder of the petite 71-year-old nun in the sacristy of a chapel at the former Mercy Hospital.
Sister Margaret Ann was strangled from behind, then, barely alive, laid straight out on the floor. A white linen altar cloth was folded and placed over her chest, and she was stabbed 31 times with an unusually shaped instrument, including nine times over her heart in the pattern of an upside-down cross.
Father Robinson was the main suspect in 1980, but when police and prosecutors said there wasn't enough evidence to convict him, the case was shelved.
Yonke weaves in stories of sexual abuse of children by local priests that began surfacing in 2002. The book details a cover-up by Catholic leaders who not only looked the other way when its priests hurt people but repeatedly lied to and stymied investigators.
The church's goal of protecting its image at all costs was abetted by several Catholic members of the Toledo police force who were friends with church officials or simply couldn't face the possibility that a priest could be capable of such evil, the book asserts.
Adjusting his work schedule, Yonke wrote the book in the quiet den of his Sylvania home from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. four or five days a week, driving downtown to produce The Blade's Saturday religion section in two or three 10-hour days. His wife, Janet Yonke, brought him meals and kept the household running.
When he got frazzled, he'd pick up his guitar for half an hour, then return to the task. Given some of the grisly material, particularly allegations of brutal rapes and satanic activities by groups that included priests, he sometimes couldn't sleep.
"I did have a lot of people praying for me," he says.
The process
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Yonke admired the flow of the The Da Vinci Code, which he'd read twice. "Words have a certain pacing and rhythm, and as I was writing it, I tried to keep in mind how Dan Brown paced his book."
He selected action verbs, deleted adjectives and adverbs, and limited the 62 chapters to about four pages each. "I purposely tried to keep the chapters short and make them so you'd want to turn to the next chapter. I just know when it's a good place to leave it and come back."
Helping sort out tricky passages was attorney Beth Karas, the Court TV correspondent who covered the trial, with whom Yonke had struck up a friendship. "I was on the phone with her for hours."
His reporting began in April, 2004, with Father Robinson's arrest and continued through the oft-postponed trial for 25 months. Yonke's ability to research, however, was hamstrung when Judge Thomas Osowik imposed a gag order barring everyone involved in the case from speaking to the media.
He did have one ace in the hole: 300 pages from the 1980 police investigation, given to him by Dave Davison, a retired Toledo police officer who felt strongly enough about Father Robinson's guilt and the police-church collusion to use a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the documents.
Had Yonke had the luxury of more time, he says he'd polish the writing a bit, eliminate some redundancies, and reconsider some of dialog he created, particularly for the killer in the act. Dialog is never fabricated in news stories, but in a nonfiction book such as this, adding reasonable dialog is an acceptable literary tool for authors who become expert in the case at hand.
"I was just trying to make it a good read," he explains. "I didn't want it to be a lot of statistics and data. Recreating dialog has to be organic. Nobody knows exactly what wording was going on. But it's an important part of any book or any narrative. The standard, I guess, is to make it as credible as you can."
Love of newspapers
Yonke grew up on Long Island, the third of five boys and a girl. His father ran a television sales and repair shop, his mother was a homemaker. He no longer practices the Catholicism of his childhood, which was far from rigid: his parents dropped the kids off at church on Sundays but did not attend themselves.
Like many journalists, he liked to write as a kid. "I have clips from third grade when I wrote for the school newspaper, the Bulldog's Bark."
He soon took heat for writing a piece predicting a bad upcoming season for the sixth-grade basketball team.
In high school, he played baseball, basketball, and played guitar in a garage band. He headed for Duke University in North Carolina in 1972.
"I majored in psychology but felt I wanted to work at a newspaper. My friends said 'don't do it. You work crummy hours and you don't get paid much,'" he says. "But I did what I wanted to do. I really love working for a newspaper."
Following graduation he landed a job at the Tampa Tribune, editing articles and laying out pages for five years. Through friends, he met Janet Culver, who had shed Toledo for Florida's sunshine. One night, bringing her home from a date, they were robbed at gunpoint; the thief, his hand shaking, held a silver automatic pistol against Janet's head.
"That really got me started looking for spiritual answers," Yonke says. Deeply spiritual, he found fulfillment in conservative Protestantism.
He and Janet married in 1980. On a 1981 trip to Toledo, he took a resume to The Blade and was offered a job on the spot.
He and Janet were expecting their first child and he could make a better living at The Blade than at the Florida paper. He worked as a copy editor for nine years, an assistant city editor for two, and pop music writer for nine.
The Yonkes have raised three daughters aged 20, 24, and 26. Outside of work, he golfs, enjoys Formula One racing, serves on the boards of a local nonprofit and his church, walks his dog a mile a day, and reads (favorite authors include Philip K. Dick, Dean Koonz, and John Updike).
He's talking to a filmmaker about the possibility of a documentary film or a television movie based on the book.
"It was just the feeling that the story needed to be told. I was really motivated for Sister Margaret Ann and all the people who have been abused," he says. "I think it's time for some changes to be made. They talk about transparency and openness. And I think it is time for transparency and openness."
David Yonke will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday for the Authors! Authors! series in the Great Hall of the Stranahan Theater, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd. Tickets are $10, $8 for students. Information: 419-259-5266.
Contact Tahree Lane at: tlane@theblade.com or 419-724-6075.
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