BishopAccountability.org
	Sexual Abuse Ruined Children's Lives, Parents Say By Tricia Bishop Baltimore Sun August 8 2010 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-merzbacher-victims-20100808,0,4609486.story In the early '70s, Eddie Blair was known as a friendly kid to the women at the corner grocery near his Locust Point home. "Ed worked up there. And those mothers and neighbors, they all just loved him," recalls his aunt and godmother, Mary Cadden, 83. But as he moved into middle school, a troubling change came over Eddie, the youngest of three boys in the Blair family. He became secretive and sensitive. And he grew angry, storming one day from a middle school classroom and slamming against the lockers until he was sent home. "I knew in my heart that it was something," says his mother, Nancy Blair, 79. "I said to my sister Mary … 'God bless him, we love him,' but I said, 'Eddie is never going to live to be 40 years old. He has got some kind of a worry or something on his mind.'" By age 34, Eddie was dead. His death certificate lists the cause as "narcotic intoxication," an overdose. But the Blairs believe the underlying reason goes back to his childhood — and one man. John Joseph Merzbacher was Eddie's middle school teacher at the Catholic Community School on Fort Avenue, and the Blairs say he terrorized their son, though they didn't learn about it until years later. "[Eddie] was petrified of that man," Blair said. She and her husband still are. And they're outraged that Merzbacher could be released from prison under a federal court order handed down a week ago. That possibility has led a number of Merzbacher's former students who say they were abused and their families to band together after years of silence and to speak out in hopes of keeping him locked up. They've launched an online petition and are making plans to meet with state and local officials who want to keep Merzbacher behind bars. The lives of some former students continued to unravel after Merzbacher was jailed. Some drank, some used drugs or overate to dampen feelings of shame. At least three have died from hard living. "Some lives were completely ruined" by Merzbacher, said Mary Lewandowski-Stylc, 46, a former student who says she was one of his victims. "Drug addicts, suicides, prostitution, you know. … I'm a fortunate one, I guess. But not everybody. People had other monsters after him to deal with." Convicted, but … Sixteen years ago, Merzbacher was charged with more than 100 crimes involving many Baltimore boys and girls, among them Eddie Blair, most from the public and private schools in which he taught. He was accused of raping and sodomizing students day after day for years without intervention. He beat them, court documents say, and forced them to have sex with each other under threat of death if they told anyone. He even fired a gun in the small Catholic school one day to prove a point, witnesses said. But today, as then, Merzbacher says he is innocent, according to his lawyer. And the Maryland court system officially recognizes only one victim: Elizabeth Ann Murphy, now 49. Merzbacher was her English teacher from 1972 to 1975, when she was a Catholic middle-schooler alongside Eddie Blair. In 1995, two decades after she was abused, Murphy finally told her story in court, with the support of a dozen others behind her. Her case was the first to go to trial, and she described for the jury how Merzbacher raped, humiliated, threatened and drugged her, providing the then-11-year-old girl with alcohol and marijuana. A Baltimore jury convicted Merzbacher of six counts of rape and sexual abuse, and the judge sentenced him to four life terms in prison. The Baltimore state's attorney's office dropped the cases involving the other students, including Eddie's, believing that the life sentences were sufficient to keep Merzbacher behind bars. "He won't go anywhere for a long, long time," a prosecutor said at the time. The decision saved the others from having to air their own experiences in court, the shame they felt and the horrendous things they say happened. But it also took away their chance to be recognized. They will forever be known as "alleged victims." A week ago, however, news came that Merzbacher might be released from prison because of a legal blunder. His defense attorneys apparently never told him about a plea deal that was offered after his indictment but before the trial. The oversight violated Merzbacher's Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel, a federal judge ruled July 30. If that ruling stands — the Maryland attorney general's office plans to appeal the federal order — Merzbacher, who has already served 15 years, will be offered the deal, which called for a 10-year term. And Merzbacher, now 69, will accept, his attorney said, in order to be set free. The teacher Merzbacher was born in 1941, adopted as an infant and brought up in a Baltimore County household where sex was part of the scenery, according to news accounts from the mid-1990s. His mother had an affair while his father was hospitalized, later divorcing one man to marry the other. And a family beer hall was eventually turned into the strip club known as Sherrie's Show Bar, with the dancers stopping by Merzbacher's house to lounge nude by the pool. At 18, he left for college, intent on being a teacher, but dropped out and went to work at his family's bar. A few years later, a teaching shortage enabled him to get a job in the city's public school system, ostensibly while earning a degree. Given a teaching slot at Highlandtown Elementary, he endeared himself to parents by coaching sports and to the boys by referring to himself as "The Merz." He took a select few sixth-graders on field trips to Sherrie's, former students said. He married during that time, when he was 26 and his bride 18. And he was transferred twice to other elementary schools, John Rurah and Tench Tilghman. But he was fired by the city in 1972 because he had never received a degree, by then required of public school teachers. The private Catholic Community School, formerly Our Lady of Good Counsel School, had no such requirement. Merzbacher spun records by The Who for students and cultivated an image of cool, in order to carry out his sadistic sexual fantasies, court complaints say. Murphy was a mobilizing force behind the criminal charges and the accompanying civil suits, which were dismissed because they were filed too late. At the urging of a classmate in 1993, she called others to ask if they had experienced what she had, until she had gathered a group of 17 former students, Eddie among them. Some said they were victims, a few said they saw what was going on. They met with a civil attorney, recommended by Murphy's brother-in-law, and then a criminal prosecutor, who opened an investigation. The first indictments came in January 1994. Two deaths Of the 13 people listed in online court records as having filed criminal complaints against Merzbacher, at least three have died. Eddie Blair in 1994, at age 34. Bryan House in 2005, at 41. And Katherine Micolowski Stinefelt-Hutton in 2008, at 49. Bryan House's case — different from the others — was in line to go to court after Murphy's, before it was dropped. He was never a student of Merzbacher's, but instead a neighbor, a kid who left home and was taken in by Merzbacher at the age of 13. "As far as everybody was concerned, [Merzbacher] was an upstanding citizen taking in this troubled youth and giving him a good home," House told The Baltimore Sun in 1994, when he was 31. "He had my mother buffaloed." When House's case was dropped after Merzbacher's conviction, he was crushed, recalls his former wife, Cindy House, with whom he had three children. She said it took all of his courage to come forward, and then it was over before he had his say. "Bryan saw a lot of things [the others] didn't," she says. "They got to go home and have some peace of mind. He lived with it 24/7." She declined to say how her ex-husband died. But the years of abuse — and subsequent bouts of depression — were a factor, according to his brother, Roger House. "Bryan carried a metric ton of dark baggage from that time in his life," Roger House said in an e-mail. "I still wish I could have done something." Katherine Micolowski, 75, lives with that same wish for her daughter. "You can't even imagine the horror and the heartache, that you sit here and you think what my child had to endure by the hands of this man who claimed to be a friend," she says. Her daughter, named after her, was one of the students who had a criminal case against Merzbacher, though she never told her mother details of what happened. "She was very closed- mouth about it … I didn't want to torture her any more than what was done," Micolowski said. "She'd say, 'Mom, you don't want to know.' " The younger Katherine — Kathy — was a happy girl, up until the fifth or sixth grade, her mother recalls, "and suddenly all that stopped." She put up a wall that affected the rest of her life. Her two marriages broke up, she was overweight, and she rarely focused on herself except to have gastric bypass surgery to control her weight. Instead, she put all she had into her work as a nurse, Micolowski says. "She was always doing for somebody else." Today is the second anniversary of Kathy's death. Micolowski found her at home, unresponsive in a chair on Aug. 7, 2008. Her depression medication was on the table next to her. Kathy died at St. Agnes Hospital the next day of renal failure, her mother says. "She never knew what it was like to be happy," Micolowski says, in tears. The parents Nancy Blair and her husband of 60 years — Edward Blair — still live in the same Baltimore rowhouse in which they raised their family. They greet guests with open-door hospitality typical of Locust Point: three kinds of homemade cake and fresh iced tea. On the dining table, they've laid out photos of Eddie, as a grown man, a teenager and as the 10-year-old boy who was taught by Merzbacher. Newspaper clippings from the time of the Murphy trial were carefully placed next to the pictures, along with a letter from the archdiocese that included an $1,100 check reimbursing the Blairs for Eddie's psychological counseling, a year and a half after he'd died. They used the money to refurbish a St. Anthony statue at their longtime church, Our Lady of Good Counsel, two doors down from the school where Merzbacher taught English in Room 103. "In Memory of Eddie Blair 1960-1994 and Classmates," reads a plaque at the statue's base. They've never lost their faith, despite what they say happened to their boy. "My good husband here, Ed, he made us a good living," Nancy Blair begins. "He worked hard, blue-collar worker. I was able to stay home … so I was here in the house with my three children." She made the three boys a good breakfast every day, straightened their ties, brushed off their white shirts and sent them off to school. "But do you know what I was sending him to? A house of horror," she says, reaching toward her 83-year-old husband and dropping her head. Eddie never told them a thing, but there was one day when Eddie was in eighth grade when his anger seemed to boil over. He "got up, went into the corridor of the school and banged and banged on all of the lockers," recalls his father. The principal called the Blairs' family doctor to take a look at the boy and sent him home. That afternoon, Merzbacher came to the door. "I thought, 'Oh, good, the teacher's coming to help Ed with his homework,'" Nancy Blair recalls. It wasn't until years later that Eddie told her about the real purpose of Merzbacher's visit. "He wasn't here for homework," she says. "He had the gun with him, and he said to [Eddie], 'If you tell, I'm killing you, I'm killing your mother, right here in your own home. When your father, when your brothers come home, they'll find them.' " "We didn't know a thing that was going on," Eddie's father says. It would take two decades for Eddie to tell them, and even then it was a struggle to put it into words. He telephoned the house for weeks, saying he had to stop by to talk about something, but then wouldn't appear. After one phone call, she just told him to spit it out, whatever it was. And when he did, she couldn't believe it. "I said, 'Ed, what do you mean, that's not true.' He said, 'Mom, please believe it.' I said 'I don't believe you, dear, I don't believe it.' " But then he told her about the others, and she accepted it, slowly and in shock. She woke her husband, and the two of them came to grips with the information. That was in 1993. Eddie confronted Merzbacher once before the trial, and then he shut down, the Blairs said. He became paranoid. He kept his blinds closed and wouldn't go outside. He didn't go to work. "He was obsessed that [Merzbacher] was going to come and kill him," Murphy says. "He was really struggling, he was really suffering, he was in a lot of emotional pain." A little while after that, his roommate couldn't wake him one morning and called the Blairs. Eddie was dead. It was June 2, 1994, the Blairs' 44th wedding anniversary. They feel his death every day. "We don't have our Eddie, and nobody — I don't care what anybody says, how they tell me they're sorry — nobody knows [what that's like] but a mother and a father," Nancy Blair says. "Don't let [Merzbacher] out of jail and do this to another mother and father. Mothers and fathers can't handle this." Contact: tricia.bishop@baltsun.com
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