Police Dig up Records Priest Ordered Buried

MARYLAND
BishopAccountability.org

By Robert A. Erlandson and Joe Nawrozki
The Baltimore Sun
August 10, 1994

Baltimore City detectives investigating sex abuse allegations against a Roman Catholic priest dug up a van load of confidential records yesterday the priest had ordered buried four years ago in Brooklyn’s Holy Cross Cemetery.

City police were accompanied by the two Baltimore County homicide detectives assigned to the revived investigation of the unsolved 1969 slaying of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik.

A high-ranking county police official said investigators were there because the name of the priest — the Rev. A. Joseph Maskell — had come up during their probe of the 25-year-old crime.

Father Maskell and Sister Catherine were both on the faculty of the all-girls Archbishop Keough High School in Southwest Baltimore in the late 1960s.

Father Maskell, 55, stepped down as pastor of St. Augustine’s Church in Elkridge on July 31 amid allegations that he had sexually abused students at Keough during his tenure as chaplain and counselor from 1967 to 1975.

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