MARYLAND
Open Salon
The body of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, Sister Cathy to those who knew her, was found on January 3, 1970 covered in snow near a garbage dump in Lansdowne, Maryland, about twenty minutes outside the city of Baltimore. The 26-year-old Roman Catholic Nun had been beaten to death, her skull crushed with an unknown blunt object. Her body was too decomposed and mauled by animals and insects for the coroner to determine whether she had been sexually assaulted or not. To this day her murderer has never been found.
Catherine Ann Cesnik was born in the small community of Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania across the River from Pittsburg to a postal worker father and a homemaker mother in a deeply devout Roman Catholic family.
When they were old enough, Cathy and her sisters attended St. Mary’s Assumption elementary school connected to the Church of the same name where she was taught by the Sisters of Notre Dame. When Cathy entered St. Augustine Catholic High School she was sure of her Vocation and shortly after she graduated in 1960 she entered Convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Baltimore as a candidate for Sisterhood. After seven years as a Postulant, Cathy Cesnik took her final vows on July 21, 1967, taking the new name, Sister Joanita.
The Sisters of Notre Dame are a teaching Order and in 1965, while still a Postulate, Cathy Cesnik began to teach at the newly opened, all-girls Archbishop Keough High School.
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