Netflix's new true crime drama "The Keepers" will launch all episodes on Friday, May 19. The story, which will be told in seven episodes as a documentary, will focus on the unsolved murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik in 1969.
"The Keepers" has been compared to Netflix's highly successful "Making a Murderer" series, which came out in 2015. Here's what you need to know before binge-watching the show.
Sister Cathy Cesnik
Sister Cathy Cesnik became a nun at age 26 and served the Archbishop Keough school in Baltimore as an English teacher. She was well-loved by her all-female students.
They would often confide in her secrets the girls wouldn't normally tell anyone one else and many believed this caused her mysterious death.
One the day she disappeared Sister Cathy Cesnik was supposed to be shopping for an engagement gift for her sister. Police found her body two months later with neck marks and a hole in the skull.
The suspect
Only days before her disappearance, 16-year- old student Jean Hargadon Wehner found the nun's body when school chaplain, Rev. A. Joseph Maskell led her to the site. Wehner claimed Maskell often abused her and threatened she would wind up like Sister Cathy Cesnik. Wehner never told anyone about what she saw until a sexual case against was filed against Maskell in 1992.
Maskell fled the U.S. to Ireland that same year and worked as a psychologist. He died in 2001 and was never charged with any crime. Meanwhile, the nun's death would remain unsolved.
More victims
Following Wehner's testimony in 1992, more women came forward and revealed that they were Maskell's victims as well. In 2016, the Archbishop Keough school, through the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, paid 16 settlements in the amount of $472,000, as well as $97,000 counseling bills for the other victims Maskell allegedly abused.
Some of them said Sister Cathy Cesnik knew what was happening and assured them she would take care of it.
The Baltimore Police recently exhumed Maskell's body for DNA samples in an ongoing case that revealed more startling discoveries in what would be delved on "The Keepers." Authorities said the DNA samples did not link Maskell.
"The fact that the DNA profiles of the various suspects have not matched the crime scene evidence — it doesn't necessarily exonerate them," a spokesperson for the police said, as per The Baltimore Sun.
Two former students, Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins, are behind the Netflix documentary. "The Keepers" will be released in full on midnight Friday, May 19.
