The Keepers

The Keepers (2017) directed by Ryan White is the latest Netflix true crime miniseries, much like The Making of a Murderer. Much like that miniseries it leaves the viewer with more questions than answers, but this one is distinctly different from its predecessor. It is the story of a beloved nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik, who was brutally murdered in 1969 and was never solved. Two former students, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Fitzgerald Schaub-who are now retired, are armchair detectives who are trying to solve the cold case. However, one of the biggest revelations was that one of the priests at the school, Father Maskell, was a serial pedophile that abused scores of students in his career. This leads to the discovery of the Catholic cover ups of the late 60s and 70s that began to be exposed in the in the 90s as victims came forward with their repressed memories. I can remember reading about the cover ups in Rolling Stone magazine when I was going to community college and living at home in the late 80s. It was very troubling for me since I had attended a catholic grade school, served as an altar boy, and my mother was  an Eucharistic minister with strong ties to the church. In fact she cut the hair of nuns, priests, and deacons. I confronted a lay deacon, Father Craig, about it once when he was getting a haircut and his answers were troubling-he said that they would give counseling to the offender and then move them to a new parish-where they had a new batch of innocent children to molest. To this day it makes blood boil, the hypocrisy of it. Spotlight is powerful film about the scandals that rocked Boston in the 90s as well. Later, it would turn out there was a scandal in Spokane, but not at the parish I attended. But one nearby and effected an acquaintance of mine and his brother committed suicide over the scandal when the scandal surfaced. My acquaintance got a large settlement from the Catholic church. The series leaves some loose ends untied, but I think that is the nature of these old cold cases. A mostly fascinating story of murder and a large scale cover up of child abuse at the hands of priests and other men of power in Baltimore.