When Satan Wore a Cross (10 page)

At their meeting, Sister Marlo Damon quickly got to the point—she wanted the Toledo Diocese to pay fifty grand to cover her present and future counseling and medication expenses. Challenged to explain why the diocese should foot the bill, Damon told him that she had been raped by Father Chet Warren.

DiLallo reminded Damon that Warren had been an Oblates priest, outside the jurisdiction of the Toledo Diocese. Anyway, he’d been kicked out of the priesthood. Damon wasn’t a nun for nothing. She reminded
him
that any priest serving in the diocese did so at the pleasure of the bishop, putting said priest under the diocese’s jurisdiction.

DiLallo wisely deferred the matter until he could investigate further. It was, after all, an unusual situation. He promised to get back to her. Four months later, Damon once again called DiLallo. What was happening about her complaint? She wanted a second meeting. DiLallo agreed. He didn’t know that Damon, though she might have been naïve, wasn’t about to let the diocese slide on its responsibility.

At the second meeting, Damon came with compelling documentation. There was a copy of a letter from her mother superior demanding that the diocese grant Sister Marlo’s payment as requested—$50K. Also, she had a pharmacist’s statement regarding her considerable cost for medication.

As 2003 progressed, Damon and her attorney—she had smartened up and got one—pressed their case. Damon contacted Claudia Vercellotti, passionate victims rights advocate for SNAP (Survival Network of Those Abused By Priests), and told Vercellotti of her claim. Vercellotti began advising her. One year almost to the day that the Dallas Charter was passed, Sister Marlo Damon was invited to testify before the Toledo Diocesan Review Board. The latter consisted of the only non-Catholic, psychologist Dr. Robert Poole, and six Catholics of varying professional backgrounds.

On June 11, 2003, Sister Marlo Damon testified in private before the review board. Listening raptly, the board heard Damon’s tales of abuse she had suffered through as a child, including the alleged rapes by Chet Warren. She gave each board member a signed statement detailing charges of rape, torture, and satanic abuse that she had repressed for so long.

Damon read to the board a statement that began with personal details, explaining how her parents had moved to Toledo in her childhood years.

“We moved into St. Pius X parish where my paternal grandparents, Fred and Mary Damon were quite active. Chet Warren, then an OSFS [
Oblates of St. Francis de Sales
] priest and associate pastor befriended my family quite soon.”

She went on to detail her childhood abuse at Warren’s hands, charging that he made her fellate and fondle him.

“On one occasion after a Friday school liturgy, he led me into the sacristy, secured the doors and forced me to lie on my back beneath his exposed penis as he masturbated himself.”

How ironic that the sacristy was also the scene of this alleged crime. The abuse she claimed progressed to violence, and by third grade, sodomy.

Then came the bombshell. Not only was Warren sexually violent, Sister Marlo claimed something worse:

“Chet Warren was a leader of a satanic group (based at St. Pius) that performed rituals in honor of Satan on a regular basis. The rituals were horrifying and sadistic, designed to break our wills and internalize whatever cores programmed message they wished to use to further our powerlessness. Among the abusers were…my father and grandfather.”

Claudia Vercellotti, SNAP’s Toledo coordinator and prime mover in bringing the Robinson case to trial.

Vercellotti carries with her a display of photographs of children abused by clergy.

Dave Davison today, as he goes through the records he kept for twenty-six years before copying them at Kinkos.

Dave Davison as a beat cop at the time of the ritualistic murder of Margaret Ann Pahl.
Courtesy Dave Davison

The Lucas County Courthouse where Robinson was tried in April and May 2006. Note the modern, conservative addition of the Ten Commandments in the foreground.

Sister Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, as she appears on the Irish five-pound note. It was recently replaced by the euro.

Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, right before her death.

The murder weapon, Robinson’s sword-shaped letter opener. Note the medallion, already removed.

A close-up of the place on the sword, under the medallion, where the forensic experts found a small spot of blood.

Autopsy photographs of Margaret Ann Pahl, concentrating on the chest wounds. Note the way the pattern of the cross on her chest veers to the left.

Margaret Ann Pahl as she appeared when cops first discovered her body.