When Satan Wore a Cross (15 page)

Judge Franks’s courtroom was practically empty. In the corner of the gallery, three digital video cameras were set up on old-fashioned wooden tripods. The “shooters” were two middle-aged paunchy guys and a woman wearing Sahara shorts that exposed a huge tattoo on her massive calf. The cameras all focused in the same direction, at the door leading to the judge’s chambers.

They paid not the slightest attention to the legless, broad-shouldered African-American transvestite wearing a nice cream-colored number and white veil. He sat alone in his wheelchair in the front row with his companion, the co-defendant, Gerard “Jerry” Mazuchowski. He looked like the “before makeover” on a reality TV show.

Mazuchowski was about six feet, and obese, wearing long Bermuda shorts, collarless light-colored shirt upon which dangled a huge wooden cross attached to a lanyard. Mazuchowski also wore a black boot from knee to heel on his right leg and foot. He walked with a limp and leaned on a cane. Fifty-five years old, he looked like he would be lucky if he made sixty.

Gerard “Jerry” Mazuchowski was a retired Toledo public school teacher and lay minister of the Catholic Church. He had met Father Robinson as a student, and the two became lifelong friends. Mazuchowski was a Secular Franciscan, a member of the National Fraternity of the Secular Franciscan Order. Secular Franciscans have a unique place in Catholicism. Article One of the Secular Franciscan Order states their place eloquently:

“The Franciscan family, as one among many spiritual families raised up by the Holy Spirit in the Church, unites all members of the people of God—laity, religious, and priests—who recognize that they are called to follow Christ in the footsteps of Saint Francis of Assisi. In various ways and forms but in life-giving union with each other, they intend to make present the charism of their common Seraphic Father in the life and mission of the Church.”

In addition to performing at their regular jobs, many Secular Franciscans like Mazuchowski function as lay teachers within the Church. But once again, the commitment they make to the Church is much greater than a lay teacher without the Franciscan religious commitment, stated in Article VI: “They have been made living members of the Church by being buried and raised with Christ in baptism; they have been united more intimately with the Church by profession. Therefore, they should go forth as witnesses and instruments of her mission among all people, proclaiming Christ by their life and words.

“Called like Saint Francis to rebuild the Church and inspired by his example, let them devote themselves energetically to living in full communion with the pope, bishops, and priests, fostering an open and trusting dialog of apostolic effectiveness and creativity.”

However, no place in Article VI is it mentioned that Secular Franciscans are supposed to dress up in nun drag and cavort through the basements of St. Adalbert’s and other Toledo churches. But that’s what happened when Jerry Mazuchowski organized a loosely knit group of church insiders who did exactly that in the 1970s. As the founder, Mazuchowski got the honor of naming them—the Sisters of Assumed Mary (SAM). This was prior to the Son of Sam serial killer case in New York City.

“We did nun drag. We gave each other nun’s names. It was nothing but absolute fun. Camp. Foolishness,” Mazuchowski later told a reporter. He claimed that Robinson had nothing to do with the group, and that SAM did not engage in any satanic activity.

Also in the courtroom was John Thebes, who ran into the jury room, pulled out a cell phone, and started a conversation; and Mark Davis, the unassuming attorney for Jane Doe. They were summoned by the judge into her chambers. They made a strange group trudging in there, Mazuchowski, nonchalantly limping along behind them, turning for a moment to give a special look to his friend in the wheelchair.

John Callahan, the gentleman dean of Toledo attorneys, was on the phone in the judge’s chambers. He had gotten stuck in traffic.

“John can you hear me?” said the judge through the doorway.

The cameras blazed away at the scintillating action.

“We’re trying to come up with a date, John, in 2007 for the hearing,” said the judge, “sometime in April.”

“I hope I live that long,” the eighty-five-year-old Callahan quipped, and everyone in the courtroom broke down in laughter.

John Callahan had volunteered his services to Robinson and was still one of his attorneys on the civil case. Callahan had told me that when he viewed the Pahl murder scene in crime scene photos, “It didn’t seem any different from all the other murder scenes I’ve seen in my many years of practice as a defense attorney.”

As for the ritualistic aspects of the murder, Callahan claimed, “I don’t think it’s ritualistic. What does an upside down cross look like anyway? If you look hard enough, you can find a pattern in anything.”

They set a date of April 26, 2007, for pretrial settlement discussions and May 21, 2007, if they went to trial. Left unsaid was that the defendants would challenge the charges on grounds of the expiration of the statute of limitations on any charges Doe claimed except of course murder.

That was it. The attorneys and Mazuchowski filed out of the judge’s office single-file, walking through the slatted rail dividing the observers’ pews from the well of the court. Outside in the large corridor, in front of the impressive backdrop of the glass-walled Lucas County Clerk’s Office, John Thebes cut a powerful and eloquent figure for the cameras.

“How come they’re not interviewing you?” I asked Mark Davis, Jane Doe’s attorney. Davis looked back at Thebes talking on camera with a hint of a smile.

“He’s been on Court TV for weeks throughout the trial. They don’t know me,” said Davis succinctly, watching as Thebes told the cameras that his client was “not guilty.”

Over at the elevator, Mazuchowski and his friend were waiting for it to arrive. Since they had no place to go at least for a few seconds, I went over and introduced myself. Mazuchowski looked at me with twinkling, questioning eyes. The elevator came and he wheeled his friend inside. The doors slowly shut on Jerry Mazuchowski’s beatific countenance. He had good reason for beaming. Davis would have to get over the statute of limitations hump, which the defense was guaranteed to bring up with the court before the April 2007 hearing.

“You want to meet Jane Doe?” asked Mark Davis at my elbow.

Following Davis down the marble stairs, I paused to admire the stained glass windows overhanging the hallway. They were magnificent frescoes of the symbols of justice. Looking back, Thebes stood tall at the top of the stairs with the reporters at his feet.

Davis went out the courthouse, walked quickly through midday traffic to the other side of the street. A few more blocks, and he had gotten to his office in a warren of an old office building in downtown Toledo, about four blocks from the Mud Hens Stadium.

The only wall in his conference room that is not bare is covered with a map of the city of Toledo, with pins at appropriate points where Davis has his bases covered. During the summer of 2006 Davis was running for judge of Lucas County. If he was elected in the fall, he would have to turn Doe’s case over to another attorney. He was clearly torn at the prospect.

“I think she’s telling the truth. Otherwise I wouldn’t be representing her,” he said. “But if I’m elected, someone else would have to take the suit forward.”

Admittedly, he was going to have a hard and perilous time making his case. All it would take would be for the presiding judge to say the statute of limitations expired on the charges and the civil suit would be thrown out. Davis went to a phone and made a call. He talked for a few moments and hung up.

“She’ll be here in less than an hour. Here, look at this.”

He handed over a huge binder, in which were copies of journal entries Doe had allegedly been keeping since she was a child. It contained extensive and bizarre drawings done in a childish hand. There were also photographs, one especially of a cute little blond girl.

Doe wrote extensively about being in a pit, buried alive. She wrote of her abuse in rhyme, like a child, with some of the entries dated 1994 when she was in therapy. The actual rhymes are written in block letters, like a child would do it. Then there were comments over some of the entries in neat script. What it looked like was a therapeutic exercise where the child writes of the abuse in rhyme and the adult comments.

About an hour later, Jane Doe and her husband, identified in court papers as “John Doe,” walked into the conference room and sat down without shaking hands.

Jane Doe was a blond, built thick, not fat, about five-seven and over two hundred pounds. Her face was washed out, worn and pained. She looked like a messed-up, broken person. Her dress was plain, but her manner harsh. Her eyes twitched.

Her husband, John Doe, was no Gary Cooper. He looked more like “Mr. Goodwrench.” He even had his real first name embroidered on his shirt. Bespectacled, he smiled the entire time.

During some of the early conversation, Jane Doe reiterated her charges about being abused by the two priests named in her suit. She sounded bitter and cynical.

“How much?” Doe asked suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

“For my cooperation in writing your book, for me giving you my journals and you telling my story.”

It was explained that Jane Doe was looking for some sort of deal, where she would be paid to tell her story, including her journal entries and drawings, perhaps even a book deal.

“I’m a journalist. I don’t pay for information.”

“Then why should I let you make money off me?” Jane countered again.

Arguing the finer points of journalistic ethics was not going to make it. Jane said she had something else to go do, and she and her husband left.

Jane Doe’s identification of Robinson and Mazuchowski through their media appearances was specious. Asking for money to tell her story just made her credibility worse. But the many similarities between Jane Doe’s and Marlo Damon’s statements were undeniable.

Dazed and confused, I walked around the block twice, trying to get my emotional bearings.

August 28, 2006

No one in Toledo believed in dressing for court except for the drug dealer who was on trial on the third floor. Not only did he dress elegantly, even Judge Osowik, the same judge who had pronounced sentence on Jerry Robinson, agreed. Osowik was presiding over the case in which the drug dealer was accused of killing a rival. The drug dealer would eventually be acquitted, to much elation in the courtroom from his supporters.

Downstairs in the second floor of the Lucas County Courthouse, I was the only one sitting in the small, six-pew courtroom of Judge Robert Christiansen, when a guy who looked like “Mr. Clean” came into court. He was a nondescript old man with a long weathered face, shaved bald head, and droopy mouth. His name was Chet Warren. A
Blade
photographer kept trying to taken Warren’s picture. He held up a manila number 10 envelope that he was carrying in front of his face. He said nothing.

So this is one of the alleged devil-worshipping pedophiliac priests I’ve heard so much about,
I thought. He didn’t look like much. But if even any part of what Marlo Damon and others had said about Warren was true, it sounded like he was the one possessed.

The hearing I was there to attend was a minor one. Now an old man, Warren had gone to a church from which he had been barred. The diocese was seeking $5,000 in relief from Warren. It was no better than a nuisance suit, meant to assuage the Catholics who had complained that the defrocked priest was still around. I wanted to know if he touched the holy water on the way out.

Judge Christiansen ordered his clerk to bring the defendant and the diocesan lawyers into his chambers away from the public. The female photographer tried to follow the men into the back room, but was stopped by a court clerk.

“I have a right to shoot under Ohio law,” the
Blade
photographer told the clerk bravely.

The clerk told her it didn’t make any difference. The judge had told him what to do, and he was there to enforce what the judge said. The
Blade
shooter left with a grimace, shoving the door open, royally pissed off that she was being stopped from doing her job.

Outside the courtroom doors, Claudia Vercellotti was talking to a reporter about “my church,” like it’s something that belongs to her personally that has betrayed her trust. It’s in her sad eyes and her obese appearance, contrasted with the photograph in her hand. It shows her as an innocent, bright-eyed, thin young girl.

“I’m double the size I was two years ago,” Vercellotti says, which she attributes to a food problem that began after her abuse by a priest.

After waiting around for two hours to talk to Warren and the diocesan attorneys, the judge instead let them slip out the back way of the courthouse without having to confront the few reporters present.

“Thanks a lot,
judge
,” Vercellotti told Judge Christiansen vocally and sarcastically. The judge looked surprised that anyone would disagree with his actions.

Downstairs, the sheriff’s deputies were angry that a defendant, even in a civil suit, had been let out the back.

“Everyone is supposed to go out the front, everyone,” one deputy insisted.

In Toledo, even now, the Church gets special treatment.

John Donahue was a Perrysburg, Ohio, attorney in private practice. Like many, the fifty-nine-year-old Donahue was riveted to his TV set by Court TV’s gavel-to-gavel television coverage. Like many both in and out of Toledo, he also felt it was an unjust verdict.

“If I was sitting on that jury, I would not have convicted him based on the evidence that I saw presented in that courtroom,” he told the
Toledo Blade.

Once a Wood County assistant prosecutor, Donahue filed documents with the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals that he would be representing Robinson during the appeals process. A native of New York State, Donahue, the transplanted Buckeye, got Judge Arlene Singer of the appeals court to approve a motion giving him additional time to amend the notice of appeal that defense attorney John Thebes originally filed with the court.

It soon came out that Donahue, like the rest of Robinson’s attorneys, was providing his legal services to the now-convicted murderer pro bono.

“That is the way it is going to be. I won’t accept any public money if it was offered,” he said.

His involvement in the case began when Robinson called him collect from his cell in the Warren Correctional Institution in southwest Ohio. During their conversation, the former priest asked the former prosecutor to represent him. Donahue agreed.

Donahue would review the transcript of the trial and testimony from hearings on pretrial issues, looking for appellate issues. He’d pay, in some way, for the cost to transcribe the testimony, approximately $15,000. A message to Mr. Donahue’s answering machine requesting an interview was returned with his voice on my answering machine.

In no uncertain terms, Mr. Donahue made it clear that there would be no assistance to anyone trying to make money off “poor Father Robinson’s” problems. In fact, the only reason he called back was “because I recognized your area code. I grew up across the river from you.”

Then the message went “click,” and it was dead air. Robinson was not going to talk. I knew that going in. Most murder defendants don’t, especially those convicted of murder that have their case on appeal. They are too afraid of saying something to a reporter that might work against them.

As Robinson’s appeal started to wind its way through the judicial system, a movement began by Toledo’s Polish Catholic community not only to raise the money for Jerry Robinson’s appeal, but to burnish his reputation as a good priest for the appeals court to consider in their ruling.

“This is hilarious and sad all at once,” says Claudia Vercellotti. “My family’s oldest friends in the world are the Mierzwiaks—Well, Dan’s Mom & Joanne’s mother-in-law, Irene died. So, I got saddled with making the funeral program (a task I didn’t mind, it beat sending flowers that would expire in a day or so). My Mom was in the back of church passing out the programs, mind you this is an old Polish woman who died, and was being buried in an old Polish church.

“Mom says that people politely took a program and then slowly, individuals who she had already given a program to, began trickling back to her asking for another one to send to this person or that person, their Busha etc. They all remarked what a beautiful little program, and of course, periodically, my Mom (as all doting Mothers do) would offer up that ‘her daughter’ made it.

“Of course Mom obliged them…then, this little old lady comes up to my Mom and says, ‘This is such a lovely program, could I please have a spare please? I want to send this to Fr. Gerald Robinson, he can get only limited mail,’ whispering, ‘he’s in jail. This is something I think he’d like.’

“Mom said she about fell over, because she couldn’t let go of the irony that my homemade program, the topic of my conversation was going to Fr. Robinson. The funniest part is I always sign my work in some fashion, but this time I didn’t—it was a rush job, I was just trying to get all the pictures in it. Mom gave it to her of course, but said it was all she could do, the irony of it all.

“As I write this, it isn’t nearly as funny, but it was when she told it, and it was because I can just see my Mom caught like a deer in the headlights.”

Appeals attorney Donahue solicited comments from those who knew Father Robinson and wished to help him. He included them in his appeal, and thus they became public documents:

In order to pay for his further defense, and especially the transcription cost, Robinson’s defenders were raising an appeals fund for him, which is what the letter writer is referring to.

Siepan’s letter was not intended to, but it does fill in a lot of the blanks.

First and foremost, she’s his aunt. The best thing she can say about the guy is he always shows up on time and “rest assured he is not a murderer.” That’s it?! Her comment about his time in the Toledo suburb of Sylvania is also revealing, showing how the diocese had hidden Robinson out in the burbs before giving him his chance to minister again at another Toledo church.

The comment about putting her home up for bail was a common one in all letters of this kind. Bail money had to come from somebody and it had been made clear to Robinson’s supporters that he had no money; it would come from them. But most revealing was the comment about Robinson’s tenure at Mercy Hospital and his relationship with the dead nun.

“Sister Margaret Pahl always allowed him to do it [decorate the chapel with flowers].”

Clearly, the Sister of Mercy was in charge, unless she consented to otherwise. Yet it was Robinson who should have been the one in charge. If it was hard to imagine him having an argument with anyone, let alone a nun about the way he wanted a service to go, it was equally as difficult for his supporters to imagine him killing one.

More typical is this letter to Donahue from one of Robinson’s diocesan colleagues:

Read these letters carefully and it becomes clear that no one knew Jerry Robinson. He emerges as an emotional enigma. Over and over in these letters, people claim to know Robinson, and whether they realize it or not, describe him was an emotionless, passive man.

Dave Davison decided to play his ace. The first cop on the scene of Pahl’s murder in 1980, the same cop who had kept insisting to everyone he could speak to that Robinson was guilty, he took me to a diner where every waitress wore high heels, fishnet or other type stockings, a skirt barely below their waists, and low-cut T-shirts.

“Here, I’ve been saving this for you or someone like you,” he said, and handed me a huge manuscript of more than three hundred pages.

They were all the records from his 1995 FOIA request. Even when some of those records were subsequently made public, Davison had more documentation on the Pahl murder investigation than the TPD did. The information was invaluable in setting up the timeline of the case, independent of anything the TPD said, since they could not be trusted.

“Going back over my time on the police force has forced many issues to the surface,” he said. “In order to survive working for that department I had to learn to hate and I did. The people on the street were not the problem. It was the people I worked with and for. Not all of them were corrupt or incompetent but a good many were, especially in the command ranks.

“That job cost me my emotions, feelings and maybe my very soul. Over time I became like an old draft horse going through the motions of a well known route. I’ll tell you what I have become. Well after I had left the department I took my McDonald’s lunch to the park across the street from me. As I was beginning to eat, a car pulled up into the spot directly behind me. I heard a gunshot.

“I got out of my car and checked that car. Inside was a man who had shot himself in the head. He was obviously very dead. I yelled over to a woman who had also heard the shot and told her to call 911 and to stay away from the vehicle. Then I went back to my car and ate my lunch while waiting for the crew. I had two thoughts about all this. The man was dead and there was nothing I could do for him, and I had paid for that food.”

“Get out, Dave,” I said. “Get out of Toledo.”

“You think I ought to?”

“Yeah, I do.”

And I meant it. Even for reporters, Toledo was a difficult place. More than one reporter told me of instances when they did not toe the Lucas County line. The result was a call to the editor, and the reporter reassigned. The guys who run Toledo do not fool around.

“You know what, Dave, you won. The guy’s in prison.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said, the smile forming ever so slightly behind his droopy mustache. But after so many years of waiting for the case to be adjudicated, could he finally let it go now that it was?

I paid the check and we left. Outside, a local radio station was doing a remote in the parking lot. The DJ was flirting with a few young women.

“You know what,” said Davison, starting his car up. “The owner of my favorite place to eat asked me if there would be a big turnout for me when I died. I told him the turnout would be much larger for me than any other ex-cop because of the people wanting to piss on my grave. I would have the last laugh. At least I would not be in Toledo anymore.”

Davison dropped me off at the courthouse. I sought out assistant prosecuting attorney Dean Mandros in his second-floor office but got only as far as the receptionist. Mandros came out to meet with me in the outer vestibule. Anyone walking by could hear the conversation. I guess his office must have been messy. Mandros’s handshake was politician-right, neither too hard nor too soft. But there was something familiar about him. It took me a few moments, and then I realized what it was.

His performance at trial had been a disorienting sideshow. Sideshows and sideshow performers are something I am very familiar with. Mandros plopped down on the aged sofa across from me and gazed on me benignly.

“I’m aware of your plight,” said Dean Mandros.

I had been seeking a copy of the autopsy and police reports and been denied them. What Mandros didn’t know was that the documents Davison had just given me included not just the police reports and autopsy diagram, but also a witness list prepared by the prosecution before the trial.