Priest's Trial in Death of Nun to Include Talk of Dark Elements

BY JAMES EWINGER
c.2006 Newhouse News Service

TOLEDO, Ohio -- There are no little murders. But Gerald Robinson is about to go on trial in Toledo for one that is unusually large, judging by the interest.

He is a Roman Catholic priest. The victim, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, was a nun, and the slaying occurred more than 20 years ago, in the chapel of a hospital where they worked.

The crime is anchored to Easter Sunday -- the most sacred, defining day in Christendom. It occurred on Holy Saturday 1980, the day before Easter and what would have been the nun's 72nd birthday.

Robinson's murder trial begins Monday, the day after Easter 2006, when a Lucas County Common Pleas judge begins empaneling a jury under the glare of national -- and quite possibly international -- media attention.

And why wouldn't the media descend?

There are intimations of a ritual killing, satanic cults, organized sexual abuse and an institutional cover-up.

Someone strangled and stabbed Pahl at least 30 times -- the wounds defining an inverted cross. Some of her clothes were pulled off, suggesting a sexual assault.

The allegations of dark rituals have aroused interest, and antagonism as well.

"That's just a ... smokescreen," said Dave Davison, a retired Toledo police officer who was the first to see the body.

It is one of the few points of agreement between Davison and retired Deputy Chief Ray Vetter, who was in charge of detectives at the time.

Davison accuses the city's heavily Roman Catholic police department of colluding with the diocese.

Robinson was a suspect from the beginning -- probably the only other point on which the two former cops agree.

"This officer (Davison), he's come up with an awful lot of outlandish stuff," Vetter said in a telephone interview. He agreed there were no signs of any ritual and that Robinson emerged as the main suspect.

The suspect list narrowed down to Robinson "because we didn't have anyone else," and because of his close association with the dead nun, Vetter said. Deception by the priest also heightened suspicion.

But the case was weak, Vetter said, and officials didn't want to go to trial and risk an acquittal that would bar any later prosecution.

The evidence -- and the allegations about rituals -- surfaced only a few years ago, when one woman pressed complaints about her own sexual abuse onto a diocese that many think did not want to hear, believe or act on them.

She identified Robinson as one of her abusers, when she was a child, and her claims ran to satanic rituals that involved at least one other Toledo-area priest.

Note that word "ritual," because it is a refrain in this case, sounded by many voices.Another Toledo woman and her husband filed suit last year against the Toledo diocese, alleging the same kind of abuse and satanic rites.
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With the current Pope, he will probably make saint by the end of the trial.