Jim Harrison misses his wife. In his paper­-strewn family room, the retired McCormick spice company bigwig widens his eyes until their cloudy blue irises swim in whites, like two eggs frying.

“I pray to God Susan comes back, but the odds of her coming back are not good,” says Harrison of his estranged wife, who vanished from his house on Friday, August 5, 1994. “It’s possible she went to Ireland.”

His face is all pathos and distance, a trans-Atlantic wrong number. Besides some of his relatives, Jim is the only person close to Susan Harrison who doesn’t say she’s dead, who doesn’t beg to learn how she was killed, who doesn’t volunteer haunting images of deli­cate Susan in a landfill, Susan down a well.

If you mention the common suspicion that Jim knows more about Susan’s disappearance than he’s willing to admit, you won’t cast a shadow on his broad, ruddy face. “The vast majority feel I have nothing to do with it, and they’re right,” says Harrison, curling back his lips to reveal his small, rectangular teeth. “Thousands of people have been very supportive.”

That Harrison will not name one person out of these thousands does not mean he knows where his wife is. It only means he stands alone, aloner by the day.

Monday, August 8, 1994, 4 p.m.

(Three days after Susan’s disappearance. Matt Gordon, the son of Susan’s dear friend Mary Jo Gordon, is trim­ming bushes at his mother’s Greenspring Valley house. Susan often stayed there after fights with Jim. Jim Har­rison pulls up in a long, dark-blue sedan and sticks his head out the window.)

JIM: Is your mother at home?

MATT: No.

(Jim parks and gets out of the car. Matt notes that Jim’s face is puffy and flushed; his hands and speech seem unsteady. Matt smells alcohol on his breath.)

JIM: Do you know where I might be able to find your mother?

MATT: She’s at work.

JIM: Susan is missing.

MATT: I know. I heard.

JIM: I’m very worried. I have absolutely no idea where she might be. I thought your mother might know. Could you give me her phone numbers at home and at work?

MATT: Sure. Wait here. (Jogs inside for paper; writes down phone numbers; returns and hands them to Jim.)

JIM: Thank you. If you hear an thing, please, please let me know.

(They shake hands. Jim walks back to his car.)

What’s widely known: More than a a year ago, bright generous Ruxton mom Susan Hurley Harrison vanished. She was last seen by second husband Jim, from whom she was separated. He said Susan had been to his house several times that day, acting in turns loving and abusive—­”going manic-depressive,” he called it. To Cockeysville police, this was a familiar description. It was how Jim usually explained the fights that had made the Harrisons’ home a frequent destination for their blue-and-white squad cars.

Susan had probably driven off a about 10 p.m., Jim said-he wasn’t sure, because he’d gone to bed to avoid her vitriol. Her green Saab convertible was found parked at National Airport with the key in the ignition and new gas in the tank. But no one has heard from Susan, and no body has turned up. Police searched Jim’s house, which was cleaned around the time Susan disappeared by a new maid who quit almost immediately. Bur if police found evidence of foul play. they’re not talking. Jim took a lie­-detector test. Police told him he failed, but he’s sticking to his story.

Jim has cooperated with investigators and reporters. against his lawyers’ advice. But unlike Susan’s siblings who hired a private investigator and who call pol1Ce several times a week for progress reports, Jim Harrison has hired no one to look for Susan. And in the 15 months since her disappearance, he has called poke just a handful of times.

“I feel Jim holds the key to the mystery,” says Lieu­tenant Sam Bowerman, a specialist in criminal personali­ty profiling. “He says it’s ridiculous for anyone to think anyone would have harmed Susan, because he loved her. But love really doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

September 1994

(About one month after Susan’s disappearance. In Jim’s family room. William Ramsey, the lead detective investigating the case, is questioning Jim.)

RAMSEY: So, Susan is down at the bottom of the stairs, screaming at you, and you just got to bed and fall asleep?

JIM: Yes, that’s right.

RAMSEY: And when you do wake up again?

JIM: About eight.

RAMSEY: Not four a.m.?

JIM: Four?

RAMSEY: A C&P lineman heard a car door slam on your property about then, heard a car start and drive off down Timonium Road, away from I-83.

JIM: How did they hear that?

RAMSEY: The lineman was up on a utility pole.

JIM: Must have been someone turn­ing around in my driveway. Peo­ple turn around there all the time.

Susan Hurley Harrison was talkative, a fragile blonde with an easy, contagious laugh. If a friend were blue, Susan would conjure a ridiculous image—a nun driving a beer truck, say—and present it for comic effect. “Now laugh!” she’d com­mand, with just a vestige of a Boston accent. And she would laugh herself.

One of five children of a Massac­husetts silver-company executive, Susan also had a creative, domestic bent. “There were always projects she was working on,” recalls brother John Hurley, eight years her junior. “When I was little, she’d let me help her lay out these big tissue-paper things she’d use to make patterns for clothes. Or she’d hold my hands up while she rolled up a ball of yarn off them.”

Susan studied art history at Manhattanville College, then found curatorial work in Boston. At 25, she married law student Tom Owsley, a Harvard chum of her older brother Bill. Joining Tom in North Carolina, Susan worked two more years, until Tom graduated and the couple moved. A year later, in 1970, her first son, Jonathan, was born.

Jon and his younger brother, Nick Owsley, entered Susan’s world at its center and stayed there. “Those kids were her life,” says Clara Arana, a friend and fel­iow craftswoman. “They were what kept her alive.”

As youngsters, Jon and Nick learned to expect their doting mother at every school event, every lacrosse game. Jon had to beg her to stay on the sidelines: “No matter what, never, ever run down onto the field if you think I’m hurt, I don’t care how bad it looks,” he said. “It’s not cool for a guy to have his mother run down on the field in front of everybody.”

She overwhelmed the boys with handmade gifts. “She’d make us sweaters, mittens, lamp shades, every­thing,” recalls Nick, now a junior at Middlebury Col­lege. “Sometimes you’d just mention something off­hand, just admire it, and she’d make you one. You had to be careful what you said,” he jokes.

Susan told her boys they were her best friends, that they understood her like no one else did. The boys say she offered a steady stream of solid guidance; even in college, she was the first person they turned to for com­fort. At a memorial service in June, Jon read a remem­brance of Susan, written as a letter to her. Here is part: “When our teammate died my junior year, I picked you up at the airport just hours after I found out. I was completely distraught, suffering in a way I could not comprehend. ‘Oh, Jonathan,’ you said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And you held my hand the whole way down from Burlington to Middlebury.

“And true to form, always thinking of others, you told me to make sure that his mother had a Mother’s Day card—it was only three days away—signed by the entire team, so that she would know she was not alone.”

November 22, 1994

(Almost four months after Susan’s disappearance. In a Towson courtroom, at a hearing to name Jon the guardian of Susan’s belongings. Her husband is legally the first in line for that task, but the family wants Jon to be named instead. Jim does not challenge the request, but he has neverthe­less been asked to testify. Carey Deeley, the attorney for Susan’s four siblings, first husband and sons, is questioning Jim.)

DEELEY: Your wife, on July 27, 1993, checked in at the hospital to be treated for a bruise on her right forehead, down into her eye, with swelling noted to the doctor in the hospital. Her knees were scraped and sore. Her wrist had been twisted. Her right eye was almost swollen shut.

DANA WILLIAMS (JIM’S LAWYER): Objection.

DEELEY: Does that ring a bell?

WILLIAMS: Objection.

JUDGE CHRISTIAN KAHL: Overruled.

JIM HARRISON: I don’t remember that situation. DEELEY: Showing you what’s been marked for identification—

WILLIAMS: Can I see that, Mr. Deeley?

DEELEY: —as—

JIM: Black eyes? Is that what you’re going to show me?

DEELEY: Let’s see what I’m going to show, sir. (Shows two photographs of Susan with a blackened eye.) That’s your wife?

JIM: That’s Susan.

DEELEY: And those are fair and accurate representa­tions, are they not, of what she looked like after the July, 1993 incident. Right, sir?

WILLIAMS: Objection, your honor.

JUDGE KAHL: Overruled.

HARRISON: Oh, her eye was much blacker than that. In fact, both eyes were blacker.

DEELEY: And how did her eyes come to be black like that, sir?

WILLIAMS: Objection.

DEELEY: What did you do to her on that occasion, Mr. Harrison?

WILLIAMS: Your hon­or, that’s two questions.

JUDGE KAHL: One at a time.

DEELEY: What happened, Mr. Harri­son, in July of 1993?

WILLIAMS: Objection.

JUDGE KAHL: Over­ruled.

HARRISON: We had come back from the beach, from Ocean City, and she had been manic depressive on the way down, and then recovered. And when she got back to 610 West Timonium Road where we live, she went berserk again. And she ran around the house. She was smash­ing stuff around the house. She was yelling. She was screaming. And she was running so fast and had been drinking again.

And she ran out the door of the new sunroom that we have, and she fell on the steps as she went out. Because I saw her stagger and fall as she rushed out the door. And she banged her head, as I recall, I guess it was right here {points), really banged it. And it resulted in an artery or a vein or whatever, pouring blood, so that this particular eye, her right eye, really got black, and the left eye became sort of lightly black.

DEELEY: Do you deny, sir, the report of the emergency room of July 27, saying that you hit her in the head with your fist at that time?

HARRISON: That is an absolute lie.

James Joshua Harrison Jr. was born in 1936 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. His father, who grew up in rural Virginia, was working as a chemical engineer, and the family lived on St. Paul Street. When Jim was five, his parents bought a house on Morningside Drive in Towson and moved there with Jim and his sister, Ann.

Jim’s parents sent the boy to the Gilman School where he excelled. In his senior year, the football coach nominated the 145-pound end to be Baltimore’s unsung sports hero of the year, an honor bestowed by McCormick & Co. Jim’s connection to the school endures—in the year before Susan disappeared, he co-chaired his class’s 40th-anniversary fundraising drive, the most successful reunion drive in the school’s history.

Jim studied engineering at Cornell, taking a semester off when his grades began to suffer from too much partying. While on hiatus, he met a high-spirited Goucher student named Molly Darden. He returned to Ithaca, and a year later Molly joined him as his bride. By the time Jim graduated in 1960, their third child was on her way.

After a stint at Whiting-Turner and six years at Martin Marietta—during which earned a law degree from the University Baltimore—Jim got a job as assistant counsel at McCormick. There, he rose to general counsel, then chief financial officer treading one proven path to the president’s office. Along the way, Jim earned an M.B.A. from Loyola College, finishing first in his class.

Jim stood particularly tall at McCormick in 1980when he learned that one division had been cooking books to swell its bottom line. It was he who urged corporate brass to come clean, launch an outside investigation and re-issue profit figures for several years past. He also distinguished himself during an unwelcome takeover bid by a Swiss company in the early 1980s, and by his sale of McCormick’s vast real estate holdings to the Rouse Company in 1988.

Jim was known as a brilliant businessman. But some say he could play the fool when it served him. When plotting an acquisition, says one observer, “he’d play this ‘Oh, I’m just a poor old country boy’ shtick. The next thing you know, McCormick owns the company and he’s rocking in his chair like Grandpa.”

March 31, 1995

(Almost eight months after Susan’s disappearance. Cocktails before a dinner to open the golf season at the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club. In the member lounge, Susan’s first husband, Tom Owsley, stands in a group near the bar by the door. Enter Jim Harrison, also a member. Tom notes that Jim is red-faced and unsteady; then Tom turns his back.)

JIM: Oh, Tom, how are the boys?

(Tom says nothing.)

JIM: Jonathan has Susan’s car?

TOM: Yeah.

JIM: If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.

TOM: All we need is to find Susan’s body.

JIM: Oh, I pray to Jesus that’s not what happened.

(Tom walks away.)

When Jim met Susan in 1976, both were married. Susan had her two sons with Tom. Jim had six children with Molly, plus a five-bedroom house in Lutherville and the inside track to the helm of an internation­al corporation.

In the following years, the couples socialized at conferences of corporate executives (Owsley is a vice a president at Crown Petroleum), and then the Owsleys moved from Reston, Virginia, to the Green­spring Valley in 1982, the Har­risons were ready to welcome them to Baltimore.

By then, Susan’s school-aged sons didn’t need her constant attention, and the domestic appli­cations of her art training—needle­-point seat covers for the dining set, hand-painted lampshades for herself and friends, a home-sewn down jacket for Tom—stopped seeing like the makings of an adult’s whole life. In the same position, some of Susan’s contemporaries struck out on their own; others stayed married but started careers. Susan just for restless.

In stepped good-time Jim, admiring Susan’s face and heart, playing to what many say was a lifelong lack of self-confidence. “He showered her with attention,” recalls Tom Owsley. “He knew how to put on the big push.” They started an affair in June of 1983.

The fall of 1984, the two couples saw a play together. Sitting around the Owsleys’ dining room table afterwards, Jim and Susan revealed their relationship to Molly and Tom. “All hell broke loose,” recalls Molly Harrison. That October, Jim and Susan left their families and moved in together.

The first person who called 911 about Susan and Jim’s troubles was probably Tom. He recalls trying to help Susan during early strife, and once again even drove her to the police station. In October of 1986, Susan called Tom at work, despondent, saying she had take a lot of pills. Paramedics arrived at the Lutherville house she shared with Jim, but Susan was gone. Jim told paramedics they’d had a fight and said she might be at Tom’s house. An ambulance found her there, but she refused treatment, so they called Jim to come get her.

In December, 1988, Jim and Susan married. By that time, she already had suffered a broken arm—she said at the time she’d fallen off a bike, but years later told her family that Jim had broken it. She had also called police numerous times, claiming Jim punched her in the eye, Jim punched her in the mouth, Jim threw water on her, Jim raped her. He rou­tinely denied the charges; she usually dropped them. Short­ly before their wedding, Jim was acquitted of two counts of battery against Susan. After their wedding, this pattern of injuries and calls for help continued.

In October, 1989, as part of a McCormick sponsor­ship, Jim and Susan played host to two teenage girls from the perky traveling stage show “Up With People.” Susan left the company’s welcome-to-Baltimore dinner early. When Jim and the girls arrived home later, Susan immediately began berating him, accusing him of sleep­ing with both of the girls—at least, that’s what one of the girls told police she had said. The visitors’ luggage was emptied and their clothes strewn about the house. For some time afterwards, Susan was unwelcome at Mc­Cormick company functions.

“She was horrible,” says Molly Harrison. “She misbe­haved constantly. Her family is completely blind to it.”

According to Molly, Susan’s portrayal in the local press has been misleadingly gentle. “We’ve been calling her ‘Saint Susan’ since the Tow­son Times story came out [in May, 1995],” she says. “It’s the joke of the city.” Molly says she has seen Susan “go off manic” many times, running off into a thun­derstorm once after Jim.

Molly also says that after Susan and Jim fought, Susan would call Molly and her chil­dren each “30 times,” looking for him. Some­times she’d ask for Jim, sometimes she’d just pause and hang up. Molly says phone company records prove the hang-ups came from Susan. (Jim says he does not remember Susan ever using the phone in this way.)

“She stalked us,” Molly says. “Every time the Owsleys say they wish Jim had never met Susan, I say it five times. Frankly, I don’t wish anybody dead, but I hope I never see her again.”

Wednesday, July 12, 1995, 1:30 p.m.

(Almost a year after Susan’s disappearance. Owings Mills District Court. Jim has been charged with drunk and disorderly conduct in Garrison. Later today, Jim will request and receive a post­ponement. Jim, his lawyer, and his two grown daughters, Betsy and Wendy, are waiting among the blond wood pews in Courtroom No. 1. There to watch the proceedings: Carey Deeley, the lawyer for Susan’s siblings and sons; detective William Ram-sey; lieutenant Sam Bowerman; a reporter.)

BETSY: Dad, I had a dream that Susan was found alive and well in Missouri—

JIM: Missouri?

WENDY: —and that her boyfriend’s left her and she can’t decide whether to come back. (Laughs.)

JIM: (His eyes widen.) I pray to God you’re right. Uh, that God is talking to you in your dream.

In late 1991, Jim learned he had been passed over for the job of McCormick CEO. Ironically, Harrison was beaten out for president by a man who had joined McCormick as head of a California spice company that Harrison had been instrumental in acquiring. Says Harrison in the third person, an idiosyncracy: “A lot of people, including Jim, figured that Jim was going to be the successor to the McCormick [company]. But Bailey [Thomas] and Gene Blattman became very close friends. And Gene Blattman, who was a fine guy, beat me out.”

After news of the promotion broke, Harrison took “early retirement” and stopped going to work, two years before his pension kicked in.

Jim began spending days at home, and the couple calls to the police became more frequent. Often, both had been drinking. Each claimed the other was the attacker, though Susan is the only one whose bones were ever broken. (Jim once showed police a yellowing bruise, saying Susan had just caused it. But Susan said a doctor had caused it days before, and the doctor confirmed this.) Susan began telling friends and family about these confrontations, but would later soften her words. Had Jim yelled at her? She’d provoked him. Had he shoved her? She’d exaggerated the injury. Besides, he had been ever so sweet to her since.

“When she would first call me, she would be extremely distressed and disoriented,” recalls sister Molly Moran, who lives in Georgia. “Then later, she got defensive, blamed it on herself, glossed over the whole thing. I didn’t know what to believe.”

Susan saw several counselors during her marriage to Jim. One Boston doctor—a cardi­ologist, the family points out—diagnosed manic-­depressive illness, and a local doctor prescribed lithium for it. But her family says the psychia­trist Susan was seeing when she disappeared had rejected this diagnosis. Susan was anxious and confused and filled with rage against Jim, they claim, but she was not bipolar. The psychiatrist they name declines to com­ment, however, citing confi­dentiality rules.

Jim and Susan each claimed the other had problems with alcohol, and they went to Alco­holics Anonymous together for a time in the early 1990s. Susan’s family says Susan did not have an alco­hol problem, but that Jim does. Jim denies he has an alcohol problem, but says Susan did. For Christmas. 1987, one of Jim’s relatives gave him an Alcoholics Anonymous manual. The inscription had nothing to do with Susan.

The summer before she disappeared—the summer of the black eye—Susan got a 10-day court order to keep Jim away from the house. She asked a judge to extend the order to 180 days, but the judge refused to do so, because Susan had accepted a ride from Jim while the order was in force. If Susan went willingly with Jim, the judge ruled, the government could not keep him away. The order lapsed, and Jim came home. To celebrate their reconciliation, the couple bought a $47,000 racehorse. Susan picked her out, so they named her “Susan’s Choice,” a strangely melancholy echo of a book Susan loved—Sophie’s Choice—about the choice between two children’s lives. The main character, bone, Sophie, lives and dies with Nathan, a charmer with an irrational, abu­sive temper. The most memorable line from the movie is hers: “The truth? I don’t even know what is the truth, after all these lies I have told.” In spring of 1995, Susan’s Choice broke her back in a Florida stable and was put to death.)

Why did Susan stay with Jim? For one thing, she was used to living well—she flew Jon to college in the McCormick jet; she had a closetful of evening gowns. In her divorce over from Tom, she had foregone alimo­ny, and it had been many years since she had worked. And there was Jim, a $4-million man, ready to take care of her. When they weren’t fighting, he was extremely attentive. On the 27th of every month for years—in memory of the date when they start­ed their affair—Jim sent Susan a gooey card.

Besides, after his retirement, Susan felt sorry for Jim. Calling from home to the friend who had shel­tered her after one blowup, Susan explained her return: “This morn­ing, he got up, put on a tie, he put on a jacket. And where did he go? To the post office.”

Monday, July 17, 1995, 9:15 a.m.

The picture-window lobby of the Ocean City District Court. Jim has been charged with drunk and disorderly conduct in a hotel parking lot. His lawyer has just arranged for the trial to be rescheduled at the circuit court in Snow Hill, so Jim can have a jury. The attorney and Jim’s daughter Betsy, also a lawyer, are conferring earl by the entrance. Lawyer Carey Deeley and a reporter are sitting outside the courtroom, on a long wooden bench. Jim walks over to Deeley, the man who had questioned him for two hours at November’s guardian­ship hearing.

JIM: (Kindly, pulling a small notebook from his jacket pocket. What’s your name?

DEELEY: Carey Deeley.

JIM: (Writes this down.) And who do you represent?

DEELEY: I’m with Venable, Baetjer and Howard.

JIM: (Writes this down.) You were at the other one, weren’t you?

DEELEY: Mr. Harrison, I really can’t speak to you.

JIM’S ATTORNEY: Jim, come here, please.

JIM: (To the reporter, brightly.) How are you?

THE REPORTER: Just fine. What’s up?

BETSY: Come on, Dad.

(Detective William Ramsey rounds a corner from the district attorney’s office.)

RAMSEY: Hi, Jim.

JIM’S ATTORNEY: Jim, why are you hanging around with those people? Those people are not on your side.

In the fall of 1993, Nick left for college, and Susan consulted a divorce lawyer. She also began planning a business to produce the hand-painted lamp shades she’d been making for friends for years.

The Harrisons’ calls to the police that fall include accusations that each had attacked the other; had destroyed things in the house; had stolen belong­ings; had trapped the other by parking behind them in the driveway.

Finally, on December 29, Susan called police from Mary Jo Gordon’s house. She had planned to meet Gordon for dinner the previous evening, but told police that Jim had held her captive in their house most of the night. She said he had punched her and shoved her into the Christmas tree. Each said the other had tried to run them down in the car, and police found tire tracks on the lawn. This was it, Susan told friends. She rent­ed a carriage house in Ruxton and took everything from the house she could take, including the washer, the dryer, both stereos and all the drapes.

Susan served Jim with a request for support, enumerating the injuries she’d received during their relationship. She blamed Jim for them; Jim denied responsibility.

But before long, Susan and Jim were dating again. “Theirs was a really destructive relationship, but addictive, you know?” Gordon says. “It was just a matter of time before they would make contact, and then the whole thing would start all over again.” Shortly after Susan moved out, Jim helped her negotiate a lease for studio space at the Mill Centre in Hampden, next to Clara Arana’s art­-jewelry studio.

Jim says that when Susan disap­peared, she was on the verge of moving back into his house. He points to his dining room curtains, which Susan had re-hung, as proof. But a Realtor the couple consulted after their separation says it was he who suggested re-hanging the drapes, to make the house more marketable. Her family says she returned them reluctantly, so the house would sell and she could get her half­share of its value. And she could get away from Jim.

But no one disputes that a week before she vanished—July 25 to 27—Susan and Jim took a holiday together in Ocean City.

“It was like she was in two worlds,” says one good friend. “She wanted to be her own person, but even when they were separated, she was still wearing her big diamond ring.”

Sunday, July 30, 1995, 7:30 p.m.

Dinner in the enclosed porch at the Turf Inn in Timonium. Along one wall of the narrow room, windows display cars streaming down York Road. On the opposite wall hang china masks of movie stars: Bogie, Joan Crawford, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe. Jim Har­rison is having dinner with a reporter.)

THE REPORTER: Have you ever known anyone else who was manic-depres­sive?

JIM: There was somebody at Cornell, but I don’t remember who.

THE REPORTER: So, apart from Susan, you’ve never known anyone who had manic-depressive illness, never seen the symptoms?

JIM: No.

THE REPORTER: Do you realize that the symptoms you describe as Susan’s “going manic-depressive” aren’t gen­erally considered symptoms of manic-depressive illness?

JIM: Not symptoms? (Pauses.) It was embarrassing.

THE REPORTER: How so?

JIM: She would call the police, the police would come, and nothing happened.

THE REPORTER: Nothing happened, but she would have a broken arm, broken ribs, black eyes—

JIM: The black-eye thing was ridiculous. She fell and bumped her head. It had nothing to do with me. She’d gone berserk, started running around. Then she fell.

THE REPORTER: Did you ever think something besides manic-depressive illness made her do these things?

JIM: No.

THE REPORTER: According to psychiatrists—

JIM: Psychiatrists?

THE REPORTER: I called a few experts, and they said that manic-depressive illness involves moods that come and stay a while; you take it in and out of the room with you. Most said that what you describe—this sudden, very limited rage, directed at one person ­isn’t classically a symptom of manic-­depressive illness, let alone the only symptom. It could be borderline per­sonality, maybe, or just someone who feels violated.

JIM: (Pauses. Picks at his cuticle.) When she wasn’t manic-depressive, she was great.

On Sunday, July 31, 1994, Susan called police. She said Jim had come to her house at 12:30 in the morning and asked her to dinner. When she declined, she said, he twisted her fingers until he injured them. She told police she would press charges.

Jim also called police that day, to complain that while he was out playing golf, someone had let herself into the house and cut up his summer clothes with scissors. He suspected Susan—and in fact, an embarrassed Susan confessed to a relative that out of anger, she had done this. Jim also said he was missing a wallet containing $4,000 in cash—a wallet that he now says is still missing.

During a phone call that evening, son Nick gave Susan a familiar ultimatum: Choose Jim or choose your sons. We want no part of him. Characteristically, Susan waffled, Nick says. It’s not as easy as that, she told him. There are financial considerations.

On Monday, August 1, Nick says, Susan called back. “I’ve made my deci­sion,” Susan told him. “I want to be with you and Jon.” The two talked eagerly about their plans to visit her brothers in Boston that weekend.

On Wednesday, August 3, Susan called Clara Arana. “I want to take you to lunch Monday, when I get back from Boston,” she said. “I have something to tell you.” Replied Arana: “I hope it’s the news I’ve been waiting for”—that Susan’s vacillation had ended. “You’re going to like it,” Susan re­plied. “But I want to tell you in person.”

On Thursday, August 4, Jim changed the lock on his family-room door, to keep Susan out of the house she co-owned.

On Friday, August 5, Nick and Susan decided not to drive to Boston that day, as planned. Instead, they would take an early plane on Saturday. Nick spent part of the day with Susan in Ruxton, then went to pack a bag at his father’s house and pick up Chinese takeout. Susan gave him her ATM card to get cash for the trip; she had only $5 and almost no gas. She also offered Nick her Saab to drive-if he had accepted, she would have been stuck at home, because she didn’t drive his stick-shift car-and told him she would nap until his return.

At 5 p.m., Susan called her brother John in Boston. She sounded worried, but he was running out the door, so he promised to call her back at 7:30. When he called back a half-hour early, Susan didn’t answer.

When Nick arrived back in Ruxton, Susan was gone. The door was ajar, and she had taken only her wallet and the spare car key.

Jim’s older daughter Wendy saw Susan arrive at her father’s house a little before 7 p.m. Then Wendy left. And Susan went inside.

(At the Turf Inn)

JIM: We fell in love. We couldn’t stop it. It just couldn’t stop. Thank God. Because I love her so much, and she loved me so much.

THE REPORTER: A lot of people say she was addicted to you.

JIM: It’s really neat. Life is full of so many different people. But then you meet somebody who is the person above all. We couldn’t stop it, so I had to leave my wife and six children. She left her husband and two chil­dren.

THE REPORTER: What do you make of people saying she was addicted to you?

JIM: That’s called “in love.” If you’re really deeply in love with someone, that’s addiction.

The year since Susan’s disappearance has not been a good one for Jim.

In December, his second son, Bill, fired a shotgun in his Florida apartment complex, drawing a SWAT team.

In January, his first wife, Molly, sued him for failing to make an alimony pay­ment. She told the judge Jim cut her off because she wouldn’t let him celebrate Christmas at the house she owns with a ‘ companion. (Jim denies making this threat.} Jim paid about half of the alimony right before he received Molly’s lawsuit. When a judge ordered him to pay the rest of it, he paid.

In February, son Bill turned up in the Appalachian mountains with frostbite. Jim brought him to the hand clinic at Union Memorial Hospital, where parts of his fingers were amputated.

In March, after talking to Tom Owsley at a golfers’ reception, Jim had words with someone else at the club and was asked by the management to leave. According to a police report, he stum­bled across a nearby road and got in a tangle with an officer trying to help. At the Garrison precinct, Harrison shoved an officer and “continued to sing loudly ‘F-k you’ over 45 times in succession.” His trial on these charges has been rescheduled for October 2.

In May, son Bill and a stranger died of gunshot wounds on a bus in Florida. Police say Bill fired the shots. Jim isn’t sure. “There were six people on the bus,” he says. “I wonder if something else happened. Like, they killed him and the other guy.”

In June, at an American Bar Associa­tion meeting in Ocean City, Jim’s car bumped into a parked truck on a hotel lot, and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated. The arresting officer said Jim slapped him and offered him a bribe. His jury trial has been scheduled for November 8.

(At the Turf Inn)

JIM: It’s much ado about nothing. I was patting him on the shoulder, trying to make friends.

THE REPORTER: He said you slapped him on the wrist.

JIM: I never did.

THE REPORTER: He said you offered him money to let it drop.

JIM: In Ocean City?

THE REPORTER: Yeah.

JIM: No.

THE REPORTER: Does that mean you did offer the Garrison cop money?

JIM: No, neither. I just don’t think you should be involved in that. You’re making me look like a horrible crimi­nal. And I’m not.

Jim Harrison is forever offering people things. Admire the electric Santa by his hearth—he bought one for each of his twin granddaughters last Christ­mas, but the parents were content with just one ­and he’ll quickly ask “Want it?” He really hates being treated to dinner. “Please let me buy,” he begs endlessly.

Some, including Jim, say he’s just a generous guy who gets pleasure out of helping people. “I just love people and I love to help people, whether it’s children or whatever,” Jim says. Others, including Susan’s family, say Jim wants people to owe him. “He’s much more willing to buy some­one’s friendship than be someone’s friend,” Jon Owsley charges.

When it came to Susan, Jim was gen­erous to a fault, ladling gold jewelry onto her the way she pressed homemade sweaters on her boys. In return, Jim expected single-minded devotion. Jon Owsley says that once, during a conver­sation in Jim and Susan’s sunroom, Jim told him that men and women could not be platonic friends. Any man who befriended his wife had more than friendship in mind. (Jim denies ever say­ing this.)

Susan once told a friend about a tiff at a baseball game. While Jim went to fetch her a snack, Susan began chatting with a couple nearby. When Jim returned, he chastened her for speaking to another man. (Jim says this never happened.) Sometimes, Jim punished Susan by leaving her stranded, says a friend who periodically retrieved her from a restaurant or her country club. (This, Jim does not deny.)

(In Jim’s family room)

THE REPORTER: You’ve got a lot of peo­ple hallucinating around you, Mr. Harrison.

JIM: What do you mean?

THE REPORTER: Well, sometimes I’ve got three or four people saying something happened one way—that you said a particular thing—and you tell me you never said it.

JIM: I can’t help it if people lie.

Whether Susan is dead or alive—and whether or not Jim was involved in her disappearance—she’s clearly stranded again. And what troubles her family most is not being able to bury her. “Where is she?” wonders Tom Owsley, rolling up his brown linen napkin after dinner at home. “In a landfill? An aban­doned well? Just covered over with branches?” He clicks his tongue and turns away.

“She is just someone who shouldn’t ever be in the situation she’s in right now,” says son Nick. “She should be up in Massachusetts, next to her mom and dad. Not for my sake—I’ve done enough grieving. But for her sake. Right now, there’s no stone, no way for her to be remembered.”

Police investigators say she has almost certainly been murdered by someone close to her. No random stranger need go to the trouble of hiding her body, they reason.

If that’s the case, then someone close to her knows where she lies. Someone can visit her grave. And that someone is the only person to whom Susan now belongs.

(At the Turf Inn)

THE REPORTER: Nick says that he saw you attack his mother. That one night when he was 12, he was staying at your house. Jon and Tom—

JIM: Who?

THE REPORTER: Jon and Tom Owsley were out of town. And Nick heard you arguing with Susan, so he called Jon, and Jon called his girlfriend to come by the house and get Nick.

Nick was down at the bottom of the driveway, waiting for Julie, and he saw his mother run out of the house carrying a bunch of her lamp shades, one torn and the rest unharmed. She ran to the trunk of her car with them, and you ran behind her. Before she could get the key in the trunk, you grabbed her and started shaking her violently.

When Nick yelled at you to stop it, you just stopped short, gave him a lit­tle smile, and walked back into the house. Do you remember this?

JIM: No. It didn’t happen.

THE REPORTER: Why would he say that it did?

JIM: She turned the boys against me.

THE REPORTER: Enough for him to remember things that didn’t happen?

JIM: He’d been brainwashed.

THE REPORTER: Why would she want to turn the boys against you?

JIM: When she went manic-depressive, I she’d say bad things, she’d call the police. As far as the boys are con­cerned, she didn’t want to be a liar. So she let them believe things.

Like his brother Nick, Cornell law student Jon Owsley is a self-possessed, good-looking Gilman School grad. Jon’s girlfriend, like Nick’s, is pretty and slight and wears a blond pageboy.

Jon is sitting in his father’s Homeland sunroom, fiddling with two stubby screwdrivers, one slotted and one Phillips-head. He’s talking about Jim Harrison. “When I was a sophomore in high school, I knew he was full of crap,” says Jon, remembering Jim’s attempts to be cordial, to act like a family. “I said, ‘Wednesday night I was picking my mom up from your house, telling you to stay the hell away from her. I’m not going to make nice with you on Sunday.”‘

Police say that Susan’s killer is better off revealing her whereabouts now. “When that person is able to admit that they’ve done something, there’s a huge sense of relief,” says Lieutenant Sam Bowerman. Besides, he reminds any guilty party who’s reading, a cooperative killer might face a lighter sentence: “Once we find the body, we won’t be interested in your side of the story.”

So if Jim Harrison knows where Susan is, and if he reveals this and ends her family’s restless search, will Jon be grateful? Will Jon feel mercy?

“I will never, never, never, ever, ever, regardless if he got ripped to pieces by wild wolves, never feel a moment of care for what happens to him,” says Jon, who is studying to become a prosecutor.

As he speaks, he slides one screwdriv­er absently against the other, as if he’s sharpening a knife.

(At the Turf Inn)

THE REPORTER: Most of the people I’ve talked to are really upset that they don’t know where her body is. It hurts them to think of her not getting a proper burial, not having a tomb­stone for people to visit. Do you ever think about that?

JIM: Oh, my God. That’s terrible. I’ve been praying so hard that she comes home. I haven’t really thought about that.

THE REPORTER: You don’t wonder where her body is?

(Jim stares at the reporter. The reporter stares back until the waitress comes.)

---

Editor’s Note: Since this story’s publication, Susan’s remains were found in rural Frederick County by two hikers on November 29, 1996. Her death was subsequently ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner, but Harrison was never arrested, tried, or charged. After two years of handling the case, the Maryland attorney general’s office called off the criminal investigation into her death due to ”insufficient evidence.” A wrongful death lawsuit filed by Susan’s sons against Harrison ended with a confidential settlement.

In the fall of 2007, Harrison died of pneumonia at the age of 71.

On Tuesday, Governor Larry Hogan announced that he will be implementing several new initiatives to target violent crime in Baltimore City, citing the increasing violence as “completely unacceptable.” Hogan plans to open a Violent Crime Joint Operations Center in the city that will have 200 “strike force” officers from 16 federal and local agencies to fight crime and gangs.

“Citizens across the state are outraged by the daily headlines of this rampant gang violence,” Hogan said at the press conference. “They don’t feel safe in their own neighborhoods . . . They’re crying out for somebody to do something to stop these killings.”

For the last four years, the city has exceeded more than 300 homicides. Hogan said that “enough is enough” and that he will use every resource available to curb the amount of violence in Baltimore, including providing additional funding to the Baltimore Police Department for signing bonuses to attract more recruits, as well as $50 million to fund every request received from victim service providers across the state.

“All of these efforts won’t be enough if we can’t keep these repeat offenders off the streets,” he said. “According to the BPD, 60 percent of those convicted of gun crimes in Baltimore City do not serve any real time and are released back onto the streets to commit violent felonies again and again. This is completely unacceptable.”

The governor will fund the expansion of Project Exile, a federal program that targets repeat offenders and have them charged under federal laws and courts that may lead to longer sentences. Hogan also said he would introduce legislation at Maryland’s General Assembly session, which begins today, that would increase the mandatory minimum sentence for repeat gun offenders.

“The federal mandatory sentences are 10 years. If we can process them on federal gun crimes and federal courts, we can put them in jail rather than a slap on the wrist with Baltimore City judges and without mandatory sentences with prosecutions here in the city,” Hogan said. “They are not enough prosecutors to handle all these cases, and we ask them, ‘How could they do more of them,’ and they said they need more manpower, so we’re paying for them.”

Hogan believes that there has been too much focus on the misconduct of the BPD and not enough on the violent criminals plaguing the city, pointing the finger at the consent decree that was implemented in 2017.

He also said that permanent leadership is vital to make this all work expressing his frustration at the vacancy of the position for the past seven months. This comes just one day after Mayor Catherine Pugh announced New Orleans Superintendent Michael Harrison as commissioner-designate.

“There’s been a whole lot of focus on the consent decree, that’s all people have been talking about,” Hogan said. “I think it’s out of balance. We’re going to focus on getting the criminals off the street.”

On June 20, Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced the National Public Safety Partnership (PSP) to combat violent crime in 12 U.S. cities. Baltimore residents and local officials were stunned to realize that Baltimore was not on the list.

“I’m feeling deprived and disappointed,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis. “Because the criteria, as it was explained to me, really epitomizes the crime challenges that exist right now in a city like Baltimore.”

The PSP was created in response to President Trump’s executive order in February to “reduce crime and restore public safety.” The selected cities—Birmingham; Indianapolis; Memphis; Toledo, Ohio; Baton Rouge; Buffalo; Cincinnati; Houston; Jackson, Tennessee; Kansas City; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois—will receive enhanced federal support to identify and prioritize resources to combat crime in their cities.

The support includes structure, leadership, and crime analysis, training development, and expedited delivery of assistance with gun violence and criminal justice from the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Councilman Brandon Scott of Baltimore City’s District 2 and vice chair of public safety, was less surprised to learn that Baltimore was overlooked.

“We know that [President Trump’s] administration is known for talking about cities like Baltimore and Chicago, but they have not lifted a finger to help,” he said. “We need to step up locally, the first thing we need to do is hire a director for the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOJC).”

The MOJC was established to reduce crime, gang activity, and drug trafficking, however, the director seat is currently vacant. Scott attributes the increase of violence in the city to that vacancy.

“We need to develop a complete and comprehensive public safety strategy or gun violence reduction strategy for the city of Baltimore,” Scott said. “We have to do that, not just from a policing lens, but also through the lens of public health because violence is a disease, and we should treat it as such. We should stop treating it like it’s just one symptom of the problem.”

According to Commissioner Davis, there should be an announcement regarding the vacancy in the near future. Baltimore reached out to the mayor’s office for comment, but did not receive a response.

“The mayor is working very hard to build her office of criminal justice,” Davis said. “She’s been very thoughtful and deliberate about building the very best team for the crime fight.”

According to the DOJ, the PSP cities are selected through a process that compares the level of violence in a city to the national average, and the city should also have crime reduction strategies currently in place. Those criteria led Davis to believe that Baltimore was a shoe-in for the program.

“What we have been doing for the last couple of years with the crime fight, reform efforts, and the consent decree, has been at a breakneck pace,” Davis said. “When the Attorney General identified jurisdictions that would benefit from enhancements, we just think that Baltimore is right at the top of the list.”

Recently, the BPD has been taking the necessary steps to ensure that officers are properly trained before hitting the streets. Davis said they have doubled the number of required training hours from the state’s obligatory 40 hours to 80.

The department has also instituted a new type of training, integrated communication and tactics (ICAT), that focuses on communication with suspects. In addition, BPD is a part of law enforcement assisted diversion for crisis intervention, which is only being used by a handful of departments around the country. 

“It’s a blended approach with police officers and mental health professionals to deal with people in a mental health crisis,” Davis said.

Early this month, there were two separate quadruple shootings within two days that caught the attention of the entire city and caused Commissioner Davis and Mayor Pugh to react. Davis placed his entire foot patrol, detectives, and sworn administrative staff on 12-hour shifts to patrol the streets for a week.

“That convinced me of a couple things. Number one: More police officers in the community matter,” he said. “Number two: As police department and a community, we continue to feel the impact of having 500 fewer police officers in 2017 than we had in 2012.”

Davis said the acts of violence needed to be addressed immediately, but the increased foot patrol and mandatory overtime comes with a hefty price tag and this strategy is not feasible.

“We had to assure the community that their police department was paying attention,” he said.   

In Attorney General Sessions’ June 20 announcement, he reassured the public that more cities will be added to the PSP moving forward, but did not specify an exact date or hint at what cities may be included. Until then, Davis said that Baltimore would continue to fight to combat the violence with the current resources.

“We are taking steps, and that’s why my disappointment was tempered,” he said.  “But when an additional opportunity arises like that, one that can sharpen us just a little bit more, we’re always interested.”

*If you have experienced or are experiencing sexual abuse, help is available through the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). Please call 800-656-HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area. 

**Be aware, this post includes spoilers for the Netflix docu-series The Keepers.

**This post has been updated with new information regarding the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s participation in the documentary, Maskell’s status as a priest following the abuse allegations, and the number of plaintiffs in the 1994 civil suit.   

On April 19, the trailer for the new Netflix documentary series The Keepers was released, and since then a heavy foreboding has hung in the air. What, everyone seems to be wondering, will the seven-part series reveal? Its intersecting subjects—widespread sexual abuse at South Baltimore’s Archbishop Keough High School in the ’60s and ’70s and the 1969 murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a 26-year-old nun, who many say was planning to reveal the abuse—are about as explosive as can be.  

For its part, the Archdiocese of Baltimore spent the week trying to get ahead of what it acknowledges is an unfavorable portrayal in the series. The church is represented in the documentary only through its answers to six written questions submitted by the filmmakers. Archdiocese spokesman Sean Caine admits the archdiocese declined filmmakers’ invitation to appear on camera, but insists that there was no nefarious motivation behind the decision. In fact, he says church officials would have welcomed the opportunity to participate in a more robust written correspondence. “I have my doubts about why they would not have had more questions for us,” Caine said Friday morning, after staying up all night to watch the series. “There was certainly a lot presented in the documentary that warranted additional questions that would have given us an opportunity to provide additional context for it. So I’m disappointed that we were given very few questions. Because, at the end of the day, it’s information you want. It doesn’t have to be on your terms. In other words, if you want to put us on camera to try to embarrass us by asking us questions we can’t answer, [we decline], but we’d be happy to research and get back to you.” Caine notes that The Archdiocese has created a microsite addressing the documentary’s release, which includes a FAQs page and a statement from Archbishop William E. Lori that was sent to the archdiocese’s entire email list earlier this week. 

Meanwhile, others see the documentary as a validation of the victims and those who have worked to tell their stories. On a Facebook group dedicated to solving Sister Cathy’s 47-year-old murder, Cesnik’s sister, Marilyn Cesnik Radakovic, wrote that, “This is a very difficult documentary to watch, but this documentary is about courage, and I hope this display of courage is felt by all that view this.”

In any case, the wait is now over. As of 3:01 a.m. today, The Keepers is available for streaming. Before you watch though, here are some things to know. 

1. This Has Been a Long Time Coming

Though Cesnik’s murder and the abuse scandal at Archbishop Keough have gone decades without the kind of international attention this series brings, these are not unknown events. Cesnik’s disappearance was front page news in November 1969, and made headlines again when her body was recovered from a secluded industrial area in Lansdowne in January 1970. After that, however, the trail seemed to grow cold and her death—from blunt force trauma to the head—was theorized to have been the result of a robbery gone wrong. But her memory lived on with her pupils. Over time, her death became something of an urban legend at the all-girls school, which was renamed Seton-Keough High School in 1988 and will close in June 2017 due to declining enrollment. 

2. The Story Was Kept Alive by a Dedicated Few 

Cesnik’s murder investigation heated up again in the ’90s when two women—both Archbishop Keough alums—brought a $40 million lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Baltimore and a priest named Father A. Joseph Maskell. The suit claimed that the plaintiffs had been subjected to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and that the church had covered up Maskell’s depravity. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleged that Maskell had been joined in the abuse by other clergy, police officers, a local gynecologist, and at least one politician. The plaintiffs were then known only as Jane Doe and Jane Roe, but the women have subsequently revealed themselves to be Jean Wehner (Doe) and Teresa Lancaster (Roe). Attorneys for Wehner and Lancaster located more than 30 people—both men and women—who were willing to testify against Maskell in the suit. Read more about the lawsuit in the award-winning 1995 Baltimore magazine article “God Only Knows”.  

In the mid-’90s, headlines about the lawsuit sparked the interest of two other Keough alumnae, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Fitzgerald Schaub. Though neither experienced any abuse themselves, they were moved by the stories of the victims and the memory of their late teacher. With help from numerous others, they began conducting their own unofficial investigation. Several years ago, the duo began a public Facebook group, which recently surpassed 1,000 members. They also run a website where people can submit anonymous tips.

These four women—Wehner, Lancaster, Hoskins, and Schaub—will be at the center of The Keeper‘s narrative. 

3. The Lawsuit Was Dismissed, But The Archdiocese of Baltimore Has Since Compensated Victims

The lawsuit was dismissed in 1995 after a judge ruled that the suit had been filed outside the statue of limitations for juvenile abuse cases. (Wehner maintains that she only recovered memories of her abuse in the early ’90s, long after the statute of limitations had expired. Lancaster and many other victims say they always remembered their abuse but were too scared to go public. This spring, Maryland extended, from age 25 to age 38, the length of time victims of childhood abuse have to sue offenders.) Father Maskell was interviewed by police and had his priestly powers revoked by the archdiocese in 1994, but he was never charged with a crime. Before the civil trial could start, however, Maskell quietly moved to Ireland, where he found work as a psychologist, sometimes even treating adolescents. According to the archdiocese’s FAQ, “the Archdiocese learned in 1996 that Maskell was living in Ireland . . . [and] informed authorities in Ireland about Maskell’s history and attempted to contact Maskell in writing on numerous occasions.” Maskell eventually returned to the Baltimore area, where he lived in archdiocese-affiliated facilities until his death in 2001. Beginning in 2002, his name was added to a list of clergy credibly accused of abuse published on the archdiocese’s website. In addition, the Archdiocese acknowledges it has paid “over $97,000 in counseling assistance and over $472,000 in direct financial assistance to those who may [have] been abused by Maskell,” including Lancaster and Wehner.

4. Sister Cathy May Not Be the Only Murder Victim

It seems likely that the series will delve into theories connecting Cesnik’s murder to the death of three other women: 16-year-old Pamela Lynn Conyers, whose body was found in Anne Arundel County in 1970; 16-year-old Grace Elizabeth “Gay” Montanye, whose body was found in 1971 in South Baltimore; and 20-year-old Joyce Malecki, who disappeared just days after Cesnik and whose body was found in Fort Meade. Because Malecki’s body was discovered on federal property, the FBI had jurisdiction over the case. It is unclear, however, if the FBI investigated the case at that time. Maskell knew the Malecki family because they were parishioners at St. Clement Church in Lansdowne, where he lived and ministered for a time in the ’60s and ’70s. With the permission of the Malecki family, Schaub filed a Freedom of Information Request in August of 2014 for all files related to a 1994 FBI/Baltimore County homicide joint task force into Malecki’s death. So far, Schaub has received no files, but did receive a reply from the FBI in April stating, “Your request . . . is . . . still awaiting assignment to a disclosure analyst for processing. The current estimated date of completion for the request is October 2017. However, given our current workload and staffing levels, it may be a very long time before you begin to receive material from this request.”    

5. Maskell’s Body Was Exhumed In February For DNA Testing

In dramatic fashion, news broke on May 4 that Maskell’s body had been exhumed from a Randallstown cemetery in February and that DNA samples had been taken from it that would be compared to physical evidence from Cesnik’s murder scene. Then, this week, barely 48 hours before the premiere of the documentary, test results revealed that Maskell’s DNA did not match DNA found at the crime scene. “For now, we’ve pretty well reached the end of the road when it comes to forensic evidence,” Baltimore County police spokeswoman Elise Armacost told The Sun. “Our best hope for solving this case at this point lies with the people who are still alive. And we hope that someone will be able to come forward with conclusive information about the murder.”

Anyone with information about Cesnik’s murder is encouraged to contact the Baltimore County Police Department’s Homicide Department, Unsolved Case Squad. Information about the murder of Joyce Malecki can be submitted to the FBI’s Baltimore field office.

Just as the city hoped it might shake its “Bodymore, Murdaland”
reputation with annual homicides two years ago dipping below 200 for the
first time since 1978, two weeks straight out of The Wire gripped residents this summer.

Over a frightening 10-day period in late June, some 40 people were
shot, including 16 killed, once again calling attention to the city’s
gun and gang violence problems.

News of the murder frenzy came in seemingly never-ending bursts via social media. For example, a Sunday morning tweet by Sun
reporter Justin Fenton on June 23 read, “By my count, 15 people have
been shot in Baltimore so far this weekend, including a quintuple
shooting, a triple, and a double.”

In the ensuing days, the number kept climbing as five people were
shot within five hours on June 17. The spike followed an earlier spate
of 12 shootings over Memorial Day weekend, giving rise to concerns that
progress in reducing the homicide rate was being lost.

“The whole city of Baltimore is hurting right now…”—City Councilman Brandon M. Scott in The Baltimore Afro-American

Though the Baltimore Police Department has maintained a Twitter page (@BaltimorePolice) for five years, the organization has recently faced some challenges with how it’s alerting its 40,000 followers to criminal activity.

“The concern is balancing the public’s need to know and the ability to do so in real time,” says spokesman Lt. Eric Kowalczyk. He explains that they’ve had to retract tweets because of misinformation. “In the first hour, the information flow is not 100-percent accurate. To meet the real-time expectation, we get notified, and we’ll tweet it out right away. But, if you continue to recall shootings, you’ll lose credibility.”

The department debated whether to delay the reporting of non-fatal shootings, but, in early October, it was decided to continue reporting as is. “There’s always a process where we look at ways to improve,” Kowalczyk says. One way the department is getting creative is nationwide “tweetalongs,” where officers tweet in real time and post pictures from the scene. “Overall, this kind of transparency is a good thing,” he says. “Whether it’s an officer walking the beat or using their BlackBerry, it’s another way to engage the community.”

Twenty years ago, Joel Lee, a 21-year-old Korean-American beginning his senior year at then-Towson State University, was robbed, shot in the face, and killed while heading to a classmate’s home in Northeast Baltimore. “He wanted to borrow a computer-science book because he was determined to get his grades even higher this year,” his friend, Folashayo Babalola, told The Baltimore Sun after the September 1993 murder. “Joel was very quiet, very ambitious,” Babalola continued. “This has really shaken me. . . . ”

The brutal slaying also shook Baltimore’s Korean-American community, whose leaders still recall the tragedy. Already feeling under siege following attacks directed at Korean-American merchants in the 1980s and 1990s, the Lee case and trial was followed closely in the city. The acquittal of the accused two years later by an almost all African-African jury spurred a protest march downtown and appeared to reflect a troubled relationship between the Korean-American community and traditionally African-American neighborhoods where many of their businesses were located.

(It wasn’t only in Baltimore where relationships between Korean-American merchants and the African-American community were overheating. A year before Lee’s murder, in Los Angeles, Korean store owners were caught in the middle of rioting following the acquittal of white police officers in the beating of Rodney King. In New York, there had been Korean-American store boycotts.)

In Baltimore, there was also a boycott of a Korean-American-owned store, which was eventually closed by the Health Department. And there was a contentious debate over the renovation of the Lafayette and Belair Markets, where Korean-immigrant owners felt they were being pushed out by the city.

Into this fraying backdrop, the Baltimore-based Korean-American Grocers & Licensed Beverage Association of Maryland (KAGRO) was founded in 1995. Forming a nonprofit to help Korean-Americans deal with vendors and navigate the myriad city regulations had been discussed for six months, says Jay Park, who operated a Park Heights liquor store for 25 years and was an early KAGRO president. But the group’s focus quickly expanded in the wake of the Lee trial—which was followed by a wave of four Korean-American store shootings in an eight-day period in January 1997. Immediately, KAGRO began working to build relationships in local communities—starting a scholarship fund, organizing outreach events, and attending meetings. Merchants tried to develop a better relationship with the city police, which had proved a struggle, if for no other reason than the cultural and language barriers.

“The timing [of KAGRO’s launch] wasn’t tied directly to the Lee case,” says Park, “but it concentrated our attention on the most pressing issues we had to deal with, which were not problems with the vendors.”

At his son’s memorial service, Joel Lee’s father said he didn’t “want my son’s death to have no meaning.”

A generation later, Park believes something positive can be connected to that tragedy. “Up until that time, I think we had been looked at and treated differently because of our skin color, our language,” Park says. “But after that, I think people saw us coming together and began to see us as a part of the community, too.”

“Korean-Americans, we don’t have a lot of resources when we arrive.”

But it has never been easy running a corner store in Baltimore. Crime and poverty persist in wide swaths. And now, after decades of struggle on tough corners, city officials are planning to significantly reduce the number of neighborhood liquor stores—the vast majority of which are owned by Korean-Americans. In a sense, Park says, KAGRO members “feel under attack again.”

Among the first things KAGRO did 18 years ago was start a scholarship program for local students. Since then, the association has awarded about $300,000, via annual grants to students in the neighborhoods where KAGRO-member stores are located, as well as to high-school and college-age children of store owners. Two police officers are also annually awarded “appreciation” honors at a ceremony at the Greenmount Senior Center.

The scholarships, as well as different community events and outreach forums, Park says, helped defuse tensions over time. “We tried to go around and get questions from the community, we tried to listen and get the community’s perspective as well as the merchants,” Park says. There were also meetings with former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke’s Korean liaison and municipal departments, and later with the O’Malley and Dixon administrations. By 2004, the Maryland Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had produced a report—years in the making—that found that, while problems persisted between the African-American and Korean-American store owners, “some merchants enjoy friendly relationships in the neighborhoods where their stores are located . . . ” The report, however, also found that “city agencies can do more” to provide services without bias. Not that there wasn’t work needed on the store owners’ side.

“There are cultural differences between the West and East,” says Jin Wook Kang, a restaurant owner and lower Charles Village liquor-store operator. “In our home country, making eye contact is viewed as disrespectful in certain relationships, for example, between a student and a teacher; with a police officer or government official. We listen, but we look down. In our home country, we put change on the counter and push it toward a customer—it’s considered more polite than touching someone’s hand. But here, someone would tell police, ‘They’re rude, they put the change on the counter and push it toward you.’ The opposite was true. It was a misunderstanding. But things have improved a great deal.”

Jay Park arrived in Baltimore as a 17-year-old in 1973, at the start of a Korean boom following the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished nation-based immigration laws giving Europeans preference. Ninety-five percent of Korean-Americans consist of post-1965 immigrants and their children. In the Baltimore region, the Korean-American community has grown from 2,000, Park estimates, when his family arrived, to 60,000.

“My father dreamed of a better life, a better life for his family—the land of opportunity—and he applied for immigration,” says Park, a fit and young-looking 57, casually dressed in a maroon golf shirt tucked into gray slacks at KAGRO’s office at North and Maryland Avenues. He speaks in accented but perfect English, smiling as he recalls his family’s early struggles to acclimate and make ends meet in their third-floor Patterson Park apartment. “Immigration was open to ‘skilled labor’ immigrants and he was an auto mechanic. He brought the whole family and only had $400. I think about it—there were seven of us—five siblings. Where does anybody get that kind of courage?” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t think I could’ve done it.”

His father eventually landed a Sparrows Point union job, where he punched a clock for 15 years. Park graduated from Towson in 1980 with a business degree, and, after a series of entry-level retail jobs, including door-to-door sales, he decided to strike out on his own. It was not just a desire to be self-employed; it was almost a necessity, he says.

“All of us have a family . . . counting on us, and this is the one thing we know.”

“First-generation Korean-Americans, we don’t have a lot resources when we arrive,” Park says. “People may have a lot of education in Korea, but they don’t know anyone and might have limited language skills. So, people pull resources together. We pull our own funding together, sometimes through a gye—a fund community members contribute to each month and then have access to. That’s how a lot of Korean-American merchants start—even today—though less than before.”

Michelle Ha, current KAGRO president, has been here since 1980 and lives above her East Biddle Street liquor store, which she’s owned for 15 years—not far from where Park’s family first settled. She throws an annual spaghetti block party, collects school supplies for neighborhood kids, and gives away Thanksgiving meals. “I love doing those things,” Ha says. A community council member, she works closely with Eastern District police—she has the commander’s cell-phone number—and officers know her by name. She also puts together an annual summer Day of Hope festival at Bocek Park, which includes children’s activities and rides.

“She’s a fixture in that community,” says Lt. Col. Melvin T. Russell, commander of the department’s community partnership division. “When I need help, she is one of the first people I call. She serves as a go-between with the small businesses [and police], and I know she provides holiday meals for hundreds of people. The city needs more people like her.”

Ha, however, is concerned about her future. Baltimore may need committed activists like Ha, but city officials don’t want the kind of business she owns in residential communities anymore. Part of the city’s massive rezoning effort entails scaling back the number of liquor licenses. Proportionally, the rollback will hit the Korean-American community, which owns the majority of corner “Class A” liquor stores, hardest.

Currently, there are 1,330 liquor licenses in the city. About 300 are “Class A” licenses, of which 128 are slated for cuttng. Thomas Stosur, Baltimore City’s director of planning, notes studies showing a correlation between crime, violence, poor public-health outcomes, and the number of liquor stores in densely populated residential areas. He adds that the last time the city underwent a rezoning overhaul was in 1971 when the 128 current liquor licenses the city wants to remove were “grandfathered” in. “We refer to them as ‘non-conforming’ because, under current law, they wouldn’t qualify for a liquor license because they are in a residential area,” Stosur says. “That’s where that number comes from.”

Stosur adds that many “Class BD-7” licenses (bars that do a majority carryout business) will be affected as well and are not typically Korean-American owned. In both cases, he says, the city intends to assist storeowners in retooling their business, if possible, so they can remain. Owners may sell their licenses, though that won’t be easy, Stosur admits.

Councilman Nick Mosby, who successfully sponsored a bill last year to stop liquor-store sales of candy, soda, and snacks to minors, says the effort to remove liquor stores from residential streets is overdue. “At the end of the day, this is an opportunity to build healthier communities,” he says. “Our juveniles grow up surrounded by liquor stores to a point where it becomes normalized. I ask people, ‘Where do you live? Would you put up with it on your block?'” Mosby acknowledges many owners have developed good neighborhood relationships, but says rezoning liquor stores out of residential areas and away from city schools is just common sense. Mosby expects the proposed rezoning to come before the City Council this fall—hearings last spring were emotional and contentious with KAGRO members voicing opposition—with a vote next spring. Owners “will have had 3 to 4 years to make necessary adjustments,”he says.

Still, Park, Ha, and KAGRO members feel they were excluded from the rezoning discussions. Park points out that while many businesses fled in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the Korean-American business owners stayed. Many in the Korean-American community did move their residences to Baltimore and Howard Counties, but still worked with city officials to reduce crime and improve neighborhoods where they owned businesses. Station North, where KAGRO’s office is located, never quite became “Korea-town,” as Park puts it, but remains the center of the city’s Korean community and includes popular restaurants that date back to the 1980s. Those restaurants and the Korean community helped keep Station North viable before its Arts & Entertainment District designation and recent boom. “Now,” says Park, “they don’t need us anymore, and it’s goodbye.”

Of course, most of Park’s children, like other store owners’ kids born here, don’t have an interest in taking over the family business. Not after watching their mothers and fathers spend seven days a week, 12 hours a day, operating a corner store in a gritty section of town, often stuck at a cash register behind bullet-proof glass.

“Our kids don’t want that,” Park says. “They want professional jobs.”

Their parents, however, can’t afford to lose their stores, where their income and retirement remains tied up.

“All of us have a family and people counting on us, and this is the one thing we know how to do,” Ha says. “Once you start, you have so much money and time invested. How do you get the return that you have worked hard for?”

Sandy Bauer’s fingers tremble, the light bouncing off her red nail polish as she clenches her hands together. Her eyes well with more than two decades of grief, frustration, and longing as she recalls the worst day of her life. It’s not often that she talks about her younger sister, but when she does, the emotion and the loss jar her as if it were still 1989. That year someone savagely murdered 27-year-old Terry Schmansky inside her Dundalk apartment. The lifeless body of the young mother of three was found by Schmansky’s brother and her oldest daughter, Tonya, nine at the time, who had just returned from bowling while Terry worked her shift at nearby Squires restaurant.

“She was the sweetest thing on earth. She should have never lost her life,” says Bauer, who babysat her sister’s other two children that September night.

Twenty-four winters have since passed, the case growing colder with each one. Somebody has gotten away with murder.

“It’s hard,” says Tonya, now 32, who has struggled with the unfathomable lingering mental effects of discovering her mother’s maimed body. “I remember every bit of it and, for a long time, it took a very big toll on me. I have post-traumatic stress disorder from that day.” Bauer, a medical-billing specialist who lives in Essex, remains convinced that she knows who killed her sister and, for seven years after the murder, fought tirelessly to convince investigators to see it her way. Police found evidence from the scene, including the weapon, a knife tossed into a Dumpster just down the road at a gas station. But still, no one has ever been named a suspect, a mind-boggling issue for Bauer.

Years of anger, Bauer admits, caused her to lose her religious faith and even blame God. “I was depressed for seven years. I was engulfed in it,” she says. “I was addicted to solving it, and I really just began to realize this is way too much sadness. I had a healthy, beautiful family of my own, and I needed to look at the sunshine, and I needed to let go.”

But police say they haven’t forgotten about Schmansky, or any of the other 233 crimes and missing person cases prioritized by the Baltimore County Police Department’s cold case unit. Many will likely remain unsolved, but since being formed in 2002 by now-retired detective Philip Marll and his partner of 25 years, James Tincher, two-dozen cases—including several decades-old crimes—have been cracked. Each year, the cold case unit’s two or three successes, often transposing new DNA technology onto old cases, bring not just closure for victims’ families, but also for a committed group of detectives that make up the squad. In 2012, police made arrests in two cold cases, including the murder of another young Dundalk woman, 24-year-old Heidi Louise Bernadzikowski, who was killed in the spring of 2000. Already this year, they arrested the suspects wanted for a 2009 Woodlawn murder.

For Marll, who will celebrate his first full year of retirement next month, his dedication to each of the investigations he worked remains as strong as his distinct Bawlmerese accent. But he’s especially committed to ones like the Schmansky case, the heartbreaking crimes that he never solved. After he left the force, he asked to keep his department cell phone active so prosecutors, colleagues, or victims’ families could reach him, if need be, about an unsolved case.

“We e-mail the heck out of Phil,” says Det. Carroll Bollinger, 50, a 28-year veteran who joined the cold case unit nine years ago. “Or I’ll call him and say, ‘Where were you going with this line of thought?’ if I’m looking at a case that was his.”

One cold case Marll worked was the murder of Sheila Rascoe, an Essex woman, raped and strangled in her apartment in 1979. Her killer, Thomas Grant, lived just down the street, it would turn out. He walked free for nearly 20 years before Marll and his unit, using science not available at the time of the crime—the ability to test and identify an individual’s unique genetic encoding molecule, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)—put him away.

Rascoe and her boyfriend, Albert Bell, had planned a weekend getaway to Richmond, VA, but when Bell arrived to pick her up, he found Rascoe’s partially nude body with a vacuum-cleaner cord squeezing her neck. Bell himself drew the initial suspicions of investigators when it was discovered that he was married—which Rascoe never knew. But any error of his ways ended there, and police eventually pushed the case aside. “There was a lack of evidence. Back when it happened, they didn’t have DNA,” says Marll.

When Marll and Tincher created the cold case unit, they did so with the intention of going first after unsolved rape and murder cases. The county had just joined an FBI-backed nationwide database called “CODIS,” which stands for “Combined DNA Index System.” The database could match the DNA from crime scenes to criminals, and the detectives knew they had a better shot at solving the cold cases where DNA meant everything.

“Sheila Rascoe happened to be one of the cases. We figured, let’s knock these out, the rape-murders, because if there is any evidence it’s gonna be easy evidence to locate,” says Marll. In 2005, the detectives returned to her case and didn’t take long to spot a T-shirt in a photo of the victim lying near her buttocks area. Sure enough, the shirt sat locked away with evidence from the scene and was sent off to county police forensic biologist Laura Pawlowski, who located a semen stain.

She immediately ordered the semen to be tested at an outside lab and compared against CODIS. Unlike on TV, warns Pawlowski and others in law enforcement, a DNA hit takes time. A lot.

“It would take me at least a few weeks to do the DNA process,” she says. “I enter it into CODIS and CODIS will not just spit out a name. It’ll tell me [if] I have a match. Then I have to contact the lab I have a match with. They have to do all these confirmation steps before they release a name to me.” Once a suspect’s name is retrieved, investigators must then swab the suspect after he’s charged and do their own confirmation to avoid any potential computer errors.

“The CSI shows are about as real as professional wrestling,” says Lt. William Duty, commander of the homicide and cold case units. “You’ll see a guy [on TV] bring a technician in a DNA lab a piece of evidence, and they’ll work up a profile and enter it into their CODIS without any kind of authentication. And then they come up with a name from a computer while he’s standing there, like he’s waiting at a McDonald’s for a cheeseburger.”

Eventually, however, Grant’s name came back after being entered into CODIS sometime during one of his five prior arrests over the years on sex offenses. In 2008, a judge sentenced him to two life terms after the case’s trial. “When we went back with the family, it was jubilation,” recalls Marll. “They were extremely happy because they still cared about her from 1979 like it happened yesterday.”

The four officers and the commander who make up the Baltimore County Police cold case unit warn that the artistic license taken by our favorite crime dramas goes well beyond condensed storylines, sometimes with real-world implications. Shows like CSI and Cold Case have also made it harder when cases are brought to trial, tainting jurors with what police refer to as the “CSI effect,” according to law enforcement.

“In our homicide trials, the prosecutors have to spend time in the beginning of the trial explaining to the jury that this isn’t CSI, that they have to forget what they watch on TV,” adds Cpl. Larry Gick, 40, an 18-year veteran who joined the cold case unit in 2007.

The process of getting prosecutors to take a cold case to a jury can also be painstaking, not like the quick meetings so often portrayed on Law & Order. Prosecutors don’t hesitate to send detectives back to work for a more complete investigation. “Certainly when we say ‘no’ I believe they’re disappointed,” says Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger. “We only get one bite at it so if you go to trial and lose, even if the person turned around and said after, ‘Yeah, I did it,’ you could never prosecute it again.”

“It’s definitely not the one-hour show you see on TV,” adds Gick, 40.

And of course, there’s the process of looking into a case gone cold, requiring detectives to examine several thousand pages of documents and notes from binders bursting at the rings. They’ll reach out to former detectives and re-interview witnesses, occasionally traveling out of state as witnesses or family may have moved away after so many years.

For the cold case detectives, time often counts on money. This year, for example, the unit will work from a tighter budget after losing a federal award they’d received the past two years. The grant could be applied to travel, DNA costs, and overtime. It’s a frustrating, but not completely debilitating hit for the unit.

“It is a little depressing we don’t have it because it was always something we could fall back on,” Gick says. “The cases won’t suffer. It just presents doors that are a little harder to push open.”

In fact, Gick says, funding cuts could slow new DNA testing on a potential clue in the Terry Schmansky case. He notes investigators have recently taken up evidence that they hope will shed new light on a potential suspect thanks to the latest updates in DNA technology and are awaiting results. “It varies how long it will take [for results] because with the grant running out, it depends on whether this evidence will make it out [in time] to be tested under the grant, or if it has to happen in house and that may take a little longer,” he says. “This is the last piece of evidence to be tested for DNA. There’s nothing left,” says Gick. “So if this doesn’t provide us with anything, we have nothing left to test.”

Marll holds out hope that justice will be brought to Schmansky’s killer, no matter how long it takes. He admits that the difficulty in solving the murder stems from a lack of physical evidence. “It’s a very tough case. When you commit a crime by yourself, and you don’t tell anybody, and there’s no witnesses to testify against you, and you don’t leave any physical evidence there, it’s almost impossible for police. We look like dunces that we can’t clear it,” he says.

However, not all cases rely on hard evidence, physical clues, or DNA technology in order to be cracked. Sometimes, investigators believe all a case needs is testimony from the right witness to bring a suspect to trial.

Meanwhile, Sandy Bauer checks in with police periodically. The last time was a year and a half ago.

“I just feel like there’s nothing more I can do,” she says. But still, she keeps the cold case unit’s number tucked in her pocketbook.

And Tonya Schmansky still thinks about her mother every day. She sees her in her two young children, especially her daughter, now 10—who shares a middle name, Anne, with her murdered grandmother and is just a year older than Tonya was when she found her mother’s body. She revels in the good memories of their time together to ease the pain of all the time since lost.

Her aunt feels the same way.

“I don’t want to say I’ve given up hope, but I guess I’ve learned to deal. You can’t live your life worrying and worrying and worrying about something you can’t control,” Bauer says. “I’ve just kind of learned to live with the fact that we won’t know.”

Only time will tell if her sister’s story has an ending.

“I think that for some weird reason it’s just not meant to be solved,” Bauer laments, adding that perhaps there is still somebody out there who will call with a tip that turns the case.

“It would be nice for me to be wrong.”

On a clear, crisp March day, Officer Christopher Davies prepares the second floor of a long-abandoned building at Rosewood State Hospital to go to the dogs—or, more specifically, to the Baltimore County K-9 unit.

Earlier in the day, Davies had signed out dangerous controlled substances stored in a safe at Essex headquarters (many of which were seized during local drug busts) as well as an arsenal of explosives acquired through the State Fire Marshal’s Office. Now, as if preparing for a dangerous scavenger hunt, Davies plants plastic Zip-Loc baggies of heroin, hashish, meth, and explosive compounds such as R5 and PETN in various hiding places around the floor. The hash goes on a shelf in the bathroom; the heroin gets stashed in a room behind closed doors; the meth is hidden inside the receiver of a telephone that sits on top of a desk area.

“It’s like a game of hide and seek,” explains Davies. “That’s all we do out here all day.”

First to arrive on the scene is the team of 4-year-old German shepherd Bosco and his handler, Sergeant Daniel Buchler, a former lacrosse player dressed in County-issued navy cargo pants with Oakley sunglasses on top of his head and a 40-caliber sig (pistol) strapped to one leg. Bosco, with his bear-sized paws, is equally formidable—at 99 pounds, he is one of the K-9 unit’s larger animals and, like many of the canines, is a dual-purpose dog trained in explosives and patrol work.

Bosco sniffs his way across the floors of the empty, tiled hallways while Buchler eggs on his shepherd with words of encouragement.

“Let’s get the bad guy. Let’s get the bad guy,” he says.

As Bosco sniffs, Buchler guides the dog through the halls, running his hands along the walls. When Buchler points to a paper-towel holder in a bathroom, Bosco stands gracefully on his hind legs and shoves his snout along the edge of the dispenser. Suddenly, Bosco’s breathing shifts from a steady pant to a more excited one. “He’s easy to read,” says Buchler. “You can hear his breathing change as he inhales.” Bosco takes a whiff, spins around, and then offers his “final response”—”a sit,” which is what he’s been trained to do once he locates the explosives. Buchler retrieves the R5 shoved up in the dispenser and praises Bosco for a job well done. “Good boy. Good boy,” he repeats, tossing Bosco his Kong chew toy reward. “He’s a foam monster,” says Buchler as he beams at the sight of his drooling dog who appears to be foaming at the mouth. “Yes, he is.”

For decades now, police dogs (thought to have originated in Belgium in 1859) have been widely employed throughout the United States, although in the wake of 9/11, they’ve become an increasingly common tool used against terrorism, especially for explosives. And Baltimore has benefited. Thanks to a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security in 2010, Baltimore County received six Suburban SUVs for the unit. (They’ve since tricked the Suburbans out with a customized HVAC “hot-dog” system to keep temperatures just right for the dogs who often have to wait in cars before their officers bring them out to sniff around.)

Even before the events of 9/11, the Baltimore area was ahead of its time in using man’s best friend to assist the men and women in blue. Founded in 1956, Baltimore City’s unit is thought to be the oldest in the country with Baltimore County and the Maryland State Police units—both founded in 1961—not far behind. (Baltimore County has a relatively large unit for the state, with 25 handlers, one bloodhound, four Labradors, and 23 German shepherds.) As of today, Maryland has a K-9 unit in almost every county.

It was the Baltimore County K-9 Unit that presided over Obama’s visit to Towson University in 2011 and guarded the perimeter of a Dundalk row house during the 2000 fight-to-the-finish standoff with spree killer Joseph Palczynski. Throughout the Old Line State, the K-9 units patrol our streets, our malls, and our airports. They are called to the scene during armed robberies or when citizens are lost or on the lam.

According to Lieutenant Stephen Troutman, top dog of Baltimore County’s K-9 Unit, his team handled 6,600 calls for service last year (in Baltimore County and beyond), which led to 129 apprehensions. Though, interestingly, Troutman notes that “the mere presence of a dog is such a powerful deterrent” that of those 129 apprehensions, only 25 times was a dog actually directed to bite.

Yes, the dogs are trained to bite, but using force is a last resort. And this reflects a certain shift in policy. In the “olden days,” explains Maryland State Police Corporal Rick Kelly, “These dogs were known as ‘alligators on a leash.’ Nationally, that’s how it was done. We’d say, ‘You have five seconds to show yourself before you get bitten.’ Those days are over—now, we ‘play fair’ and give one-minute warnings. When a dog is present, that’s often enough for people to turn themselves in.”

But it’s not just their bite that makes them an effective tool against crime. Simply put, dogs can do things that humans cannot.

“They can sweep a stadium with 40,000 to 80,000 people,” says Sergeant Eric Fogle, unit commander of the Maryland State Police’s Special Operations Division. “Or [inspect] a school with 1,000 kids that’s been shut down because of a bomb threat, or seize 39 kilos of cocaine. It’s hard to put a price on what they do. It’s immeasurable.”

Police canines are genetically blessed super soldiers of sorts. For starters, their olfactory senses can be up to “40 to one hundred times stronger than humans,” says John Pearce, associate director of the Canine Detection Research Institute at Auburn University where scientists have proven that dogs can smell 10 to 50 particles (that’s the size of something so small it could fit on a pinhead) per one trillion particles. In many cases, dogs have superior hearing, eyes equipped for night vision, and the ability to run up to 30 mph. In other words, dogs may be man’s best friend, but they can be a bad guy’s worst nightmare.

“As human beings, I don’t think we could genetically create something that would be a better tool for the tactics that we do,” says Davies. “If we sat back and said, ‘We are going to create an excellent tool for law-enforcement search and rescue, companion work, and public service, and let’s figure out how were going to do it,’ the first thing we would say is, ‘Let’s make sure he’s very stable—let’s give him four legs. Let’s make sure he’s very strong and can withstand the elements, so let’s give him fur and muscles everywhere.’ And as you went along with your list, you’d probably say, ‘That looks a lot like a dog.'”

Back at North Point’s headquarters in Essex, Steve Troutman is the guy who reads all the reports, deals with the litigation (Troutman can cite chapter and verse on seemingly every legal ruling involving K-9 dog bites), and oversees everything from the veterinary calls (because the work is so physical, it’s not uncommon for dogs to get injured in the line of duty) to the purchasing of new unit dogs.

“These dogs are living creatures and they become a companion to the [officer’s] family,” says Troutman, sitting in his office near a tiny memorial to Duke, Baltimore County’s first police pooch. “But the dog is still owned by Baltimore County, and is considered ‘equipment.’ It’s difficult to say that because it’s an animal, but it’s really like my handgun and my radio.”

Because of strict breeding standards, strong bloodlines, and a long history of using canines for police work, the “equipment” is most often imported from countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany. And though the price tag can be steep at upwards of $7,000 per dog, canines have proven to be quite cost effective. “One dog team [one cop and one canine] can replace the efforts of five officers,” points out Troutman.

Which is why ongoing training is so essential.

At Rosewood and other area training grounds, the point of the exercises is to expose the dogs—and their handlers—to an infinite number of scenarios they might encounter in the field. “You can never replicate everything that happens on the road,” says Davies, “but we try to be as creative as we can.”

The officers and their dogs go through a 16-week basic patrol school (think agility training, obedience, bite and hold work), plus an additional six-to-eight week “scent training” camp for the dog to learn to detect narcotics or explosives. Beyond that, each team is also required to “retrain” an additional 18 days a year to keep all involved on their paws and toes. It’s one thing to train in a controlled environment, says Troutman, “but the million-dollar question is if you move that task to a different location, from roadside to a ship to the interstate, can they do that simple task you trained them to do? And that’s why we never stop training.”

By the end of boot camp, the dogs and their handlers form a unique working relationship that extends off the job as well.

“Picture being married and being with [your spouse] 24 hours a day,” says Baltimore County Corporal Joe Putnam, who has a narcotics dog named Carbo. “At work. At home. On weekends and whenever you go somewhere—just because I’m off, doesn’t mean he wants to be. All he wants to do is work.”

Occasionally, a dog doesn’t have the right stuff to serve as a police canine, such as Buchler’s yellow Lab, Rusty, who is now happily living out his “retirement” at Buchler’s home. “The Lab is a washout,” laughs Buchler. “He was a bomb trainee who decided he preferred the permanent vacation concept. We got to that fourth week of training, and he just lost interest.”

Not so Buchler’s Bosco, Officer Chris Strevig’s Jett, and Corporal Michael Stricker’s Jack (who was given a set of titanium teeth after chewing through his cage—talk about a crime deterrent), who appear eager and ready to go. First, Davies calls out a series of military-style commands to the handlers, “Halt. Line up on your left. March. Pass your dogs. Leave them down.” Then, their handlers speak to the dogs in a mix of their “native” languages, most often German and Czech. “Sitz (sit), lehne (lay), zustat (stay), propustit (release),” and the dogs follow their every command.

In the ultimate test of canine self-control, Davies dresses as a decoy in a blue “scratch suit.” He comes within inches of each of the handlers and their charges, making sudden movements with his arms and loud cracking sounds with his whip. The dogs seem unbearably tense as they screech and whine, but none of them come within a wet nose of Davies. “He’s doing everything in his power to keep in control,” explains Putnam looking at Jett. “They have to ignore the decoy because the handler is telling them it’s okay.”

During “tug play,” the dogs let loose for a job well done, but Bosco’s tooth inadvertently nicks Buchler’s hand. “Almost all of the handlers have been bitten by their dogs at least once,” says Buchler. “You know what we say as a guy is standing there with two to four holes in his hand bleeding?” asks Buchler rhetorically. “We say, ‘Welcome to K-9.'”

But while dogs such as Bosco are fierce enough to apprehend suspects with a “bite- and-hold” technique usually aimed at the extremities (“Picture the pressure of three refrigerators on top of you,” cracks one of the officers), even more amazing than all the doggie derring-do is their ability to transform from ferocious warriors to beloved family fuzzballs.

“This is how terrible mine is,” laughs Buchler showing a photo of his 13-year-old daughter laying on the floor while hugging Bosco who, mere moments ago, looked like a ringer for Cujo. “On the weekends, he just plays,” says Buchler smiling at his partner. “On the weekends, he’s just a dog.”

Frank Arthur doesn’t just tell stories—he acts them out. Between bites of a Reuben at an Arbutus diner, Arthur recalls creeping past the Pepsi building on a summer night in 1986 with Scrappy G, One Way, and a few other graffiti writers in tow. An assortment of construction equipment and trucks concealed them from cars whizzing past on I-83. The expressway was being widened, and Arthur and his crew had determined that an enormous pile of metal support beams would be their next urban canvas.

“We wrote our butts off,” recalls Arthur.

“All of a sudden, one of the guys hollered, ‘Yo!'” Arthur hollers it, too, startling a few diners across the room. “Sorry about that,” he says, turning in their direction with a sheepish smile. He continues at (pretty much) the same volume but more excitedly.

“Then, I saw these high beams and crouched behind a truck,” he says, going into a crouch next to the booth. “Four cop cars flew past me and started chasing my friends, so I ran across the highway”—he stands and runs in place—”and see that the cops had them bent over a car. I felt like I had to do something, so I figured I’d create a diversion, and maybe they could get away.

“Me being an idiot, I grabbed four or five big rocks and threw them at the cop cars. Bop! Bop! Bop! Bop! The cops jumped down and thought someone was shooting at them. They called in ‘shots fired’ on the radio, and, as I jumped over one of those Jersey walls, a helicopter came out of nowhere and was right on me, so I ran under the highway near the Jones Falls.”

Arthur slides back into the booth and continues eating his sandwich. “I felt like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive,” he says. “I was climbing and jumping off of things, and, at one point, I had to stop. My body was going into convulsions, and it was scary, a total adrenaline rush. I was shaken.”

He did, though, manage to get away—by plunging into the Jones Falls and wading his way toward Druid Hill Avenue—that’s how his signature tag originated, and “Shaken” started appearing all over the city. By the late-1980s/early-1990s, it was everywhere, and Arthur was Baltimore’s most prolific—and most wanted—street artist, drawing the ire of property owners, community associations, and law enforcement.

If you drove the Jones Falls Expressway, the Beltway, or I-97; rode the subway, Light Rail, or Amtrak; or walked along Pratt or Lombard Streets, you saw his work. His distinctive tags and large, colorful pieces of interlocking letters were emblazoned on warehouses, exit ramps, overpasses, water towers, tunnels, and even the Mechanic Theatre and National Aquarium. By his own estimate, he completed thousands of pieces.

It was a compulsion, an addiction stronger than any drug, he says. “If you put sex, drugs, and rock and roll into one pill and called it graffiti, I ate that pill,” says Arthur. “Then, I spent years painting at all hours of the night and running from the police.”

Although he got away that night in 1986, he notes ruefully, “Sometimes, I didn’t get away, and I got in a lot of trouble.”

Over the years, the Pigtown native certainly paid a steep price for his graffiti habit. Although Arthur credits graffiti with saving him from the hardscrabble streets of Southwest Baltimore, it also landed him in jail, facilitated a long cycle of drug abuse and criminal hijinks, and nearly killed him.

But for the first time in years, he’s sober and not caught up in the criminal justice system. Now 43, he’s trying to go straight, raise a family, and get an education. He even paints on canvasses now instead of walls.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, he’s also being celebrated for the same artwork that got him in so much trouble. Arthur’s work appears in two recent coffee table books, The History of American Graffiti and Tools of Criminal Mischief, and he flew to Los Angeles in April for the opening of the much-ballyhooed Art in the Streets exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where he signed books in the gift shop for three-and-a-half hours.

“Everyday, I pinch myself, because I can’t believe everything that’s happened,” he says. “I open my eyes in the morning, look around the room, and think, ‘I can’t believe I’m alive.'”

Arthur lives at the Beltway Motel where Washington Boulevard crosses 695. It’s a small, two-room apartment: living room, bedroom, with small bath and tiny kitchen. Album covers of classic-rock records by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Boston line the wall behind the sofa, along with a Star Wars poster and a few Marvel comic-book covers. A half-dozen sketchbooks sit on a coffee table, with a stack of books—including 8,789 Words of Wisdom and a dog-eared copy of The Narcotics Anonymous Blue Book, which Arthur says he reads “constantly.”

Arthur doesn’t own a cell phone or car and says he’s grateful to have a bus pass, which gets him to classes at Catonsville Community College and to his girlfriend’s house. A social-services check gives him enough money to cover expenses and buy some art supplies—stretched canvases, pens and markers, brushes, and tubes of acrylic paints are stacked neatly around the room.

“Living here, I don’t bother anybody,” he says. “I come and go and do my artwork. That’s it. In fact, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

Growing up, he wasn’t encouraged to pursue art. “Everybody I knew had a hustle, and alcohol and drugs ran rampant,” he says. “If you didn’t do drugs, people looked at you like you had seven eyes and fifteen lips. It was like, ‘Stay back. You don’t do drugs.’ That was ingrained in me all my life.”

Although Arthur describes his family as “very dysfunctional,” he was particularly close to his father, who took him to the nearby B&O Railroad Museum and to movies at the Patterson and the Hollywood theaters. His father also bought him his first can of spray paint in 1984, after Arthur expressed an interest in graffiti. He even kept watch as Arthur wrote his first tags in a tunnel near the rail museum, figuring graffiti would be a passing fad like break-dancing and skateboarding had been for his 15-year-old son. “But he was wrong,” says Arthur. “It consumed me.”

Arthur had already noticed graffiti tags along Pratt Street and started photographing them with a cheap camera. “It was totally mysterious,” he recalls. “It fascinated me, and I wondered why these guys were going around writing their names.”

He explored other parts of the city and discovered more tags, as well as large, colorful pieces by the likes of Revolt and Dillinger emblazoned on walls. “Those big pieces really blew my mind,” he recalls, “and after seeing them, I knew I’d do graffiti for the rest of my life. I also knew I needed to get around town more.”

Which is how Arthur became the least likely member of the Southwestern High lacrosse team.

Arthur played lacrosse, so he could scout locations and check out graffiti in other neighborhoods. “Heading to games on the bus, I’d look for the best walls and map out spots I wanted to hit,” he says.

During a game at Northwestern, a massive wall within eyeshot of the playing field caught his attention. “All I could concentrate on was that wall, which was painted with a lot of nice graffiti,” says Arthur. “The coach was yelling, ‘Frank! Frank!’ The ball was whizzing past me, but I didn’t care. I was mesmerized by that wall.”

Arthur got kicked out of school for fighting in 1985. By that time, he was shoplifting paint and markers, smoking pot, and drinking. He got booted from his mother’s house for writing graffiti and went to live with his grandmother, who turned him out after finding cans of spray paint hidden in her laundry-detergent pail. Homeless, Arthur stole sheets off of clotheslines and slept in freight trains when he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

He also frequented Jules’ Loft, an underground club at the corner of Eutaw and Mulberry streets that booked hardcore bands and attracted skate punks and graffiti writers. One night, Arthur stood transfixed as legendary artist Cuba executed a large piece on one of the club’s walls. “It was basically a step-by-step graffiti lesson,” says Arthur. “‘Here’s the outline. Here’s the filler. Do the other outline. Clean up that outline.’ It was like watching Bob Ross, [host of The Joy of Painting] on PBS. It made complete sense to me.”

Over time, Arthur helped develop a lettering style that’s unique to Baltimore. In The History of American Graffiti, it’s described as “starting small and flaring out left to right, staying straight along the bottom, and finishing with a crazy flourish.”

“Each city has its own style,” says Arthur. “I’ll see these panel trucks from out of town that have been written on, and I’ll instantly say to myself, ‘That’s Philly. That’s New York. That’s Miami.'”

He opens old sketchbooks and flips past rough pencil drawings that eventually evolve into intricate outlines of interlocking letters and finally full-color sketches. There are hundreds of them. “This is Baltimore,” says Arthur. “We’re notorious for our hand styles, which are unique. When people worldwide see that style, they know, ‘Oh my god, that’s Baltimore.’ You can spot it immediately, because it’s distinctive. It’s like Name That Tune. You hear the first three notes of The Beatles, and you know it’s The Beatles. Seeing the Baltimore style is like that. You can identify it right away.”

But it’s fleeting, because graffiti, by its very nature, is so temporary. “Graffiti’s like a sand castle, because it isn’t permanent,” says Arthur. “It gets taken down or painted over, and I’ve lost so many pieces over the years. I’ve risked my freedom and been out there painting my butt off all night, and the very next day, they’ve painted over it.”

But Arthur maintains the impermanence is far outweighed by the adventure and exposure graffiti offers. As he describes it: “It’s three in the morning, the moon’s out, and you’re hearing gunshots—it’s kind of poetic doing artwork like that. You might be painting along the Light Rail, and you’re aware that a normal civilian will never experience the Light Rail between stations. You see things from subway tunnels, water towers, on top of buildings, and under freeway overpasses—things about the city that most people never see, because they just ride along in an air-conditioned car.

“And there’s no middleman when you’re out there painting like that. There’s no gallery involved, and you’re not begging anyone to accept you. When you’re out there on those trains and along those highways, you’re speaking to everybody. On a highway, thousands of people will see your work between seven and ten in the morning. You don’t have to put an ad in the paper or go around convincing people to see your art—you’re just out there.”

Arthur became especially fond of painting freight trains. He was fascinated by the notion that something he created could end up practically anywhere. “Once you do a train, it rolls, and it might go all the way to California,” he notes. “You will never see that train again, but that’s not important. What’s important is that a little piece of you escapes the quicksand of life in the ‘hood.”

Arthur escaped that life, barely. But it’s still a daily struggle. At noon, it’s nearly time for him to visit the drug counselor he’s been seeing for the past few years, a woman he credits with saving his life. Two years ago, she diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and explained that he’d been using drugs and alcohol to medicate himself.

By that time, Arthur had been in and out of jail for two decades. His brushes with the law were initially graffiti related, and, according to Arthur, began in 1988 when he got nabbed for painting 13 city subway trains. He was 20 years old and got sent to Hagerstown, a medium-security prison.

He got out a year later and continued writing graffiti with even greater determination.

By then, he was Public Enemy Number One to community groups like the Union Square Association whose members saw him as a vandal and nothing more. The Shaken tag was seemingly everywhere, so when Arthur got busted again, it made the papers, and the Union Square Association’s president told The Sun that she and her neighbors were “delighted, absolutely ecstatic.”

After another stint in Hagerstown, Arthur spiraled out of control, caught in what he calls “the modern day black plague of heroin and crack.” He dealt drugs, shoplifted, and battled addiction for 13 years, until a court finally ordered him to see his current counselor. “I wanted to change, because I knew I was gonna die,” says Arthur, who by then also had a young son, three-year-old Krylon (named after a brand of spray paint), to consider.

He says the counselor, who asked to not be identified in this article, not only diagnosed the bipolar disorder and prescribed medication, she also taught him morals and how to do the right thing. She paged through his sketchbooks and encouraged him to paint, on canvasses and walls that are legal. And she challenged him to get sober for a year. “She said, ‘You have a lot of talent and drive,'” recalls Arthur, “‘and if you just stop doing drugs for one year, there’s no telling what could happen.'”

Arthur’s been sober for more than 18 months. He regularly attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings and takes art classes, like Color Theory, at Community College of Baltimore, Catonsville. “As a graffiti artist, I thought I was Mr. Color, but I had no idea,” he says. He admits to being intimidated by all the technology students use these days, but he hopes to get past that and someday take classes at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

On weekends, he sees Krylon and often finds himself, lying awake, watching his son sleep. “I’ll have to snap a rubber band against my arm to see if this is actually happening to me,” he says. “Then, I’ll get him up and make breakfast, and he’ll start singing Beatles songs. I’ll hear him in the other room singing ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ and I’ll start tearing up.” Arthur tears up just talking about it.

He also has a two-year-old boy, Lykaios, with his current girlfriend, and likes taking the kids to Patapsco State Park whenever he can. “Kids just want your time,” says Arthur, “and nothing touches doing the father thing. It gave me a completely different perspective, by making me think of someone other than myself. It also made me try harder.”

He’s been beating the pavement, trying to catch a break as an artist. He paints bright and bold acrylics on canvas, mostly pop culture stuff like animated Beatles figures and Transformers characters with an occasional graffiti-inspired piece in the mix. When told they bring to mind Pop artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol, Arthur excitedly grabs a nearby sketchbook and turns to drawings of National Bohemian beer cans that were inspired by Warhol’s soup cans. He hopes to complete a series of Natty Boh paintings, as part of a larger series of iconic Baltimore images.

He hasn’t approached many galleries, opting instead for less traditional outlets like Body Mod, a tattoo parlor in Annapolis Mall; Pedal Pushers, a Severna Park bike shop; and Trax On Wax, a Catonsville record store. He also paints legal walls as opportunities arise and recently traveled to Braddock, PA, near Pittsburgh, where the mayor invited dozens of graffiti artists to paint an abandoned building as part of a neighborhood revitalization effort.

It’s emblematic of a shift in public opinion with regard to graffiti and whether it’s legitimate art or not. The debate goes on, but the Art in the Streets exhibit in Los Angeles certainly helped put the stamp of art-world approval on graffiti and street art. It’s been leaning in that direction for years, thanks to high-profile work by the likes of Shepard Fairey, who famously created the Obama “Hope” poster, and Banksy, who directed the acclaimed documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.

“That show was a whirlwind of respect,” says Arthur, who was blown away by the reception he got. “A lot of people I met had the American Graffiti book open to the Baltimore section. Some people told me, ‘I’ve been following your work since the 1990s.’ I had no idea.”

Roger Gastman, who co-wrote the American Graffiti book and co-curated the L.A. show, calls Arthur “an icon of Baltimore graffiti.”

“Frank is more committed to his art than pretty much anyone I’ve ever met,” says Gastman, who’s worked on projects with both Fairey and Banksy.

Jeff Vespa, who used to write graffiti with Arthur, agrees. Vespa, who is now a celebrity photographer and editor-at-large for Life magazine, says that his old friend is extraordinarily dedicated. “In my business, I meet a lot of creative and motivated people,” says Vespa. “But I’ve never met anyone as motivated as Frank.”

Vespa, who’s based in Los Angeles, caught up with Arthur during his visit to the city. “It was good to seem him calmed down and focused,” he says. “It’s especially satisfying, because now people really respect what he does. People at the museum were freaking out about it and asking for his autograph, and it was great seeing him in that world. He should have many years ahead of him making art, if he can just keep doing the right thing.”

On his way to meet his drug counselor, Arthur stops at the Corner Florist in Lansdowne. He comes here to get her a bouquet, which always includes a sunflower, whenever he has an extra $10. “It’s not much,” he says, “but she fought a battle with me and pulled me from the dark side.”

On the way inside, he notices someone has tagged the shop’s wall—an indecipherable black scrawl on the white siding—and winces. It’s obvious he doesn’t approve. Arthur mentions the tag to the storeowner, a middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense demeanor. “It’s a shame what they did out there,” he says. “I’m an artist, and maybe I could help you out by painting some big, colorful flowers over it. I could really make that wall look great.”

The owner says she’ll consider it, but she’ll need approval from the neighborhood association. “I understand all about neighborhood associations,” Arthur tells her, with a grin.

Apparently, it’s not the first time the wall has been tagged. “It seems like these graffiti writers have some sort of need to do this,” she says. “It’s like it’s their life or something.”

“I know,” says Arthur. “I used to be one of those guys.”

He reaches across the counter for his flowers and leaves a $10 bill on the counter. “But I’m under new management now,” he says, heading toward the door, “and I’d be happy to help you out.”

Once outside, he stops abruptly and peers intently at the bouquet he’s holding. “Wow,” he says. “Look at the color of that sunflower.”

The Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 in Hampden is part clubhouse, part HR office. In one room, officers go over paperwork regarding leave time and benefits. In the next, a neon police car hangs over a bar where off-duty cops swig beer and watch SportsCenter.

Upstairs, FOP president Bob Cherry toils in a busy but tidy office. A Norman Rockwell poster that shows a kind cop stooping down to help a little boy hangs behind his desk. On the floor are stacks of paperwork, some of them related to the union’s long-standing struggle with City Hall over police pensions. Others, research about accidental police shootings. Cherry, who’s been a cop for 18 years, always wanted to work in law enforcement.

“The model of public service was put in me as a kid,” says Cherry, who grew up in a working-class town south of Boston and still has the Southie accent to prove it. “I believe that there are some folks who have that calling.”

Unlike most cops, Cherry spent years working with inner-city kids before he joined the force. After graduating from Boston College, he worked as a case manager and team leader for Baltimore’s Choice program, which provides outreach and support for troubled young people. For three years, he counseled and tracked kids in Cherry Hill and East Baltimore.

“It was frustrating,” says Cherry, who has lived in Baltimore City since 1990. “All these kids, their neighborhoods were ravaged by poverty, no jobs, drugs everywhere—the one avenue where you would hope they would get some security would be school and, back then, they were pretty bad.”

Still, Cherry fell in love with the city.

“It’s like Boston: the blue-collar, tight-knit neighborhoods,” he says. “I realized that this is a city that I want to work to improve.”

In 1993, Cherry became a police officer, quickly rising through the ranks, working on the Violent Crimes Task Force, and ultimately, as a detective in the homicide division. In 2008, his colleagues in the FOP elected him their president, taking him off the streets.

It’s been an eventful three years. The recession and cuts in the city budget have meant near-constant battles with City Hall over salary, benefits, and pensions. Three police officers were killed in the line of duty in the past year. And this year has brought a string of controversial incidents, including an accidental police-on-police shooting in January and the arrest of 19 officers in an alleged extortion scheme in February.

“I wish I was back on homicide,” says Cherry—not at all kidding. “It’s hard to keep everyone happy up here, whether you’re dealing with City Hall, command staff, or even the men and women who you represent.”

Relations with the City Council and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake headed south last year when the council drastically cut city contributions to police pensions, reduced benefits, and eliminated tuition reimbursement.

Cherry was particularly miffed that the mayor helped kill a bill allowing the city and the FOP to enter binding arbitration and shot down an FOP counter-proposal to the city’s changes in the pension plan that, he says, would have matched City Hall’s cuts.

“You show up at our officers’ funerals and say ‘good job.’ You go on TV and talk about the reduction in crime and say ‘good job.’ But you won’t sit down with us who, though we disagree, have come a lot further than unions across the country,” he says. “It’s unfortunate.”

Ryan O’Doherty, a spokesperson for the mayor, says the pension legislation included many fiscally responsible compromises.

“The mayor was concerned about getting the pension system funded so it would be there when police officers and firefighters need it,” says O’Doherty. “Bob Cherry was more concerned about keeping a system where government employees retire in their early 40s with a full pension after 20 years.”

It got so bad that the FOP filed a federal lawsuit against the city and helped pay for billboards that read: “Welcome to Baltimore. Home to a Mayor & City Council who turned their backs on our police and firefighters.”

“It’s frustrating that I have a strained relationship with folks at City Hall,” says Cherry, who hasn’t talked to the mayor in six months. “I think we can bring a lot to the table.”

Cherry is looking into a performance-based contract for cops, like the one the Baltimore Teachers Union recently signed.

“There’s less money going around,” says Cherry, who’s a fan of ousted D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who also favored performance-based contracts. “We have to find ways to streamline our services without giving up on the goal of public safety.”

Above all, says Cherry, his most important priority is making sure his fellow police officers get the respect they deserve.

“There are a lot of intelligent, hard-working men and women in the Baltimore Police Department that can make Baltimore a stronger place,” he says. “I love representing them.”

Anna Sowers knew something was wrong when her husband didn’t respond to news that she’d just spotted Scottie Pippen in a bar. She’d planned this all-girls weekend in Chicago for months. During a break between the spring and summer terms in Sowers’ graduate school schedule, the group—four Baltimore friends, all professionals in their 20s and 30s—would relax and enjoy each other’s company in the Windy City.

Sowers’ husband, Zach, had been on her mind all weekend: In 2005, on another trip to Chicago, he surprised her by proposing during a walk near Lake Michigan.

Now, almost two years to the day later, in Chicago again, Sowers was desperately trying to contact him. At a nightclub with her girlfriends, she had spotted Pippen, the former Chicago Bulls basketball star. Zach was a huge basketball fan. Anytime she went to D.C. to visit the Smithsonian, he would go with family to catch the Washington Wizards. Sowers dialed Zach’s cell phone several times and sent text messages that she’d seen Pippen, but he wasn’t replying.

“Scottie Pippen would be a big deal to him,” she says. “Zach always had his cell phone on, we both did. So it was strange he wasn’t replying. It was already 1 a.m. in Chicago, though, so I thought maybe he was in bed.”

Zach, she’d learn late the next day, was lying in the street in front of their rowhouse, his body wrenched between the curb and a parked car, less than 10 feet from the front door of their Patterson Park home. Her husband of eight months had been robbed, severely beaten, and left unconscious. He was eventually found and taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital as a John Doe.

Over the next 297 days, as Zach lay in a coma, and after he finally succumbed to his catastrophic injuries in March of 2008, Anna Sowers’ outrage at the violent attack and the criminal justice system would transform her from a young newlywed into a powerful victims’ rights advocate. She organized “Neighbors’ Night Out” campaigns to raise awareness around violence; she led rallies and made countless TV and radio appearances, questioning public officials over the plea deal given to her husband’s attackers; she wrote a scathing op-ed about Baltimore’s criminal justice system; and she drafted “Zach’s Law,” a package of legislative proposals aimed to correct the injustices that she found in the handling of her husband’s case.

“I never thought I’d be a quasi-public figure with a bullhorn at rallies, talking to the mayor or city council—that was never a part of me,” says Sowers, who, since the attack, has moved back to Frederick where she and Zach grew up as childhood friends. “As much as I hate the city, I love the city. It’s where Zach and I started our lives together. I want to make sure it never happens again to anybody else.”

In fact, immediately after completing her MBA at Johns Hopkins last year—soon after Zach’s death—she dramatically changed course and decided to pursue law school. She recently took the LSATs and went through the application process, intending to become a prosecutor to, as she puts it, “lock up bad guys.”

Sowers never anticipated that her heartfelt effort to create something positive out of her husband’s death would plant her in the middle of a racially charged debate over the causes and effects of violence in Baltimore City. She may not have changed anything yet, but Sowers’ tragic story and her activist campaign are likely to have a lasting impact on the city that she both loves and hates.

Kristie Callander, one of Anna Sowers’ pals on the Chicago trip, said that, though her girlfriends didn’t want to say it, they knew something was wrong the afternoon following their brush with Scottie Pippen.

“Anna kept trying to reach him,” Callander recalls. “Someone would say, ‘I’m sure he left his phone in the car’ or something like that to calm her down. It got worse as the day went on. He’s just not the type not to call.”

Meanwhile, Sowers’ brother, William Cheng, the last person to see Zach, went to their house. Nothing was amiss, except the alarm hadn’t been set the night before and their dog Mia, the pug they’d bought together five years earlier, really needed to go to the bathroom—the first clear sign her husband hadn’t made it home.

When Zach, a Johns Hopkins financial analyst and part-time D.J., didn’t show up to meet a friend for a concert that evening, worry turned to panic.

“We grabbed the last plane back to Baltimore,” Callander says.

Sowers watched her husband nearly die three times that night. “I wanted to know [if he would] come out of the coma,” she recalls. “Doctors would say it was one out of a thousand [but] we held out hope. We wanted to be optimistic. I knew it was likely going to be very sad.”

Anna Sowers began putting in long hours at the hospital, tracking Zach’s every surgery, medical procedure, and reaction, posting e-mail updates on a website (zachsowers.com) created by his college pal from Towson, Justin Bright. In the aftermath of her husband’s attack, the 27-year-old was quickly forced to deal with hospital administrators, insurance regulations, doctors, nurses, family and in-laws, credit card companies, banks, bills, and decisions about Zach’s will and estate.

“His mother was not handling it well, his father was in Ohio, and English is not my parents’ first language,” says Sowers, whose father and step-mother are Taiwanese immigrants. “I had to be the glue that held everything together.” Sowers’ mother died when she was young and she says Zach’s murder caused her to reflect on that tragedy too, which only compounded the pain.

Sowers, who grew up taking violin and piano lessons, describes herself as “a typical Asian-American overachiever” and still has trouble understanding how, if she has done everything right, her life was devastated by such violence and tragedy.

“I’m young, I have a half-dozen married friends,” she says. “I don’t know anyone who had lost anyone significant—not to murder. I can’t believe this happened to me.”

A few days after the attack, police obtained evidence from a surveillance video where Zach Sowers’ credit cards were used and arrested four teenagers, Trayvon Ramos, 16, Arthur Jeter, 17, Eric Price, 16, and Wilburt Martin, 18. Sowers began following the prosecution’s case very diligently.

“I could feel sorry for myself, ‘Oh, cry me a river, I lost my mom, now my husband, and I’m being screwed by Baltimore City justice,’ but what good would that have done?” she says. “I wanted to keep the focus on Zach and the issues.”

In the first two months after the attack, Sowers continued to be encouraged by her husband’s recovery. On the morning of July 3, 2007 she posted an e-mail on zachsowers.com: “The best thing that happened today was that Zach ‘localized’ for the doctors, meaning that when they stimulated (hurt) him, he brought his arms/hands up to where they were stimulating (hurting) him. This is a huge step neurologically!! Before, he would just move his arms inward a little to show that he felt pain but never touched where it was. So now he’s showing that his brain is thinking at the higher level. The nurses and doctors were very excited, as were we. I’m so excited as I’m typing this.”

Zach, however, never did wake from the coma. Around this time, Sowers began taking her first steps as a community organizer, putting together “Neighbors Night Out” with friends to raise awareness of the attack and funds for Zach’s medical bills. Some 30 bars in Patterson Park, Fells Point, Federal Hill, Canton, the Inner Harbor, and Locust Point donated a percentage of their sales, garnering $13,000.

Continuing her Hopkins MBA classes and channeling her anger into activism, she recognizes, helped stave off depression. “I didn’t want to become like a hermit and drown in sorrow,” she says.

Later, Sowers, then a Hopkins marketing project manager, spoke at a Take Back the Streets Rally organized by former city councilman and then-mayoral candidate Keiffer Mitchell, telling the crowd how crime touches everyone in Baltimore and stressing the need for awareness and holding public officials accountable.

The sympathetic young wife, delicately featured and attractive—almost fragile in physical appearance—may not have envisioned herself as “a quasi-public figure with a bullhorn at rallies,” but the former CNN intern proved confident in front of a microphone and camera. Fueled by anger, she was never intimidated about calling on top city and state elected leaders.

With the assistance of an acquaintance, Hopkins Medicine magazine editor Ramsey Flynn (a former editor at Baltimore magazine), Sowers continued to generate media attention for her husband’s case and her crusade against violence. Her initial objective was to ensure Zach’s attackers were charged as adults, and then to get to a jury that would listen to the evidence. She sought and received encouragement from Mitchell and other local leaders.

Marvin ‘Doc’ Cheatham, head of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, met with her several times and proved an especially eager supporter. He accompanied her to the courthouse for Zach’s attackers’ hearings and later hosted Sowers, Flynn, and Examiner reporter Luke Broadwater on the NAACP Report cable show.

The tipping point in the story, both in terms of Sowers’ activism and media attention, came after Baltimore state’s attorney Patricia Jessamy’s office accepted pleas from the attackers in December 2007. With Zach still in a coma, Ramos plead guilty to first-degree attempted murder and robbery and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, though he would be eligible for parole in 20 years. His co-defendants, Price, Jeter, and Martin each received eight years in prison. For Sowers, justice was far from served.

Accepting a plea from Ramos after the other three had agreed to testify against him was a clear sign, Sowers felt, that the state’s attorney general’s office feared taking the case—any case—to a Baltimore jury. When prosecutors explained why they wanted to cut a plea deal with the attackers, Sowers says they explicitly described “the harsh realities of Baltimore City jurors,” i.e., that they tend to be lenient on African-American defendants.

Later, when an Abell Foundation study reported that city juries are overwhelmingly less likely than county juries to convict defendants on the most serious charges brought before them (see sidebar), Sowers responded with a strongly-worded op-ed in The Examiner that attacked Pat Jessamy for dismissing the report—which had been commissioned by her deputy prosecutors.

“It’s no secret that Baltimore City juries are notoriously biased against prosecutors and cops,” she wrote. “The notion is that the mostly black jury pool distrusts the mostly nonblack justice system, and freeing black defendants is their way of settling old scores. . . . Pat Jessamy’s rejection of the Abell Foundation’s report on the city’s jury problems exposes her self-defeating ‘leadership’ style in a way that should frighten every city taxpayer.”

While city leaders, elected officials, and law enforcement officials maintain that addressing issues of education, health care, and poverty are crucial to reducing the cycle of violence, Sowers, who says she supports measures aimed at preventing youth from turning to crime, has definitively chosen to focus her attention on legal and judicial issues.

She put together a series of legal proposals called “Zach’s Law.” The piece most directly tied to Zach’s case calls for murder charges when a victim has fallen into a persistent, vegetative state. University of Baltimore criminal and constitutional law professor Byron Warnken said a new law could make it possible to retry a defendant who had been offered a plea if the victim dies after the agreement has been reached.

Other sections of “Zach’s Law” seek to open juvenile records to law enforcement agencies across state lines and to keep juvenile records from being wiped clean after offenders’ 22nd birthday, as is current policy. Patrick Dooley, legislative aid to Delegate Peter Hammen, who has met with Sowers, said prior to the 2009 General Assembly that, while “Zach’s Law” has been discussed, “nothing like ink to paper has been done.”

The most controversial aspect of Sowers’ efforts has been challenging what she and others perceive as jury bias in the city.

Earlier this year, with Flynn’s encouragement, she sought to organize the “Black 25,” a group of black leaders in the city who would publicly denounce Baltimore’s “Stop Snitching” culture that, they believed, not only hindered investigations, but frightened juries. “Stop Snitching” has become a mantra in hip-hop songs, on T-shirts, and on an infamous underground DVD featuring Baltimore-born NBA star Carmelo Anthony. The idea is to discourage people from informing on or testifying against people committing crimes. Most urban activists decry the sentiment. But by bringing race into the equation, Sowers alienated many black community leaders who had been among her staunchest allies and demonstrated her inexperience as an activist.

Sowers and Flynn approached Baltimore NAACP leader Cheatham, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County Freeman Hrabowski, pastor Frank Reid III of the Bethel AME Church, Rep. Elijah Cummings, pastor Heber Brown III of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, and Marcus Dent, chapter commander of the Baltimore Guardian Angels. All soundly rejected the idea.

Pastor Brown, who is also second vice president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and founder of Young Clergy for Social Change, met with Sowers and Flynn to hear their proposal for the “Black 25” and said that while he believed Sowers and Flynn to be “pure in intent,” their idea struck him as naïve. “If all it took to abolish and do away with [the ‘Stop Snitching’ culture] was for 25 black leaders to make a pronouncement, that would have been done a long time ago,” he says. Brown says that, like many in the black community, he sees the crime issue from several perspectives: He lost a cousin to murder and has another family member incarcerated on drug charges.

Of the 282 Baltimore homicides in 2007, only a dozen of the victims were white, like Zach. Brown, while expressing deep sympathy for Sowers, says he finds it “remarkable” that after another 220-plus murders in 2008 “we are still talking about this one.” Few of the victims’ families, he says, have the resources that Sowers, with the aid of friends in Hopkins’s communications department, can match to keep their loved ones and their issue in the media spotlight.

Sowers agrees that she and Brown didn’t see “eye to eye.” “I’m not a social reformer,” she says. “I’m a victims’ rights activist. I’m about holding people who commit crimes accountable.” Although she admits to frustration, she also vows to push forward. “Sometimes, I think, why is this even my problem, I’m not a public official. I’m not the mayor. I have no idea what it takes to make a difference, to make the city safer,” she says. “The homicide rate might be lower, but I don’t feel safe, nor do my friends.”

At least for now, her outspoken and passionate activism in raising community-awareness remains Anna Sowers’ greatest memorial to her husband. “I can tell you that a few months after Anna’s husband was attacked, a lady carrying a purse in Canton and was attacked and mugged and we had 120 people at our next community relations meeting,” says Melissa Techentin, president of the Southeast Police Community Relations Council. “That’s because of her.”

Anna Sowers never actually took her husband’s last name. Her name is Anna Cheng. When the media began referring to her as “Anna Sowers” she realized it was better not to correct anyone—it would afford her more anonymity at work and in grad school, which it did.

Now, beyond deciding which law school to attend, she is trying to figure out the rest of her life. She remains friends with members of her tight-knit Patterson Park/Canton/Fells Point community, although those days are gone.

“This has been the longest and shortest year of my life—sometimes I forget that I turned 28 years old,” she says. “The shortest year because everyday was the same. I’d go to work and then the hospital. No difference between Monday and Thursday. Weekends, the same thing, except I didn’t go to work. All day long, I’d worry if Zach was okay, if he was going to survive until I got to the hospital. The longest year of my life because so much has happened. There was never time to digest it. I never felt the shock.”

Though she intends to become a prosecutor, Anna doesn’t think she can stomach violent crime cases, adding she can’t watch television programs like Law and Order or CSI without thinking of her husband. She imagines working in white-collar crime.

She remembers being fearful at first, taking Krav Maga self-defense classes, buying mace, and considering purchasing a gun (she never did). When Zach was still in a coma, she remembers seeing his stuff around the house, like his Towson ID card, and putting his laundry away and wondering if he’d ever wear those clothes again.

She got mad at herself for washing his pillow because it had smelled like him, and vowed not to wash any more of his clothes. They had talked about kids down the road, about moving west, to Chicago or San Francisco. She doesn’t believe, as some people have told her, “that everything happens for a reason.”

“Anybody who tells you that is happy,” she says. She hasn’t found God or forgiveness. “I will hate the people who did this all my life.”

But she does badly want something meaningful to come from her husband’s murder—a law that will provide a sense of justice in his name and, hopefully, prevent other families from experiencing such devastating pain. For herself, she says she found strength in recalling how the Sept. 11 families managed to handle their grief. And, in the cap of a Snapple bottle from a lunch shared with a friend four months after the attack on her husband, she found words to live by.

“There was a quote and it said, ‘If you are going through hell, keep on going,'” she recalls. “It’s from Winston Churchill. I didn’t get it. I was like, ‘Who wants to stay in hell?’ Then, I realized what it meant. If you keep going, eventually you’ll get out. I’m just not there yet.”

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City Juries vs. County Juries

Explaining the glaring differences in verdicts

Anna Sowers and other activists frequently cite a September 2008 study by the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation, which reported a major disparity in jury verdicts for defendants in Baltimore City versus those in three surrounding counties.

The most remarkable finding, based on 293 selected cases from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, was that Baltimore City jurors convicted defendants on the most serious charges against them only 2 percent of the time. By comparison, Baltimore, Anne Arundel, and Howard County juries convicted defendants of the most serious charges in 63 percent of the cases brought to trial.

That dramatic finding was somewhat offset by the fact that City juries were more likely than county juries to convict defendants of lesser charges, 61 percent to 28 percent. But city juries’ hesitancy to convict defendants of the most serious charges got wide play in local print media and talk radio.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy questioned the study’s methodology, results, conclusions, and proposed remedies, which included the creation of regional jury pools.

“To bring people in from Howard, Baltimore, and Anne Arundel Counties does not promote the cause of equal justice, and, I believe, is unconstitutional,” said Jessamy. She says the central problem remains the issue of trust between city police and citizens.

University of Baltimore law professor Byron L. Warnken says the findings affirm what was learned more than a decade ago during the O. J. Simpson murder trial—predominantly black juries and predominantly white juries will look at the same evidence and reach different conclusions based on their personal experiences.

“My observation is that the more rural, white juries tend to trust police and prosecutors too much, and urban juries, not enough,” Warnken said.

Baltimore City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a former defense attorney, acknowledged a troubling reality: “Defendants know they’ll get a better deal in Baltimore City than in the counties.”

On clear days, Ed Norris rides his new motorcycle, a Victory Kingpin, to his four-hour radio gig, where he holds forth on everything from the war in Iraq to the Ravens to the city schools.

Some days, there will be crises, of the sort that come up at radio stations, over equipment breakdowns or airtime. Some days, on the ride in to work, he can’t help it. All he can do is grin.

Few would have imagined this life for this man. Certainly not Ed Norris himself. Not during his spectacular rise from beat cop in New York City to police commissioner in Baltimore, where he brought the city’s notorious murder count below 300 for the first time in a decade. Not when he fell from grace three years ago, pleading guilty in a lurid federal corruption case that charged Norris with using an off-the-books police expense account to bankroll personal shopping excursions, steak dinners, bar tabs, and romantic liaisons.

While he was serving his six-month sentence in federal prison, Norris couldn’t imagine any life on the outside. He knew his conviction meant he could not return to policing. After he was released, in February 2005, he discovered that finding any work would be a complicated endeavor. He got an $8-an-hour job selling soap and cologne at the perfumery Caswell-Massey because it was the one store near where he and his wife were living at the time in Tampa, Florida, that did not include the question on its application form: Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Two months later, someone complained to the store’s corporate headquarters about its ex-cop, ex-con employee. Norris was out of a job again.

But, now, here he is, every weekday from 10 to 2, presiding over a call-in radio show gaining popularity at such a rate that local CBS Radio executives are discussing shopping it for national syndication. One on-air promo for the show intones: “The Ed Norris Show, locked and loaded,” although its host (a felon) can no longer own a gun. The show is heavy on Maryland politics, with Martin O’Malley—the state’s new governor, and Norris’s old boss—a frequent subject of discussion. But because of his conviction, Norris couldn’t vote in last fall’s election. The man who once controlled a 3,000-officer police department now controls this pulpit of talk radio. So, he talks. He talks about race. He talks about terrorism. He talks about movies. He talks about Britney Spears. He talks about rebuilding a life.

“No offense, you earned it, but not everybody gets a second chance like you,” a caller said one day.

“I’m lucky. I know it,” Norris replied.

At age 46, he is making real money—”more next year than I’ll ever make as a cop,” Norris says, maybe unconsciously holding out hope that he could rejoin a department. He plays a recurring character on the HBO series The Wire, he tools around town in a red BMW 325 coupe (back when he was allegedly living large as the city’s $137,000-a-year police commissioner, his personal car was an aging Volkswagen Jetta, he notes for the record).

Norris and his wife, Kathryn, have moved back from Florida and settled in Baltimore County (Norris says that his wife declined to comment for this story). Everywhere, he is stopped by people who want to say hello or shake his hand or give a nod of approval.

“They just want to touch him,” says former Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, who hired Norris away from the city in December 2002 to head the Maryland State Police, the job he had to leave a year later when the federal charges came down. One of Norris’s new colleagues, Baltimore radio personality Maynard Edwards, puts it this way: “He’s gone from police officer to folk hero.”

There’s only one problem with this new Ed Norris: He wants to be the old Ed Norris. If he could have any job he wanted, any job on Earth, he would be a cop again.

“I’d probably be the commissioner of Baltimore again. I’d like to just re-right that ship,” Norris says. “Yeah. . . . If I was absolved today, I would really like to just go back and fix it—from what I hear, they’ve got a lot of problems.”

His voice trails off. He laughs. Later, he goes back to it again.

“It’s just how I’m wired,” says the third-generation police officer, who worked 24 years in policing before it all collapsed. “It was all I lived for, to help people. I don’t want it to come across like I’m not happy in my new career, because I love it—I’m really loving this job, it’s a great career, and I’m going to continue in it. Becoming police commissioner is not in the realm of reality, so it’s not going to happen. But I’ve just had this thing, I’ve always been like this—helping people, it’s the best thing you can do. When I thought that was taken from me, that I was never going to get to do that again, I was really devastated.”

Public life is littered with once-powerful men brought down by their vices. And the story of Edward T. Norris seemed destined to join that canon. When he swept into town in 2000, Baltimore hardly knew what to make of its brash, fast-talking out-of-town top cop. He had his police shirts custom made and wore a black leather uniform jacket. He got regular manicures and became a fixture at the city’s best restaurants. He also would occasionally jump out of his police vehicle and give chase through the roughest streets of Baltimore: Unit One, rolling. Norris’s mentor in New York City had been Jack Maple, the bon vivant cop credited for the dramatic crime reduction in that city in the 1990’s and known for his penchant for bow ties, two-tone shoes, and extravagant meals.

Norris, it seemed, had been a good student. Under him, Baltimore’s homicide count began to drop. From 305 in 1999, the year before Norris started as commissioner, to 253 in 2002, the year he resigned.

“I thought to myself then, and I feel now, that he was the guy,” says former Maryland State Police Lt. Colonel Mark “Steve” Chaney, who closely followed Norris’s efforts in the city and then served as his second-in-command in Annapolis. “Guys like him only come around once in a while. He was the person who could come down and who could relate to things, he had the city experience, he had the leadership . . . I think that he had the uncanny ability that a lot of police leaders lose along the way to step back and put himself in the shoes of his officers.”

University of Virginia business professor James G. Clawson uses the turnaround of the Baltimore Police Department under Norris as a teaching example in his graduate-level leadership class.

“In the original go-around, I sort of viewed him as a true American hero,” Clawson says. “And in many ways, I still do, in the sense that he saw something that needed to be done and he was able to do it in large measure, regardless of resources or support. It was sort of John Wayne trying to fix the situation.”

Now, when his class reads the case study of Ed Norris, though, there is an epilogue about how it all unraveled.

It started with stories in The Sun, disclosing the existence of an off-the-books expense account and offering a glimpse of how the city’s captivating commissioner did business. There were pricey steak dinners, stays at the posh W Hotel in New York, outings to Orioles games. There was no public money in the loosely structured account, and most of the roughly $180,000 spent during Norris’s three-year tenure had directly benefited the department. But some $20,000 was in question. Norris said he would pay back any personal expenses. He took his licks in the press.

It didn’t end there. A few months after Norris left the city to head the Maryland State Police in December 2002, federal prosecutors picked up the case. In December 2003, they brought an indictment packed with titillating details about gifts for three women bought at Victoria’s Secret the day before Valentine’s in 2001, a $367 meal at Fleming’s Steakhouse in the Inner Harbor, shoes for $163 at Dan Bros. Discount Shoes, and more.

Norris read the charges, and he felt sure he could beat them. The shoes? They were combat boots bought the day after the Sept. 11 attacks; even the indictment noted the date on the receipt, Sept. 12, 2001. The dinner at Flemings that the indictment suggests was Norris and a female friend celebrating a birthday dinner for $376.10? It was dinner with a member of the police department, and there were two other men at the meal. The Valentine’s gifts? Norris says he never used cash from the fund to pay for personal gifts, and the court records showed that while prosecutors had a black robe to introduce as evidence, they didn’t have any receipts submitted to the fund for reimbursement.

Bring on a trial, Norris said. Prosecutors came back with what defense lawyers told him was the head shot. Investigators found that Norris took $9,000 from his father to help pay for his house and then later paid the money back—meaning it should have been considered a loan and reported on federal tax forms. The feds had Norris on a fraud count with a 30-year maximum sentence. His father could have faced charges. Norris says he didn’t see any choice. He pleaded. He stood in court, said he was guilty, and got a sentence of six months in prison, six months’ home detention, and 500 hours of community service.

The day before he reported to the minimum-security federal prison at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, two old friends from the NYPD picked Norris up so his family would not have to drop him off at the prison. The three friends had one last run. “It was like The Last Detail with Jack Nicholson,” Norris says, a reference to the 1973 movie where two Navy officers assigned to take a young offender to prison determinedly show him a good time along the way.

“We went, we had a steak, we had booze, went to a topless bar, we got it all in,” Norris says. “Then the first thing I did that next morning, I woke up early, I banged on all their doors, I go, ‘I want to get this done. Get up, get up. Let’s go.’ It was like, ‘I want to do this. The sooner I get there, the sooner I get out.'”

After a few months at Eglin, Norris and other prisoners were evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. He spent six weeks sleeping on the floor of a federal prison in Mississippi and later was transferred to the federal prison in Atlanta. Some prisoners knew his story. Others assumed the white guy with the shaved head and long beard was a meth dealer. Inmate number 41115-037 had spent his life locking up criminals. He never had thought much about the nuances of prison life. Now he was sleeping with his feet pressed against the door of the cell to keep out the rats. But what haunted him most was what he would do when he was done doing time.

“I had no idea. No idea. It was the worst,” Norris says. “Actually, a guy [convicted in an accounting scandal] came up to me, and he was like, ‘For the rest of us, this is bad, but we’ll recover. We have capital. We have businesses, we’ll create more businesses. But you—this is it. You can’t work in your field.’

“I said, ‘I know. I have no idea what I’ll do.’ For me, that was my biggest fear. I knew I could get through the tough part of it in prison and home detention. But the rest of my life—I’m still pretty young. I’ve got to work another 30 years.”

So Ed Norris began to rise again.

While he was serving his six-month home detention at the small house in Tampa, where he and his wife and their young son, Jack, had moved to escape the public eye of Baltimore, the former commissioner agreed to go back into that public eye. He started appearing, by phone, for an hour each day on the Big O & Dukes show on WHFS (105.7 FM). He started by talking about life on the inside. Life on home detention. His case. What it was like to work for Martin O’Malley. What it was like to work for Bob Ehrlich. The same blunt charm that won over the city a few years earlier was at work again.

When his home detention ended and U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett ordered that Norris had to perform his community service in Baltimore, he had a job waiting as co-host of the retooled show, Ed Norris with Big O & Dukes. Soon enough, it became, simply, The Ed Norris Show.

Other opportunities came as well. A cameo appearance as a homicide detective on HBO’s The Wire while he was police commissioner had grown into a recurring character. When Norris was out of prison, the show’s creator and executive producer, David Simon, invited Norris back to the set. Simon never considered cutting Norris, but he wasn’t sure that Norris would want anything to do with a city where things had gone so wrong.

“I didn’t think we’d see much of him in Baltimore,” Simon said. “I had a feeling that whatever love he felt for this town was going to be gone. And I thought, what does a guy like that do? You know, when you’ve been a career cop, what do you do? But, you know, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald is full of [crap]. There are second acts and third acts and fourth acts in a lot of lives.”

These days, his television character is the closest Norris gets to police work. At his sentencing, prosecutors suggested Norris would find work after prison in consulting. But no town wants an ex-convict advising their police force, Norris said. When he was first released, he volunteered to perform his community service in Iraq, helping U.S. troops train the country’s police force. His conviction blocked that as well. Instead, he has spent the past year, a few hours at a time, serving out his community service working with The League for People with Disabilities. He expected to complete his 500th hour early this year. He still has one year of supervised release ahead. And then?

“You pay your penalty, but you never finish paying it. You never finish,” Norris says. “And I’m doubly outraged, because in my mind, I still didn’t do it. I’ve been convicted of a crime I never committed and now I’ve got to live with this forever.”

For Norris, that is the worst part. He pleaded guilty to things he says he did not do, and so in what should be a victory lap—a celebration of his swift, successful reinvention—he is slowed by the weight of the details of the case: the 34 instances of improper activity detailed by prosecutors. He goes through each one in his head, and he grows angry all over again.

“I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do it. I know who I am. I know what I’ve stood for my whole life,” he says. “I’m a lot of things—I don’t steal anything. I’m not a thief. You want to believe I slept with six women? Make it 12. Make it a [expletive] hundred. I don’t care. Think what you want—it’s not a federal crime.”

Not everyone loves the new Ed Norris. Not everyone has forgiven the old Ed Norris. Callers to the radio show still bring up the case sometimes. One of his former bosses, Governor O’Malley, won’t discuss him. But he has plenty of fans.

One is his other former boss, Ehrlich, who, while he was still governor, invited Norris to the mansion in Annapolis to celebrate the radio show’s soaring ratings.

“I thought he got the short end of the stick. I thought he was not treated fairly. That view’s been well expressed by me. And to see him come back like this is very satisfying,” Ehrlich said in an interview shortly before he left office. “What occurred, it is what it is, it’s never going to change. On the other hand, in life you can either be captured by the past or you can go back out and compete—and he has gone back out and competed very successfully.”

In his public defense now, Norris has some new ammunition. The U.S. attorney who brought the case against him, Thomas M. DiBiagio, later was reprimanded for pushing his staff in emails during the summer of 2004 to bring three “front page indictments” by Election Day. Justice Department officials in Washington blocked DiBiagio from bringing any public corruption cases without their approval. Supporters of Norris saw it as evidence that the case against him was driven by a prosecutor looking for political pelts. “You were the 8-point buck,” Norris said he was told once by Ehrlich. “Who better to get than you?”

Now in private practice, DiBiagio flatly disputes that notion. “I think he’s confusing two things. He stole the money. He did commit the crime. And whether I in-artfully stated goals for the office is something completely different. He knew the system. He knew if he didn’t think he was [guilty], there would be a trial.”

“From the office’s standpoint, our core belief was justice without fear or favor, and the law applied to a popular police commissioner the same way it applied to a young kid on the street,” DiBiagio said. “The evidence was overwhelming that he stole money from the police department. To look the other way would be wrong.”

For the ex-cop and for the ex-prosecutor, the case is one of blacks and whites. Others see much gray.

“The fact that he can’t utilize his skills now to help Baltimore, or any other place like Baltimore, is not a victory for anybody,” says Simon, a former police reporter who had been impressed by Norris’s efforts to overhaul the city’s troubled force. “Ed Norris is going to make more money outside of government than he would inside government. I’m sure he’s there. His penance should be, you have to go back to be chief in Baltimore. The ultimate punishment? You want to sentence the guy? Sentence the guy to get the murder rate down another 30 percent. Because he’s the guy that could do it.”

Bob Philips, senior vice president for CBS Radio in Baltimore, says the “sky is the limit” for Norris in his new career. But even Philips does not pretend to think that this life is his new star’s first choice. “I would say it hasn’t been easy. It would have probably been a lot easier for him to move to another marketplace to start over,” he says. “I think deep down, he misses police work. He had something taken away from him that he lived his whole life for. And I think there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t miss it.”

If it weren’t for the radio, if it weren’t for The Wire, if it weren’t for the generous welcome he found back in Baltimore, Norris isn’t sure what he would be doing now. He might have taken a job in construction. He might have sold suits. Instead, he got a job where tens of thousands of people listen every single day to what he has to say.

“If I lost this job tomorrow, because they switched the station to gospel or something, I’d still thank them for the job, because I never would have had this opportunity for people to really get to know me,” he says. Of the case, of everything else, he says only: “I don’t know. I don’t know why this happened. Big picture: I have to think this happened for a reason. Otherwise, I couldn’t live with myself. So, maybe, who knows what will happen. Maybe I will train somebody some day and he will be the guy to win the war on terror. I don’t know.”

He isn’t sure why it all happened. How, exactly, he became this new Ed Norris. But one thing is for sure: He doesn’t want to forget it.

When he got out of prison, when he got back to Baltimore, he got a reminder tattooed on his back. He wanted it to be permanent. He wanted it to hurt. Some days, when he is at the gym or trying on clothes, he catches a glimpse of it in a mirror.

It is a phoenix, rising.

In October 1992, nearly three decades after realizing his childhood dream to become a priest, Rev. Joseph Maskell was summoned downtown to Baltimore’s archdiocesan headquarters. Though the caller wouldn’t divulge the meet­ing’s agenda, Maskell couldn’t help wondering: Was it time for him to be transferred to another parish?

But waiting for him in the archbishop’s office on that gusty Monday were two diocesan officials, two attorneys and the archbishop himself, William H. Keeler. They were seated at a round table, their faces grim.

Bracing himself, Maskell settled his large six­ foot frame into a chair facing the others.

They got right to the point: A former student of Archbishop Keough High School, where Maskell had served between 1967 and 1975, was accusing him of having sexually abused her some 20 years earlier.

Father Joseph Maskell.

Now a 38-year-old mother of two, the Baltimore woman had only recently remembered these alleged abuses, and contacted the archdiocese in late June in search of an apology and some spiritual help.

Church-hired private investigators had since failed to corroborate her allegations; nonetheless, officials wanted to confront the 53-year-old priest directly. Perhaps the show of force would prompt a confession.

But Maskell professed his innocence. He denied ever abusing anybody, and, according to a family member, even offered to take a lie detector test.

The archdiocese, says this family source, countered with more restrictive choices: Either check in to a Connecticut psychiatric facility, or step down from the pulpit.

Maskell looked to the archbishop. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

Go to Connecticut, said Keeler.

Escorted back to Holy Cross, his parish in South Baltimore, Maskell was given just hours to pack a bag and leave the rectory. His disappearance from Baltimore was cloaked in secrecy; even fellow priests were denied details. Maskell’s mother learned something was wrong only after receiving phone calls asking the whereabouts of her son. (To this day Maskell believes the emerging scandal hastened his mother’s death months later.)

In an earlier era, a concerned archbishop might have taken the accused priest aside, chastised him and transferred him discreetly to another diocese. But with charges mounting nationally that the Catholic church lacked the fortitude to police its own ranks, the pressure was on for a show of self-prosecution.

Even given the prospect that Maskell might be unjustly accused, he would have to fight for himself under the new rules—without the protective embrace of the institution that had nurtured him for his entire adulthood.

Sexual abuse by priests has rooted like a cancer within the body of the American Catholic Church, eluding most public detection until the early ’80s. More than 500 priests have since been accused, prompting legal actions that have drained Cath­olic coffers of up to $500 million.

The crisis contains disturbing truths about the power of human denial. And it has forced a nationwide soul-searching both inside the Church and out, all of it eventually arising from one profound question: What mechanism of the mind could so effectively suppress the conscience—especially the presumably higher conscience of a priest—that a man might permanently injure children entrusted to his care?

The recent publicity has also forced policy reviews within Catholicism’s fraternal citadel: What is the proper Christian response to accusers? To an accused brother? To the parish community? And does the priesthood’s celibate nature attract men who are earnestly fleeing their urges, only to leave them ill­ equipped in moments of temptation?

In heavily Catholic Central Maryland, these are no academic questions. Within the past decade, more than 12 area priests have been publicly implicated in the sexual abuse of minors. Most of these men have been stripped of their collars; one committed suicide.

Even against this grim backdrop, the allegations against Father Joseph Maskell reveal the Catholic crisis in its extreme. If the claims are true—and several of them defy belief—they portray a man suffering from more than a dangerous disorder; they show the quintessential authority figure, operating with a badly-damaged moral compass, committing creatively diabolical acts against the innocent for years without correction.

Two of Maskell’s accusers allege rape and other sexual batteries, and have filed a multi-million-dollar civil action.

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Operating on one plaintiff’s testimony, county police have quizzed Maskell about his knowledge of a murdered nun whose body was found in 1970, though they have since generally discounted him as a suspect. Meanwhile, city police are still puzzled over why Maskell ordered the graveyard burial of a small mountain of psychological tests and other documents he’d compiled during years of pastoral counseling.

Still other Maskell critics have emerged, with more than a dozen of them telling Baltimore magazine in recent months that the public allegations of sexual misbehavior fit a pattern. Many of those interviewed remember Maskell for his imperious, manipulative or lewd behavior. A group of Towson lawyers claims that, in addition to their two plaintiffs, they’ve met with 15 people who say Maskell subjected them to one or more sexual violations. And a third alleged rape victim, the first willing to be publicly named, has stepped forward to share her story with Baltimore.

Should the charges against Maskell eventually prove little more than faulty 20-year-old memories—some of them retrieved after a long period of alleged amnesia—the simple damage of public accusation may have already made it impossible for Maskell to pursue his vocation again.

While declining to be interviewed for this story, Maskell has repeatedly maintained his complete innocence. And a large group of friends and former parishioners feels that—but for the tragic misaccusations that have ruined his life—Maskell would have continued to be an exemplary priest. His sister, Maureen Baldwin, puts it most emphatically: “My brother has done nothing—repeat, nothing—wrong.”

For a brief moment, shortly after his exile to Connecticut, it looked like Fr. Joseph Maskell’s nightmare might go away.

As a follow-up investigation, two diocesan representatives met with Maskell’s first accuser, Jennifer*, who by now had gotten herself an attorney. When pressed for the names of witness­es or other victims, Jennifer chided her questioners to prove the case without her, and began naming at least a dozen other people who’d allegedly abused her sexually—including a former Baltimore city politician. In the church’s eyes, her credibility diminished with each new allegation.

Even if the charges prove little more than faulty memories, the public accusations may have already made it impossible for him to pursue his vocation.

Jennifer and her attorney soon parted ways, while the archdiocese continued to search for corroboration without her help.

According to diocesan spokesman William Blaul, investigators talked with “dozens” of other Keough students and came away empty-handed. (Though during the years that Jennifer was in high school, some 1,500 students attended Keough.)

Meanwhile, doctors at the Connecticut psychiatric facility, the Institute of Living, conducted a nearly six-month course of evaluation, after which the archdiocese determined Maskell was “able to return to ministry,” says Blaul.

After hearing from canon lawyers that his clerical rights had been violated, says his sister Maureen, Maskell demanded a parish assignment. And with no legal grounds on which to refuse, the diocese gave him an administrative post at St. Augustine in Elkridge.

The reprieve was short­lived. Some St. Augustine parishioners, tipped off about Maskell’s circumstances, protested his arrival. One woman is even said to have handed out anti-Maskell fliers in the parking lot.

Diocesan representatives tried to smooth things over with the parish leadership. And Maskell himself addressed the issue from his new pulpit one Sunday morning, assuring the congregation that he would not run from these untrue allegations.

Maskell knew Jennifer had not let the matter rest, but he clung to the hope that his vocation would endure. “If I lose this parish,” he told his half-brother Tom, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it.”

Since childhood, Anthony Joseph Maskell seemed destined for the priesthood. Born in 1939 and raised in Northeast Baltimore near Clifton Park, his favorite childhood game was “Mass.” In child-sized vestments his mother had sewn for him, Joe would gather neighborhood children into the family’s basement, where he would dispense the body of Christ in the form of white Necco wafers.

His mother, Helen Maskell, was very keen on her son becoming a priest, recalls childhood friend Bill Heim. “I always wondered if he was going to revolt at some point,” Heim says. “But he never did.”

When young Joe was old enough to join in sandlot baseball games, he would dress in black and take his position of choice behind the plate, calling the balls and strikes. According to Heim, Maskell liked having the author­ity to say: “This is right; that’s wrong.”

A fastidiously clean kid, a teenaged Maskell one year spent so much time immersed in his bathtub ritual, Heim recalls, that his father announced his displeasure over it. Joseph Francis Maskell, an office-furniture salesman with Lucas Brothers, was known for his short fuse.

At 14, Maskell went off to St. Charles Seminary in Catonsville, but returned after about a week because he was homesick. When he tried seminary again, after high school, he liked it fine, and reveled in the privileges that came with being a third-year sacristan, which included free social time after mass while the congregation prayed. The perk seemed to appeal to his ego. “He used to say with a smile, ‘We’re sacristans. It is our place to be back here,”‘ recalls long-time friend and fellow seminarian William Kern.

Once ordained, Maskell was known for delivering thoughtful homilies with a compelling bass voice, and for excelling in the heroic moment. When Holy Cross parishioner Lynn Gerber Smith gave birth to an ailing baby, the priest rushed to the hospital and performed an emergency baptism. When Maskell’s friend Albert Griffith called to say he was depressed and thinking of “blowing my brains out,” Maskell drove to Severna Park within 15 minutes.

Maskell chaplained for the Baltimore County Police, the Maryland State Police and the Maryland National Guard. He was in his element holding an improvised mass on the hood of a jeep, or cheering up troops in the rain, or walking over to a county police sta­tion with one of his own pistols to tar­get shoot with the boys.

More than 500 priests have been accused of sexual abuse since the ’80s, prompting litigation that has cost the church $500 million.

Maskell’s police credentials made their greatest contribution on January 4, 1987—the night of the Chase Amtrak crash that killed 16 people. Maskell had been monitoring his police radio and was on site and past the barricade within 45 minutes. Kneeling in the gravel by the railroad ties, he administered last rites and tried to comfort those still alive, including a woman who had been carried from the wreckage without one of her legs.

“I could tell by the arch of his back that he was personally feeling the suffering that was in front of him,” remembers Chaplain Robert K. Shaffer. “That woman was dying and Joe knew it.”

Tired and distressed by what they’d witnessed at the crash, Shaffer and Maskell left the scene around 11 p.m. Shaffer, a Protestant, went home to his wife of 36 years. As a Catholic, however, Maskell had long ago forsaken any such comfort.

The spiritual value of celibacy, in theory, is to demonstrate a priest’s religious commitment—and his link to Christ. One of the Church’s most controversial codes, clerical celibacy has long been a time-honored tradition, but it’s hardly a founding doctrine. Indeed, some popes, including the very first, Saint Peter, enjoyed the worldly pleasures of family life.

In their 1993 book A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church, authors Elinor Burkett and Frank Bruni characterize the ascent of celibacy—between the fourth and 12th centuries—as an attempt by leaders of the Western European Church to maintain control of Church property and power, which might otherwise have passed to clergy members’ offspring. As far as the authors are concerned, this power play endures. “Mandatory celibacy allows the Church tight control over its priests, who have no dividing loyalties to wives and offspring and thus require minimal salaries,” they write.

Although the Church demands celibacy of its priests, it does little to prepare them for the rigors of that life, says Lutherville psychotherapist Richard Sipe, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject. A retired Catholic priest, Sipe is the author of A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy and the just-published Sex, Priests and Power.

In the comfortable home he shares with his wife, psychiatrist Marianne Benkert, Sipe recalls one seminarian’s experience. Confused about his commitment to celibacy, the student asked his rector for advice. “Don’t worry,” the rector replied. “Once you get ordained, it all falls into place.”

But it doesn’t, says Sipe, who believes that celibacy—when followed out of a well-examined, internal commitment—is noble, but that it is ill-suited to institutional obligation.

Fr. Raymond F. Collins, dean of the Catholic University’s School of Religious Studies, believes seminaries are much better able to prepare students for celibacy today than during the era when he and Sipe (as well as Maskell) were enrolled. Seminarians, he says, need “to be aware of themselves as sexual beings and to realize that their sexuality is going to affect their fashion of dealing with other human beings in each and every instance. The seminary has to help the seminarian realize that he is not a disembodied or angelic being.”

How qualified was Maskell for this difficult course? If his developmental years were any indication, Maskell displayed little outward interest in any sexual life at all.

According to Maureen Baldwin, her brother was so intent on becoming a priest that he never had a date in his life. When a girl he knew in high school told him he had the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, he had no idea how to respond.

Friends from his teen years can’t recall Maskell ever expressing a libido. “I never saw him with a girl the whole time we were in school,” says Dennis Rogers, “outside of his mother.”

As an adult, recalls Bill Heim, Maskell admitted that, when he was about 10, he’d had a crush on a pretty neighborhood girl. Maskell raised the subject, Heim believes, as a way of saying that at this one point in his life, he had experienced romantic love.

In recent years, the credibility of recovered memory has raised some eyebrows among researchers and the public.

Though it may seem odd to reach so far back for such a memory, the priesthood is filled with men who—bound for the seminary from an early age­—never reached psycho-sexual maturity, write Burkett and Bruni. When such a priest breaks with his vow of celibacy, the authors add, he might seek involvement with his “emotional peers … teenagers.” Some men can be drawn to the mantle of celibacy in the hope that it will shield them from disturbing elements of their sexuality, and are disappointed when it does not.

Sipe has interviewed or reviewed the histories of more than 2,000 Catholic priests. Six percent, in his estimate, have had sex with minors; two percent with pre-pubescents. This represents significantly higher rates, he believes, than among clergy of non-celibate denominations.

According to Sipe’s formula, 3,000 of the nation’s nearly 50,000 Roman Catholic priests pose a threat to the children under their influence. From figures in a report commissioned by the Archdiocese of Chicago, priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley also estimates the current national figure of child-molesting priests at between 2,000 and 4,000, with each one of them likely to victimize an estimated 50 minors over the course of a career.

Diocesan spokesman William Blaul counters that celibacy does not pose an inherent problem, and that the para­mount issue is screening out potential abusers. (Toward that end, he says, today’s seminarians undergo criminal background checks and a battery of tests designed to ferret out character flaws, though no test is completely reli­able for detecting a predisposition to sexual abuse.)

Nonetheless, for some celibate priests, the fact that all sex is forbidden arguably blurs distinctions among different types of sexual behavior. As one deacon told Sipe, “I don’t see what difference it makes whether I use my hand or somebody’s vagina to have an orgasm.” This sort of naive, all-or­-nothing thinking, when flamed by the loneliness of the celibate life, according to Burkett and Bruni, can leave a priest primed for bad behavior.

In 1966, about 16 months after his ordination, a young Father Joseph Maskell became associate pastor at St. Clement in Lansdowne. There, 13-year­-old Bill* felt like a bigshot whenever the priest would call him out of class at the parish school to chat, usually for several hours at a time, two or three times a week. They often started out talking about sports, but invariably wound to the subject of male anatomy, alleges Bill.

One day, Maskell took Bill and two other boys target shooting. On the drive home, Bill sat up front with Maskell, and as the car rose over a bump in the road, Bill alleges, Maskell reached over, grabbed Bill’s crotch, and said playfully, “Hold on to your balls.”

Bill says he began to feel cautious around Maskell. One afternoon when the school baseball team was changing into new uniform pants, Maskell told Bill that he needed a jockstrap to play. Bill didn’t have one, but Maskell did, back in the rectory. The priest sent Bill to get it, giving him the key to his bedroom. Bill dashed to the rectory, leapt into the jockstrap, and was dressed in record time, he says, just before Maskell arrived.

Bill began telling his friends to be careful around the priest. Word of this filtered back to Maskell, who called Bill into the rectory, several days before graduation, Bill says. Allegedly, the priest confronted him: “Listen, you little m—–f—-r. If one more person says something to me that came from you, I’m gonna make sure you don’t graduate.”

At home, Bill told his mother (since deceased) that Maskell had threatened him. She phoned the archdiocese to complain, he says. Bill graduated on time, and within three months Maskell, though continuing to reside and perform some duties at St. Clement, was assigned to Archbishop Keough High School for girls.

At Keough, Maskell was known by at least two contradictory personae. One was a gruff militarist who barked out commands in the hallway and might search a girl’s locker for drugs or even cut open the hem of her skirt if he believed she was showing too much thigh.

The other was a chummy confidant who developed a following among some of the girls by offering his office as a smoking lounge in a school where smoking was grounds for suspension. Girls pretended to need his counsel so they could get out of class. After hear­ing his invitation to light up, they’d smoke until they got dizzy, spinning their tales of parental misunderstanding, or boyfriend problems, as the priest would nod appreciatively and take notes.

Lutherville psychotherapist Richard Sipe estimates 6 percent of priests he surveyed have had sex with minors.

Many women today recall his being genuinely helpful. “He was my mentor,” says one. Says another: “He helped me to put my life back together. He let me cry on his shoulder.”

But while dispensing such comfort, others claim, Maskell also sometimes crossed a line.

“My parents fought a lot and embarrassed me,” says one alum from the class of 1972, who mentioned this to Maskell during a smoking session. “He homed in on that. And he said, ‘Come sit on my lap.’ I sat on his lap, and he rocked me back and forth until I started getting weird feelings. As he was rocking me, he said, ‘Your father isn’t affectionate enough with you.’ I was upset because he was saying stuff about my father, and it made me cry,” she says, adding that her mother called the school to complain about the incident only to have her call transferred directly to Maskell. “She told him to just leave me alone.”

Deborah Wisner, of Keough’s class of ’74, also went to see Maskell to smoke and discuss family problems. She says he showed her a series of ink blots, diagnosed her as “sexually frus­trated,” and recommended further counseling. She avoided his office from then on by walking up an extra flight of stairs.

Former Keough student Karen* says Maskell called her into his office one morning and told her that someone had seen her with her boyfriend naked in a parked car. “I told him that it couldn’t have been true,” she recalls. “No matter what I said to him, he said, ‘I understand, dear. Now let’s talk about it.'” According to Karen, the priest had specific questions about her boyfriend’s anatomy. For six hours, she says, he interrogated her. “He told me my problem was that I was frigid,” she claims. “He took his big pocket watch out. He said he could hypnotize me and help me.”

Other Keough alums also recall that Maskell presented himself as a sexual healer. Several women even say that the priest claimed to be an actual gynecologist. (“He’s always been a frustrated doctor,” says his half-brother Tom).

One of these women adds that Maskell was so taken with himself that, as part of her counseling, he put his face within a few inches of hers and asked her to look into his eyes and tell him how beautiful they were and how good looking he was.

Stacy* knew Maskell from both St. Clement and Keough, where she was a member of the class of ’72. She claims that one day during ninth grade, Maskell summoned her to his office to mention that her reading aptitude was below par. He sat on his desk, perched above her. “He said that I wouldn’t have gotten into Keough unless he’d pulled strings. I was kind of frightened. I said, ‘Gee, I thought I got in on my own merit.’ And he said, ‘No, you have a reading disability, and you would never have gotten in if it weren’t for me.’ And then he asked me if there was anything that I could do for him. I said, ‘No, not that I can think of.’ I didn’t know what he was getting at,” says Stacy.

Ann*, who doesn’t wish to be named because “I still have a fear of the man,” says Maskell invited her on a boat ride with some other girls. As they drove along the Beltway, she asked him where the other kids were and was told they couldn’t make it.

They arrived at the boat, docked in the Dundalk area, and after helping her aboard, Maskell suggested that they just sit around and talk. At some point, she says, he told her about a church renovation project that unearthed, behind an old radiator, dozens of desiccated condoms.

“I really don’t think you should be talking to me about these kinds of things,” she told him. He changed the subject, but after he lapsed into a description of sights he’d seen on lovers’ lane, Ann says she asked to be taken home.

She stayed away from the priest, but about a year later, she discovered to her chagrin that Maskell was sitting opposite her in a confessional. She claims he quizzed her about her sex life, which, at 14, was nonexistent, and as she tried to answer his questions, she squeezed her eyes tight in the vain hope that he wouldn’t see her. That was her last confession for 20 years.

By early 1993, Jennifer had resumed her quest against Maskell through Towson lawyer Phil Dantes, who enlisted a colleague familiar with Keough to see if there was enough support for Jen­nifer’s claims to justify an investigation. They quickly decided there was.

Rev. Robert Hawkins got a church scolding after he took Maskell in for several weeks. Says Hawkins: “I think [Maskell’s] really a casualty of the times.”

But what about Maryland’s three­ year statute of limitations for civil complaints? Could the recently recovered memory of a long-forgotten offense become grounds for a proper lawsuit?

To bolster their proposed legal maneuver, Dantes and colleague Jim Maggio ran an anonymous ad in The Sun seeking other alumni who might have memories from their days at Keough. Copies of the ad were also mailed directly to Keough alums. And for good measure, the attorneys tipped off a Sun reporter about the probe, hoping publicity would scare up witnesses.

Jennifer, meanwhile, allegedly suffered more new images of past sexual abuse, a painful process that had begun years earlier, when she first came to believe an uncle had abused her as a child.

Then, in the spring of 1992, a series of new images convinced her she’d been sexually abused by others, as well. In the first of these alleged abuses, she recalls confessing to a Keough priest that her uncle had urged her to let a dog lick her sexually, and that the dog later died. She claims the priest then began masturbating, saying that if she told anyone, she would go to hell.

Distressed at the memory, Jennifer examined her 1971 Keough yearbook and recognized the face of the priest she remembered in the confessional. Surprisingly, however, it was Maskell’s name under a nearby photo that caused in her “an ugly stir.”

In the following months, Jennifer waded into a stream of increasingly chilling convictions. She claims the two priests instructed her to perform oral sex on them because “the Holy Spirit was coming through them….It was like the Eucharist.” She saw Maskell for counseling sessions during which “he was praying that I would stop being bad.”

Over a three-year period, she says, she and Maskell had vaginal intercourse four times, including once during which he called her a whore. She alleges Maskell once forced her to have sex with a uni­formed police officer and at least once to have sex with someone who gave the priest money. Other alleged memories involve a broth­er from Cardinal Gibbons, anal intercourse and coerced enemas.

In 1993, she says, she recalled that Maskell allegedly hypnotized her: “He would use a certain phrase and everything would just stop.” The phrase, she says, was, “I only want what’s best for you, just what’s best for you.” She says he told her that before divulging a certain incident to anyone, “I was to kill myself.”

Jennifer also claims Maskell once put a gun in her mouth. On another occasion, she claims, he held an unloaded gun to her head and pulled the trigger, allegedly warning that her policeman father, if he ever learned “what was going on,” would surely do the same thing with a loaded gun.

But it was an episode Jennifer says she recalled in January 1993 that alerted Baltimore County police.

Jennifer says that in the spring of 1969, her sophomore year at Keough, she talked with Sister Catherine Cesnik, a popular young English teacher, who asked how Jennifer liked Keough. “I told her I had a hard time with my studies and didn’t like Keough a lot,” Jennifer says. Cesnik asked if she could help, but Jennifer said there were things she couldn’t talk about.

Was someone making her do things she didn’t want to? the nun asked. Was somebody hurting her? Was it someone that Cesnik knew?

To each of these questions, Jennifer says, she nodded yes.

“[Jennifer], is it the priests?” Jennifer indicated that it was.

Sister Catherine “Cathy” Cesnik.

“Oh, God,” Cesnik allegedly said. “I suspected as much.”

Jennifer says Cesnik hugged her and told her to enjoy the summer; the nun would take care of everything. But when Jennifer returned in the fall, Ces­nik had changed jobs. Maskell, though, was still at Keough, and Jennifer claims he told her someone had approached him during the summer and accused him of “hurting the girls.”

That November of 1969, Sister Ces­nik left the apartment she shared with another nun in Southwest Baltimore, went out on some errands, and never came back. The following January, hunters found her body—bludgeoned to death and partly consumed by ani­mals, her clothes in such disarray as to suggest sexual foul play. The field where she lay was four and a half miles from her apartment, but not far from Maskell’s former parish, St. Clement, in Lansdowne.

In November of 1969, Sister Cesnik left her apartment to run some errands and never came back.

Jennifer claims she now remembers a cold day—Maskell was wearing gloves; she, a coat—when he took her to visit Cesnik’s corpse. It lay in an open, barren place, next to a dump­ster. As she bent over the body, she claims she heard him say, “You see what happens when you say bad things about people.”

“When I first remembered Sister Cathy,” says Jennifer, “I felt that I had killed her. I know now that I was led to believe that I killed her.”

She says Maskell and a religious brother would show her items—a neck­lace, for example—that had supposedly belonged to Cesnik. The men pretended to have discovered the items in Jennifer’s school locker, she says. Eventually, Jennifer claims, she was able to recall the religious brother telling her that he had beaten Cesnik to death.

A private investigator hired by Jennifer’s attorneys contracted county police and asked to look through the old Cesnik file, but was denied access. After police met with Jennifer in the spring of 1994, they reactivated their investigation, but were unable to verify her account, which differed from the original crime scene, says Homicide Commander Captain Rustin Price. There was no dumpster in the field where Cesnik’s body was found, for example, says Price. A news­paper account from the time, however, describes the field as a “dump.”

And county detective Sam Bower­man, an FBI-trained expert in criminal personality profiling, believes Cesnik’s murderer was a stranger. “Father Maskell would have been more meticulous,” he maintains. “I don’t think Father Maskell’s connected to her death in any way.”

The newspaper ad mailed to Keough alumnae arrived at the Howard County home of Tracy* in the fall of 1993. She cried. She laughed. She ran around her yard. “I was confused,” she says, “yet excited that someone out there was going to take action.”

Unlike Jennifer, whom she claims never to have met, Tracy says she has always remembered some of her encounters with Maskell but that certain graver abuses she recalled only recently. But even the things she says she’s always remembered were bad enough that, for part of her adult life, she kept track of Maskell’s where­abouts with the thought of killing him.

Petite, blonde, with doe-brown eyes and a hawk nose, at 41 Tracy recently graduated from community college with honors and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree. She wants to go to law school and become a criminal prosecutor. Her face has changed since high school: Her features are sharper, her gaze more penetrating.

Tracy first went to counseling with Maskell on October 5, 1970. Her par­ents were upset at finding drug para­phernaIia in her purse, and Tracy hoped the priest would talk with them. She was crying when her friend Lisa* brought her to Maskell’s office, she says, adding that the priest then led Lisa out the door and locked it.

Tracy claims Maskell hugged her and told her that, although he wasn’t supposed to touch the girls, they found it calming. He pulled his chair around to the front of his desk and allegedly removed her clothing, piece by piece, until she was completely naked, she says. The priest then massaged her breasts and asked if her boyfriend touched her similarly, she claims. Allegedly, Maskell reassured her: “I am touching you in a Godly manner.”

This session led to a series of meetings in which, Tracy claims, she was naked, sometimes sitting on his lap. On one occasion, she says, her friend Lisa was present while Maskell conducted an explicit anatomy lesson with Tracy as the model. (Baltimore magazine’s efforts to contact Lisa have been unsuccessful, though Tracy’s attorneys say Lisa corroborates their client’s account.)

Maskell also took Tracy to a gynecologist, Tracy asserts, and watched her examinations. When the doctor prescribed a thrice-weekly douche, Maskell offered the private bathroom adjoining his office for that purpose. She claims the priest watched her administer douches, as well as enemas.

She says she implored a different priest at Keough to take over her counseling, because Maskell “was a pervert.” “Please help me,” she remembers saying. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” he allegedly replied. The priest advised her to stay away from Maskell and shut the door in her face, she says.

Years later, after her mother died in early 1993, Tracy claims she had several new memories about Maskell, in which the priest had not merely observed her gynecological exams and treatments, but had allegedly helped administer them.

Within a week of receiving the lawyers’ anonymous ad in the fall of 1993, Tracy wrote to them, and got a letter in return explaining that the attorneys were seeking corroboration of alleged sexual abuse at Keough.

Tracy called Dantes associate Beverly Wallace late one afternoon and asked, “Who are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Wallace asked.

“Joseph Maskell,” Tracy said. “Bingo,” replied Wallace.

Tracy offered to be a witness, she says. Her next alleged memory came to her in early March 1994, as she was lying in bed at night. Remembering the second time that Maskell had taken her to the gynecologist’s office in 1970, she suddenly came to believe she had been raped by both men, she says. “I screamed that I had been raped and woke up my husband,” she recalls.

The next morning, Tracy called Beverly Wallace and asked for the name of a therapist.

New alleged memories continued to surface: Maskell and two police men raping her in the back seat of his car; Maskell hypnotizing her; Maskell spraying her and himself with a femi­nine hygiene product before raping her as Irish music played.

Tracy says she had talked to friends back in high school about Maskell, even about going to the police, but abandoned that plan because Maskell was a “police priest.”

“I had been warned sternly by Father Maskell that I would not be believed—that I was a druggie slut and no one would believe me over a priest,” she says. “He also slapped me about the face, and he showed me his gun.”

Not only did Tracy’s growing cache of allegedly recovered memories support those of Jennifer, but she also decided to become a plaintiff herself.

The Dantes legal team assembled their civil case while sharing information with the state’s attorney’s office for a criminal investigation. And by summer of 1994, they were ready to play hard­ball with the archdiocese. They gave the Church one month to come up with a serious monetary offer, or they would file the civil suit.

At St. Augustine, as the deadline approached, Maskell drew withdrawn. A tabloid TV show was rumored to be interested in the story. Despite his earlier declaration to parishioners, he asked the archdiocese if he could return to the Institute of Living, citing stress from the ongoing ordeal. In August 1994, with Maskell back at the Connecticut facility, the archdiocese waited out the attorneys.

The hammer came down in two seven-count complaints, asking for a total reward to Jennifer and Tracy of $40 million.

Word of the Maskell lawsuit quickly became a hot topic in the Catholic community, and it even prompted some tongue-clucking one afternoon among four middle-aged women at a parish crab feast. “Do you believe those girls trying to accuse Father Maskell of such outrageous behavior?” one of them said.

Overhearing this, 38-year old Eva Nelson Cruz felt rage, and she snapped back: “Don’t be surprised if someone right here at the table had a problem.”

The group fell silent. Later, during the car ride home. Cruz asked her mother, Babe, what she remembered about Maskell.

Babe Nelson brought up the time when Eva, at age 12, had collapsed at school. Taken to St. Agnes Hospital, she drifted in and out of a coma for two weeks, while doctors struggled to come up with a definite explanation.

One day, Nelson opened the door to Eva’s hospital room to find Maskell, bent close over her daughter, his arm resting on the edge of her bed. Nelson claims Maskell jumped up and said he was hearing the girl’s confession.

But Babe Nelson doubted her daughter was lucid enough to make a confession; the girl even seemed to be asleep. And there was something about Maskell’s posture and his surprise that made Nelson uncomfortable. She didn’t quite believe the priest, but she didn’t want to disbelieve him.

Jennifer testified in the trial that there were other Keough teachers who’d abused her as well, as had two of the nuns.

“I wonder why I didn’t say something earlier,” Nelson now said on the car ride home, crying quietly.

“Yeah,” her daughter said numbly as she drove. “It would have been helpful.”

Over the next few days, Eva Cruz became consumed with the sound of water slapping against the hull of a boat and the idea that something had happened between her and Maskell.

Even before age 12, Eva Nelson had been tormented by two thoughts whose origins mystified her. She was certain that God didn’t love her, and sometimes, at random moments, she would hear a little voice in her head, her own voice, imploring Jesus to have sex with her. Immediately after hearing this little voice, she says, she would briefly pass out.

The parish crab feast called up a series of fragmented impressions: Maskell’s car, the floor of a boat, water slapping. Physical pain. Being dropped off at the St. Clement rectory.

At the urging of a priest friend, she arranged to meet with archdiocesan officials in her therapist’s Columbia office in October 1994. Cruz brought her mother. Father Richard Woy and attorney Thomas Dame represented the archdiocese.

Cruz told the group that Maskell had taken her to a boat and that she was convinced the two had had intercourse, and also that he had penetrated her with an object she couldn’t picture.

Woy was quiet and a bit awkward as Dame took furious notes. They asked whether Cruz intended legal action.

Cruz told them that she wasn’t planning to sue, but she was interested in some empathy, which seemed to her in short supply. “You’ll never understand the hurt, the pain, the anxiety, the loss of self-esteem that’s happened for most of my life,” she shouted at Woy.

The church administrator appeared unsure how to best respond; nonetheless, he told her to contact him if she remembered anything else.

Efforts by Baltimore magazine to speak with Woy and the other church administrators have all been referred to diocesan spokesman Blaul, who generally refrains from comment in matters of ongoing litigation.

By May 1995, neither the city’s criminal investigation of sexual abuse—limited by the narrower laws of 1970—nor the country’s investigation into the murder of Sister Cesnik had brought any indictments against Maskell. But he faced the multi-million-dollar civil suit filed in city circuit court.

In his search for relevant information, Judge Hilary Caplan, a 12-year veteran jurist, had personally sorted through the load of papers that Maskell had ordered buried four years earlier in Holy Cross cemetery—ostensibly to protect parishioner privacy without violating a ban against outdoor burning. Most everything, however, was water logged beyond recognition.

This first week in May, Caplan was holding a preliminary hearing to consider whether so-called “recovered memories” constituted justifiable exception to the state’s three-year statute of limitations in civil suits. To focus on the narrow legal issue at hand, both plaintiffs’ allegations were to be accepted for now as truthful, and no corroborating witnesses were to be called. What was on trial now was memory itself.

None of the defendants—Maskell, the archdiocese, Tracy’s gynecologist, or the School Sisters of Notre Dame who operated Keough—were present except for a quarter of charcoal-suited attorneys.

At the plaintiffs’ table, Phil Dantes, sporting a mustache-in-progress, was accompanied by Maggio and Wallace.

They called Tracy to the stand, where she carefully recited her old, then new alleged memories of Maskell.

During cross-examination, the attorney for her high school gynecologist portrayed Tracy as an opportunist with a history of drug use. After some wrangling over the dates in which Tracy’s new alleged memories occurred to her, the lawyer argued that all but one of them were remembered after Tracy’s first meeting with attorneys.

“Were you told that you couldn’t sue for your abuse because it had happened such a long time ago?” the lawyer asked in a series of questions.

Tracy regarded the attorney coolly. “I don’t recall,” she said.

Jennifer testified in the afternoon, reciting a number of alleged memories of abuse by Maskell. There were other Keough teachers who’d abused her as well, Jennifer said, as had two of the nuns, including a high-ranking administrator of the school, who “was with Father Maskel, and they were using the vibrator, and she went down on me.”

During the 10-minute break that followed, Sun reporter Robert Erlandson buttonholed Dantes in the back of the courtroom. Could these new allegations possibly be true? the reported wondered.

“I just ask the questions,” Dantes replied, his back near the rear wall of the courtroom.

“You know whether she’s telling the truth,” Erlandson insisted, towering over Dantes. It had been Dantes, after all, who’d brought Jennifer to The Sun in the first place.

During Jennifer’s cross-examination, a defense lawyer pointed-out that Jennifer could not recall any teachers from Keough who had not abused her. He then referred to Jennifer’s memories of abuse outside of school, at a pub to which her uncle had taken her. “At the same time that you remember these eight or nine people, you began to have the recollection of Father Maskell.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer.

“Then there was a Brother [Ron*]. Was he on more than once occasion?”

“Yes, quite a few.”

“You also mentioned Brother [Fred*]? Was that on more than one occasion that [he] abused you?”

“Three that I remember,” she said. “One occasion he just spanked me.”

“OK. Now, there was Brother [David*] also?”

“It’s Brother [Gavin*]. . .”

The silver-haired lawyer went on to list six additional male abusers, including the city politician who Jennifer claimed had given a pretend political speech while she was required to perform oral sex on him.

Moving on to the next claim, the lawyer asked if the two nuns Jennifer had named “were merely present? Or did they participate in the abuse?”

“They participated.”

“Didn’t you testify that you found that memory absurd and almost impossible to accept?”

“Yes.”

“Lastly we have the Bishop. What was his involvement?”

Jennifer recalled visiting Father Maskell’s office only to find a bishop there instead. “And he gave me final absolution,” she said. “He spit in my hand. He told me that was my bond with the devil and before I was to wash my hand, I was to consider breaking all bonds with the path that I was on. And to go on a new road.” That was Jennifer’s last memory of her high school days at Archbishop Keough.

As she left the stand, Dantes gave her a supportive hug.

Later in the hearing, psychotherapists testified that Tracy and Jennifer were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from their alleged abuse by Maskell. But neither mental health professional who testified for the plaintiffs was an expert in memory.

In contrast, the defense had four expert witnesses, three in the field of memory and at least two national power hitters, including Dr. Paul McHugh, director of the Johns Hopkins department of psychiatry. McHugh is on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a national support and advocacy group that helps parents whose children are purportedly misled in therapy into believing they were abused. In recent years, the mutability of “memory” and the related legal implications have ignited tremendous controversy among researchers and the public.

Chronicling one of the most infamous such cases, Lawrence Wright, in his gripping 1994 book Remembering Satan, goes so far as to argue that a Washington state policeman “remembered” abusing his daughters in a series of bizarre cult rituals only because overzealous interrogators convinced him of it.

Judge Caplan, after listening to the experts on both sides, did not believe there was sufficient scientific foundation to support the contention that Jennifer and Tracy had lost and then somehow recovered their memories of abuse. “It is a leap of faith that this court cannot make,” Caplan concluded.

At the pronouncement, courtroom 201 became very still. Beverly Wallace frowned openly.

Caplan continued that he was not judging the plaintiffs’ credibility—merely the empirical evidence of repressed memory. “The court is going to grant a motion to dismiss, welcome an appeal, and let chips fall where they may.” (As of this writing an appeal has been filed and will likely be heard in early 1996.)

Outside on the courthouse steps, Maskell’s lawyer and friend J. Michael Lehane said the ruling clearly “vindicated” his client.

Others remain unimpressed. One Finksburg woman, a friend of Jennifer’s who had abandoned Catholicism over the Maskell case, wrote bluntly to Cardinal Keeler: “Through a technicality in the law, this archdiocese has succeeded in avoiding any responsibility to the victims of Joseph Maskell…May God’s justice be visited upon you.”

During the year after her first meeting with Father Woy and diocesan attorney Dame, Eva Nelson Cruz says she avoided media accounts of the Maskell case because she didn’t want to contaminate her own memory. She had been having additional revelations about Maskell.

She recalled that he had encouraged the children of St. Clement to come to him with their “deepest problems,” and that she’d given him her first confession, around age 10. In the confessional, she’d revealed that she used to sit on her grandfather’s lap while he would masturbate her in front of neighborhood children. Maskell asked her to explain the abuse in detail, she says, and prescribed five Hail Marys and two acts of contrition. He also allegedly made this unorthodox pronouncement: “He told me that God did not love me anymore. But that he would make it so that God would love me again through him. But that we’d have to do it alone. No one else could be around. And that he would have to take me somewhere.”

She remembered meeting him in front of the small green rectory on First Avenue and driving out to his boat, a cabin cruiser. (A friend of Maskell’s says he used to lend his 22-foot cabin cruiser to the priest around the late 1960s and later sold it to him.)

Cruz believes there was a second man on the boat: stocky, with a round face and thinning hair. “I remember kicking somebody in the mouth. Hard.”

While recently walking along First Avenue in Landsdowne, she recalled visiting Maskell at St. Clement. In her mind’s eye, she saw him wearing the black clerical cape that he often favored during the winter, and she claims that he asked her to look deeply into his eyes and told her: “You won’t remember. You won’t remember. If you remember you’ll die.” She could picture him twirling fiercely—the cape flapping around his head.

Taking Father Woy up on his earlier invitation, Cruz called him at the archdiocese to say she had additional memories and wanted a second meeting in her therapist’s office. They scheduled one for June 2. Dame was present again, and this time so was Beverly Wallace, even though Cruz still had no intention of suing.

For one thing, her therapist had cautioned her against it. “A lawyer would have a field day arguing that she’s confusing issues of her grandfather with Father Maskell. And that’s possible,” concedes her therapist, Kenneth Ellis. However, Cruz’s memories about her grandfather were very accessible, Ellis says, and yet “there was always something else that was bothering her that she could never get to.”

He brings up some of her dreams from the 1980s: a soldier shoots a nun and then rapes her while Eva watches numbly; Eva skates through a cathedral and is taken aside and raped. “It’s not unreasonable to interpret Eva’s dreams as tapping into repressed memories of her experiences with Maskell,” says Ellis.

Since the previous group meeting in Ellis’s office, Cruz concluded that it had been on Maskell’s instruction that she would ask Jesus to have sex with her. It was part of Maskell’s prescription for re-establishing her in God’s grace, she says. Maskell had insisted that in order for her to be completely cleansed of the incestuous sins with her grandfather, it was necessary for her to disrobe, she says. Allegedly, the preist then opened a vial of holy water and sprinkled some on her vagina, reciting a blessing in Latin. “The final cleansing process was for him to penetrate me with his penis, because Jesus worked through him,” says Cruz. But first he penetrated her with some object—she felt sure, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She remembered pain and bleeding.

County Detective Sam Bowerman believes Cesnik’s murderer was a stranger.

As she tried to figure out what the object might have been, her breathing became heavy and panicked. She needed to pause for several minutes to regain composure. Then, it appeared to her: wooden, perhaps 12 inches long, an inch and a half thick, with a metal figure attached to it. “A crucifix,” she announced.

After the meeting, Cruz asked Wallace to linger an extra moment. “Are other people remembering things like this?” she asked the attorney.

With the exception of the cape, everything Cruz brought up had been reported to Wallace by someone else.

“Pedophilia” the sexual attraction to pre-pubescents, and “ephebophilia,” the attraction to young adolescents, are often regarded nowadays as biological compulsion—no more changeable than, say, adult heterosexuality. As sexual orientations, they are not curable, only containable, usually through a combination of drug and talk therapies as well as eternal vigilance. Certainly many cases of sexual abuse by priests are committed by certifiable pedophiles acting out an unchecked craving.

But other cases are better explained as the consequence of narcissistic personality disorder, according to some experts. “A wise man once said, ‘We’re born selfish and we grow out of it,’” quotes Dr. Frank Valcour, medical director of St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland, one of the country’s leading facilities for priests with sexual problems. But narcissists don’t grow out of it and can become “a law unto themselves,” he says.

Often the object of abuse in their own childhoods, abusers with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely difficult cases, because they are unable to see their own actions from another’s point of view. The narcissist tends to develop a self-concept as entrenched as it is deluded. One priest who admitted to intercourse with a girl saw the act merely as a “reserved embrace,” because he did not ejaculate or display passion, according to Burkett and Bruni. Through reinterpretation the priest was able to maintain that his action was not “a sin.”

The priesthood can provide a dangerous domain for the narcissist, who might be overeager, for example, to embrace his appointed role as the sign of Christ’s presence in the world.

One especially perilous aspect of the vocation, according to Richard Sipe, is confession. Because sexual deeds outside of marital intercourse (and even “impure thoughts,” in some cases) are met by damnation unless confessed, the priest becomes the repository of a tremendous number of sexual secrets. Week in, week out, he is exposed to the lusts of his congregation. This puts men who often lack sexual self-knowledge or perspective, and who are barred from any sexual life, in the dangerous position of having to interact with other people’s sexuality.

The priest who is apt to be corrupted by this process might rationalize that in the service of cleansing other of their sins, he needs to examine that sin in great detail, Sipe postulates. Or even, for therapeutic or other reasons, he might need to recreate that sin—as though his priestly presence would somehow transform the act.

There is yet another path of thought down which a narcissistic or otherwise maladjusted priest can be led astray, according to Sipe. And it goes something like this;

To be male and celibate, as seen through the long lens of traditional Catholic perspective, is superior to being female and sexual, says Sipe. In fact, female sexuality is the scapegoat for a lot of earthly misery, from Adam’s fall on, acknowledges Catholic University’s Fr. Collins.

“When you blame one group for something,” asserts Sipe. “and you declare another group superior, and then thirdly you reserve the power to this superior group, it lines up the inferior group to be used at the service of the superior group.” The temptation for members of the elite, he continues, is to hold themselves blameless for breaking certain codes of behavior, and even for thinking themselves above such codes.

While Catholic University’s Collins is amply willing to accept this as a sociological truism, he is uncomfortable with the next extension of Sipe’s argument, calling it “inflammatory.”

Sipe raises the extreme analogy of S.S. officers who, after a busy day of killing homosexuals, purportedly indulged in homo-erotic behavior amongst themselves. “Sexual abuse is just a symptom of a system of declared superiority, power, the use of other people,” Sipe maintains. “I do believe that there is a connection between this and the roots of the Holocaust.”

In his 1986 study The Nazi Doctors, noted psychiatrist Robery Jay Lifton turned to the Holocaust as well in his quest to understand how evil can function in a presumably moral soul. Lifton coins the term “doubling” for the mechanism through which a person, especially one of elevated moral standing, is able to reconcile his misdeeds with his conscience by creating an additional perspective. This new perspective does not deny the act itself, but reinterprets its meaning as benign or even heroic. The Nazi doctors killed, but, by their lights, did not murder. Any daily atrocities were reinterpreted as part of the larger, supposedly higher, mission of cleansing and healing Europe. As the Nazi doctor in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow puts it, “Because I am a healer, everything I do heals, somehow.”

Through this warped looking-glass, anything a priest might do is, by default, holy—a view that often has been adopted by parishioners. And in 1960s Baltimore, as elsewhere, many Catholic children were conditioned to accept this simplified distortion, sometimes at their own peril.

To the victims of sexually abusive priests, mere explanations such as “craving disorder” or “narcissism” or “doubling” surely provide thin solace indeed, and a wholly inadequate foundation upon which to repair one’s spirituality. Sadly, the long-term damage to religious faith remains the cruelest irony of abuse by priests. As one alleged survivor pointed out in a recent confrontation with the archdiocese: “God’s not happy about that.”

As the Maskell case approaches winter unresolved, the beleaguered priest remains largely invisible. Some rumors have placed him abroad. His sister Maureen says he’s simply “up north.”

Wherever he is, Maskell feels tremendously isolated, reports his longtime friend Rev. Robert G. Hawkins, until recently pastor of St. Rita’s in Dundalk. Hawkins took Maskell in for several weeks last year, and got scolded by the archdiocese for doing so. Says Hawkins of Maskell’s plight: “You’d be surprised how your phone stops ringing. People who you knew, all of a sudden they’re not talking to you. I guess people figure it’s like a death.” He pauses to catch his breath and dry his eyes. “I think he’s really a casualty of the times. He’s dead. He can’t function as a priest around here anymore.”

Nonetheless, Maskell is hoping that, after the civil appeal, the Archdiocese of Baltimore will reinstate his priestly faculties, so that he can once again shepherd a flock in some faraway place and reclaim his youthful ideal of being the one to say: This is right; that’s wrong.

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Update 12/4/17: The source known as Jennifer in this story is Jean Hargadon Wehner, featured in the Netflix documentary The Keepers. Wehner contacted us and wanted to amend the story from her point of view: Before coming in to give an official statement, Wehner was encouraged by the diocesan representatives to get an attorney. Her first official statement of abuse was held at her attorney’s office, with two diocesan representatives. After giving graphic details of her alleged abuse, she was pressed for the names of witness­es or other victims. Jennifer emotionally told them they should take the responsibility off of her and do something.

A couple of months later, Wehner called a follow-up meeting at her attorney’s office to share names of alleged abusers she had been remembering. Wehner gave the two diocesan representatives names of a number of adults who had allegedly abused her sexually while she was a student at Keough—including a former Baltimore City politician.

Later, Wehner states her attorney was upset with her for sharing names of alleged abusers and not victims. She and her husband fired him. She requested a meeting with one of the diocesan representatives without lawyers present and was told no. Wehner says this action was her final personal interaction with the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

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Asterisks denote pseydonyms. Paul Mandelbaum is a former Baltimore senior writer and a contributor to The New York Times. This article is the result of more than 100 interviews conducted over a nine-month period. Accounts from legal plaintiffs are taken from their court appearances and public documents. Research assistance provided by Baltimore intern Wil Hylton.