Attorneys for convicted murderer and Roman Catholic priest Gerald Robinson have filed a motion seeking to vacate his 2006 murder conviction in the 1980 death of a 71-year-old nun, claiming they have uncovered new evidence that the priest’s defense team failed to present at his trial.Robinson, now 69, has consistently maintained that he did not kill the nun on April 5, 1980. He is serving a sentence of 15 years to life after his request to remain free pending appeal was denied. He did not testify during his three week trial in 2006.
He was represented at trial by a four-member defense team consisting of John Thebes, Alan Konop, Nicole Khoury and John Callahan.
According to attorneys John Donohue and Richard Kerger who are handling Robinson’s appeal, several witnesses say they have information indicating that someone else killed Sister Margaret Ann Pahl and that they had either told Robinson’s defense attorneys or attempted to do so before or during the priest’s trial but the information was not presented at trial.
Robinson was arrested in April, 2004, 24 years after the murder. He was 43 and a Roman Catholic chaplain at Mercy Hospital where Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was the caretaker. The nun’s body was found on the floor of the sacristy where she had gone to prepare the chapel for Holy Saturday Mass. She had been strangled and stabbed between 27 and 32 times in the chest and neck, wounds which formed what investigators say resembled a cross. She was covered with an altar cloth and her undergarments had been pulled down around her ankles but investigators said she was not sexually assaulted.
The new evidence suggests that the late Rev. Jerome Swiatecki, another Catholic priest who worked with Robinson as a chaplain at the hospital, may have killed the nun, not Robinson.
Swiatecki’s former housekeeper, Sister Dorothy Marie Balabuch, described him as an “immoral man with a very bad temper” who liked “hard core pornography” and knives. David Cone, a security guard at the hospital who had been hired two days after the murder, claims that he had accused Swiatecki directly of killing the nun and says that the priest had replied, “So what if I did?”
He allegedly told Cone that he was a nobody and that no one would believe him if he made public his accusations against Swiatecki whose hobby was wood carving.Cone says that he had meet pre-trial with Robinson’s attorneys but that they had not called him to testify at the trial.
Sister Dorothy Marie says she had called the law of Thebes twice before the trial, leaving messages that she had relevant and important information to the case but that the attorney never returned her calls.
Swiatecki died in 1996 at age 83. Police officers who investigated the murder claim that Swiatecki had an alibi for the time the murder was committed.
Robinson was a suspect early in the case because he was seen near the chapel at the time of her death. Although a sword-shaped letter opener was found in his room that prosecutors believe was the murder weapon, he was not arrested. However, the case remained unsolved for over 23 years. Robinson had presided at her funeral mass.
Prosecutors said that Robinson has been motivated by anger at Sister Pahl’s domineering personality. She had also reportedly complained about how Robinson had conducted a Good Friday service the night before the murder.
In December 2003, a woman reported to police that she had been sexually abused by a group of priests who performed Satanic rituals and held sadomasochistic orgies. Following the woman’s allegations in 2003, a cold-case squad began reviewing the nun’s murder case again. Three other women also came forward and claimed they had been sexually abused in cult-like ceremonies involving altars and men dressed in robes between the late 1960s and 1986.
Robinson’s appeal in the case was filed with Ohio’s Sixth District Court of Appeals in August and there could be a ruling late this spring. The newest filing seeking to vacate Robinson’s conviction also alleges that the prosecution withheld material evidence known as exculpatory or Brady material from the defense, saying that copies of 1980 police reports were not the discovery material turned over to Robinson’s defense teams.
The reports contain statements from witnesses who say they saw a “mysterious black male” in the hallway of the hospital the morning of the nun’s murder.
In October, 2006, Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Thomas Osowik, the sentencing judge, denied Robinson’s request to be released from prison while he appealed the conviction.
Osowik had denied that motion as well as an earlier one which asked that Robinson be released on $250,000 bond because his conviction was based on circumstantial evidence.
In denying Robinson’s motion for release, Osowik had said the verdict was not against the weight of the evidence, writing that “the court cannot find that the jury lost its way. The defendant has not presented any argument that would warrant any suspension of the sentence imposed”.
Osowik said that Robinson’s attorney had made significant misrepresentations in his arguments regarding the trial evidence including that the prosecution’s case was based on allegations of Satanic worship, that the blade of the murder weapon was dull and the location of Robinson’s apartment.
Osowik said this was understandable because Donohue had not been one of the attorneys representing Robinson at trial.
The defense team had argued that evidence claimed was contradictory and that the original investigation of the murder had been bungled.
The eight women, four men jury had deliberated for six hours and 25 minutes over two days following the three week trial before rendering its guilty verdict.
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