Federal investigators told a crime victims’ advocate’s office that they are working on exhuming the body of Joyce Malecki, a sudden development in the decades-old cold case detailed in the Netflix series “The Keepers.”
The FBI recently spoke with Malecki’s brother and an investigator from the Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center about the development, according to Kurt Wolfgang, who directs the advocacy nonprofit that has taken on Malecki’s family as clients.
Malecki, a 20-year-old Lansdowne woman whose body was found in 1969 at the Fort Meade military installation in Anne Arundel County, went missing four days after Sister Catherine Cesnik did. Cesnik was a 26-year-old Archbishop Keough High School nun whose death under similar circumstances was the focus of the 2017 documentary series, which aimed to link both homicides to sexual abuse at the now-closed Catholic school.
The FBI took charge of investigating Malecki’s death after her body was found by two hunters on federal property — a section of Fort Meade called Soldiers Park. An autopsy determined she had been choked, stabbed in the throat and dropped into the Little Patuxent River with her hands bound behind her, and there was evidence she had fought with her killer.
Cesnik’s body was found in early 1970 by a hunter and his son near a landfill in Lansdowne, and an autopsy found she died from a skull fracture caused by a blow to her left temple by a blunt instrument.
Malecki is buried in Loudon Park Cemetery on Wilkens Avenue in Southwest Baltimore, according to an article from the time in The Sun. Under state law, any request to exhume Malecki would go through the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, which has yet to receive one, James Bentley, a spokesperson for the office, said Thursday morning. Bentley said his office would be likely to work cooperatively with the FBI on the case.
Though newspapers quickly noted the similarities between both disappearances, authorities never linked the cases or identified a suspect in either homicide. The FBI met with Baltimore County detectives in 1994 to explore connections between their respective cases. And “The Keepers” release in 2017 prompted numerous calls to the Anne Arundel County Police Department, which in response issued a statement reinforcing that Malecki’s death is being investigated by the FBI.
Cesnik and Malecki disappeared that November after leaving to go shopping — Cesnik at the Edmondson Village Shopping Center in West Baltimore and Malecki at a Glen Burnie mall. Both bodies were similarly found by hunters in wooded areas with the women’s cars abandoned. And both women, the documentary notes in its finale, knew A. Joseph Maskell, the Baltimore priest accused of sexually abusing multiple Catholic school students.
Maskell died in 2001, but his body was exhumed in 2017 by Baltimore County Police investigating Cesnik’s death. The results of a DNA test performed on Maskell’s body, released shortly before “The Keepers” premiered, found no evidence connecting him to the crime scene.
It is unclear what the FBI plans to do with Malecki’s body once it is exhumed, or what prompted investigators to decide to do so. A spokesperson for the FBI said Wednesday evening that the agency would not comment “out of respect for the ongoing investigation” of Malecki’s death.
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(Baltimore Sun reporter Christine Condon contributed to this article)
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