Review: The Keepers

Verdict: Worth Entering.

Sister Catherine Cesnik taught English and drama at a Catholic girls’ school in Baltimore. She was young, she was good at it, she loved poetry, and by the accounts of the women who were her students more than fifty years ago she was the kind of teacher a frightened girl could tell things to. On the seventh of November, 1969, she went out in the evening to buy an engagement present for her sister, and she did not come home. Her body was found in January, in a place called Lansdowne, near a rubbish dump. Nobody has ever been charged with her murder.

I begin there, with the person and not the case, because it is exactly the thing The Keepers does that most true crime cannot bring itself to do, and it is the whole reason the series is worth your seven hours.

What it is

The Keepers is a seven-part Netflix documentary from 2017, directed by Ryan White. Its ostensible subject is that cold case: the unsolved 1969 killing of Sister Cathy. Its actual engine is two women — Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Schaub, retired, former students of hers — who have decided, decades later, that if no one else is going to find out what happened to their teacher, they will do it themselves, with binders and spreadsheets and a Facebook group and the particular unstoppability of women in their sixties who have run out of patience.

And what they uncover is not, in the end, a murder mystery. It is an institution.

Because the reason Sister Cathy may have died — the series is careful, and I will be careful, to say may — is that she knew. One of her former students, Jean Wehner, came forward decades on with an account of being sexually abused, as a teenager, by the school’s chaplain, Father Joseph Maskell, and of Maskell showing her Sister Cathy’s body to make sure she understood what happened to people who talked. Maskell was eventually removed from ministry. A great many other people, it turned out, had their own accounts of him. He was never tried for the murder, and when his body was exhumed years later to test his DNA against the evidence, it did not close the case. The murder is still open. What is not open — what the series lays out with terrible patience — is the pattern of abuse, and the apparatus of church and police and prosecutors that appears to have spent a very long time making sure none of it went anywhere.

What works, which is nearly everything

I have written before about what I think is wrong with most true crime — the way it turns the murdered into content, hands their worst day to strangers as entertainment, and reserves its real energy for the killer, who is always, somehow, the interesting one. The Keepers is the argument that it does not have to be that way.

It keeps the victim a person. Sister Cathy is never once flattened into a body-in-a-field for us to stand over. We get her poetry, her doubts about the church, the specific quality of attention she paid to girls nobody else was paying attention to. By the time the series is done you do not feel that you have consumed her death. You feel that you have been introduced to her, late and under terrible circumstances, and that you are sorry.

It points its anger in the right direction. The contempt in The Keepers — and there is contempt, correctly — is aimed at the institution: at a diocese, a police department, a prosecutor’s office, and the long quiet machinery of a place protecting itself. Not at the women who were hurt. Never at the dead.

And it is honest about its own detectives. Gemma and Abbie are not reckless. This matters more than it sounds, because the internet is now full of amateur sleuths who ruin lives on a hunch, who name the innocent and call it justice. Gemma and Abbie are the opposite: careful, sourced, willing to say we don’t know. They are what the amateur investigator is supposed to be and almost never is, and the series holds them up without pretending they have powers they don’t.

You can feel, all the way through, that the people who made this were asking themselves whether they should be making it. The director has said as much — that it was a sickening thing to build, that his team kept stopping to ask why they were including what they were including. That question, asked honestly and often, is the entire difference between this and the true crime I can’t stand. You can hear it in the edit. It sounds like restraint.

What it leaves out — because a fair review has to

I would not be doing my job, or keeping faith with the thing itself, if I told you it was flawless.

Some of its most harrowing testimony rests on recovered memory — memories retrieved, years later, in a way that the science is genuinely and honestly divided about. The series does not pretend otherwise, but it also leans on that testimony for some of its most cinematic moments, and a viewer should hold it the way the survivors themselves largely do: seriously, and carefully, and with the knowledge that the abuse itself does not stand or fall on any one account — it is corroborated, terribly, by the sheer number of people who came forward. The pattern is not in doubt. The specific memories are a harder, more fragile thing, and the series is at its best when it lets them be fragile and at its weakest when it lets them be a reveal.

And there is the structural ache of the form: it is built like a mystery, and mysteries promise solutions. Seven hours train you to expect an ending, and the ending does not come, because there isn’t one. The murder is unsolved and remains unsolved. That is not the series’ failure — it is the truth — but the shape of the thing sets you up for a resolution the world declines to provide, and you should go in knowing that you will be left, deliberately, holding the same open door the two women have been holding for decades.

The gothic reading

Here is what The Keepers is really about, under the case.

It is a haunted-house story in which the house is a church. Everything that makes the classic haunting works — a place that harbours a wrongness, a corruption that spreads to everyone who enters, a crime the walls know and will not tell — is here, except that nothing supernatural is required, and that is what makes it worse. The confessional, the most sacred room in the building, the one designed for the safe telling of terrible things, becomes in this story the exact opposite: a place where a girl told the truth and was punished for it. And at the centre of it all is a dead teacher who, if the worst of it is true, died because she tried to protect children — which is not a ghost story, though it has the shape of one. It is a grief story about a woman who is still, somehow, protecting them: it was her old students, carrying her, who finally forced the thing into the light.

For readers of

If you read the kind of fiction I write — small towns that remember, families that don’t say the real thing, institutions that fail the people who trust them — this is the true-crime series for you. It is also, quietly, one of the most serious documentaries ever made about the Catholic abuse crisis, and it earns that by never once forgetting that it is about people.

Verdict: Worth Entering. Go in for Sister Cathy. Stay for the two women who would not let her be forgotten. And do not expect the door to close behind you, because it hasn’t closed for anyone else, either.

A note on the facts: the murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved; the abuse allegations against Joseph Maskell are a matter of extensive public reporting and, later, of a Maryland Attorney General investigation. I name no murderer, because no one has been charged, and I treat the survivors as people, because they are.