FBI is set to exhume body of murder victim Joyce Malecki whose case was profiled in Netflix docuseries ‘The Keepers’: 20-year-old vanished four days after slain nun, 27

The FBI will exhume the body of a young murder victim who was killed 54 years ago after her case was chronicled in the Netflix documentary series Watchmen.

Joyce Helen Malecki, 20, disappeared November 11, 1969. Her body was found two days later in a pond at the Soldiers’ Park training area at Fort Meade. She was stabbed in the throat and strangled.

The FBI has now told her surviving brother, Darryl, that they have set Maleki’s exhumation for December 14th.

Malecki’s remains will be exhumed at Loudoun Park Cemetery in Baltimore after more than five decades.

The FBI intends to look into an unspecified lead that may link the two cases. Kurt Wolfgang, an attorney and executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center, previously told DailyMail.com.

Joyce Helen Malecki, 20, disappeared November 11, 1969. Two days later, her body was found by two hunters in a pond at the Soldiers’ Park training area at Fort Meade. She was stabbed in the throat and strangled.

The Rev. A. Joseph Maskell was never criminally charged and has denied all charges. In 1994, he was removed from the priesthood in Baltimore. He died in May 2001.

Although he said the FBI had given them limited information, he said that in Malecki’s January 1970 autopsy, a hair was found on her body that did not belong to her, and he believes that is what investigators will be looking at.

Around the same time Malecki died, 27-year-old Katherine Ann Cesnik, a nun and Catholic high school teacher from Baltimore, went missing on November 7, 1969.

Her body was discovered on January 3, 1970, almost two months after she went missing. She was strangled and suffered a fatal head wound.

Cesnik’s unsolved murder became the subject of a true-crime documentary after Former student Jean Hargadon Wehner went to her teacher, Sister Chesniak, to report that she had been sexually abused by the school chaplain.

When the chaplain discovered that Wehner had said something, he took her to Cesnik’s corpse and threatened that it would be her if she did not remain silent.

Wolfgang, who represents Wehner and a number of other victims of sexual abuse at Archbishop Keough High School, said his client never went to authorities because she was afraid she and her family would be killed.

“She was petrified with fear,” Wolfgang said.

Sister Katherine Ann Cesnik, 27, a nun and Catholic high school teacher in Baltimore, went missing on November 7, 1969. Her body was discovered on January 3, 1970, almost two months after her disappearance. Cesnik suffocated and received a fatal head wound.

Wehner, featured in the film “Watchmen,” first came forward with her allegations in 1992 that the school’s former chaplain, the Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, repeatedly raped her while she was a student at her alma mater, Archbishop Keough High School. .

She spoke out after the Maryland Attorney General’s Office released a redacted report into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore earlier this year. Baltimore Sun reported.

After the deaths of Malecki and his beloved nun, Baltimore County detectives interviewed dozens of people, but the killer was never found and the case went cold for decades.

The attorney general said a total of 39 women and men have filed claims against Maskell. He has since died.

As the Netflix true crime series brought attention to Cesnik’s unsolved murder, detectives are now looking into a potential connection in both murders.

Wolfgang said he represents the Malecki family and is in daily contact with Darryl Malecki, Joyce Malecki’s brother.

“I think the family really doesn’t understand what happened here and is very hungry for answers and justice,” he said.

He told DailyMail.com that the reason Maleki’s murder was featured in the Netflix show Watchmen was because of sister Katherine’s disappearance four days later.

“Both were young, beautiful girls, their cars were found with the keys in the ignition and they were both killed in the same manner,” he said.

“In both cases, their cars were moved and parked somewhere after the abduction.”

The Netflix crime series Watchmen focuses on the unsolved murder of Baltimore nun Sister Katherine Ann Cesnik (pictured).

In the docuseries, survivors detail allegations of sexual abuse against Father Maskell and allegations of an institutional cover-up.

According to a 2023 report from the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, Maskell was transferred to different parishes in the 1960s due to “disturbing behavior with children.” New York Post reported.

According to the report, Maskell was “involved in sexual fantasies and Boy Scout behavior, as well as the presence of young girls at the rectory under suspicious circumstances,” the news outlet reported.

Maskell was never criminally charged and denied all charges. He was removed from the priesthood in Baltimore in 1994 and died in 2001.

Wolfgang told DailyMail.com that “many teenage girls were victims.”

He estimates that Archbishop Keogh High School alone had at least 50 students. Many of these victims were abused, drugged and hypnotized by Maskell and others, he said.

“There is much more to this story and many more revelations to be revealed regarding the Archbishop of Baltimore and Archbishop Keough High School sex abuse scandal, and Father Maskell as an integral part of it.”

He called many of the surviving victims “heroes.”