Gemma Hoskins, Baltimore teacher who investigated murder of nun in Netflix’s ‘The Keepers,’ dies

Gemma Hoskins, a former Maryland Teacher of the Year known for investigating the local murder of a nun in the 2017 Netflix documentary series “The Keepers,” died Sunday.

Hoskins, 73, was a student of Sister Cathy Cesnik at Archbishop Keough High School and spent years investigating Cesnik’s 1969 murder even before being featured as an advocate in the Netflix series. Hoskins and other students believed Cesnik’s killing was covered up by authorities because the nun suspected Father A. Joseph Maskell, a chaplain and counselor at Keough, of sexually abusing students.

Hoskins’ death was announced on social media Monday morning by podcaster Shane Waters, with whom she co-hosted “Foul Play: Who Killed Sister Cathy?”

Cesnik was the reason Hoskins became a teacher, Waters said. Hoskins taught elementary school for 26 years and was named Teacher of the Year in 1992.

Teresa Lancaster, a sexual assault survivor and advocate also featured in “The Keepers,” posted in a social media tribute that Hoskins was a “true trailblazer” who courageously and persistently questioned what others wouldn’t.

“She genuinely cared about what had happened to her Keough sisters who suffered abuse,” Lancaster wrote. “She listened, she pursued the truth, and she never stopped seeking answers.”

While filming for the documentary, the two visited Keough together, and Hoskins convinced staff to give them a tour by citing an imaginary relative as a prospective student, Lancaster said in an interview.

They visited the chapel, “a place where so many horrors had occurred,” Lancaster said. It was the first time she had been back to the space since she was abused.

Hoskins “was incredibly kind and compassionate,” Lancaster recalled. Hoskins told her friend that they would stop immediately at any time if she became too overwhelmed.

“She wanted our story out there, but she also didn’t want anyone injured in the process,” Lancaster said.

Lancaster stressed that Hoskins never gave up, even though exposing the abuse “was a long, slow journey. But she was in it for the long run.” Her friends called her Nancy Drew.

Hoskins later detailed the experience in her 2020 memoir, “Keeping On: How I Came to Know Why I Was Born.” She was also a key advocate in the 2023 passage of Maryland’s Child Victims Act, which eliminated the civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse and allowed survivors to revisit previously time-barred lawsuits against their abusers and the institutions that protected them.

“I have no doubt that Gemma is at peace now, and I hope she has finally found the answers she was searching for, including the truth about who murdered our dear Sister Cathy,” Lancaster wrote in her social media post.

Because of Hoskins’ “courage and dedication, our truth was finally heard, and people began to listen,” she added.

The Maryland Office of the Attorney General produced a 456-page report in 2022 detailing the allegations of child sex abuse and resulting cover-up in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The report included additional claims against Maskell, who died in 2001. He was never criminally charged. He publicly denied the allegations against him in media reports in the 1990s, but the attorney general’s report included a 2019 interview with another teacher who said Maskell confided to him that the allegations were true.

Hoskins was among the advocates who facilitated survivors’ meetings with state investigators.

“If you told her something that happened to you, she believed you the first time,” Waters said. “She did not make you prove it. I watched her do that over and over, and I never once saw her get tired of the person in front of her.”

For their podcast, Hoskins talked to guests before they joined the show and came up with questions for them. She also named almost every episode, Waters said.

“We kept at it for almost eight years because neither of us was willing to let it go quiet,” Waters wrote. “Nobody has ever answered for what happened to Cathy.”

The duo published 95 podcast episodes together — more than they initially planned, but just shy of the 100 they had discussed. Waters said he’d still like to try to hit that milestone.

“What the Archdiocese of Baltimore did to those kids is on the record now, in their own settlements and in the Attorney General’s report, and Gemma’s position on all of it never changed,” Waters wrote. “She said ‘I’m not going to sit down, shut up and go away.’”

In a 2023 letter to The Banner, Hoskins celebrated more survivors coming forward with their stories after the release of the state investigation.

“Thousands of broken angels are rising up together, a real big band of them,” Hoskins wrote. “Their strength comes from each other and all of us who honor them, respect them, care for them and love them. Institutional power is mighty, but temporary.”

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