By Seamus McGraw
April 27, 2006
TOLEDO, Ohio (Crime Libarary)
The Case That Almost Wasn't
Her real name has never been publicly released, but the now 42-year-old woman identified in court papers and in the press as Jane Doe may well have done as much as anyone to set in motion the chain of events that led to the arrest of Father Gerald Robinson and his now ongoing trial for the murder of an elderly nun nearly two and a half decades ago.
And while those who know her say it was never her intention, there are some who believe that if the woman, described as accommodating and cooperative almost to the point of being self-effacing, had not come forward in 2003, then the case against Robinson might never have been made.
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| Robinson in Court |
Ironically, says Claudia Vercellotti, an activist with the local advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests and other church leaders) who has worked closely with Jane Doe, the woman had far different intentions when she first emerged in June of 2003 to recount what she described as an ordeal of ritualized sexual abuse, Satanic in its overtones, committed, she alleged, by priests years earlier. Among them, she alleged, was Robinson.
For years, she had kept her allegations largely a secret, but the haunting after effects, she claimed, had driven her to seek intensive, and expensive therapy. At last, she brought her story of abuse she endured years earlier to the Diocese of Toledo's Review Board.
By all accounts, she was not seeking the prosecution of those she alleged had molested her. At least not at first. Instead, swayed by the church's pledge that it would remunerate victims of sex abuse by priests, she came seeking $50,000 to cover the cost of years of therapy as a result of the alleged abuse.
What happened next remains a subject of controversy.
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