Latest news with #Merzbacher
CBS News
28-03-2025
- CBS News
Ex-Baltimore County priest charged with molesting child at St. Agnes helped victim in infamous sex abuse case
Baltimore County police said they are looking for more possible victims of a former priest now charged with sexually abusing an altar boy at Saint Agnes in the 1990s. That victim came forward after more than 30 years. The former priest, William Mannion, went before a judge this week and is maintaining his innocence. The now 40-year-old victim said he was abused repeatedly for years while a student at Saint Agnes in Catonsville from 1991 to 1994, starting when he was just 7 years old. According to charging documents, Father William Mannion, then a young priest at Saint Agnes, warned the child he "had to do these things or God would punish him" and "his parents would be condemned to hell." The chilling account in charging documents said Mannion would use puppets from class in the abuse—calling it a "sick puppet show"—and make the victim pray and shower afterward to "scrub away the sins." WJZ Investigates spoke to Teresa Lancaster, an abuse survivor whose case was featured in the Netflix documentary "The Keepers" and who was abused by Father Joseph Maskell. "To stand in front of people and tell your story of the most horrific, private thing that ever happened to you, it's difficult. But as time goes on, I found it was a little bit easier for me each time because of the people validating what happened," Lancaster said. Mannion left the priesthood shortly after the alleged abuse occurred. Police said Mannion would not speak to detectives about the allegations against him. He is featured on page 283 of the landmark 2023 Maryland attorney general report on sexual abuse in the Baltimore archdiocese. He was a former student of John Merzbacher and described Merzbacher's "outrageous and inappropriate behavior." The attorney general's report states, "In 2018 and 2019, a former priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and a former student of Merzbacher's, William Mannion, was interviewed by the Office of the Attorney General. He described Merzbacher's outrageous and inappropriate behavior. Mannion remembered Merzbacher sending the victim into the cloakroom and being alone in there with her. In 1993, he saw the victim at a wake and asked her if she was a victim of Merzbacher, and she said yes. Mannion reported the abuse to the Archdiocese." He helped Merzbacher's victim, Liz Murphy, come forward. Mannion was assisting Murphy during the time he was allegedly abusing the student at St. Agnes. "What better way to hide than to pretend that you're helping survivors," Lancaster said. Murphy's testimony put Merzbacher behind bars for four life sentences. Merzbacher died in prison two years ago. Murphy died last month but shared her story repeatedly with WJZ in interviews over many years. "At the age of 11, 12, and 13, he raped me, he threatened me, he put a gun to my head. John Merzbacher going to jail will never restore my childhood or all that I have lost from his brutality," she told WJZ Investigator Mike Hellgren in 2023. Lancaster said she got to know Murphy well. "She was such a brave person," she said. "She will be greatly missed in the survivor community." Murphy's obituary mentions her work with survivors. "Seeing the devastation in her own life and in the lives of other victims, including many, many untimely, much-too-early deaths, Liz could not, would not stand by to watch the perpetrators moved around from church to parish to school, continuing to harm children all the while," the obituary states. As one-time confidant turned suspect William Mannion waits to learn his fate, a judge ordered his release on home detention. Lancaster knows how difficult it is for any victim to come forward. "It rips it right open again, and they're going to go through the process of dealing with this abuse. It's like soul murder. It lasts your lifetime," she said. WJZ did reach out to Mannion's attorney, but we have not heard back. The victim accusing Mannion first came forward through a therapist in 2023. Police said anyone with information about Mannion may contact the Crimes Against Children Unit at 410-887-7720 or Child Protective Services at 410-887-8463 . Following the charges against Mannion, the Archdiocese of Baltimore issued the following statement to WJZ: "William 'Bill' Mannion left the priesthood in the late 1990s and requested to be formally removed from the clerical state (laicized) for reasons unrelated to abuse. The Vatican laicized him in 2004. He would later marry and have children. The Archdiocese of Baltimore is saddened to learn of allegations of abuse by Mannion and is committed to cooperating fully with law enforcement. The Archdiocese of Baltimore is committed to protecting children and helping to heal victims of abuse. We urge anyone who has any knowledge of any child sexual abuse to contact law enforcement and call the Archdiocesan Office of Child and Youth Protection."
Los Angeles Times
26-03-2025
- Science
- Los Angeles Times
What to do when family history is radioactive? Work around stonewalling relatives
After World War II, with support from Albert Einstein, Eugen Merzbacher entered the United States from Turkey to pursue graduate studies in physics at Harvard. There, the story goes, my father lent him his quantum mechanics notes, so Merzbacher could enroll in the course midyear. In a nice irony, Merzbacher would later author the standard textbook in that field. That a family friend survived to make this contribution was the result of an unusual confluence of luck and circumstances. In 1935, Merzbacher's industrial chemist father relocated his German Jewish family from the outskirts of Berlin to Ankara, Turkey's capital. 'We didn't flee. I never call us refugees. We were émigrés,' Merzbacher told me in a late-life interview, stressing the distinction. Siegfried Merzbacher, it seems, had received a well-timed job transfer just as the persecution of Jews in Germany was reaching a crescendo. Joe Dunthorne's discursive fourth-generation memoir, 'Children of Radium,' unpacks that move, while wandering across Europe and through decades of family lore. Based in London, Dunthorne is a poet and novelist whose debut novel, 'Submarine,' was adapted into a 2010 film. In the memoir, he carefully chronicles his great-grandfather's unsavory involvement in Nazi chemical weapons research and gas mask development. In the process, he raises familiar questions about the limits of his own quasi-historical enterprise. The memoir displays Dunthorne's gift for wry understatement and his doggedness as a researcher: he dug through archives, toted around a Geiger counter and even cooked food that his great-grandfather once consumed. Post-Holocaust memoirs are often quest stories, and Dunthorne juxtaposes his attempts to uncover the truth, or some approximation of it, with a fragmentary narrative of Siegfried Merzbacher's life. But the book's circuitous, meandering structure, including a major digression about one of Siegfried's sisters, tests the reader's patience. Epiphanies are sandwiched between near-irrelevancies and reportorial dead ends. As is typical, Dunthorne confronts gaps in the historical record — documents incinerated by bombs, removed by the Allies, even discarded by unsentimental relatives. Aggravating those gaps are distortions of memory and uncooperative key sources. Dunthorne's grandmother (Eugen Merzbacher's sister) essentially stonewalls him in his interview attempts. 'We felt her presence in the lack of it,' he writes of her funeral, a fitting coda to her elusiveness. Even his mother, who plays an important role in his research and earns the book's dedication, requests anonymity. Dunthorne compromises by referring to her only as 'my mother.' With the passage of decades, facts are difficult to unearth, and emotions and motivations are even more recalcitrant. To promote readability, Dunthorne admits to taking 'significant liberties with the chronology' of his research and to dramatizing moments in his characters' lives — deviations from journalistic accuracy that, however minor, underline Dunthorne's unreliability as a narrator. That unreliability mirrors, whether intentionally or not, that of one of his principal sources: the voluminous, virtually unreadable memoir that his great-grandfather composed. Dunthorne had access to the German original, about 1,800 typewritten pages, as well as to a translated, abridged version distributed to family members. Eugen Merzbacher, afforded a few cameos in 'Children of Radium,' turns out to have been the translator, finishing the task shortly before his death in 2013 at 92. Dunthorne's title derives from one of Siegfried's early professional accomplishments: the manufacture of a radioactive toothpaste that became the choice of the German army. 'A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia ensured that the troops pushing eastward, brutalizing and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth,' Dunthorne writes, combining ironic detachment with horror. In 1926, Siegfried worked to create 'activated charcoal' filters for gas masks, a task he justified as life-saving. In 1928, he was named the director of a German lab researching chemical weaponry. As late as 1935, with a Nazi named Erwin Thaler, he co-authored an article in a trade publication, The Gas Mask, about carbon-monoxide poisoning — a method used years later to kill Jews. 'The relationship between their article and the gas vans was purely speculation, an invention of retrospect,' Dunthorne tells himself. In his own memoir, Siegfried had denied ever writing for the publication. The Merzbacher family lived in Oranienburg, the eventual site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And Siegfried's relationship with his non-Jewish colleagues was naturally complicated by the politics of the time. Their work fueled Nazi militarism but, in some instances, they themselves lacked ideological fervor. Or maybe Siegfried's expertise simply outweighed his Jewish background. The transfer to Turkey happened, Eugen Merzbacher told me, because his father's bosses 'saw the handwriting on the wall.' In Ankara, Siegfried became co-director of a gas mask factory, a joint Turkish-German enterprise next door to a poison gas laboratory. 'He and his family were fleeing the Nazis while remaining reliant on them, something that would only become more problematic in the years to come,' Dunthorne writes. The relocation saved the lives of Siegfried's immediate family, at some cost to his peace of mind. 'I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience,' Siegfried later wrote. Dunthorne, in his wanderings, uncovers some impacts, direct and indirect, of his great-grandfather's actions. He visits the town of Ammendorf, Germany, where a chemical manufacturing plant run by Siegfried's bosses, since transformed into a nightclub, has left behind a toxic mess and a high incidence of cancer cases. More chilling yet, Dunthorne finds a letter connecting Siegfried to Turkey's purchase of chemical weapons from Germany — weapons allegedly used to massacre Armenians and Kurds in the town of Dersim. He notes, too, that the gas mask filters Siegfried helped develop allowed Jewish prisoners to clear corpses from the gas chambers. Siegfried later emigrated to the United States with his wife, Lilli, and worked in a New Jersey paint factory. After his retirement, his lifelong anxiety and depression worsened, and he was, for a while, institutionalized. With his mother's help, Dunthorne obtains Siegfried's psychiatric records, an investigative coup, and uses them to reconstruct his early life. In the end, the memoirist wrestles with both his great-grandfather's complicity and his family's continuing ties to Germany. Among his discoveries are editorial missives by Siegfried that preach global disarmament. 'In his letters, he envisioned a safer future, and in his memoirs he invented a safer past,' Dunthorne writes, inching his way from condemnation to empathy. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and the Forward's contributing book critic.
