Gemma Hoskins, a former Maryland Teacher of the Year known for investigating the local murder of a nun in Netflix’s 2017 documentary series “The Keepers,” died Sunday.
Her death was announced on social media Monday morning by podcaster Shane Waters, a frequent collaborator with whom she co-hosted “Foul Play: Who Killed Sister Cathy?”
Hoskins 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 murder may have been covered up by authorities because the nun suspected Father A. Joseph Maskell, a chaplain and counselor at Keough, of sexually abusing students.
Cesnik was the reason Hoskins became a teacher, Waters said in his social media post. Hoskins taught elementary school for 26 years and was named Teacher of the Year in 1992.
“If you told her something that happened to you, she believed you the first time,” Waters wrote in his tribute. “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.”
Hoskins talked to guests before they joined the show and came up with questions for them. She also named almost every episode of their podcast, Waters said.
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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.
“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 Maryland Office of the Attorney General produced a 456-page report in 2022 detailing allegations of child abuse, sexual abuse and the 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.
“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.”
This story will be updated.
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