It was a true-life story that captured an immense global audience: Making a Murderer, Netflix’s 2015 series about a Wisconsin man who served 18 years in prison for a wrongful conviction, before he was released and subsequently re-arrested and convicted of murder, had 20 million viewers across the world on the edge of their seats.  And there were real-life consequences for the people most closely involved, and for the United States justice system.
Now the TV company has unveiled the series it hopes will follow in its footsteps. The new seven-parter focuses, again, on a real-life story mired in controversy. Only this time the subject matter is the Catholic Church because the new series, The Keepers, centres on the unsolved murder of a nun in Baltimore. It promises to be as influential and far-reaching in the questions it raises and the new evidence it brings forward. The issues under investigation include the power relationships that existed and continue to exist within the Church and between the Church and the civil authorities, the relationship between priests and nuns, and the now-ubiquitous issue of abuse and sexual crime.

The Keepers focuses on Sr Cathy Cesnik, a popular teacher at the all-girls Archbishop Keough High School in the deeply Catholic city. On 7 November 1969 she popped out to buy a few groceries from the local shop, and never returned. A few hours after she left, the nun with whom she shared a flat, Sr Helen Russell Phillips, called a priest – and he called the police. Cesnik’s car was discovered nearby, not in the spot where she usually parked it; but of the vivacious 26 year old, there was no sign.

Her body was discovered two months later a few miles away, near a rubbish tip in an isolated area. An autopsy found she had been battered to death, and at first police presumed that she had been abducted by a stranger, driven away and murdered.