Gemma Hoskins

Gemma Hoskins was a Baltimore schoolteacher, memoirist and victims' advocate who became one of the central figures of the 2017 Netflix docuseries The Keepers. She spent decades pressing for answers in the unsolved 1969 murder of her former teacher, Sister Catherine Cathy Cesnik, and supporting survivors of abuse linked to Archbishop Keough High School. She died on 20 September 2026 at the age of 73, after complications following open-heart surgery, according to friends who announced her death the next day.

Hoskins grew up in Baltimore and attended Archbishop Keough, an all-girls Catholic high school where Cesnik taught English and drama. As a senior in 1969 she watched the disappearance and later discovery of her teacher's body shake her community. She later told the Baltimore Sun that Cesnik was the reason she became a teacher herself, and that she tried to carry Cesnik's classroom habits into her own work. She taught for more than two decades in Harford and Baltimore Counties, including fifth grade at Jarrettsville Elementary, and was named Maryland Teacher of the Year in 1992. Education Week and Harford County Public Schools records also place her among the system's honoured educators that year. She earned a bachelor's degree from Towson State University and a master's in instructional technology.

Long after Cesnik's case went cold, Hoskins and fellow former Keough student Abbie Fitzgerald Schaub began investigating on their own. They built the public Facebook group Justice for Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki, which grew from under 1,000 members to more than 80,000 after The Keepers premiered, and they maintained WhoKilledSisterCathy.org to gather tips. Their work, and the Emmy-nominated series directed by Ryan White, brought national attention to Cesnik's killing and to allegations that Father A. Joseph Maskell and others had abused students at Keough. Hoskins was remembered in the series and in later interviews as tenacious and warm, the investigator who asked hard questions and also held survivors' hands.

After the documentary, she kept advocating. She published the memoir Keeping On and co-hosted the true-crime podcast Foul Play: Who Killed Sister Cathy? with Shane Waters, producing 95 episodes. Friends including Teresa Lancaster and David Lorenz of the Abuse Survivors Coalition described her as a consoler as much as a firebrand, standing with survivors at press conferences and during the Archdiocese of Baltimore bankruptcy proceedings. Waters said he hopes to continue the podcast toward 100 episodes in her honour.

Although the justice she sought in Cesnik's case did not arrive in her lifetime, her advocacy helped keep survivors' stories in public view and made The Keepers a lasting part of how many Americans understand institutional cover-ups. She was predeceased by her husband, Ernest Joseph Hoskins, and in later years lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore and in Dagsboro, Delaware.