Family of Joyce Malecki hopes exhumation will bring answers in 54-year-old cold case: ‘Bring this person to justice’

CENTREVILLE, Md. — Thursday, in the chapel at Baltimore’s Loudon Park Funeral Home, Darryl Malecki stood beside the casket of his forever 20-year-old sister, Joyce.

It had been 54 years since Malecki and his family laid Joyce to rest, but this week, her body was exhumed for further investigation. Her murder remains unsolved.

“First of all, I said hi,” Malecki recounted, his voice wavering. “And I’m sure she’s in heaven, and I hope she’s talking to my parents. And we lost a grandchild. Hopefully she’s holding her.”

In that moment, Malecki tried to remember the good times of their youth in Baltimore County: The winter days spent sledding down snow-covered hills. The dinner table conversations. His thoughts raced as he grappled with what to tell her, after all the years that had passed.

“Your mind starts really spinning,” said Malecki, 71, during a news conference Friday at the Queen Anne’s County Library in Centreville, just a few miles from his home on farmland in Church Hill.

Afterward, the investigators let Malecki and his family members serve as the pallbearers, and carry Joyce to the hearse. Her casket was lowered back into her grave in the Loudon Park Cemetery, he said.

Joyce’s mother and father, and her brother, Donald, all died without knowing what happened to the kind-hearted young office worker who left home in 1969 to go on a shopping trip and meet with her boyfriend, who was stationed at Fort Meade — and never returned.

Two days later, she was found dead in an area of Fort Meade known as Soldiers Park, having never made it to her date.

Joyce’s death, which is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation because she was found on federal property, was popularized by a Netflix documentary series called “The Keepers,” which sought to link her death to that of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, who disappeared four days prior.

The 2017 series suggested that both murders could be tied to A. Joseph Maskell, a chaplain and guidance counselor at the now-closed Archbishop Keough Catholic high school, who was accused of sexually abusing multiple students. Maskell died in 2001.

Cesnik was a nun at Archbishop Keough, and Malecki had encountered Maskell, who was also a priest at St. Clement’s in Lansdowne. Maskell’s body was exhumed in 2017 as investigators searched for evidence.

“As far as where we lived and grew up, we were only like, maybe three blocks from St. Clement’s — the church — and the school,” Malecki said Friday. “And the rectory is only two blocks. And we went to church and Sunday school every Sunday. But as far as linking them together? I don’t know.”

The family has also wondered if Joyce Malecki’s killing could be tied to that of Pamela Lynn Conyers, a 16-year-old Glen Burnie High School student who was killed about 11 months later, after going to the very same shopping mall.

Earlier this year, Anne Arundel County officials announced that new DNA technology had allowed them to identify a suspect in Conyers’ murder, a man named Forrest Clyde Williams, who didn’t appear to have known her. Had Williams been alive, he would have been charged with the killing, officials said.

But still, all the Malecki family has is conjecture.

Malecki said Friday that he first learned an exhumation was possible about two years ago. Now that it has finally happened, he said Joyce’s remaining siblings and relatives are praying that they will soon get the answers they so desperately want.

“I’m very glad it happened,” Malecki said. “Could it have happened sooner? I don’t know. But it did happen. And we’re just hoping that we bring some closure, and bring this person to justice.”

“One of our strongest points of conjecture is that the FBI would not be doing this if they didn’t have something specific in mind,” said Kurt W. Wolfgang, executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center, which is representing the family.

FBI investigators informed Malecki a few years ago that all of the evidence in his sister’s case had already been destroyed, he told reporters Friday during a press conference in Centerville. The family was told long ago that skin had been found under Joyce’s fingernails, and that blood had been discovered in the back seat of the car that she was driving.

“She did put up a fight — which I’m very proud of her — in her last moments,” Malecki said.

Wolfgang said he remains puzzled by the knowledge that there are about 4,000 pages worth of information in Joyce Malecki’s case file — all of which have not been released publicly.

“None of us have ever heard of a single homicide file having anything near 4,000 pages in it,” Wolfgang said.

That fact was discovered after someone curious about the case lodged a Freedom of Information Act request for the file with the FBI in about 2012, Wolfgang said. At first, officials at the FBI told the requester that they would release the 4,000 page file in chunks.

But two years passed without any documents, and FBI officials later said that none would be released, because the case was considered an open investigation. Could that be an indication that the case had gone cold, but then the FBI discovered a lead and reopened it?

“That’s one of the mysteries to us that we would like to see unraveled someday, but it’s obviously of lesser importance than a determination as to who committed this horrible crime,” Wolfgang said.

“We remain committed to bringing justice for Joyce and her family,” the FBI said in a statement on social media, noting they could not provide additional information on the investigation.

Through the years, Malecki’s memories from the days after his sister disappeared on Nov. 11, 1969 have remained sharp.

Malecki was 17-years-old at the time, and working a shift at Gino’s, where he was a fry cook, when his sister stopped by the restaurant, asking if she could swap cars with him for a Christmas shopping trip to the Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie.

From the side door of the restaurant, Malecki gave her his keys and wished her well.

“I was the last one in my family who spoke to my sister while she was alive,” he said. “Who would’ve thought?”

The next day, Malecki remembered that his mother, Doris, was worried sick. Since Joyce had told her mother where she intended to go and when she expected to come home, her brothers went out looking for her.

They found her car in a parking lot near the entrance to Fort Meade, where Malecki said he recalled there being a bar and a phone booth. But they couldn’t find Joyce.

A few days later, hunters discovered her body in a creek. Joyce’s hands were bound behind her back, she was covered in scratches and bruises and she had been strangled and stabbed in the throat.

“I went back one time to see the area,” Malecki said Friday. “To me, I would think that you’d have to know that area, where they dumped her body. It wasn’t easy to get to.”

After Joyce’s body was found, the family was told to drive to a building at Fort Meade so they could identify her, Malecki said.

“My parents, they were so upset they couldn’t do it. And so, my oldest brother, he went in and identified her. And when he came out he was visibly shaken.”

“That was within his mind all the time,” Malecki said.

Sometimes, when he is thinking about Joyce, his mind wanders to what could have been. She would probably have a family of her own by now. She could have accomplished so much.

“She was a beautiful girl, and I just think what she could have done with her life. Who knows? She could have made a big difference somewhere.”