LEELANAU COUNTY — Northern Michigan is filled with historical stories, and some of them are much darker than the ones told in museums.
A missing nun named Sister Mary Janina sparked a decades-long saga of twists and turns back in the early 1900s and shocking revelations that shook the foundation of the small town of Isadore in Leelanau County.
“Sister Janina never intended to be a nun. Life circumstances led her in that direction,” Author Mardi Link said. “She went to live with a motherhouse in Livonia. And she was educated there. And they brought her up to be a Felician Nun. So that was really her only option at that time. I think that’s indicative. There were 22 young women in her graduating class and she graduated 22 out of 22.”
Link said Father Andrew and a few other people had been fishing for the day on Lake Leelanau, and when they arrived back at the church, Sister Janina was gone.
“The door to the rectory was open, and her rosary and her copy of the Nuns Rule, which is a book of lessons and rules for nuns to live by, were just lying there in her room. She disappeared in August of 1907, and it was pretty abrupt. There wasn’t any sign that she was going to leave, or that she had signs that she didn’t like her position there.”
“The whole community pitched in and looked all over but never could find her,” said Heather Cartwright, who is a descendant of the Prosecutor in the Sister Janina trial. “And there was a lot of speculation about what had happened to her. Did she decide she didn’t want to be a nun and run away? Had she been, you know, abducted and taken somewhere? Had she been killed or had she suffered some kind of accident when she was out walking around?”
Multiple theories surrounded the disappearance, including the theory that she had gone insane like her mother. “They searched the swamp. They used a bloodhound, Link said.
“They had 400 people, if you can imagine that today, searching for her in rural Leelanau County and not really any sign. She was missing for more than a decade before they discovered her, and it was what sounds today like just kind of some random events that led to her discovery.”
“There was a new young priest at Isadore, and he decided he’d like to build a brick church there,” said Cartwright. “Up to that time, it had been a wooden church. And so he started making plans to knock down the old church and build a new brick church there.”
But during the construction, human remains were discovered while digging in the basement of the church. The remains included portions of a nun’s garb and the ring Sister Janina received when she took her vows.
“I found a trove of documents at the University of Notre Dame down in Indiana,” Link said. “And among those documents were these things that were called coupons at the time. And basically they were sent out by the Vatican, and they instructed priests on what to base their sermons on that that week. And one of those coupons was written in Father Andrew’s handwriting, which I became familiar with. And it was it confirmed the rumors that circulated in Leland County for a century, which said that she was pregnant when she disappeared.”,
Suddenly, the small town of Isadore was enraptured in a twist that no one expected. A murdered nun, an alleged cover-up and a scandal that people rarely talk about today.
“I found this document that said ‘fetus bones found with nun never brought out at trial.’ I had just kind of this incremental feeling of what it must have been like when the whole community discovered that,” Link said.
“The housekeeper who was there at the time, Mrs. (Stella) Lipczynska, was identified as a suspect,” Heather Cartwright said. “She was arrested. She at that time was down in Manistee working for the same priest, Father (Andrew) Bieniawski, who had been the priest at the time.”
And through Mardi Link’s research, she discovered that Stella Lipczynska had kept a regimented schedule at the rectory. This revealed that she believed Father Andrew was spending more time with Sister Janina than he was on his priestly duties.
“She was ultimately put on trial,” Cartwright said. “My great-grandfather (Parmius Gilbert) comes into the scene when they are holding a hearing after Mrs. Lipczynska was arrested.”
“She was jailed and law enforcement decided that they wanted to try to get her to confess,” Link said. “They hired a female detective. Dressed her like she also had been arrested for some crime, and put her in the cell with Stella as a way to try to get Stella to confess. Initially, that didn’t work. Stella continued to say that she was innocent, and so they upped the ante and rigged up a skeleton, almost like a puppet, with candles. And they made the skeletons speak, and they brought Stella into here, all of that, hoping that this would frighten her into a confession.”
After Stella’s confession, she was sentenced to life in prison. A sentence she wouldn’t see completed.
“She eventually was paroled,” Link said. “She wasn’t pardoned, but she was paroled and she was able to leave prison. You would think that she might just go live a quiet life somewhere with her family. But instead, Stella was rehired by another Catholic community, this one in Wisconsin. And she worked for them as their housekeeper for many years.”
“So many people were in a position to maybe know what happened or suspect what happened, and they just let it lie for a really long time,” said Heather Cartwright. “When it is the murder of a young woman in cold blood. I think when someone is murdered, the community should care. And it’s the type of crime that cries out for justice to find out what happened and for there to be consequences for people who do something like that and it’s a really interesting story of how a secret can lie dormant, but the truth was fighting to get out all that time.”
Stella Lipczynska died in 1962 at the age of 92.
Sister Janina was 34 when she disappeared and her remains were used during the trial to tempt a confession.
There are multiple theories about where her remains were buried afterwards; none of them have been confirmed.
If you want to read more about the Sister Janina case, you can learn more in Mardi Link’s book Isadore’s Secret: Sin, Murder, and Confession in a Northern Michigan.
Ask about it at your local bookstore or find it online here.
