Maura Clarke - Murder

Murder

In their deaths, Sister Maura Clarke and the three other Catholic missionaries joined the ranks of more than 75,000 people who were killed in that nation's civil war.

On the afternoon of December 2, 1980, Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, picked up two Maryknoll Missionary Sisters from the airport. They were arriving from Managua, Nicaragua after attendance at a Maryknoll conference. The women were under surveillance by a Salvadoran national guardsman (La Guardia Nacionál) at the time, who phoned his commander for orders.

Acting on orders from their commander, five national guardsmen changed into plain clothes and continued to stake out the airport. Donovan and Kazel returned to pick up a second pair of Maryknoll Sisters: Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, who were returning from the same conference, on a flight not due until 9:11 pm.

The five National Guardsmen, now out of uniform, stopped the women's vehicle after they left the airport in San Salvador. Clarke and the three other women were taken to a relatively isolated spot, where the soldiers beat, raped, and murdered them.

At about 2200, three hours after Donovan and Kazel had picked up Clarke and Ford, local peasants saw the sisters' white van drive to an isolated spot and then heard machine-gun fire followed by single shots. They saw five men flee the scene in the white van, with the lights on and the radio blaring. The van would be found later that night, set afire at the side of the airport road.

Early the next morning (3 December 1980) the bodies of the four women were found by local residents, who were told by local authorities (a judge, three members of the civil guard, and two commanders) to bury the women in a common grave in a nearby field. Four of the local men did so, but informed their parish priest, and the news reached the local bishop and the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, the same day.

The shallow grave was exhumed the next day (4 December 1980) in front of fifteen reporters, Sisters Alexander and Dorsey, several missioners, and Ambassador White. Jean Donovan's body was the first removed; then Dorothy Kazel's; then Maura Clarke's; and last, Ita Ford. The next day, a Mass of the Resurrection was said by Bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas; and on Saturday, December 6, the bodies of Donovan and Kazel were flown to the United States for burial. In keeping with the tradition of the Maryknoll Missionaries, the bodies of the Maryknoll Sisters, Clarke and Ford, were buried locally, in Chalatenango, El Salvador.