COLUMN ONE : Days of Grace End in Terror : Five nuns from Illinois refused to flee Liberia’s bloody civil war. They died trying to give the nation a legacy of hope.

The bathtub was the worst. It squatted against a wall, red with blood.

Sister Shirley Kolmer and Sister Joel Kolmer told no one at their missionary headquarters here in Illinois, but somebody had been shot in a bathroom of their convent in Liberia. A priest was with them when they found the gore.

“Do you really want to go back into this house?” asked Father Jim Gessler, also a missionary. “Someone’s been killed in there.” He had a suggestion. “Here’s your chance to get out of this area and get something different.”

“Oh, no,” Shirley Kolmer said.

“I’ll stay,” Joel Kolmer said.

Those four words decided it. They moved back in. The Kolmers, cousins and members of a Catholic religious order called the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, had fled war-torn Liberia seven months earlier. Now they were back. This would cost their lives and the lives of three fellow sisters.

The five were shot to death one year ago last October. The killers, said to be members of a rebel group, are still at large. Eyewitnesses say they can identify some of them. But an official at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, says the United States has conducted no formal investigation. The State Department supports a peace process that could make the rebels part of the Liberian government, and some American officials say privately they doubt that anyone will be brought to justice.

In spite of this, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ will not forsake Liberia. They have no nuns there now, but they plan to send more when it seems safer. The order refuses to abandon what it considers to be its calling: to bring medical help, education and religious instruction to others, particularly those who are the neediest, those in places where other missionaries will not go.

The five nuns, plain-spoken natives of rural Illinois, were firm in their commitment to Liberia. Shirley and Joel Kolmer, 61 and 58, Sister Barbara Ann Muttra, 69, and Sister Agnes Mueller, 62, were living there when civil war erupted. By August, 1990, all had been forced to leave. They hoped to return--Agnes despite cataracts and Barbara Ann in the face of cancer that could recur.

Sister Kathleen McGuire, 54, had not been to Liberia before. But she wanted very much to go. So after Shirley and Joel patched the walls and scrubbed the bloody bathtub and returned to declare that Liberia and their convent there were safe, all five set out from their provincial headquarters, on a hilltop overlooking this small town. It was the summer of 1991, and they were eager with enthusiasm.

“Well, Meg, I’m ready to go! You said I could when I got a clean bill of health. And, hey, I got it!” Barbara Ann told Sister Meg Kopish, a member of the provincial leadership.

“How many arms did you twist?” Meg asked.

Barbara Ann feigned hurt.

Softly, Meg Kopish gave in. “I’m teasing, Barbara,” she said. “I believe you.”

*

Much had happened since the order had abandoned Liberia the year before. Neighboring nations in West Africa had sent a peacekeeping force to end the civil war. It was called the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). But ECOMOG did little good.

Prince Yormie Johnson, one of two rival rebel leaders, had confronted Liberian President Samuel K. Doe at ECOMOG headquarters in the fall of 1990, and both forces opened fire. Johnson and his rebels chased Doe and his troops into the building, then from room to room. Johnson’s men shot the president in both legs. As scores of their soldiers lay dying, Johnson took Doe to his camp on the outskirts of Monrovia. “One of Johnson’s men had a knife, a machete, and cut off Doe’s ear,” the London Observer quoted a witness as saying. “Then they cut his face. He was crying, and blood was running down his cheeks from his face and his head.” Doe blew on the blood. “One of Johnson’s men thought he was trying to do some kind of juju, blowing on himself to make himself disappear. So he shot him again.” Johnson videotaped the torture. Doe finally died. Johnson’s men loaded his body into a wheelbarrow and pushed it around Monrovia. People slashed it with knives.

Rival rebel leader Charles Taylor swept past the nuns’ abandoned convent in suburban Gardnersville and advanced to within a few hundred yards of the executive mansion downtown. But Johnson’s troops pushed him back. Survivors in Doe’s palace guard climbed to the roof of the mansion and turned artillery on Johnson and his men. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail of Freetown, Sierra Leone, quoted one of Doe’s generals as saying that the late president’s pet lions, unfed since the slaying of their master, prowled through the palace, eating people weakened by starvation.

A third rebel force joined the fighting. It called itself the United Liberation Movement (ULIMO). But in time, ECOMOG drove all of the rebels out of Monrovia. A cease-fire took effect. It left Taylor in charge of the countryside. Because the countryside amounted to more than 90% of the nation, Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) held the upper hand. Liberia lay in ruins. By one estimate, the fighting had killed 15,000 people; 500,000 were homeless; an additional 700,000 had fled to surrounding nations. Tens of thousands of men, women and children, dehydrated by diarrhea, were dying of hunger.

*

By August of 1991, all five nuns had returned to their convent in Gardnersville, on the eastern outskirts of Monrovia. They finished the cleaning and repairing that Shirley and Joel had begun during their spring visit.

Shirley reopened St. Patrick’s High School, near downtown Monrovia. Joel, Agnes and Kathleen taught at St. Michael’s elementary and high schools in St. Anthony’s parish and conducted reconciliation workshops. There could be little learning, Kathleen said, until the trauma of war had been healed. Barbara Ann hauled supplies to her old clinic in Kle, 25 miles north of Monrovia. She talked Archbishop Michael Kpakala Francis into loaning her a large orange twin-cab pickup truck. Once a week, sometimes more often, she filled it with medicine, food and equipment. She handled the truck like a teamster.

Early on, however, there were signs of trouble.

The first was a sharp increase in “roguing,” a Liberian euphemism for theft and robbery. One September night, three or four armed men jumped a concrete-block wall around the convent and began breaking through the windows. A security guard ran them off. The archbishop had urged the nuns to build a higher wall, and now the North Star Security Agency, which employed the guard, insisted on it. The sisters had the wall raised to nine feet. They had shards of sharp glass cemented along the top. Then they reinforced the gate. They asked North Star to provide more guards: two at night and one during the day. Although they discussed arming the guards, they decided against it because it would increase the chances that someone could be killed.

The second sign of trouble came during Barbara Ann’s trips to Kle. Despite the cease-fire, rebel skirmishes were increasing. The clinic at Kle offered treatment to anyone, regardless of allegiance. But the belligerents grew less and less respectful of such neutrality.

In October, Charles Taylor set up 15 checkpoints on the road between Monrovia and Kle, one nearly every mile. His troops were difficult to deal with and grew more so each week. Characteristically, Barbara Ann talked her way out of most jams, sometimes with her famously sharp tongue. On Feb. 8, 1992, says a proud entry in a diary called the annals, kept at the Gardnersville convent, one soldier took particular note of her fire and remarked to another within earshot: “The Old Ma’s full of rice.”

But the growing threat was not funny. Two days later, Barbara Ann left for Kle in the orange truck, loaded with food for 250 refugees at her clinic. She did not come back that night. Nor did she return the next day. After four days, a Baptist minister arrived at the Gardnersville convent. Six of Taylor’s men, he reported, had taken the truck away from Barbara Ann in Kle. The minister said she had resisted but some of the men were armed and told her that if she did not give up the truck it would be confiscated at the first checkpoint on her way home and she would be left stranded on the road at night. Angry but without any choice, she turned over the keys. The minister said she intended to stay in Kle and get the truck back.

Another day went by. Then another. The next day, a villager from Kle stopped at St. Patrick’s High School to say that Barbara Ann was still trying to get the truck back. Seven days later, Barbara Ann returned, but without the vehicle. The annals note that she got a “cool welcome” from the archbishop, who believed that his truck was gone for good.

To their superiors, the nuns made little of the incident. They had been ordered to telephone Ruma on the first Friday of each month. Because they had no phone at the convent in Gardnersville, they drove into Monrovia to place the calls. But this was one of several instances in which they did not report everything that was happening, lest their superiors grow alarmed and summon them home. The pirated truck, nonetheless, was a serious matter. Kle needed food, and Barbara Ann was not about to let Taylor or any of his men keep her from bringing it.

An Associated Press reporter, Michelle Faul, encountered Barbara Ann in Monrovia. Barbara Ann had tears in her eyes. She was stamping a foot in indignation, pleading with a representative of the United Nations to lend her his vehicle so she could find Charles Taylor himself. Babies were starving, and she wanted her truck. “I know I can get it back,” she said. “Just let me get up there.”

A priest intervened, Faul says. “Simply too dangerous.”

But somehow Barbara Ann made it back to Kle. She could not find Taylor, but she managed to locate his chief of staff.

He was no match for her.

On March 8, nearly three weeks after the orange truck had been taken, Barbara Ann drove it triumphantly up to the convent gate in Gardnersville.

She celebrated by baking a pineapple upside-down cake.

*

Charles Taylor refused to disarm. He called the countryside he controlled Taylorland. He mined its diamonds and its iron ore, and he cut its mahogany and its ebony. He sold them in Europe, and he bought more guns. He accused ECOMOG of being a puppet for Nigeria, which was supplying most of its men and materiel. Truces were broken, renegotiated, then broken again.

*

In the summer of 1992, Kathleen McGuire and Agnes Mueller returned to Ruma on home leave. Kathleen celebrated with a friend, Sister Kate Reid. If she suffered any apprehensions, Kate Reid says, she hid them well.

Agnes tried to ease her family’s fears. But at the same time she did something that no one expected. She gave away her most prized possessions. Her brother Paul had sent her a music box when he served in World War II. It was about four inches square. The sides and top were made of dark brown and blond inlaid wood. When she lifted the lid, it played “La Cucaracha.” She gave it to Paul’s daughter, Lynda. Her other brother, Joe, had sent her a small gold compact from Germany during the war. It had a mirror and a tiny brush. She gave it to Joe’s daughter Sharon. During her home leave, Agnes had taken a course in basketry, which she thought might be useful to teach to women in Liberia. She had made several baskets. She gave them to Joe’s other daughter, Judy.

“She didn’t say anything to anybody,” Paul Mueller said. But he and Joe wonder if she had a premonition.

While Agnes and Kathleen were with their families in Illinois, Sister Elizabeth Kolmer went to Liberia to visit her sister Shirley and her cousin Joel. Elizabeth Kolmer says the country was tense--and that tension in the countryside, particularly, seemed to be getting worse.

She and Shirley rode with Barbara Ann to Kle. They took the orange truck. At all of the checkpoints, Elizabeth says, Barbara Ann stopped, leaned out of her window and inquired, in the Liberian idiom: “How’re y’ keepin’?” The guards always wanted money. But Barbara Ann kept her cash to buy rice and supplies for the refugees. Instead, she gave the guards chewing gum. Most of them knew her, Elizabeth says, “and they’d let her go through.”

Barbara Ann always picked up people along the road. On this particular day, she had stopped for a woman with a baby. Now, at a checkpoint just outside of Kle, a rebel soldier wanted a ride.

“He said he would sit inside the truck,” Elizabeth said. “It was raining, and he was not going to sit on the back. He was an officer!”

He climbed into the twin cab with the nuns.

It occurred to Barbara Ann that everyone in the back of the truck was getting wet.

“Where’s the baby?” she asked.

“The lady got on the back,” Elizabeth replied.

“Oh, we can’t go with the baby in the back!”

Barbara Ann eyed the soldier, sitting in the cab. He refused to give up his seat. To Barbara Ann, the priority was clear: The mother and her baby were in the back, and the baby was getting wet.

But the soldier was adamant.

Finally, Elizabeth says, “Shirley got out of the car and went back and got the baby from the lady, and we carried the baby inside the car.” The child rode on Shirley’s lap.

The tension eased. But Elizabeth never forgot it.

Nonetheless, it came as a surprise when, on Aug. 28, 1992, Charles Taylor’s men took Barbara Ann captive.

She had given her beloved orange truck back to the archbishop, and he had loaned her in return a Mitsubishi van called a Pajero. Now, at a checkpoint between Monrovia and Kle, soldiers took all the grain out of the Pajero, along with all of her medical supplies.

Then they took the Pajero.

Barbara Ann’s sister, Mary Sabo, and her provincial superior, Sister Mildred Gross, both are certain that she resisted.

“She could talk,” Mary Sabo says, “ ‘What are you going to do with my truck, man!’ ”

The soldiers shoved her.

Barbara Ann probably got angry. “She was feisty,” Sister Mildred said.

They took her prisoner.

They marched her off to their camp. They gave her food. She said later that she could not eat. They gave her a bed. She could not sleep. All night, they kept her under armed guard.

The next day, they let her go.

But they kept the supplies and the Pajero. She set out to Gardnersville on foot. “I don’t know if anybody picked her up,” Mary Sabo said. “That must have been quite a trip.”

Altogether, it was enough to prompt a special phone call to Ruma. Kathleen and Barbara Ann told Sister Mildred and Sister Meg Kopish that they were calling because they feared that Ruma might hear about what had happened some other way. This way, Meg says, they could “put us at ease.”

Still, the gravity of the circumstances crept into the conversation.

“Barbara Ann said she was really scared,” Mildred said. “But then she said: ‘I’m really better now.’ ”

Both Kathleen and Barbara Ann urged the provincial leadership not to worry. Apart from being shoved, Barbara Ann said, she had not been mistreated.

In a letter home, she dismissed the matter. “God continues to bless us all and has spared my life from the gun,” she wrote to friends, “so I know God wants me to continue to be courage and strength for these people.

“It may take a while to rebuild lives, but, praise God, I will be here to help.”

On the first Friday of October, Shirley made the requisite telephone call to Ruma. Barbara Ann had been ill, and Shirley feared it was cancer again. She arranged for Barbara Ann to return home for a checkup. She would go back with Sister Meg Kopish, who was coming soon to visit.

Liberia was tense, Shirley said, but there was no reason to call off Meg’s trip. As for herself and the other sisters, there was no need to fear for their well-being.

“We’re fine,” Shirley said.

*

On Thursday, Oct. 15, 1992, Taylor and his NPFL rebels launched a full-scale assault on Monrovia. They shelled and rocketed the city. Their artillery battered the seaport and the airport. Their troops pushed into the suburbs. Hundreds of people died. Thousands of refugees poured into downtown. Taylor vowed to take Monrovia if he had to destroy it. The attack took the ECOMOG peacekeepers by surprise. But ECOMOG rallied. Nigeria poured in men and equipment. Its ships and fighter-bombers pounded Taylor’s forces. By now, Prince Yormie Johnson’s rival rebel force had all but collapsed, but ULIMO and the remnants of Doe’s old army, the Armed Forces of Liberia, sent troops against Taylor, as well. Liberia was at all-out war again.

*

The first rockets fell in the early morning. “All that day and the next, Oct. 16, 1992, we could hear the gunfire in the distance,” said Father Jim Gessler, a member of a missionary order called the Society of African Missions (SMA).

“At this point, we all began to make (a) mistake about the strength and (willpower) of ECOMOG. We had seen their tanks around town and their jet bombers flying around now and then. And we all presumed it was only a matter of a few days until ECOMOG would push the NPFL back, then move up country. I presume the sisters thought the same.”

In Ruma, the leadership got word of the attack. SMA provincial headquarters in Tenafly, N.J., planned to contact its priests by shortwave radio. Did Ruma have a message for its nuns?

Provincial Superior Mildred Gross, Provincial Councilor Meg Kopish and others in the leadership put the words down on paper and went over them again and again. “We in no way wanted to tell them they must come home,” Sister Mildred said. “That would only antagonize them, and they wouldn’t come for sure.”

She says Ruma sent this message: “We were thinking of them and supporting them with our prayers, and we would support any action they needed to take for their safety, and we would be in touch with their families.”

A message came back. Mildred said it declared simply: “The sisters are safe.”

Thousands of refugees trudged past the convent in Gardnersville, fleeing guns and tanks. On Monday, Oct. 19, and in the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 20, the sisters carried out water and gave it to the refugees to drink.

If God loves these people, says Father Mike Moran, another SMA missionary, and if missionaries are witnesses to God’s love, then how can missionaries leave when the people are most in need?

In one way, he says, this is foolishness: Without faith, it makes no sense. But, he said, “we have faith, (and) faith without works is meaningless. . . .

“That’s what these sisters were doing.”

Shortly after noon that Tuesday, Mike Moran stopped by the convent to make sure all five of the nuns were safe.

“They were all there,” he said. “Shirley and Kathleen had just come back from St. Pat’s in town. So we sat down, and we talked a little bit. Shirley and Barbara did most of the talking. Kathleen and Agnes were very, very quiet. They were concerned.”

Shirley and Barbara Ann tried to reassure the others.

“It’s not that bad,” Shirley said. “It’s not going to be that bad.”

“No problem,” Barbara Ann said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

But Agnes still said nothing. “She was quiet,” Mike Moran said. “Kathleen the same way. She just sat there.”

Four young Liberians were there, members of Joel’s program for young women aspiring to become nuns, as well as two Liberian families from the neighborhood who had come to the convent for refuge. All of them too said very little.

About 4 p.m., Agnes began cooking chicken soup for dinner. One of the aspirants reported later that “Sister Shirley and myself cooked the rice. Joel was happy. . . . She was not afraid.” But Agnes was still frightened. The aspirant says Agnes could not shake a feeling that something was about to happen.

Some of the guards supplied by North Star were young and inexperienced. But the nuns had grown fond of them, particularly the day guard, whose name was Peter. He was 19. “The sisters actually taught him how to hold that job,” Elizabeth Kolmer said. “Peter was such a nice guy. He would have his little book. It was a very elementary book. . . . I think he was trying to learn how to read.”

On this particular evening, Peter grew worried about his family. Accounts vary about why. Some say he was concerned because of the fighting. Others say somebody in the family was ill, perhaps a child. In any case, Barbara Ann and Joel agreed to take a few minutes before dinner and drive him home.

On the way, Barbara Ann and Joel stopped to pick up two ECOMOG soldiers. One of the aspirants watched them, Mike Moran says. Barbara Ann was at the wheel, and Joel was in the right front seat. Both soldiers got into the back seat with Peter.

The car turned north on Barnersville Road and drove out of sight. After a mile and a half, as it neared a settlement called Barnersville Estates, it pulled to the right shoulder.

It seemed, Moran says, that Barbara Ann intended to drop the soldiers off.

One climbed out of the car and turned down the road. Suddenly there was a burst of gunfire. By Moran’s reconstruction of events, it probably came from behind a wall across the road.

He has very little doubt that Taylor’s troops were hiding there in ambush. Nor does he doubt what happened next.

The ECOMOG soldier fell.

More gunfire, likely from an assault rifle, cut a horizontal line of ragged holes through the driver’s side of Barbara Ann’s car.

Joel opened her door. She stood and probably tried to run. But there was still more gunfire. It caught her. One bullet pierced her leg. She fell outside the car. There was more gunfire. Bullets, or perhaps the momentum of her fall, rolled her over. She came to rest with her head under the passenger side of the car and her body draped across the side of the road.

A bullet shattered the carburetor or broke a gas line, and heat from the engine or a spark from the bullet started a fire. As flames spread, Taylor’s troops ran to the ECOMOG soldier in the road and stripped him of his weapons and his valuables. Then, from the looks of what little remained, they ran to the burning car and pulled Joel’s watch from her wrist and the heart-and-cross symbol of her order from around her neck.

They opened the back doors of the car and looted the other ECOMOG soldier of his weapons and valuables, then took whatever might have been in Peter’s pockets. At one point, they found Liberian money and threw it on the road. It was worthless in Taylorland, where the rebels had a currency of their own.

They opened the driver’s door. Barbara Ann’s body tumbled out. The fall knocked her eyeglasses off. One lens shattered, and the other broke in half. Part of it fell out of its metal frame. From her wrist they took her watch, and from around her neck they took her heart and cross.

Then they fled.

The car burned, along with much of what was near it. Its cushions burned. Its tires burned. All of its glass melted and part of its transmission. Its gas tank burned but did not explode. By then, Sister Barbara Ann Muttra, Sister Joel Kolmer, Peter the security guard and the two ECOMOG soldiers probably were already dead.

Killed instantly by the bullets?

“That’s my guess,” Mike Moran said.

When Barbara Ann and Joel did not return for dinner, Shirley, Agnes and Kathleen began to worry. Night fell. Still they did not return.

The next day, Wednesday, Oct. 21, fighting in Gardnersville grew severe. The sisters gave shelter to more Liberians from the neighborhood, including a Lebanese man and his family who ran a store nearby. By one count, there were 17 people in the convent, including Shirley, Agnes, Kathleen and the four aspirants. Sometime during that day, one of the aspirants reported afterward, they “found out for sure” that Barbara Ann and Joel had been killed. “Probably somebody coming from Barnersville saw the bodies,” Mike Moran said, “and went and told the other sisters.”

By that afternoon, Taylor’s rebels had taken control of Barnersville Road, not half a mile from the convent. If Shirley, Agnes and Kathleen wanted to flee, they had to do it now. They tried, the aspirants say. “But each time,” says Sister Mildred Gross, reading from aspirant reports, “fighting broke out.”

Sometime the next morning, a doctor and a nun from another order, Sister Barbara Brilliant of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, tried to reach the convent in an ambulance. But two Liberians were wounded in front of them, and they stopped to help the Liberians instead.

By Thursday night, there was not much hope. Inside the convent, the aspirants say in their reports, Shirley and Kathleen tried to keep up everyone’s spirits. “Kathleen and Shirley were very brave,” said Sister Kate Reid, paraphrasing the aspirant reports. “They didn’t ‘lose it,’ as we would say.”

On Friday, Oct. 23, ECOMOG, under pressure from the U.S. Embassy, sent troops into the neighborhood. “They rounded up the people in the area to bring them out, (including) the sisters,” Mike Moran said. “They were all ready to go, and then the fighting started again, right there--a fierce battle. So they told everybody to go back to their houses and wait.”

Three ECOMOG soldiers were killed. “That was the last time anybody saw ECOMOG.”

Two hours later, at 5 p.m., several of Taylor’s soldiers came to the convent gate. They were young, hardly more than boys. They were armed.

Based on accounts from the aspirants, from Father Mike Moran and from the leadership at Ruma, three of the men went by the names of Mosquito, Black Devil and CO Devil--although Mike Moran says he believes that the latter might be a misrendering of Gio Devil, a well-known fighter who took his name from the Gio tribe.

Gio Devil, he says, was notorious in Cape Palmas for a number of killings. Mosquito likely was an NPFL officer known as Gen. Mosquito, a commander of young combatants described in one news report as boy soldiers high on drugs, carrying teddy bears and assault weapons. Black Devil, Mike Moran says, was familiar for what in the United States would be called tagging. He had his signature on buildings.

One of the three, Mike Moran says, demanded: “Come, open the gate!”

Kathleen stepped forward with the key. Basing his account on an aspirant’s report, Father Moran says Kathleen was joined by the Lebanese shopkeeper who had brought his family to the convent for safety. But the soldier did not wait. According to the aspirant’s report, “he busted it open.”

Barbara Ann had taken one car, but there was another still at the convent, Mike Moran says. The soldiers asked for the car keys, says Sister Mildred Gross, citing another aspirant’s report. “They got the keys,” Sister Mildred says, reading from the report. Then, without any provocation, “CO Devil shot Kathleen’s arm.

“She fell down.

“The same bullet hit the Lebanese man, and he died on the spot.”

Then the soldier took aim at Kathleen, huddled on the ground at his feet.

“CO Devil shot Kathleen on the neck,” Mildred says, still reading from the aspirant’s report, “and she too was dead.”

A report from another of the aspirants says the killer was Commander Mosquito. Mike Moran and Mildred Gross attribute the difference to sheer terror. “You have to remember,” Sister Meg Kopish said, “these young women . . . (saw) all this, and they were very excited.”

Now the rebels ordered everyone to come outside.

The soldiers demanded money.

“They asked Sister Shirley for the U.S. dollars that they had,” Sister Mildred says, reading further from one of the aspirant reports. “But sister told them that they had put all the money in the bank.”

Instead, Shirley offered them Liberian dollars.

They rejected the offer.

One soldier, Mildred says, accused the sisters of supporting ECOMOG. Then they ordered their captives to separate: all of the Liberians to one side, including the aspirants, and Shirley and Agnes to another side.

“Sister Shirley started to beg,” Mildred says, reading still further.

It did no good.

“He shot sister Agnes. Then (he) shot Sister Shirley. As soon as he saw us looking, he told us he was going to kill us.”

The bullets knocked the nuns to the ground. One went through Shirley’s head.

The two nuns bled into the tan Liberian soil and died.

The others were spared.

*

The aspirants fled.

So did the other Liberians. The convent was looted; clothing was stolen, along with food, furniture and appliances.

The aspirants reached Bishop Benedict Dotu Sekey in Gbarnga and told him what had happened. Archbishop Michael Kpakala Francis blamed the rebels and held Charles Taylor accountable. Taylor denied responsibility.

Week after week, the fighting raged in both Barnersville and Gardnersville. The bodies of Barbara Ann Muttra, Joel Kolmer, Kathleen McGuire, Shirley Kolmer and Agnes Mueller lay unprotected in the Liberian sun.

Father Mike Moran tried to reach them in vain. The U.S. Embassy tried without success to contact Taylor to arrange their recovery.

Finally, at 5 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 29, five weeks and two days after the sisters were killed, a group from the church and the embassy, including Mike Moran, were given an hour of protection from ECOMOG to reach the convent.

In flak jackets and a bulletproof van, they followed a truck filled with ECOMOG troops. The convoy made it without mishap. Outside the convent wall, Father Moran says, he found Kathleen’s body, decayed but still in a blue print dress with small flowers.

While embassy officials recovered her remains, Mike Moran walked through the gate and into the front yard. He saw the Lebanese shopkeeper, intact and clothed. Only his shoes were missing. Mike Moran looked at the man’s face. “He was in shock.” Then he turned around. He saw legs and a torso, cut off at the waist. “Then an upper part of one of the bodies. . . . I think, the arm . . . and a whole upper part of one of them. . . .

“We were not sure who was who and what was what. . . . Most of it was bones. . . . Some of the bones had flesh. . . . But it was all pieces.”

The dirt showed two patches of red. The bodies of Shirley and Agnes had been moved. Then Mike Moran saw their skulls.

They were several feet away, against a wall.

“After they killed them,” Moran says, “they went back and decided to mess up the bodies . . . cut them up, throw them around.”

On Monday, Dec. 21, two months and one day after Barbara Ann Muttra and Joel Kolmer were killed, another group from the embassy and the church, again including Moran, drove out Barnersville Road.

The embassy driver spotted a piece of gold. It was part of a tooth, and the tooth was in a skull that lay on some grass near the roadway. The skull belonged to Barbara Ann.

Nearby was a burned-out car. Partially under it, where she had fallen, Moran found the remains of Joel Kolmer. In the back seat, he saw the uniform and the skeleton of one of the ECOMOG soldiers. Next to the soldier were Peter’s bones. In the middle of the road a few feet ahead of the car was the other ECOMOG soldier. Lying just outside the driver’s door was Barbara Ann’s body.

“We found her glasses right there by the door,” Moran says. In the driver’s door, he saw the bullet holes. Across the road, he noticed a wall. “They would have come from inside the wall, and all of a sudden jumped out, started shooting. . . . A bullet maybe went into the carburetor or something, and the gas got onto the hot engine.”

Once the fire started, Mike Moran says, the rebels must have hurried to take whatever they could. He found the scorched Liberian dollars in the road but no personal effects.

Had Barbara Ann’s skull, lying in the grass, been severed?

“Maybe,” Mike Moran said. “Later on.”

*

The nuns came home in silver-gray caskets. Pathologists identified them using medical records and dental charts. They confirmed that Shirley Kolmer had been shot in the head, that Joel Kolmer had been shot in a leg and that some of the remains were traumatized and others were charred.

Among bones and pieces of clothing, the pathologists found two heart-and-cross pendants: Shirley’s and Kathleen’s.

Their memorial services were solemn but touched with irony, even humor. Kathleen, the war protester, for instance, was described by her military brother, Fred, as a soldier of Christ. A chaplain dedicated a peace-and-justice center in her honor and splashed some Tanqueray gin, her favorite drink, into the holy water for the blessing.

Apart from newspapers in the Ruma area, notably the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which devoted a full section to the sisters, none paid much attention after the first few days. On Nov. 19, Sister Meg Kopish, testifying before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, made an “urgent request for a full investigation.” But the U.S. government has not complied. Indeed, as time passes, prospects for such an investigation seem to diminish.

There is a shaky cease-fire in Liberia, where 1.5 million war victims are homeless and 200,000 are threatened by disease and starvation. An interim government has been established, and elections are planned for February or March. Charles Taylor’s NPFL is part of the interim government. Moreover, Taylor or his representatives could be elected to a permanent government. This means that any investigation incriminating the NPFL would tarnish the interim government, perhaps a permanent government.

The State Department supports this peace process. Before the cease-fire, the department held Taylor and the NPFL responsible for all five deaths. But now it seems to be backing away from such a broad condemnation. Citing eyewitness accounts of the slayings of Shirley Kolmer, Agnes Mueller and Kathleen McGuire, an official at the State Department said recently that it continues to “hold the NPFL accountable for the deaths of at least these three.” He did not mention Barbara Ann Muttra or Joel Kolmer.

The official, George Moose, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said in response to recent questions from The Times that the United States government “has consistently and emphatically demanded that the perpetrators of this heinous crime be brought to justice.” But then Moose added: “Unfortunately, the unresolved civil conflict has left Liberia a divided and unpacified country and severely disrupted its judicial system.”

Disruption is indeed a problem, says an official at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia. But this official, who spoke privately, says the embassy has conducted no investigation of its own; it has made no effort, for instance, to find any witnesses to the killings of Barbara Ann Muttra and Joel Kolmer. Moose said the embassy has “interviewed eyewitnesses.” But the embassy official says these were the aspirants, who already had been interviewed by priests and bishops.

“The only formal investigation,” the embassy official said, “was undertaken by the Catholic Church.”

The Adorers of the Blood of Christ want peace most of all. They have not pressed the State Department, but they will cooperate in any official investigation--”because we are interested in knowing why the sisters were killed,” Sister Mildred Gross says, “not because of any desire for revenge.”

The State Department assumes that the killers are out of reach in rebel territory controlled by the NPFL. Moreover, says the embassy official in Monrovia, the U.S. Embassy considers NPFL participation in the interim government, and perhaps in a permanent government, to be “a complication” in any effort to bring Charles Taylor’s men to justice.

Will justice be served?

The chances, say State Department officials, who requested anonymity, are slim.

Researcher Nina Green contributed to this series.

Mercy Mission Ends in Murder

The five nuns from rural Illinois, killed while attempting to help Liberians in the middle of a civil war.

Barbara Ann Muttra: 48 when she went to Liberia. She was 69 when she was slain.

Shirley Kolmer: Went to Liberia when she was 46. She was shot to death at age 61.

Joel Kolmer: Was 50 when she went to Liberia. She was killed eight years later.

Agnes Mueller: Went to Liberia at age 57. She was 62 when she was gunned down.

Kathleen McGuire: Was 51 when she went to Liberia. She was 54 when she was killed.

Liberia Beckons

1943: Barbara Ann Muttra becomes a nun. She trains to be a nurse and eventually goes to Vietnam during the war to care for refugees and war orphans.

1947: Shirley Kolmer becomes a nun. She teaches school, gets a doctorate in mathematics and becomes a professor at St. Louis University.

1948: Agnes Mueller becomes a nun. At first, she is a nurse, but in time she turns to teaching and parish ministry.

1956: Kathleen McGuire becomes a nun. She gets a doctorate in education. She persuades her convent to participate in the sanctuary movement for illegal immigrants.

1957: Joel Kolmer becomes a nun. She teaches school for 25 years in Iowa and Illinois.

1971: Barbara Ann goes to Liberia as a missionary and runs a clinic.

1977: Shirley goes to Liberia as a missionary and teaches mathematics to university students in Monrovia.

1980: Samuel K. Doe, a descendant of native Liberians, and other noncommissioned officers end a long reign by the descendants of American slaves by having the president of Liberia killed in bloody coup.

1982: Joel goes to Liberia as a missionary and directs training for young women who aspire to become nuns.

1987: Agnes goes to Liberia as a missionary. She teaches, serves as a parish minister and works as a nurse.

1989: Rebel Charles Taylor invades Liberia on Christmas Eve. He and his men lay siege to Monrovia and its suburbs, including Gardnersville, where the nuns have a convent.

1990: In the spring, Barbara Ann returns home with cancer and Agnes returns for eye surgery. During that summer, Shirley and Joel flee Liberia in the face of Taylor’s rebellion.

Living With the Terror

1990

September: President Samuel K. Doe is slain by troops under the command of rebel leader Yormie Johnson.

October: Nations in the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) install an interim government in Liberia. ECOMOG drives all of the rebels out of Monrovia.

1991

March: Fighting eases. Shirley and Joel Kolmer return to Liberia. They find terrible destruction. One person who hid in their convent was killed in a bathtub.

May: The Kolmers go home and report that Liberia is safe enough for them and their fellow nuns to return permanently.

July and August: Barbara Ann Muttra recovers from cancer surgery. Agnes Mueller recovers from eye surgery. Barbara Ann, Agnes, the Kolmers and Kathleen McGuire reopen the Liberian mission.

October: Charles Taylor’s troops, the principal surviving rebels, set up roadblocks in the countryside. Barbara Ann Muttra is detained on her way to a clinic in the town of Kle.

1992

August: Taylor’s men take Barbara Ann Muttra captive overnight. She is freed unharmed.

Oct. 15: Taylor launches a new assault on Monrovia and its suburbs, including Gardnersville, where the nuns have their convent.

Oct. 20: Barbara Ann and Joel are killed near Monrovia and their car is burned. Taylor’s men are blamed.

Oct. 21: Shirley, Agnes and Kathleen try unsuccessfully to flee.

Oct. 22: Efforts to rescue them fail.

Oct. 23: Soldiers, identified as Taylor’s men, come to the convent and shoot Shirley, Agnes and Kathleen in cold blood.