TOLEDO, Ohio — On April 5, 1980, the day before Easter, a nun named Margaret Ann Pahl was strangled to death in a hospital chapel in Toledo, Ohio.

Police saw aspects of a ritual killing in the 71-year-old's murder. Her body was covered with an altar cloth and posed as if she had been raped. The assailant had stabbed her at least 27 times, with the wounds forming a pattern on her upper body.

The murder of a nun in a sacred place at the holiest time on the church calendar stunned Toledo, a city with a heavily Catholic population. Who could do something so diabolical? people asked.

For 24 years, there was no answer. But then, on April 23, 2004, cold-case detectives announced an arrest that was as troubling as the crime itself. The Rev. Gerald Robinson, a chaplain at the hospital and one of two priests who presided at Sr. Margaret Ann's funeral Mass, was charged with her murder.

Robinson goes on trial this week in Lucas County Court of Common Pleas on a murder charge that carries a possible life sentence.

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Authorities said they used new forensic techniques to link the 68-year-old priest to the murder weapon. He insists he is innocent, and some of his former parishioners have rallied behind him — even joining with Robinson's relatives to put up their homes as collateral for bail.

The trial, which will be broadcast on Court TV and streamed online at Court TV Extra, has attracted attract national attention not only for the shocking nature of the crime, but for other, even more disturbing, allegations of satanic worship and ritual child abuse that led to the re-investigation of Sr. Margaret Ann's murder.