Death on the Devil’s Teeth

by Pollack, Jesse P.

  The Devil’s Teeth cliff in Springfield’s Houdaille Quarry. Jeannette DePalma’s remains were found on top of this cliff on September 19, 1972. Photo by Mark Moran.

  While the investigators awaited the arrival of Dr. Ehrenberg, members of Springfield’s Detective Bureau began combing the area around the body for any trace evidence. After hours of searching the scene, it became apparent that no pieces of evidence that might lead to an obvious cause of death would be found. “The best that I can recall,” Kisch says, “there was nothing that was found there that could be used to conclusively say that foul play was suspected in any way, shape or form.” This was not only a cause of frustration for the group of investigators but also a cause for legitimate concern. If there was no evidence to suggest that this was a homicide, suicide or accident, how then, the investigators wondered, did this body come to rest in this desolate area?

  One person who was especially troubled by this was Don Schwerdt. “As a parent, this stood out to me,” he says, looking back. Standing over the decomposing remains of what he believed to be a missing teenage girl, Don thought to himself, “This could have been one of my kids…”

  At 6:05 p.m., a little over two hours after the discovery of the remains, Dr. Bernard Ehrenberg arrived on the hill and officially pronounced the body dead. “It was a more of a formality,” Kisch remarks. “It was obvious to anyone with a set of eyes that the girl was dead, but we couldn’t proceed until an official declaration was made by Ehrenberg, and even that, at most, was just him walking up to the body, pointing at it and saying, ‘Yup, she’s dead. Take her away.’ That’s all.”

  The fire department was radioed and told to proceed to the quarry, and a short time later, Springfield’s American LaFrance ladder truck arrived. The truck was backed up against the cliff ’s rocky wall, and the eighty-five-foot aerial ladder was raised about halfway to the cliff ’s edge. Fireman Don Stewart ascended the ladder and joined the detectives at the scene. Stewart, a Vietnam veteran, was visibly shaken at the sight of the body.

  “Don Stewart was an easygoing, fun-loving guy before Vietnam,” Cardinal recalls. “After he returned from ’Nam and was hired on to the fire department, his demeanor changed. Even though he acted upbeat in public, in private he seemed sad all the time. Don was the spitting image of Woody Harrelson and probably spent as much time in a real bar as Woody did acting in one on Cheers. Helping bring Jeannette down from the mountain bothered Don greatly, and he talked about it often in the days and weeks following the whole event. He told me that her body was grayish brown, like leather. I remember him saying that her body didn’t look like the body of a person that had been beat up or killed in an accident. Those types would be sprawled out or distorted or in a kind of fetal position. He said that she looked peaceful—almost like she was sleeping—and that really bothered him.”

  Only one year after assisting with the recovery of Jeannette’s body, Don Stewart would commit suicide by shooting himself in the heart. He was surrounded by fellow Springfield firefighters and police officers, all begging him to drop his pistol. “In addition to some other things, I do believe that the DePalma incident weighed heavily on him,” Cardinal says in retrospect. “Don was always in turmoil after Vietnam. Important things became minor, and minor things became important to him. Girls were a bad issue, as was drinking. Another member of the department, Ted Johnson, was always at odds with Don. Ted was higher up on the totem pole. The two of them always seemed to rub one another the wrong way. For no real reason, Ted would sneak around and try to catch Don and many others committing minor infractions. This guy was really high-strung, and he really annoyed Don, to say the least. Well, underneath it all, Ted had problems of his own and eventually threatened to take his life. One day, he just locked himself in his basement, and his wife heard a gunshot. It got real quiet, and when he didn’t answer her calling for him, she went ballistic. When the police arrived and broke into the basement, they found him just sitting on the floor with a bullet hole in the wall. Turns out, this guy had no intention of shooting himself. Ted told the cops that he just wanted to scare his wife. Well, he was sent off to a ‘special place’ for a few years, and when he came back, the department promoted the guy! Don Stewart made Ted Johnson into the laughing stock of the whole department. I don’t remember the exact words he used, but things like ‘ditzeldork’ and ‘wiener’ were usually followed by references to Ted’s aiming ability and so on. It was intense!”

  Ed Cardinal believes that Stewart’s taunting of Johnson would later backfire on the young firefighter and contribute to his own eventual suicide.

  “Sometime later, Don hooked up with a rather high-end female, and one night, he showed up outside her apartment with a gun. I honestly don’t remember what exactly set him off. It may have been another guy showing up at her apartment, or she could have just dumped him or whatever. Someone called the Springfield Police Department, and they called our fire chief, Ed Erskine, and asked him to go calm Don down. Once Deputy Chief Erskine showed up, Don became convinced that he was about to lose his job. On top of that, after all this time, Don had been belittling Ted for ‘not having the guts’ to shoot himself, and now he was in the exact same spot. I think, in Don’s mind, there was no turning back at that point, especially with everyone watching. It was just a total shock to everyone. Don and I were good friends. Chief Erskine was real shook up over it. He told us all that he believed that if everyone had just [gone] away, Don would have just put the gun down and [gone] home.”

  With his suicide, Don Stewart became the first victim of the so-called DePalma Curse, which allegedly befell the Springfield Fire Department after Jeannette’s body was recovered. According to Ed Cardinal, Chief Robert Day quit the department and went to work as a janitor in a local school. Deputy Chief Ed Erskine gave up “years of conservative thinking,” quit the fire department, divorced his wife and ended up living in his car for several years. Another fellow firefighter needed to take a leave of absence for “mental rehabilitation,” while yet another randomly quit the department without giving any reason.

  While Cardinal acknowledges the veracity of these claims, he refuses to believe in any kind of DePalma Curse. Looking back, Cardinal says, “I seriously doubt that the DePalma incident had any bearing on the fates of the majority of these men. It was just a sad, unfortunate day for the department. Whatever happened to those guys afterward was just a ‘bad luck happens’ kind of thing…”

  Ed Cardinal in 1968. After retiring from the Springfield Fire Department, Cardinal began writing articles for Weird NJ magazine and was instrumental in assisting the authors with their research for this book. Photo by Don Stewart.

  Back at the quarry, a body bag was retrieved, and the detectives carefully placed the remains inside. “They wanted to do everything they could to preserve the integrity of the body,” Don Schwerdt recalls. The bag was then bundled up and placed onto a Stokes stretcher. The Springfield Fire Department had decided to remove Jeannette’s remains by means of a method that was usually reserved for incapacitated victims of a disaster or serious accident.

  “Back then, the standard operating procedure was to tie a rope to a rung at the base of the ladder, lay the rope on all of the rungs, then drop the rope over the top rung and let it fall to the ground with a lot of slack,” Ed Cardinal explains. “You would then secure the rope to the stretcher. All the while, the ladder and two ladder extensions would remain in the truck’s bed. Then, as you lifted the ladder, the stretcher would rise to a predetermined height when the slack was taken up. As you extended the extension ladders, the stretcher would rise the rest of the way at half the speed that the ladder was extending, as the balance of the slack was used up. Reverse would lower the stretcher at half speed, be gentler and would be easier to control. Sometimes, tormentor ropes would be tied to stretchers in order to keep them from spinning or to guide them away from trees or wires.”

  Once the body had been lowered to the quarry floor, the multitude of detectives,
patrolmen, firefighters and county investigators all made their way down from the cliff using the same aerial ladder. “I remember the guys at the bottom of the cliff shaking the ladder to rile up Calabrese,” Schwerdt recalls with a laugh. “Sam was afraid of heights, you see.”

  The body was then loaded into the back of an ambulance and driven to the Sullivan Funeral Home in nearby Roselle. “We were using Sullivan’s morgue back in those days,” Schwerdt remembers. “It had better facilities than ours.” Once the body arrived, Dr. Ehrenberg began a preliminary examination of the remains, which yielded no apparent cause of death.

  Ed Kisch was not surprised by Dr. Ehrenberg’s failure to determine what had killed Jeannette. “Bernie Ehrenberg was not a trained pathologist,” Kisch recalls. “The guy was a friggin’ physician! You know how Bernie Ehrenberg got his job? Political appointment. Bernie Ehrenberg was not competent enough, as far as I am concerned, to have been conducting forensic autopsies. I know for a fact that he botched the autopsy of another high-profile murder victim that was found up on Springfield Top.” When asked if he was referring to the 1976 murder of Springfield resident Beverly Manoff, Kisch laughs. “We’ll let that one lie,” he says. “I can tell you this, though: that murder will never be solved.”

  Back at the morgue, Dr. Ehrenberg eventually decided to have the body X-rayed for any possible bone fractures, bullet holes or knife strikes. The remains were carefully wrapped up and driven to Elizabeth General Hospital, about three miles from the funeral home. “Forensic science was in its infancy in 1972. If you wanted to X-ray a body, you had to drive to Elizabeth,” Schwerdt recalls.

  The X-rays revealed no bone breaks or fractures. Further adding to the frustration of the investigators, no bullet holes or knife strikes were found either. The investigators decided to focus their efforts on identifying the remains while Ehrenberg ordered further tests. Calabrese remembered Detective Olivo’s statement regarding the supposed local runaway Jeannette DePalma and decided to start there. Due to the extensive decomposition of the remains, Calabrese figured he would likely need dental records for a positive identification. The office of Jeannette’s dentist would be the detective sergeant’s first stop.

  This particular dentist agreed to speak with us, but only if his demands of anonymity were met. Cleary agitated and anxious, the dentist feared any kind of possible repercussions for his comments regarding Jeannette and his involvement with the investigation into her death.

  “I am glad to give you any information that I remember, but I don’t want my name associated with this,” the dentist says. “Jeannette was not your all-American girl, if you know what I mean. She was odd. She hung around with a rough crowd. The kind of kids you wouldn’t want your own children around. I’d definitely say she was a troubled kid. This family was a peculiar family, and I don’t know what you know about them. At the time, it was a very harrowing experience. These people still live around here. I’m frightened of these people, quite frankly, and I don’t want them showing up at my door. I have my own feelings about who this family is, and I don’t want to go into it. The bottom line is, they were odd, to say the least. An odd family. They are still in this neighborhood, and I don’t want to be part of why they are angry because, quite frankly, I will have bad nights thinking about these people, um…looking to get me because I identified their daughter. I mean, they were strange people. I just want you to know that. Do you understand the circumstances? This was an unsolved ritual murder or whatever it was, and I am still close to this neighborhood and they were strange people. They were a big family. I don’t want somebody knocking on my door, saying, ‘You touched my daughter!’ You follow what I’m saying? This is not a happy thing for me. It is something that has haunted this area for a long time.”

  Jeannette’s dentist then began to recount the day that he was asked to assist in the identification of her body. “I was fresh out of dental school around this time,” he says. “My father, who[m] I shared the practice with, got all of the older patients, and I got all the kids. Jeannette was one of them. One day, at about three thirty in the afternoon, this detective named Calabrese walked into my office. He goes, ‘I need you to come with me,’ and I laughed at him. I said, ‘What am I, under arrest or something?’ And he told me, ‘No, we have a body to identify.’ I told him that I currently had patients and to come back at five thirty, after I had closed up.”

  If the dentist’s recollections are accurate, his encounter with Calabrese most likely occurred the day after Jeannette’s body was located, as the detective sergeant was still searching for her remains at 3:30 p.m. the previous day.

  “I knew these guys, and I knew it wasn’t a joke,” the dentist recalls. “I’d seen Calabrese around before. He sometimes worked as a crossing guard at one of the schools.” When Calabrese returned, he instructed the young dentist to bring along Jeannette DePalma’s dental records. “I knew that she was missing,” he says. “Everyone in town said that she was a runaway.” Calabrese then drove him to the Sullivan Funeral Home, where Ehrenberg was waiting with the remains.

  When the dentist arrived, he was taken straight to the morgue. “The body was on a metal morgue table, and that table was covered in plastic,” he says. “When I arrived, they kind of unfolded the plastic so that I could have access to the body. There was really no identifiable body to speak of. It was all dried up. You couldn’t even tell if the body was male or female. The clothes were more identifiable than the body. I could tell that she had been wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The clothes were all beat up and dried up. The bones still had flesh in some areas, but it was all shriveled. It reminded me of the cadavers that we used in dental school. Calabrese then handed me Jeannette’s skull. The skull and mandible were intact, and the skull still had hair on it.” The dentist then began to compare Jeannette DePalma’s dental records to the recovered mandible, tooth by tooth. “Her X-rays were recent. I had put fillings in earlier that summer.” After careful examination, the dentist confirmed that the mandible belonged to Jeannette DePalma. “I was able to determine from the dental records that it was her,” he recalls. “I’ll never forget that day. I had never been asked to identify a body before…”

  Now armed with a positive identification, Detective Sergeant Sam Calabrese could finally notify the DePalma family and make an official statement to the press.

  At some point during Dr. Ehrenberg’s subsequent round of tests, the determination was made that, while no official cause of death could be determined, it was possible that Jeannette DePalma had been the victim of strangulation. This determination was eventually leaked to the press, and in the minds of countless Springfield residents, Jeannette DePalma was now officially being considered the victim of a homicide. Ed Kisch, however, had his doubts. “Ehrenberg never came up with a specific cause of death. There were some innuendos that were made by him, but I won’t go into those because innuendoes are not worth anything when it comes to police work. They’re rumors, as far as any of that is concerned. Ehrenberg could not positively determine that she was strangled. He could not positively determine whether or not she had been beaten with some type of instrument. There was no indication from him, from what I was able to understand, that there were any damages to the bones. There was no indication that she was shot. Those were things that, I believe, were not able to be proven by the pathological examination, so what we had was a suspicious death because of where the body was ultimately located.”

  In addition to the perceived evidence of strangulation, Ehrenberg made another rather curious discovery. In 2004, Weird NJ magazine reported that after Jeannette’s autopsy, “a tissue sample submitted for toxicological examination proved unsuitable for alcohol analysis, but determined that there was a lead content in the body of .694 mg.” The source of this information has since been lost to time, but it has been confirmed by the DePalma family. “My uncle Frank knew a guy at the medical examiner’s office,” recalls Racheal Sajeski, the daughter of Jeannette’s older sister Gwendolyn. �
�He went down there in the 1980s to ask about the lead content and was told to back down. They told him to stop asking questions and to leave it alone.”

  John Bancey, the son of Jeannette’s older sister Darlene, told a similar story during a 2004 interview with Weird NJ magazine. “My uncle Frank, that’s [Jeannette’s] brother, he had a friend in the medical examiner’s office, and he said that something wasn’t right. My uncle pushed the issue and pushed the issue, and he started to get threatened, told he would be arrested if he didn’t stop. Because he was questioning everybody. He was pretty upset about it.”

  A blood lead concentration of 0.694mg/L is a significantly high level for a teenager. Slightly higher levels have been known to lead to permanent brain damage and death. The symptoms of lead poisoning include weight loss, insomnia, anemia, abdominal pain, memory loss and a tingling sensation felt in the body’s extremities. Jeannette DePalma, however, seemed to exhibit none of these symptoms around the time she died. Jeannette’s mother, Florence, told the Elizabeth Daily Journal that her daughter “had a slight cold” on the day she vanished, but no other ailments were mentioned. It is also safe to assume that a teenager suffering from a fatal bout of lead poisoning would not feel well enough to run away from home.

  With this in mind, the matter of how such a high amount of lead entered Jeannette’s body is shrouded in mystery. Dr. Randall C. Baselt’s Disposition of Toxic Drugs and Chemicals in Man cites a study in which the children of “industrially-exposed fathers” were found to have blood lead concentrations from 0.30mg/L to 0.80mg/L. This occurrence was due to lead dust being carried home on the clothing of parents working in the industrial field. Is it possible that Jeannette’s father, an automotive wrecker, brought lead dust into his home?

  If that were the case, the professional opinions of those who believe Jeannette’s exposure to lead was antemortem would be significantly bolstered. “I am not aware of lead being formed postmortem in a decomposing body,” says Dr. Cyril Wecht, one of the world’s leading forensic pathologists.