Dr. Judy Melinek, however, believes that there might be an alternative explanation. Dr. Melinek, a forensic pathologist who worked to identify victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, theorizes that the ground on which Jeannette was lying might hold the key. “The biggest problem is the lead in our soil,” Dr. Melinek says. “One question would be how much soil was in the sample taken from the victim.” In her professional opinion, a contaminated tissue sample could have led to these test results. “During the 1970s, a lot of lead got into soil from lead paint because it was only banned in 1978,” Dr. Melinek continues. “This may be a real level and background for contaminated soil in the ’70s.”
After the inconclusive autopsy, the dried and decaying clothing of Jeannette DePalma was packed up, along with her pocketbook, and returned to the Springfield Police Department. Once the clothing and pocketbook made their way back to the police station, the bizarre and arguably unprofessional decision was made to have Jeannette DePalma’s clothing hung over a large air conditioning unit on the side of the building. “They had the clothes hanging there for a good three, four days or better,” Schwerdt remembers. “I don’t know why they had them hanging there.”
“There weren’t a whole lot of brain surgeons on the job in those days,” retired Springfield lieutenant Peter Hammer says with a laugh. “You were lucky if half of us could read or write back then.”
“It was just like a clothesline with her shirt and her slacks hanging on it,” Don Schwerdt recalls. “They stunk the whole department up. It was awful. Once you see death, you don’t forget the smell.”
Ed Kisch remembers the clothing and pocketbook eventually being boxed up and sent to the New Jersey State Police’s crime lab for further forensic testing. “Normally, if you were to send clothing evidence to the state police or the FBI, they would want you to dry the clothing out,” he says. “There were maggots crawling all over Jeannette’s clothing. That was from the flesh. After awhile, it stunk. I can remember some of the officers started to scream and yell about the clothes being out there. Chief Parsell got on that bandwagon and yelled at Sam Calabrese. ‘Get those clothes out of there! They don’t belong out there!’ he said. Finally, they were moved and sent out. I never did find out if they got anything off of the clothing or the purse. By that point, the Detective Bureau was handling the case, and they weren’t very talkative.”
Don Schwerdt shares the same sentiment. “The case was not discussed with the patrol division at all. It was like it was all over. The Detective Bureau was very hush-hush back in those days, and once they handled it, the patrol division was cut out. They didn’t give us any information after that. It was all very tightlipped. They wouldn’t give us guys in the patrol division the time of day. They used to call us ‘F Troop.’” The Detective Bureau’s nickname for patrolmen such as Don Schwerdt and Ed Kisch was a rather unflattering reference to the ABC sitcom F Troop, which aired from 1965 until 1967. The series, starring Forrest Tucker, often employed slapstick humor and showcased the exploits of a group of inept United States soldiers in the late 1860s.
Back at the Springfield police station, rumors began to run rampant regarding an incident that had occurred, allegedly involving Jeannette’s detached arm.
The wife of a retired Springfield police officer who has asked not to be identified recalls being told that after Jeannette’s arm was found on Wilson Road, it was brought back to the Springfield police station and placed in the break room refrigerator. “After that, while everyone else was out in the quarry looking for the rest of the girl, some of the other officers thought it would be funny to put the arm on top of another policeman’s lunch to scare him,” she recalls with disgust.
“That rumor is the perfect example of how things tended to snowball out of proportion with this case,” Kisch says. “The arm was placed in the refrigerator in an effort to preserve it as a whole in case further testing was necessary. Why this particular fridge? It was the only one in the police department that could hold the arm, and it had limited access. The only other place would have been a morgue, and at that time, the department was using local funeral homes for autopsies. The arm’s chain of custody was no longer so important, as it actually had been removed from the crime scene by a dog and therefore had already been contaminated. We could not sign off on the chain of custody form because that chain had been broken by the dog. I can’t even answer if Ehrenberg ever conclusively said that the arm was or wasn’t Jeannette’s. It was assumed that after the rest of the body was located, and that there was an arm missing from it, that the arm in evidence and the body belonged to each other. Anyway, as far as any prank goes, that’s all bullshit. Del Tompkins, who was the juvenile officer at the time, took his lunch out of the fridge and sat down to eat it. The other guys in the break room said, ‘Whoa! Are you really gonna eat that, Del? It was in there with a friggin’ arm, for Chrissakes!’ And Del said, ‘I don’t give a shit what it was in there with, I’m hungry!’ So that’s where that story came from. No prank, just a bunch of guys busting Del’s chops.”
This would not be the last rumor to surface regarding the strange case of Jeannette DePalma, the supposed “runaway” about whom everyone in Springfield had heard and read yet no one seemed to truly know.
3
THE “RUNAWAY”
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
—Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
The young woman who would come to be known as “the girl on the mountain” was born Jeannette Christine DePalma on August 3, 1956, in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Florence, a homemaker, and Salvatore DePalma, the owner and operator of D&D Auto Salvage in Newark. Jeannette was the sixth child born to a large Italian Catholic family, which would grow to a total of seven children with the birth of her sister Cynthia the following year. The DePalma family resided in Roselle before relocating to the township of Springfield in the mid-1960s, purchasing the large house at 4 Clearview Drive for $65,000. Today, the property is valued at more than $500,000. For the DePalmas, suburban Springfield seemed like the ideal place to settle down and raise their large family.
Located in the heart of Union County, the township of Springfield was formed in the late eighteenth century, with its roots heavily planted in the American Revolution. It was during the Battle of Springfield that the iconic command of “Give ’em Watts, boys!” was bellowed by the Reverend James Caldwell. Caldwell, a Continental army chaplain, provided his soldiers with stacks of hymnals that had been published by Isaac Watts, an English theologian, to use as wadding for their guns.
A young Jeannette DePalma (center) pictured alongside her sisters Cindy and Gwendolyn. Courtesy of the DePalma family.
Several decades later, vast changes would take place that eventually transformed Springfield from the small farm town that it was into the upper-middle-class community it is today. In the 1920s, a large swamp near the geographical center of town was used as a depository for ammunition, chemicals and other leftovers from the First World War. The swamp was deemed an optimal place, as these harmful items would be out of sight from residents and nearly inaccessible, except by steam-powered railroad. This, however, did not stop the local curious youth from eventually finding their way to the depository. Those same children would eventually grow up and fight in the next world war, passing tales of the swamp’s orange water, rust-colored dirt and bubbling ground to the next generation.
During the Great Depression, the United States government formed what were known as CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camps. Able-bodied men were put to work removing the leftover World War I ammunition from the swamp. The area was filled in, and a large athletic field was built on top. The older residents of Springfield began to express deep concern about the harsh chemicals and ammunition byproducts that lay buried beneath an athletic field—a field that seemed to produce only the greenest of grass. However, the townspeople’s concerns fell on deaf ears,
and the athletic field sat untouched for years before Springfield finally decided to clean up the area.
By the early 1940s, Springfield had become the quintessential all-American town. The town’s center—which, ironically, was not positioned in the center of town—contained every pleasantry and necessity that a resident of Springfield could reasonably need. There was a hardware store, a butcher’s shop, a bakery and a malt shop, as well as the local barber, doctor and dentist. All were easily accessible via a trolley track running down the center of Morris Avenue. A large automobile repair shop was located on the far end of town, while the east end boasted an old-fashioned automobile dealer, as well as a lumberyard and the centuries-old First Presbyterian Church of Springfield. The church still casts a large shadow over Morris Avenue to this very day. Around the corner from this church is a Revolutionary War–era cemetery, along with the historic “Cannonball House,” which now houses the Springfield Historical Society. The house got its peculiar moniker after a British cannonball pierced its walls during the Battle of Springfield. The Cannonball House was one of only four homes left standing after the British retreat. The historical society continues to display the famed cannonball, and over the years that followed, several hundred more would continue to be found in the nearby Rahway River.
As the years went on, Springfield’s old wooden firehouse was moved to a new brick building, and the municipal building was constructed to look like all of the other new brick buildings that were popping up all over the Garden State. Brand-new houses began to appear on the side roads off Morris Avenue. The new homes, with their bright white façades and evergreen shutters, all seemed to resemble the popular Sears & Roebuck “Modern Home.” These predesigned houses gained prominence in the post–World War II American suburbs.
In the early 1950s, the farmers on the south end of town were selling off their land, and new developments of rather small houses on five-thousand-square-foot lots were built. By 1960, the development houses had begun to grow in size, and almost all took the shape of the popular split-level homes that were being constructed on quarter-acre lots. During this time, an ethnic change was beginning to take place in Springfield. As more and more developments were built on old farmland, the once-familiar social roles played by the north and south sides of town were now being reversed. The south side of Springfield began to fill up with families moving in from the larger cities of Manhattan and Long Island. A large portion of those families were either Italian or, in most cases, Jewish. “While there never seemed to be a seething animosity toward any ethnic group in Springfield,” Ed Cardinal recalls, “there now was a slight edge between the tightknit farming families that had once held prominence in town and the new ‘city slickers.’ The edge between the two groups rarely, if ever, warranted a fight or argument, but both sides eventually began to gravitate toward their own respective cliques. The children of the town’s farmers had the Future Farmers of America organization and farming courses at school. The Presbyterians, or ‘preppies,’ had their school functions and varsity sports. Finally, the ‘city slickers’ had their parties and dances. Despite these differences, the younger residents of Springfield all seemed to get along with each other, for the most part.”
This, unfortunately, would not be the case with some of the older townspeople. In one particular instance, a gentleman from New York City who served on Springfield’s town council told a popular New York City newspaper that Springfield was “a fine up-and-coming Jewish community.” This statement would prove to be controversial to some of Springfield’s gentile residents. “From that point on, the town council seemed to seesaw back and forth between Italian, Jewish and ‘old-time’ politicians,” Ed Cardinal continues. “For years, the town council never seemed to get things right. The fire department suffered, the police department suffered, all while realtors and lawyers bickered back and forth. People argued that the newcomers were building too many baseball fields. They complained about the newcomers wanting fancy things like sidewalks, paid fire departments and better streets. They complained that the old-timers only hired cops, firemen and town workers from the old-time families and that the newcomers only hired the lawyers from their own ranks. The bickering and lawsuits never seemed to end. It was all very ‘us against them,’ but nobody could really define who us or them really were.”
On the positive side, Springfield was beginning to garner a respectable reputation for its clean streets and parks, along with its lack of graffiti, litter or run-down areas. Springfield’s churchgoing citizens ensured that no “negative” establishments such as adult bookstores, biker bars or tattoo parlors would be allowed in town. Car washes and pinball machines were not permitted, and ordinances were passed that prevented cars on blocks, recreational vehicles or boats being housed in front yards. The residents of Springfield could also proudly boast of the township’s lack of gang activity or violence. “There were no gangs to speak of, but there were a few interesting characters in town,” Ed Cardinal says with a laugh. “There was Tilly, an extremely short and fat one-eyed woman with one huge breast. There was the lady who swept ‘moonbeams’ off of her driveway all night long, as well as the mailman who ended up living in a dumpster in Las Vegas. And then there was ‘Faaah.’ ‘Faaah’ would walk down the streets of Springfield late at night, slamming street sign after street sign with his palm, shouting ‘Faaah!’ over and over again.” Cardinal can recall even more colorful residents of Springfield. “There was the Mechanical Man, a guy that walked just like a robot all the time. Another guy would wander around town claiming to be a visitor from Mars, as well as an FBI agent. And finally, there was Tony. Tony was a little short guy in a hard hat who would stand on the side of the road with a clipboard, counting every single car that passed by him. And then there were the rest of us…”
In the mid-1960s, construction began on a series of large houses on the mountaintop located on Springfield’s west side. A new street, Mountview Road, was cut across the mountain with the sole purpose of servicing these new homes. For many years to come, Mountview Road would be known as “the new road” to the longtime residents of Springfield. The creation of this brand-new neighborhood, dubbed “Springfield Top,” meant that the fire department would need larger and faster trucks and that the police department would need more officers and more patrol vehicles. The residents of Springfield who were not fortunate enough to live in this new and affluent area soon complained about having to pay for services that benefitted only the new residents. With their purchase of 4 Clearview Drive, the DePalma family instantly became one of the many new mountaintop residents for whom the original townsfolk held a special level of disdain.
As if this were not enough, further attention was drawn to the DePalmas due to what many perceived as strange behavior. Several Springfield residents recall the family rarely leaving their home, and when they did, they seldom spoke with neighbors. In a close-knit community like Springfield, families that kept to themselves could expect to have suspicious eyes laid on them. “Something wasn’t 100 percent with that family,” recalls a former acquaintance of the DePalmas. “They were weird.”
Ed Kisch remembers being called to the DePalma residence several times in the early 1970s. “Sal and Florence would get into a fight, someone would call us and, by the time we got there, Florence would turn us away. She’d say things like, ‘Well, there was a problem, but now there’s not.’ We were constantly getting called up to that house on Clearview Drive.”
The former DePalma home at 4 Clearview Drive in Springfield. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
Racheal Sajeski confirms Kisch’s account of these events. “My grandpa Sal was rotten to my grandmother,” she recalls.
Once she grew into adolescence, Jeannette, the second-youngest daughter of the DePalma family, found herself the focus of local gossip. Margaret Bandrowski, now a Springfield Township committeewoman, taught at Union Catholic Regional High School in the 1970s when Jeannette was a student. Bandrowski can recall being privy to the hear
say surrounding the young pupil. “I knew who she was, but I did not know her,” she says. “Judging by what I heard from other students, Jeannette was a little on the wild side. Now, I don’t exactly know the specifics of what ‘wild’ necessarily meant for her, but in those days, it usually connoted that she hung around with boys, maybe did some drugs or smoked. Stuff like that.” Bandrowski admits that these connotations seem pretty tame by today’s standards. “You must remember that this was a different era,” she muses. “I don’t think ‘wild’ meant anything other than that Jeannette was not the perfect Christian child that her mother believed her to be. I have no reason to think the girl did anything more than experiment with drugs of some kind, and that may not have gone much beyond anything other kids were doing at that time.”
Roy Simpson, a former resident of nearby Mountainside, remembers being privy to neighborhood rumors regarding Jeannette’s alleged “wild” behavior when he was a child. “She was supposedly promiscuous,” he says. “That was the talk at the time. We didn’t really hear too much about drugs. Mind you, I was only about eleven at the time, but we would mostly hear of the sisters’ promiscuity.”
“Back at the station, we used to call Jeannette ‘Party Girl,’” Kisch recalls. “I can recall quite a few instances where I had to pull that kid out of the backseat of some guy’s car over at Briant Park.” Located only one mile away from the Houdaille Quarry, Springfield’s Briant Park was a popular lovers’ lane in the early 1970s.
Jeannette DePalma as a student at Union Catholic Regional High School in 1970. Courtesy of Union Catholic Regional High School.
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 4