Death on the Devil’s Teeth

by Pollack, Jesse P.

  “They were the black sheep family of Springfield,” Roy Simpson says. “This is innuendo from what the neighborhood talk was at the time, but they were considered to be kind of a tough family. The girls were always kind of considered to be a little bit more on the sleazy side, which is a terrible thing to say, but that was the gossip in the area at the time.”

  Mary Starr agrees with this gossip. “Jeannette dated a lot,” she says. “I would definitely say that she was a wild child. I remember there being a series of boyfriends. We would see cars coming up the street for Jeannette and Gwendolyn. They all smoked cigarettes and things like that. I think Jeannette was more into experimentation than a lot of the other kids in high school.”

  Gail Donohue, however, downplays the rumors regarding her best friend’s supposed promiscuity. “I know she liked to kiss,” she says. “But in that day and age, it was first base, maybe second, and that was it. She was a virgin.”

  “I didn’t find out until much later after the incident, but I had heard that Jeannette had gotten religious toward the end,” Simpson continues. “What we in the neighborhood remember is her wild side. I can tell you firsthand that we never saw the religious side of her or heard anything about it during the time that this all was happening. None of us remember that part of it. I didn’t even hear about it until years and years afterward when I actually read it somewhere. It was not common knowledge in the neighborhood. The DePalma family was always kind of looked at as a tough, hard-nosed kind of family.”

  In 2004, a man who identified himself simply as “Rich” granted an interview to Weird NJ magazine. During the course of that interview, Rich spoke at length about Jeannette and the services that the DePalma family attended at the Assemblies of God Evangel Church in Elizabeth: “It was a very weird church [Jeannette] went to. My friend met her at a high school dance. He kind of fell head over heels for her. She was really cute. He said, ‘When can I see you again?’ And she said, ‘My parents are very strict; the only way you can see me is if you come to church with me.’ She was a really cute girl, a girl that guys would really like, and she had a really charming way about her. She was kind of a little bit of a wild girl. I don’t think she was so religious so much as she was dragged by her parents to church. She was a girl who was just very rebellious. She didn’t want to be dragged to that church three times a week. It wasn’t just a Sunday service.”

  Cindy DePalma refutes that notion. “We were not forced,” she insists.

  Gail Donohue, however, agrees with Rich’s assessment. “I felt like she was pressured,” she says. “I remember being down the shore with Jeannette about two weeks before she vanished. We were down at Wildwood for my birthday, and in order for Jeannette and I to be able to go out on the boardwalk and play some games and look for some boys, we had to tell their parents that we were going out to ‘witness.’ Now, I’m a lapsed Roman Catholic, so I didn’t know anything about this stuff. That was the lie that we told her parents. We said we were handing out the Bible and stuff. I know she felt pressured about the witnessing thing. I mean, here we are at sixteen years old on the boardwalk distributing these witnessing pamphlets. I knew nothing about this stuff.”

  Rich continued his interview with Weird NJ magazine by saying the following:

  [My friend] was so smitten with her that he did go to church with her. [He] came back and told us and said, “Hey, go to this service, it’s really wild. And besides, the chicks running around are really cute.” So, that’s why we went. It was a really wild Pentecostal, really intense service she went to. Faith healing, all that stuff went on in that church. I would say that I knew Jeannette for about four months before she died. All of us got to know her and the church pretty well. There were several unusual things about it. It was a church in the middle of Elizabeth, which is a rundown area, yet all the people in the church were very white collar, from Springfield, Summit; very white in a lower economic area. Most Pentecostals are from down south or black. We stuck out like a sore thumb. We looked like the Rolling Stones in the back of a white collar Pentecostal church. Most upper class people do not become Pentecostals. White upper middle class people, they usually go to those conservative churches, like Methodists and Catholic. But what were all these guys? Well-heeled people sitting with their kids in the middle of Elizabeth, listening to miracle services and getting very involved with it.

  The services were electrifying. My friends and I sat there in the services half the time with our jaws dropped. [My friends and I] were all Catholics. You know the way the Catholic mass is; the Catholic priest is not very demonstrative. We were sitting in this church, and all kinds of weird, and heavy, heavy hellfire and brimstone preaching. And the people that went there kind of had a glassy-eyed look, now that I look back on it.

  This was around ’72, and me and my friends were kind of long-haired hippies, trying to get after the girls in the church, and that’s why we were there. But what we saw when we were there, it was really weird. Honest to God, I didn’t know if we were watching something holy or demonic.

  Imagine being a kid who’s ten, eleven years old, and a lot of the kids were, and like I said, they were all white, middle class, with their parents. They’re hearing preaching that would scare the bejesus out of you. The preacher was up there like, “If you don’t accept Jesus as your savior, you’ll burn in eternal hell. The smoke of your torment will go up forever!” That kind of stuff. Electrifying! This was no Catholic service. This was a real Pentecostal, wild demons getting thrown out of people. The pastor would touch his hand on somebody’s forehead and you’d hear like a growl of a demon coming out of a guy. And then he would fall down and say, “Oh my God, I’ve been delivered! Satan is out of me!” That kind of stuff. A lot of churches have “accept Christ as your savior,” and there’s nothing wrong with that, but this was a step beyond. People were talking in tongues, and they used to try and preach to me and my friends all the time, yet they had this glassy-eyed kind of farawayness. Kind of like the way Moonies might be perceived.

  We just had a bad feeling in that church, although at that time I didn’t recognize it. At this time, when I was only nineteen, I didn’t put all these pieces together. But, I’m thinking, “Man, that was a weird situation Jeannette was in when this happened.” I didn’t think anything so Christian could have ties to Satanism. But, I was studying the Bible for years, and there are those denominations where you just don’t know if you’re seeing the work of Christ or of the Devil.

  If I was talking to a detective, I’d say, “Look in the direction of that church, it was weird,” and if I was a detective myself, I would actually look at who was the pastor in the 1970s and what happened to him. The weirdest feeling I have is that maybe that had something to do with such a bizarre death. And she was such a pure type in a lot of ways, she would be somebody that Satanic people would go after.

  Jeannette’s nephew John Bancey was interviewed for the same issue of Weird NJ magazine. During his interview, Bancey criticized Rich’s assessment of the then Reverend Tate’s church. “I’ve been there many times,” Bancey told Weird NJ. “It was Evangelical. It had youth groups. You could trust people. We’d go to youth groups and stuff like that. They’d have the big sermon on Sunday. My grandfather was a big contributor to the church.” Bancey, in particular, refuted Rich’s notion of the Assemblies of God Evangel Church practicing faith healing. “That’s a whole different class. You’re talking about like the Pentecostal Holiness Church. They do weird stuff. This is more like a Baptist church.” While Bancey refuted Rich’s memories of the church having Pentecostal qualities, he did acknowledge the then Reverend Tate’s sometimes damning sermons. “Well yeah, it’s like ‘You’ll burn…’ and stuff like that, but it was a very mellow church.”

  Another parishioner, Joseph Cosentino,* remembers Tate’s animated style of preaching, but his recollections tend to give more corroboration to Rich’s account than John Bancey’s. “There was nothing mellow about it,” Cosentino says. “This wa
s a big church. It was like Benny Hinn. They used to bring in guest pastors and all this kind of crap. They’d yell and scream and jump up and down. There was faith healing and speaking in tongues. They did that all the time. Tongues, faith healing, baptisms, demon castings, lots of people giving their lives and 10 percent of their earnings to Jesus. It was quite the show, really. I never thought of it as evil or anything—just a really overblown, weird church. Looking back, it was like some of the parishioners were almost using their daughters to get young guys to come to the church and give money to it. Kind of odd when you think about it—an outreach program from a church full of rich people comes into an inner-city park to recruit a bunch of drug-soaked heads? Most of us had money for pot and LSD, but church? Not to be anything other than honest, they did have some fine-looking daughters, but most people from their neighborhoods would be appalled to have any of us show up at their own church. I remember thinking that was a little odd at the time. I hung around that church long enough to know what a load of shit it was and got out of there pretty quick. After a while, I just asked myself what the hell I was doing there. It was not anything that I believed in. I don’t know about corruption or who was pocketing the money, but the whole thing wasn’t like a Christian church. It was evangelistic. I went there for about three or four months. I saw the hypocrisy, and I had to walk away from it. It was just one of those places where a lot of rich people went. They all tried to out-rich each other. Their idea of doing good was donating money when Pastor Tate needed a new van. I thought it was silly. These people didn’t believe in God; they believed in getting people’s money. The whole thing was a show. I decided that if I wanted to see a show, I was going to pay ten bucks to see Led Zeppelin instead of watching Pastor Tate get up there, getting all sweaty and excited about some bullshit that I didn’t even believe in. I didn’t come from a rich family or anything like that. I grew up in Newark—a shithole. The last few months that I was there, I would just stop in every now and then just to say hi to some friends I had there.”

  During his short time attending services at the Assemblies of God Evangel Church, Cosentino became acquainted with the DePalma family. “I knew Jeannette and her sisters Cindy and Gwendolyn. I knew her mom and dad, too, actually. I had dinner over their house a couple of times. I hadn’t seen Jeannette for probably a year prior to her death. By then, I was completely out of that whole scene.” Cosentino has since heard of Jeannette’s reputation of being a “wild child” but disputes its accuracy. “If Jeannette was ‘wild,’ I knew nothing about that,” he insists. “Cindy and Gwendolyn were both pretty hard, but Jeannette was definitely not like that at all. She was their sister, and you could tell that they were similar in a lot of ways, but she was pretty sweet.”

  By 1972, the term “Jesus freak” had become a household name in America, and by Lisa Treich Greulich’s own account, she and her cousin Jeannette had become full-fledged Jesus freaks themselves. Pastor Tate, however, does not share this sentiment.

  “Jeannette attended services, but I don’t think I could say that her interests were really in Jesus so much as her involvement in the occult,” Tate says. “She was definitely involved with some occult things. It’s so strange that she wanted to be involved with that, especially when her family was getting so involved with the Lord. Knowing her, it probably was an act of rebellion. She was a very rebellious girl.”

  Cindy DePalma, however, denies Pastor Tate’s allegations of Jeannette being involved in occult activity. “There were no witchcraft books,” she maintains. “Jeannette and I were afraid of the devil. I don’t remember any strange books being found at all.”

  Jeannette, Cindy and Gwendolyn DePalma, circa 1970. Courtesy of the DePalma family.

  Gail Donohue also doubts the veracity of Pastor Tate’s claims. “I don’t remember Jeannette ever having an interest in the occult,” she says. “You know, but at that age, it’s possible because kids like spooky stuff at slumber parties and all that kind of stuff. I remember being at a slumber party, and my friends were having a séance, trying to bring Mary Jo Kopechne back from the dead. Her parents lived right down the road from me in Berkeley Heights. We all lit candles and held hands. We didn’t use a Ouija board or anything. I was scared to death of Ouija boards. My father had bought me a witchcraft book, but it was so over my head, I couldn’t understand it anyway. He would buy me anything to keep me reading if he saw my interests going in certain directions.”

  In addition, Lisa Treich Greulich refutes Pastor Tate’s account of her cousin’s supposed dark interests but has an idea of where his story may have originated. “My grandmother found Jeannette’s diary, not a book on witches or Satanism or anything,” Lisa maintains. “Jeannette wrote in her diary that she was going to stop smoking weed and give her herself to Jesus.” When asked how Florence DePalma reacted to her daughter’s diary entry, Lisa says, “My grandmother had to have known. It was no secret that Jeannette smoked pot. Either way, there were no Satanism or witchcraft books. Jeannette was never into anything like that.”

  This would not be the last time that a supposed diary of Jeannette’s would be at the center of controversy. According to Gail Donohue, Florence DePalma paid her family a visit shortly after Jeannette was found dead. Upon opening the door to his comfortable Berkeley Heights home, Gail’s father immediately noticed a book in Mrs. DePalma’s hand. She told Mr. Donohue that it was Jeannette’s diary and that she wished to discuss a few disturbing entries with him and his wife. Gail’s father agreed and let her inside. “Mrs. DePalma sat down on our couch with her funky glasses on and started to read from the diary,” Gail recalls. “My parents then sent me away because Mrs. DePalma wanted to talk to them privately. I would say that they all spoke to each other for somewhere around forty-five minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes. After Mrs. DePalma left, my dad came upstairs into my room and had a talk with me. I was writing creatively around the time, and he asked me if Jeannette ever did the same. He wanted to know if she ever exaggerated, or made up stories or wrote creatively, and I said, ‘No, I don’t think Jeannette even liked to read, let alone write.’ I think my parents must have been pretty shocked by whatever was supposedly in Jeannette’s diary. I didn’t even know she had a darn diary, and I was her best friend! The whole thing blew my mind. It made me feel like I never even knew her.”

  Despite their apprehension regarding this supposed diary of Jeannette’s, the Donohue family had other, more troubling concerns. “Given Mrs. DePalma’s state of mind and how far out she was, my father did not want me to take any phone calls or have any contact with the DePalma family whatsoever,” Gail recalls. “If they did try to contact me, my father wanted me to get ahold of him immediately. So whatever Mrs. DePalma told him that night made him fear for me. He said something to the effect of ‘She’s so far out there, Gail. I don’t want her thinking that maybe she could take it upon herself to have you join her daughter.’ Something happened between the two of them that scared him, and he was not a man to be scared. He honestly thought that she might do something to me. He thought I’d end up dead. She must have come off as a crazy person. My father was not a stupid man. He was very conservative. I used to have to throw my blue jeans out my window and sneak them onto the bus so I could wear jeans in school like the other kids. That’s how conservative he was.”

  What was supposedly written in this alleged diary of Jeannette’s is most likely lost to history. According to Gail Donohue, her father never revealed to her what Florence DePalma read out loud in their living room that night, and Jeannette’s closest sibling, Cindy, has no recollections of her own. “Jeannette kept a diary,” she says. “I don’t know if I ever saw it, but if I did, I don’t remember what it said.”

  Another tale regarding Jeannette DePalma’s diary comes from Brian Paulson,* a former resident of Springfield. “My sister was dating Nick Zavolas, the older brother of two twin girls that were in my class,” Paulson recalls. “My sister Christine* came home from school one day somewhat wo
rried. She told our mother that Nick was interviewed by the Springfield Police Department because he was mentioned in Jeannette’s diary. Apparently, Jeannette had a crush on Nick and was actually not too happy that he was dating my sister. I don’t remember if the police spoke with my sister at all, and I seem to recall that they only spoke to Nick once or twice and then that was it. My sister has flat-out refused to talk about this.”

  We reached out to Nick Zavolas, who was absolutely confused by Paulson’s claims. “Christine Paulson was in my grade, but we never dated. I also do, in fact, have two sisters that went to school with her brother Brian, but I was never questioned by the police about Jeannette DePalma, and I never heard that my name appeared in her diary.” Zavolas does not know why, but he feels that either Brian or Christine Paulson might have confused him with a close friend. “A good friend of mine did date Christine for a long while. His name was Joseph Fantozzi. I’m wondering if Brian got the two of us mixed up. I don’t know if Joseph was ever questioned by the police regarding Jeannette or anything, but I know that he did date Christine. Joseph is no longer with us, though.”

  If Christine Paulson is correct in stating that detectives from the Springfield Police Department were actively questioning friends and acquaintances of Jeannette due to being mentioned in her diary, one can assume that the Springfield Police Department had Jeannette’s diary in its possession—most likely catalogued as evidence for its investigation. If that were true, one is left to wonder what Florence DePalma brought to the Donohue residence if Jeannette’s real diary was actually in the possession of the Springfield Police Department at that time. The answer to this question may never be known. Florence DePalma likely took this information to her grave.