Death on the Devil’s Teeth

by Pollack, Jesse P.

  Jeannette’s older sister Darlene Bancey also recalled being told of Donna Bladis’s suspected involvement in her sister’s death when she spoke with us. “I had heard rumors that she died at party at Donna Bladis’s house,” she said. “But I don’t know if those rumors are true or not.”

  Denise Parker,* a childhood friend of Donna Bladis, also remembers hearing these rumors. “They say that Jeannette went to a party at Donna Bladis’s house,” Parker recalls. “Donna always had people at her house twenty-four/seven, but there was no party that particular day. Jeannette just went to Donna’s house because everybody would go to there to hang out. She figured that she could probably get Donna to give her a ride, but Donna was grounded. She was always grounded,” Parker laughs. “But everybody knows that she was at Donna Bladis’s house last.”

  When asked if the Springfield Police Department ever followed up on these rumors, Ed Kisch replies, “You couldn’t get near these people if you had questions or suspicions. The only difference between the Bladis family and a group of mobsters was the fact that they actually ran a legitimate business. If the Springfield cops went to the Mountainside cops and wanted to find out about the party that supposedly happened on the night that the DePalma kid went missing, they weren’t going to find anything out. Cops had friends, and they protected these friends. The Bladises were constantly buying dinner for the chief of police over in Mountainside. They had political connections, as well.”

  Out of all of the theories that he has heard over the years, Ed Kisch believes that the Bladis theory is the one that is most rooted in truth. “I am 90 percent sure that something happened to Jeannette in that house. There are some people who blame Mark Bladis.”

  A since-deleted post made by an anonymous user on an online message board contained quite a contentious claim: “Mark Bladis told me that he was with Jeannette DePalma the night that she died.” A posting this vague could be taken any number of ways—an admission of guilt in the murder of a teenage girl or perhaps a comment made in passing that was wildly taken out of context. After all, if Jeannette DePalma did stop by the Bladis house on August 7, 1972, and Mark Bladis was home, he then truly was with Jeannette on the day that she died. Would it be reasonable, under those circumstances alone, to suspect Mark Bladis of any wrongdoing in relation to Jeannette? Absolutely not. However, Ed Kisch remains unconvinced. He cites recent comments made to him in private by an investigator with the Union County Prosecutor’s Office.

  “Vincent Byron believes that Mark Bladis knew something about Jeannette’s death,” Kisch says. “Byron did get his nose into that case because he got hired by Union County to specifically work cold cases. A source that I had told me specifically that, as far as the Union County Prosecutor’s Office is concerned, that case is closed—dead—and the person most likely responsible for her death is dead, and there were references made to Mark Bladis. Like I said before, I am almost positive that Jeannette overdosed on something during a party at that house. Some kids probably panicked, and then they dumped her in the quarry.”

  Ed Cardinal and Donald Schwerdt, however, do not see this as being logistically feasible. “It would be nearly impossible for someone to carry her up there if she was dead weight,” Cardinal insists, citing the steep hill that investigators had to climb in order to reach Jeannette DePalma’s body. “I can’t imagine carrying a body up that hill. In fact, some of the cops told us that they could not even climb the hill with the aid of equipment.”

  When asked if he believes that a group of teenagers could have kept a secret like that for over four decades, Ed Kisch replies, “Oh, hell yeah! Before I retired, I put in twenty years as a juvenile officer, and let me tell you something—kids keep the best secrets there are.”

  Gail Donohue, however, does not take stock in such theories. “If there was a party, I would have known about it or Jeannette would have told me about it,” she insists. “I don’t remember us going to a lot of parties. We used to go to dances at high schools. If Jeannette and I went out for a night, there would be no parties involved. It would be dances at places like Scotch Plains High School or Summit High School, or something like that. I think the Bladis theory is stupid. Jeannette and I hadn’t been over the Bladises’ in quite a while.”

  Authors Mark Moran and Jesse P. Pollack in 2014 on the Mountview Road side of the base of the Devil’s Teeth cliff. Photo by Doyle Argene.

  “I don’t think it was a dump job,” Schwerdt says. “I personally think there was some kind of a party going on there and something happened, and whoever was there with her panicked and left her there, and to this day, nobody knows really what happened. Well, one person does…”

  The “dump job” theories make little sense to Peter Hammer, too. “I don’t think she was dumped there, but at the same time, she had no reason to be inside of that quarry,” he says. “It’s all so strange. I mean, she didn’t just drop out of the sky either!”

  Like many of Jeannette’s peers who were interviewed for this book, Ed Kisch does not acknowledge the Houdaille Quarry as being a popular party spot for teenagers in the early 1970s. “At that time, the kids partied on Baltusrol Golf Course at nights and on weekends,” he says. “They had some humongous parties out on the golf course. Whether Jeannette DePalma was part of that scene or not, I don’t know, but I do remember some of these things could be funny on a Friday night. Don Schwerdt and I were working together, and we got a call from some of the people that lived in Mountainside about some noise coming from the golf course. So we hooked up behind the clubhouse, and we knew there was a party going on out there. So when we both drove out in our cars, we drove out with no lights on. When we got to the area where we knew that the kids would be partying, we then turned on our lights at the last minute while we were driving down the fairway. I’ve got to tell you, these kids were asshole and elbow all over the place. There had to be fifty kids or more up there. There were more than twenty-four cases of beer up there. There were more than five or six bottles of Jack Daniels. There were shirts, there were pants, there were bras, there were panties. I’m looking at Don, and he’s looking at me. We can hear these kids scurrying through the brush. I commented to him, ‘Oh well, this ought to be interesting how some of these girls are going to get out of here!’ So that’s where the major partying took place, not too far from where Jeannette lived.”

  Abandoned equipment in the woods surrounding the Houdaille Quarry. Photo by Doyle Argene.

  It may never be known for certain whether there was, in fact, a party at the Bladis home on the evening of August 7, 1972. If there was, no one has come forward claiming to have attended such a party at the time of this book’s writing. The late Donna Bladis’s husband, John Rosenski, maintains that there “was no party at the Bladis home the day that Jeannette stopped by uninvited.” Mark Bladis died in 1988, taking any secrets he might have held to the grave, and Richard Bladis did not respond to our requests for comment.

  Sometime late in the evening on August 7, Florence and Salvatore DePalma began to feel uneasy. Their daughter certainly should have been home from work by then, and if she was going to be late, she would have called. It was not long before the two gave in to their shared anxiety and began telephoning the homes of several of Jeannette’s friends.

  Not a single person that the DePalmas reached out to had seen or heard from Jeannette. Florence and Salvatore now began to entertain their worst fears. They decided that it was time to contact the authorities. Once Jeannette’s parents got on the phone with the Springfield Police Department, they were shocked and frustrated to learn that it would be a further twenty-four hours before their daughter could be officially listed as missing.

  “It was strange how runaway situations were not handled the same way back then as they are today,” Ed Kisch says. “Back then, runaways did not garner much attention because they left willingly, and running away from home was not a criminal offense. You know, you put the stuff out on the teletype, but did you really look for them? No.
Locally, you would beat the bushes a little bit, but if you didn’t come up with anything, sooner or later, these kids wound up coming back home. At the most, you would refer them to counseling. It was no major thing.”

  All the DePalmas could do now was wait.

  According to several Springfield Police Department retirees, Florence and Salvatore claimed that Jeannette had run away when the two reported their daughter missing.

  “When she was reported missing, everybody thought that she had run away,” Don Schwerdt recalls. While preparing Jeannette’s missing person report, members of the Springfield Police Department began to take note of the DePalmas’ short and vague answers to officers’ questions. “There was talk in the stationhouse that they weren’t very cooperative,” Schwerdt says. “It was like, ‘Let’s keep this quiet and not be out in the public with it.’ That was my opinion, and that’s the opinion that most of the guys in the police station had. The family didn’t really come out right away and give any interviews or anything—as far as I know, at least.” Florence and Salvatore’s perceived lack of cooperation was not enough for the two to be formally considered suspects in their daughter’s disappearance. In recent years, the practice of immediately placing suspicion on the parents of a missing or murdered child is much more commonplace, a notable example being the 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey.

  Numerous residents of Springfield and nearby Mountainside also maintain being told that Jeannette had run away from home.

  William Nelson, a former Mountainside resident who lived only two blocks away from the DePalmas, remembers the rumors surrounding Jeannette’s disappearance. “It was my understanding that Jeannette just ran away,” Nelson says. “You know, something might have happened like a family argument or a disagreement, and off she went. But there wasn’t a whole lot said about it because it was just another kid who had run away, and hopefully she would come back, you know? It wasn’t much ado about nothing; it was just another kid in the neighborhood ran away.”

  Mary Starr was also privy to this neighborhood gossip. “I did hear the rumor that Jeannette was running away,” she recalls. “Jeannette would not have surprised me if she had run away from home. Jeannette would have been more inclined to go against her parents, I think.”

  During his 2004 interview with Weird NJ magazine, Jeannette’s friend Rich recalled an incident that took place sometime between Jeannette’s disappearance and the eventual discovery of her body. Rich claimed to have been told by Salvatore DePalma that his daughter had, in fact, run away from home during this period of time:

  I was not at all surprised when her father told me that Jeannette ran away. She was just that type…they said she didn’t take any of her clothes, so the parents were very concerned. She was gone two weeks already when we went up to the door to get her. My friend wanted to see her. He thought she was mad at him. “Why didn’t Jeannette call me?” he wondered and he said, “Let’s go up to Springfield to her house and try to get her outside to go for a ride away from her parents.” So we went up there. Five of us in the car on a Sunday. And he says, “Rich will you go up to the door for me? Because I think she’s mad at me, but they all know you.” So I said, “Sure, I’ll go up to the door.” It was an upper middle class house in Springfield. The parents were at the door, and I says, “Is Jeannette here?” And they says, “No, Jeannette hasn’t been here for two weeks, we think she ran away.” And at this point she was missing but no one knew what happened to her.

  Jeannette DePalma in 1972. On the right is her sister Darlene Bancey. Courtesy of the DePalma family.

  Florence and Salvatore DePalma made no reference to Jeannette’s having run away during several interviews that they gave to the Elizabeth Daily Journal and the Newark Star-Ledger, each time insisting that their daughter had simply left home to visit her friend in Berkeley Heights. After several days had gone by with no word from Jeannette or the Springfield Police Department, the DePalmas decided to coordinate a search of their own.

  Darlene Bancey recalled being told by her mother that Jeannette had “left to go to the movies and never came home.” Bancey immediately lent herself to the search effort.

  In 2004, John Bancey discussed with Weird NJ his recollections of accompanying his mother to New York City to look for Jeannette:

  I was probably about four and a half, five years old. I still remember what happened. It was in the summer, but they obviously didn’t tell me what was going on. Sometime in August. Right before my birthday. In September, before they found her body, we went to New York, we were looking for my aunt. We went all over the place. There were still a lot of hippies and everything. So we searched, and my mother, all the sisters, they handed out flyers, nobody knew what happened. I just remember them saying that she wasn’t coming home. I didn’t know what was going on at the time, until I was a little older.

  The DePalma family’s reason for believing that Jeannette had run away to New York City remains unclear. Today, Gail Donohue believes that it was merely guesswork on behalf of her best friend’s family. “If you think about it, going back over thirty years, if you’re a suburbanite girl, and if you’re going to run away—I mean, girls from the Midwest run away to New York City all the time. So, I think that was probably a general assumption.”

  This “general assumption,” by one means or another, made its way to the Detective Bureau of the Springfield Police Department. “When the Springfield Police interviewed me, they were treating it as a runaway situation,” Gail Donohue recalls. “They treated it as a runaway situation so much that, after a while, I was convinced that Jeannette was hiding or living in New York City somewhere and that I would hear from her sometime. The detectives had me convinced of that. Cindy DePalma literally hit me at the Summit train station because she believed that I knew where Jeannette was. The whole time she was missing, I was just thinking, ‘Damn, Jeannette! Contact me somehow, please, so I can at least get your sister off my back,’ you know? Initially, for the first two weeks, I told the detectives, ‘You guys are wrong. If she had run away, I would have known about it. Something happened to her.’ It was the constant badgering from the detectives that led me to finally accept that she ran away. Now, I can see why interrogations sometimes end with false confessions. If you’re told something often enough, you start to believe it.”

  While Florence, Salvatore and Darlene focused their efforts on locating Jeannette in New York City, Carole DePalma searched closer to home. “My sister Carole walked through the reservation across from Summit Road, looking for Jeannette,” Cindy DePalma recalls. “She never said why she felt this way, but she had this feeling that Jeannette might be there.”

  Once it became apparent that Jeannette was not going to turn up alive in New York City, Springfield’s Detective Bureau began to suspect foul play. It was not long before detectives began to set their sights on members of Jeannette’s inner circle. “I know that the Springfield Police Department considered one of Jeannette and I’s [sic] friends to be a suspect,” Gail Donohue says. “His name was Louis. I don’t remember his last name, but he lived right at the bottom of Baltusrol Golf Course in Springfield. He was really into music before his time. Jeannette and I would go over to his house and listen to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. I think he was probably considered a suspect because he was a nonconformist. He was into heavy metal. He had long hair. I always thought he was a sweet guy, and he was always kind to me, but I think he may have had a couple of juvenile priors. I do remember talking to him and him saying, ‘Good God, Gail! They accused me of killing Jeannette!’ They hardcore interrogated him down at the police station.”

  Despite the investigation into the guilt or innocence of Jeannette and Gail’s peers, members of Springfield’s Detective Bureau apparently failed to locate or interrogate any of the missing teenager’s love interests. “I don’t even believe that the Springfield Police Department ever checked into, found or interviewed any boyfriends that she might have had,” says Ed Kisch. “I couldn�
��t even tell you if the Springfield Police Department, at the time, even knew if she had a boyfriend, which I know she did.” Although Kisch claims to have known that Jeannette was seeing someone at the time of her disappearance, he did not know this boyfriend’s name. “The only person who might be able to tell you that would be Sam Calabrese,” he says.

  We contacted Sam Calabrese in June 2012. During this initial contact, the now-retired Calabrese expressed a willingness to discuss the DePalma case for this book, but “only in person” and only after he knew exactly what our research would entail. If those conditions could be met, Calabrese said, he would agree to discuss Jeannette and the investigation into her death. After providing the retired detective with detailed information regarding our research and receiving an answer in the affirmative regarding meeting in person, Sam Calabrese ceased all contact with us. Two and a half years’ worth of letters, phone calls and e-mails would go completely unanswered.

  “That’s Sam’s nature,” says Ed Kisch. “He does not know you, and he does not know what you’re doing. Listen, if you were a newspaper reporter, and you came into the Springfield Police Department and you wanted some information, we, as detectives, had the right, through the chief of police, to release information as long as he knew what we were releasing to the newspapers. This way, the chief wouldn’t be blindsided because we released something that maybe we shouldn’t have released. So, if the reporters came in on any type of a case, we could, if we wanted to, give them information. There would be some reporters that would come in and would be very pushy. Guess where they wound up. They wound up out the door. There would be other reporters that would come in and could write good articles, and they would be fed a lot of information. I can you tell personally that if a reporter came in and wanted some information, I would ask them if they would hold off writing their story for a couple of days. They would say, ‘No, I don’t want to wait that long.’ I’d say, ‘Good! Get the fuck out the door! I’m not talking to you.’ They would say, ‘You can’t do that to me!’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I can; you’re coming to me! I’m going to give you information, but I can’t give it to you right now. You want a story? Come back. Please.’ They’d say, ‘Nope. I want it now,’ and I’d tell them, ‘Get the fuck out. You’ll never get another story from me again.’ Then, of course, two days later, they’d call up or come in and apologize, and everything would be fine. There was a lot of stuff that was never released. In other words, the reporters couldn’t push for it because that was stuff that was part of a criminal investigation. That was not public information at that time. Now, you have to remember that there are only certain things that are released to the public—automobile accidents, pedestrian accidents, fires, burglaries, et cetera. Very few stories were released. Sam himself released a lot of information to the newspapers, but we could never release the information in our names. The information was released in the name of the chief of police. In other words, there were standing orders. If it was a co-investigation, and the prosecutor’s office was involved, we would have to say that we were sorry but we were not allowed to give out any public information and that they would have to contact the prosecutor of Union County for any public releases.”