Death on the Devil’s Teeth

by Pollack, Jesse P.

  For decades, many believed that Jeannette’s unannounced appearance at the Bladis home was the last time she was seen alive. This would have been the case were it not for a recent revelation by Jeannette’s friend Rosanne, who claims to have seen Jeannette walking down Summit Road in Mountainside sometime after her disappearance.

  “I don’t remember how long she had been missing for when I believe I saw her,” Rosanne says. “But it was a very profound experience for me. It was later on in the afternoon, maybe even early evening. I remember it was definitely still light out. I was sitting outside on a chair in front of our house on Summit Road, watching the cars go by. I think this was either before dinnertime or right after we cleaned up from dinner. I remember seeing a beige, four-door car turn onto Wyoming Drive and then stop. It looked like an Impala or an older Monte Carlo. I did not see anyone get out of the car, but I think I assumed that the girl who I saw walking toward me from that area moments later came from that car. I really didn’t think much more of it until the girl got closer to me. Once I got a better look at her, I immediately thought that it was Jeannette. I can recall my heart beating fast. I stood up, moved the chair and tried to decide whether or not I should run inside my house or try to get a better look at this girl as she approached closer and closer. Although she was walking on the other side of the street the entire time, I wanted to keep my eyes on her. With my heart racing, I tried to muster up some bravery and call out her name. I wanted to see her face when she turned to see who called out, so I yelled out, ‘Jeannette, Jeannette!’ But here’s the thing: she never flinched. Not one bit. She kept her head down, almost hiding in the long dark hair that was just hanging there. She was wearing jeans and, I think, a hooded sweatshirt. I can’t remember if the hood was up. If it was, the hood would’ve been a dark color. Maybe dark blue. Either way, she had dark hair and was definitely not wearing a light or brightly colored shirt or top. She was walking quickly, and she did not acknowledge me whatsoever.

  “As she continued down Summit Road, now passing Saw Mill Road, I knew I had to do something before she was out of my sight. I ran inside, ran upstairs and yelled for my sister. Nothing. So I ran outside to the screened-in back patio where we ate summer dinners and babbled everything I had just seen to my parents. We ran through the house and out the front door…could not see her anymore. She was already too far away. Of course, there were tons of trees, cars and homes that clearly could have obstructed our view. Today, I would have jumped in my car to catch up and find her while dialing 911, but back then, I recall being frightened and just trying to make sense of what I saw. As for my parents, we were a family of nine, very Catholic, and I was their twelve-year-old daughter running through the house saying I saw Jeannette, the missing friend of their eldest daughter. The same missing friend who was linked to witchcraft, Ouija boards and dark stuff like that.

  “I remember asking myself why this girl had ignored me. If she wasn’t Jeannette, was it not odd that she had failed to turn her head and look my way as I yelled out a girl’s name two or three times? I think it was not much longer that the news broke about Jeannette’s remains being found. Kids in the neighborhood were talking about using a Ouija board to ask Jeannette what had happened to her. It was a fad at the time, I think.

  “Today, as a parent, I cannot even imagine how horrific this must have been for Jeannette’s family and how frightening for families like my own who had lived this tragedy back then. Our town of Mountainside, as well as the neighboring towns of Springfield and Westfield, had some awful crime cases now that I think of it. And yet, these towns were beautiful, filled with many caring families and wonderful memories as well.”

  While Rosanne’s story is certainly compelling, many aspects of Jeannette’s disappearance and subsequent discovery do not lend themselves to her account. For one, aside from this single occurrence, no one has ever come forward claiming to have seen or heard from Jeannette after midday on August 7. Another issue is the fact that Jeannette’s remains were found clad in the same outfit that she was wearing when she left home on the day she vanished. The outfit Rosanne describes does not match the description of the clothing Jeannette left home wearing. The final matter of contention involves Rosanne’s claim that this sighting of Jeannette occurred shortly before the discovery of her body. It is universally agreed among those who were on-site at the Houdaille Quarry on September 19, 1972, that Jeannette’s corpse had decomposed to the point of almost total skeletonization—a process that rarely occurs over a matter of mere days.

  One matter that is not universally agreed upon, however, is the issue of what exactly was found arranged around the body of Jeannette DePalma, the supposed victim of a black magic ritual.

  5

  WITCHCRAFT

  The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

  —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  After Jeannette DePalma’s remains were recovered from the Devil’s Teeth and later identified by her dentist, investigators from the Springfield Police Department were given the uneasy task of notifying her family. “I was over at my parents’ house early that morning,” Darlene Bancey recalled. “After I went home, the police came and notified them.”

  Jeannette’s older sister Gwendolyn was hundreds of miles away when she got the news. “I was in rehab for drugs in North Dakota when that happened to Jeannette,” Gwendolyn says. “I was gone for about thirteen months. I stayed in a home with other addicts, and at the end of the year, they would have a little graduation for the girls when they finished the program. My parents called and told me right away. I was in shock.” Gwendolyn fondly remembers her younger sister often calling to check on her progress in the facility. “She called me whenever she had a chance. She was such a smart and happy girl. She got good grades in school.” Decades later, Gwendolyn DePalma still struggles to hold back tears when discussing Jeannette. Wiping her eyes and lowering her head, she quietly says the words that have lingered in her mind for so long: “I miss Jeannette…”

  Gail Donohue received the news not long after. “I can still remember where I was and what I was doing,” Gail says. “We got the notification at night. I had just washed and blow-dried my hair, and my father called for me to come downstairs. He said, ‘You need to sit on the couch.’ I sat down, and he said, ‘They found Jeannette’s body.’ At that point, I had no reaction. I went into shock. The possibility of Jeannette being dead had never occurred to me.”

  The final resting place of Jeannette DePalma, as it appears today. Photo by Mark Moran.

  On Saturday, September 23, 1972, after a ceremony at the Assemblies of God Evangel Church in Elizabeth, Jeannette DePalma was laid to rest in a Union County cemetery. “Over five hundred people showed up,” Lisa Treich Greulich says, recalling her cousin’s funeral service.

  “I seem to remember her casket being white with gold trim,” recalls Tom Hunter,* a friend of Jeannette’s. “Supposedly, her parents were well off and probably got the Cadillac. Naturally, it was closed, and there was a very good photograph of Jeannette placed on top. It was the picture that was used in the paper.”

  Gail Donohue’s memories of Jeannette’s funeral are not of pretty pictures of her best friend, but they do involve her burial container. “It was a closed casket ceremony,” she recalls, “On the coffin was a wreath that said, ‘Sweet Sixteen.’ I got sick to my stomach. I was so disgusted that I literally threw up. I mean, how cheesy can you be? To give you an idea of what these people were like, I remember walking into their house, and they had plastic all over the furniture. Look at these people; they made an icon out of Jeannette!” Cindy DePalma, however, maintains that she does not recall Gail being in attendance at her sister’s funeral. Donohue continues to resent Cindy for this.

  A prayer card from Jeannette DePalma’s funeral service. Courtesy of the DePalma family.

  Jeannette’s closest friend also continues to be perplexed by Florence and Salvator
e DePalma’s behavior after their daughter’s death. “I couldn’t believe their lackadaisical attitude about Jeannette’s death,” Donohue says, still audibly upset. “My dad took me over to the DePalma house the day after he told me that Jeannette’s body had been found. I guess by that time, the shock had started to wear off. My dad had called the DePalmas and said, ‘May we please come over? Gail is upset and has some questions.’ We walked into the house, and Mr. and Mrs. DePalma were sitting on the couch in the back room where Jeannette and I used to watch to television. I said, ‘What happened?’ Mrs. DePalma said, ‘We are at peace. A couple of weeks ago, God told me that Jeannette would be found to the north of us.’ They were spaced out. I didn’t get the acceptance. It was their child! It was my friend! These people let their daughter go with that acceptance.”

  Florence DePalma’s comments to the news media startled Donohue even further. Only two days after the discovery of her daughter’s remains, Florence told the Newark Star-Ledger that she had already “resigned herself to her daughter’s death” weeks before. “The Lord had given me peace,” she told Star-Ledger staff reporter Arthur Lenehan Jr. “I didn’t understand it, but I just trusted in God, and I still have that faith.”

  Gail Donohue’s reply to that comment is brief: “What parent would possibly say that about their child?”

  After Jeannette’s body was buried, the Springfield Police Department began to investigate the nature of her mysterious death. Her decaying clothing was packaged up and sent to the New Jersey State Police crime laboratory, and the rolls of crime scene film were sent for processing. The Detective Bureau began to consider whom to interrogate first. During these initial days of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Sam Calabrese and his fellow officers had very little information to work with. A cause of death could not be determined, there were no known eyewitnesses and no murder weapon had been recovered. An explanation for how this teenage girl ended up dead in the Houdaille Quarry and how her corpse managed to lie there unnoticed for nearly two months eluded the thirty-three-year-old detective.

  Donald Schwerdt, however, believed that the answer to this question rested with another: where did the makeshift cross and arrangement of stones around Jeannette’s body come from? Surely, if those in the Detective Bureau could discern why these objects were there—and more importantly, who had left them—the case would easily be closed. The problem was, not everyone in the Springfield Police Department believed that these items were even there. Ed Kisch does not recall noticing any sticks or stones around Jeannette’s corpse, at least none that seemed deliberately arranged. “She was found lying in the middle of the woods, for Chrissakes,” Kisch says. “There were sticks and stones everywhere!” One possible reason for this discrepancy is the fact that, by his own admission, Ed Kisch was in the presence of Jeannette DePalma’s body for only “about five minutes,” and his attention was focused on locating identification and narcotics in her purse. Is it possible that an officer who spent only a limited amount of time at the crime scene could have missed these objects altogether? Is it also possible that one would have noticed this strange arrangement only if he was attentively scrutinizing the scene in person or thoroughly examining the photographic record? An article that appeared in the September 29, 1972 edition of the Elizabeth Daily Journal seems to allude to this being the case. The article, entitled “Girl Sacrificed in Witch Rite?” made the following claim:

  Author Jesse P. Pollack pictured on the quarry side of the base of the Devil’s Teeth cliff. This is the spot where the Springfield Fire Department was required to back a ladder truck up to the cliff in order to recover Jeannette DePalma’s remains. Photo by Doyle Argene.

  Investigation into the death of 16-year-old Jeannette DePalma is focusing on elements of black witchcraft and Satan worship. A review of death scene photos, according to reports, is leading authorities to believe the girl’s death may have been in the nature of a sacrifice. Pieces of wood, at first thought to be at the scene by chance, are now seen as symbols. Detectives thoughout [sic] Union County have been alerted to the possibility that a cult, or a cult member, played a part in the death. A search party discovered her remains—she had been missing six weeks—on Sept. 19 in a wooded area of the Houdaille Quarry atop a 40 foot cliff about 400 yards from Shunpike Road. One searcher said two pieces of wood were crossed on the ground over her head. More wood framed the body “like a coffin.” Another person who was there said, “I guess if you were looking for signs, they were there.”

  This article was the first publication to link Jeannette DePalma’s death with witchcraft and Satanism. It immediately caused a panic and an overwhelming sense of dread, the reverberations of which can still be felt in the tri-state area today. Some residents of Union County and beyond believed that this was merely an example of media sensationalism. Others took it as Bible truth and began locking their doors at night for the first time after reading this single newspaper article. When we interviewed him, Donald Schwerdt claimed to have no memory of any sticks or branches framing Jeannette’s body “like a coffin.” Schwerdt also said that he did not recall seeing any smaller crosses made from sticks lying near the body, as the Newark Star-Ledger reported in subsequent articles.

  One person who does remember seeing these items, however, is Jeannette’s cousin Lisa Treich Greulich. Over the years, Lisa has made the pilgrimage to Springfield several times in order to visit the location where her cousin’s body was discovered. The first time was on September 21, 1972, a mere three days after Jeannette’s body had been discovered. Entering the woods off Mountview Road, it was not difficult for her to locate the exact spot. “The police tape was still there, hanging from the trees,” she recalls. “There was a black imprint in the shape of her body on the ground. She rotted into the dirt.” Around this imprint, Lisa says, were logs. “There was one horizontally placed above where her head had been, and another down by her feet. Her feet were actually resting on the log.” Inside this small area is where Lisa found the crosses. “They were little, and they were made out of twigs. They were all around where she was laying.” These curiosities were made simply by laying one twig across the other in the shape of a cross. “I could see from the imprint that her left arm was bent under her head, like she was sleeping.” This particular piece of information was never released to the press and was confirmed for us by Donald Schwerdt. “I was told by my family that Jeannette was wearing brown leather sandals that day,” Lisa continues. “They were like the ones Jesus wore. When they found her body, one sandal was still on her foot, and the other was lying nearby.” Donald Schwerdt also confirmed this unreleased detail.

  Just one example of the sensational newspaper coverage following the discovery of Jeannette DePalma’s body. Courtesy of Donald Schwerdt Sr. and family.

  Ed Kisch maintains that he witnessed nothing like the items that Donald Schwerdt and Lisa Treich Greulich claim to have seen. What Kisch does recall, however, are two trees that had fallen against each other, forming the shape of a cross. “As far as the scene where the body was, there were trees that were leaning on each other. The best that I can recall, at this point, is that they were probably trees that were dead and blown partially over by the wind. They were leaning into each other.”

  Ed Cardinal recalls hearing the same story about the crossed trees. “I don’t know if I made it up in my mind or I actually saw a photo along the line, but the two trees were a couple of inches in diameter and a couple of feet long,” Cardinal says. “The main tree may have been alive, but the tree that had fallen into it, creating the cross, was stripped of bark, gray and dead. I seem to recall the main trunk having a ‘V’ or a notch where the cross arm nestled on a steep angle. In the photo I may have seen, or in the renditions drawn that were shown around, I would not say it was a cross but something people would want to make look like a cross. Don Stewart said he did not see any cross. He was very anti-hippie and despised that culture. He said that the ‘cross’ was just a tree.”

 
; Cardinal also recalls the Springfield Fire Department essentially reenacting the recovery of Jeannette’s body as a drill for trainees. “We returned sometime later to take photos of the area for a department drill,” Cardinal says. “The drill was composed of bringing the aerial truck up to the quarry to the same spot and practice lowering a victim in the Stokes stretcher, both by carrying the basket and by lowering by rope draped over the extended ladder. I recall Deputy Chief Erskine and Captain Ted Johnson, along with Don Stewart and myself, going to the Devil’s Teeth beforehand to lay out the plan for the drill. We did not take the aerial ladder, but we took the fire van and first climbed the hill to the scene. We then drove around to the quarry side where the aerial truck would be located during the drill. I believe we had a human dummy made from old folded fire hose we used to simulate Jeannette’s body. During this drill, I did not notice any semblance of a cross or even took notice of the base tree. However, I was not aware of any details of the cross story at that time.”