Death on the Devil’s Teeth

by Pollack, Jesse P.

  So that is the sum of it. If any one of these had been the condition we might have pulled through but this was too much at last. I’m certain that all have gone to Heaven now. If things had gone on who knows if that would be the case.

  Of course Mother got involved because doing what I did to my family would have been a tremendous shock to her at this age. Therefore, knowing that she is also a Christian I felt it best that she be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her.

  After it was all over I said some prayers for them all—from the hymn book. That was the least I could do.

  Now for the final arrangements:

  Helen & the children have all agreed that they would prefer to be cremated. Please see to it that the costs are kept low.

  For Mother, she has a plot at the Frankenmuth church cemetary [sic].

  Please contact:

  Mr. Herman Schellhas

  Rt. 4

  Vassar, Mich., 41768

  (She always wanted Rev. Herman Zelinder of Bay City to preach the sermon. But he’s not well.)

  He’s married to a niece of Mothers & knows what arrangements are to be made.

  Also I’m leaving some letters in your care. Please send them on & add whatever comments you think appropriate.

  The relationships are as follows:

  Mrs. Lydia Meyer—Mothers sister

  Mrs. Eva Morris—Helens mother

  Jean Syfert—Helens sister

  Fred & Clara—John sponsor

  Herb & Ruth—Freds sponsor

  Marie—Pats sponsor

  Also I don’t know what will happen to the books & other personal things. But to the extent possible I’d like for them to be distributed as you see fit. Some books might go into the school or church library.

  Originally I had planned this for Nov. 1—All Saints Day. But travel arrangements were delayed. I thought it would be an appropriate day for them to get to Heaven.

  As for me please let me be dropped from the congregation rolls. I leave my-self in the hands of Gods Justice & Mercy. I don’t doubt that He is able to help us, but apparently he saw fit not to answer my prayers they [sic] way I had hoped that they would be answered. This makes me think that perhaps it was for the best as far as the childrens [sic] souls are concerned. I know that many will only look at the additional years that they could have lived but if finally they were no longer Christians what would be gained.

  Also, I’m sure many will say “How could anyone do such a horrible thing.”—My only answer is it isn’t easy and was only done after much thought.

  Pastor Mrs. Morris may be reached at

  802 Pleasant Hill Dr.

  Elkin—Home of her sister.

  One other thing. It may seem cowardly to have always shot from behind but I didn’t want any of them to know even at the last second that I had to do this to them.

  John got hurt more because he seemed to struggle longer. The rest were immediately out of pain. John probably didn’t consciously feel anything either.

  Please remember me in your prayers I will need them whether or not the government does its duty as it see [sic] it. I’m only concerned with making peace with God & of this I am assured because of Christ dying even for me.

  P.S. Mother is in the hallway in the attic—3rd floor. She was too heavy to move.

  John.

  In the short time that it took to read the five-page, handwritten letter, John Emil List went from inconspicuous suburban accountant to the tri-state area’s most wanted fugitive. He would remain so for decades. While her father seemingly vanished into thin air, the ghost of Patricia List would loom large over Union County for years to come. Memories of the self-proclaimed witch’s supposed involvement with a teenage coven of devil worshippers would later lead many to wonder if this same group of disturbed youths had murdered Jeannette as a sacrifice. Ed Kisch believes that the Westfield Police Department tapped into this theory and exploited it.

  “I can tell you that the Westfield Police Department had talked about finding books on witchcraft in the library of the List house,” Kisch recalls. “When I was in the Detective Bureau, I worked with Howie Thompson,” Kisch recalls. “Howie Thompson was a very, very good man and a good detective. His heart was always in the right place, and he always kept an eye on you. He would make sure that you were straight. He taught everybody in Springfield’s Detective Bureau a lot of things, and he had played, I would say, a pretty good part in the DePalma investigation, as far as photographing the scene, preserving the evidence and stuff like that. During one of these meetings between the Union County detectives, there was some talk of the scene of where Jeannette’s body was found and that there were trees, or there were crosses or there were trees that were made into crosses. I have to tell you—that is totally unfounded. If anything, you see, if you have one tree standing up and another tree dies and falls against another, is it possible, if you look at it, that you could see something that nobody else sees? That’s a possibility. Howie Thompson was asked at this meeting if there was anything up there to indicate that maybe the people were involved in the occult, and he said no. Now, I will tell you that somebody who was at that meeting went to the newspaper and said, ‘Howie Thompson said that the trees formed a cross.’ Howie was livid. He was upset because it wasn’t truthful. I can remember, after going back into the Detective Bureau and going to these meetings, talking to Howie and saying, ‘Howie, are you going to say anything tonight?’ and Howie would say, ‘I’ll never say another thing at these meetings after what they did to me with the DePalma case.’ Howie got burnt. He took that hard. After that, he didn’t trust anyone. So in any case, there was never anything at the scene to indicate that witchcraft, the occult or anything like that would have been involved in Jeannette’s death.”

  After discovering these bloody marks on the floor, detectives learned that John List dragged the bodies of his murdered family into the ballroom of his home. Collection of the authors.

  The Elizabeth Daily Journal also reported on the supposed connection to the List murders. In the Tuesday, October 3, 1972 edition of the newspaper, it was reported that “cult symbols” were found on the Devil’s Teeth near Jeannette’s body and that these symbols were “similar to those found at the List family house in Westfield.” Neither the Daily Journal nor any other media publication, for that matter, ever elaborated on what “symbols” were supposedly found in the List home that would later mirror the scene on top of the Devil’s Teeth. One such explanation may lie with the placement of the List bodies in the ballroom and how this possibly could have correlated to the cross or crosses that were allegedly observed near Jeannette’s body. If one were facing the ballroom’s fireplace, the body of Helen List was laid out in a vertical manner. Her three children were then subsequently laid side by side in a horizontal position to the immediate left of their mother. Many publications somewhat erroneously reported that the List bodies had been stacked or laid out “in the shape of a cross.”

  One such Daily Journal article went as far to claim that the Union County Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation into the death of Jeannette DePalma had “been widened to include a review of the List murders in Westfield.” This article, the aforementioned “Girl Sacrificed in Witch Rite?” cited Patricia List’s collection of books on witchcraft, along with the reputedly active coven in Union County, as reasons for the possible connection.

  Whatever the original source of the occult rumors may be, the media had done its damage. As far as anyone was concerned, a Satanic cult or a coven of witches had murdered a sixteen-year-old girl and left her body in the woods, surrounded by a multitude of strange objects.

  “There were rumors flying all over the place,” Mary Starr recalls. “There was a rumor going around that a dog had found her femur. We heard that she was found in the middle of a pentagram and that she was laid out in some sort of a Satanic ritual. I don’t know if any of that was true. They closed the quarry for a very long time after that, and there w
ere now guards there. I know a lot of kids who jumped the fence to try and see where it had happened.” While Starr acknowledges the rumors regarding Jeannette being an occultist herself, she does not believe them. “Those rumors started after she had died,” she insists. “I never heard anything like that while she was alive. Girls in high school can experiment a lot, but does that mean they really think that they are witches? No. When the rumors about what was supposedly found around her body and how her body was found came out, we were all pretty shocked.”

  Donna Rivera, a fellow parishioner at the Assemblies of God Evangel Church in Elizabeth, remembers hearing the stories about witchcraft being involved in Jeannette’s death while attending services. While this gossip was certainly sensational, Rivera was not shocked when she first heard these rumors. “It was not a surprise,” Rivera says. “Jeannette was a wild child. She and Cindy were rebellious and a problem for her parents. She was not at church that long before she died. I don’t think she was involved with witchcraft. She probably got involved with the wrong people. I think we all believed that was how she died.”

  While Reverend Tate was seemingly enjoying basking in the limelight that his publicly expressed occult theories were bringing him, other members of the Assemblies of God Evangel Church began to disassociate themselves from the dead teenager. In early 1972, the Assemblies of God Evangel Church helped to found the His Place coffeehouse in Elizabeth. Located on the corner of Elizabeth Avenue and Bridge Street, His Place was a thinly veiled Christian outreach center that targeted troubled teenagers. “The idea was to help what we called ‘street kids,’” recalls Curtis Dady, a former employee of His Place. “They were kids who were experimenting with drugs and whatnot. They were getting in trouble, overdosing and having trouble with their families. His Place wasn’t the originator or the sole manager; it was just one of the centers, so to speak, that did this kind of counseling. The kids from the church and the coffeehouse kind of blended together. Some of the kids from the Evangel Church were from the middle class, and some of the kids at the coffeehouse were more of your lower-class, tough situation–type kids, and maybe they would have drug problems or whatever. They kind of blended together there at the coffeehouse.” While offering its own blend of in-house counseling services, His Place also hosted several live Christian music acts. Dady’s rock group, The Brethren, was just one of these acts.

  A September 21, 1972 Star-Ledger article entitled “Springfield Cops Find Girl’s Body” was the first public mention of Jeannette’s association with His Place. The article claimed that Jeannette “often worked” at the coffeehouse (described in the article as a “community office”), helping teenagers who were suffering from drug problems. Florence DePalma was also quoted in the article, backing up this claim. “They have kids who come in off the streets with problems,” she told the newspaper. “Kids with drug problems particularly, and Jeannette would talk to them trying to help them. We’ve all seen with our own eyes that the kids often find some peace there—and a solution sometimes.”

  Gail Donohue is more than skeptical about this. “Oh God, do you see what they did with their sick religious minds?” she says. “They glorified her. They made her into something she never was. What credentials could she have had at sixteen years old to have been a drug and alcohol counselor? Zero. She couldn’t have had counselor experience or drug rehab experience in order to teach anybody or to be certified. I know those centers sometimes had people who had demonstrated their recovery working as counselors, but they sure as hell wouldn’t have been fifteen or sixteen. I mean, we’re talking lawyers. How the hell can you tell someone who is in rehab that they’ve got a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old counseling them. That is bullshit!”

  A teenaged parishioner of Elizabeth’s Assemblies of God Evangel Church stands outside of His Place, Evangel’s youth outreach center. Jeannette’s involvement with His Place continues to be controversial decades after her death. Collection of the authors.

  However, Curtis Dady provides some insight into this notion. “The idea of a help line came about,” he says. “It was actually a network. The young people would be trained just to answer the phones and be a compassionate and empathetic listener, but there was no direct counseling or anything like that. There were these weekly sessions on how to reach out to people in trouble. Basically, if someone called up on the phone and said, ‘My parents just kicked me out, and I’m out of money and high on drugs and I’m thinking about committing suicide’ or whatever, the kids on the phone would say to them, ‘We want you to know that God loves you, and why don’t you come down to the center and have a cup of coffee? It’s not worth taking your life at this point.’ That’s kind of a crude example of it, but you get the idea.” Dady believes that Jeannette DePalma could very well have received this kind of training at His Place.

  However, shortly after the Star-Ledger revealed Jeannette’s association with the coffeehouse, His Place went into complete damage control mode, disavowing any professional connection with her. On Monday, October 2, 1972, members of the coffeehouse contacted the Elizabeth Daily Journal to minimize “the role of the facility in connection with the death of Jeannette DePalma of Springfield.” William Edkins, the coordinator of counselors at His Place, told the newspaper that there was “virtually no chance” of Jeannette having been a “counselor for drug addicts, alcoholics or other troubled persons.” According to the Daily Journal, His Place’s staff insisted that Jeannette had “visited the coffeehouse only twice” for “Bible study sessions.”

  Several of the former staff members at His Place continue to downplay or deny the coffeehouse’s connection to Jeannette to this very day. William Edkins did not reply to our requests for comment. Reverend Louis LaGatta, who was the youth pastor at His Place, claims to have very little memory of the teenager, despite previous comments to the press about her personality and love for life. “I really did not know her very well,” he told the authors of this book. “She wasn’t involved enough with me when I was the youth pastor for me to make any definitive statements.”

  Alexis Keturwitis, a His Place staff member who allegedly drove Jeannette to the coffeehouse and other church activities, was far more discreet when we asked her to comment on her relationship with the dead girl. “I cannot assist you at this present time,” she wrote via e-mail.

  Joseph Cosentino is not terribly surprised by the hesitancy of some of the coffeehouse’s former staff to speak about any controversial matters, let alone Jeannette. “Something bad went down over there when His Place shut down,” he says. “I heard that there was a big drug thing going on. I guess the church split in two because one of the higher-ups was on some kind of prescription drugs, and he was losing it. All kinds of weird shit. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

  It is not known whether the rumors of a “big drug thing” or Pastor Tate’s occult theories play any role in Keturwitis’s, Edkins’s or LaGatta’s hesitation to discuss this case. “I did find Pastor Tate’s comments in those newspaper articles to be particularly disturbing,” Cosentino says. “He seemed to have it all figured out, or at least he was trying to sound like he did. I had heard about the sacrifice rumors—that there were little stones placed around Jeannette in the shape of a coffin or something like that. I think something about stone crosses, as well. Tom Hunter and I did go and visit the site where they found her body. I don’t remember how long it was after, but I want to say it was six months to a year afterward. By that time, it was a tourist attraction and easy to find, but like I said, I was long gone from that scene by the time all this happened, so I was not aware of Pastor Tate saying that stuff to the papers at the time. Just creepy.”

  One person who definitely believes in Pastor Tate’s theories is Jeannette’s acquaintance Elizabeth Mullins. According to Mullins, Jeannette’s company was “questionable,” as she was supposedly associated with drug addicts. When asked if she believes that DePalma was the victim of Satan worshippers, Mullins says that she personally believ
es that Jeannette fell victim to a group of teenagers with whom she used to hang out and that this group practiced witchcraft. Mullins believes Jeannette was targeted because she had drifted away and turned to God. “It’s easy to see why she became a convenient target for a bunch of evil kids,” she says. Mullins also recalls being told by friends that Jeannette had been harassed by people whom she personally did not know but who knew of her and her involvement in anti-drug campaigns. Today, Mullins claims to be “100 percent sure” that Jeannette’s murder was carried out by a group of people, not just one person. Mullins also believes that Jeannette’s body was deliberately left on the Devil’s Teeth to be found and that her murderers are “still out there.”

  While they would renounce these beliefs decades later, during the initial days of the investigation into Jeannette’s death, her family also wholeheartedly believed in Pastor Tate’s postulations regarding witchcraft and Satanism.

  “There are worshipers of Satan, and the possibility is there that they killed her,” Salvatore DePalma told the Elizabeth Daily Journal.

  Florence DePalma echoed similar sentiments. “Jeannette may have met her death by persons possessed by the devil,” she said during the same interview. “She liked to help others and prayed with and for those whose bodies were possessed by evil spirits. When one prays with such a person, the devil’s voice is heard. When that person allows Jesus to enter, the devil flees. There are persons who seek out witchcraft and Satan instead of Jesus Christ.” Florence also told the Daily Journal that Jeannette had witnessed her classmates at Jonathan Dayton High School “praying to the devil.” She claimed that her daughter came home very upset about the behavior of her peers and that Jeannette returned to school the next day to “preach the word of Jesus to the Satanists.”

  In early October, the DePalma family received a rather disturbing piece of news. On Saturday, September 30, members of the Springfield Police Department allegedly brought a “witch” to the top of the Devil’s Teeth. The supposed witch, who was said to have been a local schoolteacher, was, according to reports, brought to the cliff top in order to examine the “occult symbols” that were found around Jeannette’s body. The Elizabeth Daily Journal, Newark Star-Ledger and the New York Daily News all reported on this incident. Florence DePalma was particularly horrified by this rumor, as she feared that her daughter would be resurrected by this witch and not told the truth of her demise. By that time, Jeannette’s mother was thoroughly convinced that the persons responsible for her daughter’s death were possessed by demonic beings.