Death on the Devil’s Teeth

by Pollack, Jesse P.

  Once reports of its detectives collaborating with practitioners of witchcraft hit the front pages, the Springfield Police Department immediately ceased providing any useful information to the press. When confronted with these rumors, Detective Sergeant Sam Calabrese replied with “no comment.” Springfield police chief George Parsell was quick to play dumb with reporters and attempted to shift blame to the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. “I heard that some people from the department supposedly brought a witch out there, but I know nothing about it,” Parsell told the Elizabeth Daily Journal. “The people from the county prosecutor’s office were also supposed to know something about it. Why don’t you call them?”

  While Ed Kisch finds it doubtful that any local schoolteacher would identify herself as a “witch” to the police, he does acknowledge that the Springfield Police Department did occasionally consult with and receive help from some unconventional sources. “Calabrese did consult with a psychic on a later case,” Kisch says. “She came forward on her own, feeling that she could possibly be of assistance. She offered what she thought might have been useful to the police, which turned out to be nothing. Remember, when the witchcraft thing came out, it was a news item. In good faith, I will say that there are people who claim to be witches—white witches, black witches, good witches, bad witches, witches who practice religion and so on. In a homicide, if witches were thrown into it, it would be a hot item. Let us not forget Charles Manson.”

  While the Springfield Police Department and the Union County Prosecutor’s Office were refusing to confirm this disturbing rumor, one person claimed to have intimate knowledge of its validity: Reverend James Tate. “I never did hear if the witch found anything,” Tate told the Elizabeth Daily Journal. “But I know she was there.” Tate told the New York Daily News that a detective from the Springfield Police Department had personally given him this information.

  “Judging from the newspaper articles, it seems that Reverend Tate had a lot to say about the witchcraft, as well as Jeannette’s parents and family,” says Ed Kisch. “Maybe this was their way of dealing with the unknowns of her death. I can’t ever see the prosecutor’s office ever believing that witchcraft was involved. Rumors can be very dangerous, and I believe that is all that the witchcraft theory is. The witchcraft rumor sells newspapers, but rumors never solve crimes. Interest in witchcraft is always out there, mainly because it is an unknown, but it is a real thing. There were Santeria acts in the Watchung Reservation. They found signs of animals sacrificed and related it to that.”

  Situated roughly three miles away from the Houdaille Quarry, the Watchung Reservation is no stranger to rumors regarding witchcraft and Satanism. The reservation, known to locals as “the Res,” is the largest park in Union County and a protected landscape. Densely littered with tall maple trees, the Watchung Reservation provided an optimal amount of privacy for those who wished to practice black magic. Unlike the circumstances that surrounded Jeannette DePalma’s death, there was ample evidence to support the presumption that devil worship was at play in this 1,945-acre forest.

  On Wednesday, October 4, 1972, the Elizabeth Daily Journal ran an article entitled “Do Pupils Pray to the Devil?” in which a Jonathan Dayton sophomore spoke of séances that were held on the reservation and said that the son of a Springfield police officer had provided him with this information. The same article alleged that a “number of animal sacrifices have been reported in the Watchung Reservation, but Union County Park Police have refused to comment.” In the “DePalmas Say Slayers Possessed by Demons” article that was published earlier the same week, Daily Journal staff writer Thomas Michalski wrote that Union County Park Police had discovered a series of sacrifices “involving cats, dogs, and even a goat.” Michalski also wrote of a “bowl of blood and pigeons with their necks snapped” being found inside the reservation.

  In 2004, Weird NJ magazine received an anonymous letter that mentioned the Satanic cult that roamed within the Watchung Reservation. In the letter, this formidable cult was finally given a name. “Weird NJ #20 was a better than average issue,” the letter began. “Of great interest to me was the Jeannette DePalma case. I was a young teenager when that happened and lived in the next town. About two years prior, there was much talk in my school about the cult you mentioned. They were known as The Witches.”

  Pastor James Tate corroborated the rumors of this group during his interview with us. “I think that Jeannette was involved with a group of people who would meet in the Watchung Reservation,” Tate said. When asked if he was referring to The Witches, he replied in the affirmative. At the time of this interview, Pastor Tate was not aware of Weird NJ magazine or the anonymous letter that had mentioned the cult.

  “They must have let it be known in the area that they planned to kill a child on or about Halloween, either by kidnapping and sacrificing them or by poison,” the anonymous letter continued. “I remember being anxious about this because I went trick-or-treating in those days. I didn’t read the newspapers, but I was well aware of the dog that brought home the girl’s arm. The story was well known, as I lived within three miles of the quarry.”

  “I came across a few sacrifices inside the Watchung Reservation during the spring and summer of 1972,” Denise Parker recalls. “I found feathers strewn all around. I also saw dead pigeons and a stone bowl that had brains or some organ pulverized in it. On one occasion, my friend Neil and a buddy of his from Cranford were camping inside of the reservation just off of the water tower path. While walking the path, they stopped at this wooden pavilion near the water tower where a couple of guys were standing. Neil walked up to them and asked for a smoke. The guys said, ‘Yeah, you can have a cigarette, but you can’t look at these chickens.’ Neil actually sat on a picnic table behind the pavilion, not realizing what was going on. His friend was trying to discreetly make him realize that they needed to get the hell out of there. Finally, he whispered, ‘Neil…they’re sacrificing those chickens.’ Well, they casually said, ‘See ya later, guys. Thanks for the butts.’ And got their butts out of there. When they got back to their campsite, they grabbed all of their stuff and ran out to W.R. Drive, where they flagged down a cop. They took the cops to the pavilion, and the Wiccans were gone. The next morning, the guys came to my house. I didn’t believe their story, so they took me to the pavilion. There, I saw with my own eyes the beheaded carcasses of the chickens. Their heads were strewn about in the woods, not far away.”

  Parker also recalls hearing about another disturbing sacrifice shortly thereafter. “There was this girl named Liz Blood who lived in a rental house behind the grammar school in Summit,” Parker says. “She was around seventeen at the time. She had long, frizzy hair and a tattoo of a serpent on her hand. I did not like her, and I kept my distance. My friend David and his brother Chad lived nearby, and we used to hang out and ride bikes together. Liz Blood would always come around and try to talk with us. I can distinctly remember one of the guys telling me that Liz was trying to talk them into going to a goat sacrifice. She stole a goat from the backyard of someone’s home. I don’t know where she stole the goat from, but as a coincidence, there was a family in Mountainside who lived on Route 22, and somebody stole a goat from them. It was a family pet. Liz Blood forced six kids to go into the woods with her and sacrificed this goat in front of them. It freaked them all out. She could be pretty accommodating as far as hanging out and stuff, but she was always talking about Satan. Then she sacrificed this goat in front of all of these people, and they all freaked out and wouldn’t go near her anymore. After that happened, we all stayed away from her. We ran like somebody had a gun to our heads.”

  Author Jesse P. Pollack stands in front of a wooden gazebo that was used during ritual animal sacrifices inside of the Watchung Reservation. Photo by Michael Helbing.

  While Denise Parker does not necessarily believe that Liz Blood killed Jeannette DePalma during some sort of Satanic sacrifice, she does believe that Blood encountered Jeannette’s body before invest
igators did and left occult objects around the remains. “If there was any Satanic connection with Jeannette’s death,” she says, “it might have been something like Stand by Me, where the kids went to look for the body. I feel like someone might have come across her body, and then word got out that there was a body in the quarry. Maybe Liz Blood went up there and made it appear that there was a sacrifice for a self-fulfilling type of thing.”

  Lauren Irene grew up in Mountainside during the early 1970s and remembers the Res well. “I grew up on Ridge Drive in Mountainside, off of Summit Road,” Irene says. “The people across the street of us’s backyard was the reservation, basically. I remember going to the water tower when I was little. My friends and I used to hang there and smoke cigarettes and chill. My brothers used to go camping up there. There were so many times where they would come home in the middle of the night because they had found unusual, ritualistic objects. I want to say they found things hanging from the trees. The reservation was supposedly a hot spot for cult activity because it was sacred Indian land.”

  The Watchung Mountains were indeed once home to the Lenape tribe. The word “Watchung” is derived from the Lenape words Wach Unks, meaning “high hills.”

  “I always remember hearing about witches,” Irene says. “But who knows. It could have all been just one big rumor spread by everyone playing telephone.”

  Roy Simpson can recall hearing the nefarious rumors regarding the reservation even prior to Jeannette’s death. “I can tell you that there was a lot of talk back then about covens of witches and Satanic rituals inside of the Watchung Reservation. We had heard that rumor for a long time before the DePalma incident happened. After that happened, there were all kinds of rumors that this is what the DePalma incident was about. We heard that she was found with little crosses around her body. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what the talk of the town was. At the time, it was very prevalent. From what I remember, the talk was that she was found on some type of altar with little wooden crosses surrounding her body. I can’t remember, but it seems to me that there was a rumor that there were some animal sacrifices found near her, too. I can’t positively remember if that was the talk at the time or if that was something that I heard afterward. As I said before, there was talk about these kinds of things happening in the Watchung Reservation before the DePalma incident happened, and after that incident happened, it really fanned the flames of those rumors.”

  These rumors led Lilith Sinclair, the leader of the Spotswood, New Jersey branch of the Church of Satan, to approach the Newark Star-Ledger. During her interview, which was printed in the Sunday, October 8, 1972 edition, Sinclair denied any connection between the Church of Satan and Jeannette’s death. “When Satanism is mentioned, many people immediately think of us,” Sinclair told reporter Arthur Lenehan Jr. “My people have been getting a lot of questions about the DePalma death, so I want to make it clear we have nothing to do with anything like that.” Sinclair was quick to point out that willpower, not “drugs and bloodshed,” was the preferred tool of the Church of Satan. Sinclair told Lenehan Jr. that “the power we generate comes from within ourselves” and that her group “focuses its attention on me, and I channel the psychic energy to accomplish whatever the group had decided to do.”

  Sinclair would later marry Michael A. Aquino, who achieved notoriety as the founder of the Temple of Set, a splinter group of the Church of Satan. We reached out to the Temple of Set in the hopes of speaking with Lilith Aquino regarding her interview with the Star-Ledger but were told by Lincoln Shaw, the Temple’s executive director, that the “Temple of Set does not confirm or deny anyone’s membership” and that his organization “stopped giving interviews in the 1990s.”

  While Ed Kisch acknowledges the occult activity that was seemingly rampant in the Watchung Reservation, he does not believe that these incidents were limited to just that one area.

  “There were also Santeria sacrifices in certain neighborhoods in Elizabeth,” Kisch recalls. “Reverend Tate’s church was located in Elizabeth. Maybe some of the police bought into that theory and took the investigation in that direction. I certainly don’t buy into the witch theory. I must say, on the lighter side, I did hear at one time there was a Calabrese voodoo doll that was in the Detective Bureau that had a lot of pins stuck into it. It must have been true love. Oh well. But that’s another story…”

  Like Ed Kisch, Gail Donohue does not put stock in the myriad occult rumors. Also like Kisch, she places blame on the media. “I remember when the witchcraft stuff hit the Star-Ledger, I called the detectives on the case and they told me to calm down,” she recalls. “They came over and talked to me. They said, ‘The Star-Ledger has to print stuff, and unfortunately, newspapers these days print sensationalism.’ They told me that there was no evidence of witchcraft.”

  Whether or not a series of makeshift crosses fashioned from tree branches or sticks was, in fact, discovered around Jeannette’s remains might never be officially confirmed or denied to the public. However, one cross that should have been found at the scene never was. A golden crucifix that Jeannette was wearing around her neck on the day of her disappearance was never recovered.

  Once Halloween fell upon the township of Springfield, it was hard for its residents to see any child dressed in a dime store witch or devil costume and not think of the dead girl from Clearview Road. While local parents cautiously chaperoned their young children as they trick-or-treated, the Springfield Police Department, along with the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, continued its investigation into Jeannette DePalma’s death behind closed doors.

  6

  SUSPICION

  The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

  —Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

  Sometime in October 1972, a young man walked into Springfield’s Municipal Building and asked to speak with Officer Ed Kisch. This young man, twenty-one-year-old Terry Rickel,* claimed to have information regarding the death of Jeannette DePalma.

  “I didn’t know Jeannette personally,” Rickel says, “but I knew friends of hers. At the time, I was actually dating a girl who was accused of hiding her. They initially thought she ran away.”

  Sitting down in an office with Kisch, Rickel told the patrolman that he had a pretty good idea of who killed the teenager. Kisch retrieved a pad and pencil as the young man began to tell him about a strange figure who lived in the woods bordering the Houdaille Quarry.

  “He was called ‘Red,’” Rickel says. “He was probably in his thirties then, maybe late thirties. He was tall and thin with wild reddish hair and a full beard. He was a weird-looking guy. He looked like an old hippie.”

  According to Rickel, Red was a vagrant who often worked at the Baltusrol Golf Club as a caddy. “Baltusrol is more exclusive now, so you obviously can’t just walk in there and say, ‘I want to caddy,’ but back then you could just stand there and wait for someone to pick you out. The golfers you caddied for would then pay you in tips. I think Red had been there for maybe three years. He would live in the woods during golfing season and then go somewhere else that was warmer once the seasons changed.” Rickel proceeded to tell Kisch about Red’s campsite in the woods. “I told Kisch that this guy lived in the woods right where her body was found,” Rickel says. “Her body was found just outside this guy’s campsite. It was still golfing season, and he would have still been caddying at Baltusrol and living in those woods. I’m sure the caddy master knew where Red lived, but I don’t think the owners of the Houdaille Quarry knew that he was living on their property.”

  While Kisch says today that he has no memory of a meeting between himself and Terry Rickel, he definitely has clear recollections of the transient caddy.

  “Information had come to the Springfield Police Department that a caddy who
worked at the Baltusrol Golf Club was living in the woods off Mountview Road,” Kisch says. “At that time, the only information about him that the Springfield Police Department had was that he was known as ‘Baltusrol Red’ and that he caddied at the golf course. After he finished whatever his day was, he would walk up Shunpike Road, then walk up Mountview Road and then go through the fence, where I believe there was a hole. He lived in the woods like a homeless person, or a recluse or whatever you want to call him.”

  Finally, after weeks of fruitless investigation, the Springfield Police Department had a clear suspect. Donning his jacket, Kisch, along with other investigators from the department, made his way outside to his patrol car and drove out to Mountview Road.

  Searching the same foreboding area where he had helped to locate Jeannette DePalma’s remains only weeks before, Ed Kisch and his fellow officers discovered their suspect’s makeshift home along a creek located only fifty yards away from the Devil’s Teeth. This campsite was defined by a small shack constructed from scraps of tin sheeting. Kisch remembers the shack being roughly eight feet long and three feet high. “The man lived in a sardine can, if you ask me!” he laughs. Inside this “sardine can” of a home, Kisch discovered a blanket, cans of food and some cooking pots. Previously cooked rice sat rotting inside of one. Whoever vacated this spot had left in a hurry. “This was where this man was living,” Kisch recalls. “He’d get up in the mornings, and I guess he’d wash and head up to the golf course and caddy.”