Terry Rickel also remembers this area well. “It was a small campsite. He ate out of cans and read books. He had a shopping cart that he kept in the woods with him. He would go to the supermarket with it and buy food with the tips he made while caddying. He mostly kept to himself, but we all knew him and knew where he lived. I actually knew a couple of guys that used to go up to his campsite to hide out. When he’d come back from caddying, he’d bury his money, and they’d watch where he buried it. When he left, they’d go and dig it up and take his money.”
“Red lived in the woods when we were kids,” Hank Warner,* a longtime resident of Springfield, recalls. “That’s who we really think killed that poor girl; the caddy called ‘Red’ or something. This guy lived in the woods back then, and you know, if he worked his ass off every day, he could go home with like $120 a day, which was good money back then. There are still people to this very day that caddy up at Baltusrol just because they can get paid in cash, which is king. He lived in the woods up here, and that’s where they found this poor girl. I never heard anything else about the story ever since that happened, but us kids that hung around in town, we had our suspicions that Red was the murderer in this case.”
It soon became apparent to Kisch and the other investigators that whoever had once inhabited this small campsite was not returning. When asked if he felt it was odd that this man left his makeshift home and food behind right around the time that Jeannette DePalma is believed to have died, the retired detective replies, “I will tell you, there were not too many people who thought it was odd at the time because if there is no official cause of death for Jeannette, why would it be ‘odd’ other than this was a person of interest that might have some information? Now, whatever the information is depends on what he’s going to offer when he’s found. Half of the caddies that were working up there didn’t want their names to be known because there was a percentage of them that had arrest records. They might only tell you their first name. They didn’t work for the golf club; they were independent contractors. They would sit up in the caddy shack, and when they needed a caddy, the caddy master would ring the phone. I think, at the time, that was Don Baker. He’s dead now. I don’t even think Don Baker was any help with telling the Springfield Police Department who this guy was because he didn’t know! I think he also only knew him as ‘Baltusrol Red.’”
Despite the seemingly impossible odds of finding a homeless man who was known to locals and his employer by only a nickname, the Springfield Police Department forged on. “The department put in a significant amount of effort into trying to locate this individual,” Kisch says. “I, for some reason, want to believe that there was even a flyer put together.” In the end, the efforts of the Springfield investigators paid off. Later on in the fall of 1972, Baltusrol Red was finally found.
An abandoned Quonset hut only yards away from the spot where Jeannette DePalma’s remains were discovered. This hut is now a makeshift home to several transients not unlike “Baltusrol Red” Kier, the man initially suspected of murdering Jeannette. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
“Out of all this, the man was identified,” Kisch recalls. “I can only tell you, if it’s correct, that his name would have been Red Kier.” Kisch cannot remember if Red was truly a nickname or not. “His first name could have legitimately been ‘Red,’” he postulates. One person, Kisch says, definitely knows for sure. “Sam Calabrese knows…” Ed Kisch remembers the then detective sergeant being present for Red’s interrogation. “I know he was questioned. I believe Sam Calabrese was present when Red was talked to. The only reason I say that is this: Sam Calabrese was a very aggressive and positive person, and he would have gone out of his way to make sure he was there when Red was talked to. Red might have been interviewed at the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. I believe that they located Red’s family in, I believe, Georgia, and through that, they were able to get together. When Red did speak to law enforcement, I believe that there could have been an attorney present on his behalf. I believe he came from a family with money. I can only tell you this: whatever the outcome of that interview was…I want to say that Red was cleared and that he was no longer a viable suspect. I was told this was because of the differences in age and lifestyle between Red and Jeannette.”
Terry Rickel believes the decision to clear Red as a suspect was a mistake on behalf of the investigators. “The fact that he wasn’t there when the body was found is what leads me to believe that Red killed her,” Rickel says. “It was still golfing season, so he should have still been there.” Over four decades of pondering have led Rickel to propose a possible scenario that may have led to Jeannette’s mysterious demise. “Back then, all of the kids in town hung out at the high school parking lot,” he says. “When they wanted to smoke some weed, they’d all pile into a car and drive up Mountview Road to Baltusrol Top. Then they’d turn around and come back to the high school to hang out and listen to their eight-track players and stuff in the parking lot. That was like the pot run. All of the kids knew that. I think one day Jeannette decided to walk to town to hang out at the high school, and she knew that there was a lot of traffic on Mountview Road—people she would know. So she walked Mountview Road, but unfortunately nobody came by there that she knew. She got to the end of the road and maybe had to go to the bathroom. She definitely wasn’t there partying like some of the cops theorized because you couldn’t park your car there. You could walk, but where are you going to walk from? It’s so far away from everything. You’d have to park your car on Mountview Road and walk, and then the police would see your car there and wonder what was going on. So I think she probably walked into the woods and dropped her drawers, not knowing she’d walked into Red’s campsite. She’s crouched down, taking a leak and she sees this crazy-looking guy and starts screaming. He didn’t want to get in trouble, probably went over to her and tried to stop her, covered her mouth and accidentally killed her.”
Rickel also believes that the supposed “occult” objects found around Jeannette’s body were actually part of a makeshift memorial constructed by a grief-stricken Red Kier. “I think she was placed on top of that cliff. I heard that when she was found, her body looked like it had melted into her clothing and that branches were put around the body, like a coffin. I don’t think Red intended to kill her; I think he just accidently killed her because she started screaming. I think he put those branches around her because it was the best that the guy could do for her under the circumstances. It was caring in a way. I honestly believe that there were no rituals in the quarry because rituals occur at night, and Red was always there sleeping. There were no witches or cults with the Sabbath going on. That stuff was up by the water tower in the Watchung Reservation. That’s where that stuff was going on. There was no witchcraft involved in the Jeannette DePalma murder.”
Unlike Rickel, Ed Kisch feels that the investigators made the right decision by letting Red go and does not believe that the transient caddy had anything to do with Jeannette’s death. In fact, Kisch suspects that Red was not even aware of the decomposing body lying only yards away from his campsite. “The body was up, Red was down,” he says. “You’re not going to smell a body until you get fairly close to it. If he was fifty to seventy-five yards away, he wasn’t going to be able to smell it. It’s like coming across a dead deer; you’re not going to smell it unless you come within fifty to seventy-five feet of it. That’s why I always keep a bag of lime in my garage. We have a lot of deer down by us, and if a deer runs across the road and gets smacked by a car, sometimes they will crawl into the woods on my property. My house is about two hundred feet away from these woods, and I can’t smell them. However, if you get within fifty feet, you know it. I take a bag of lime and dump it on it, and in two days, it’s gone. So, where Red would have been, there was no way he would have smelled that. There was no way he would have smelled anything.”
After he was questioned by investigators and subsequently released without charge, “Baltusrol Red” Kier vanished from the
Springfield area, never to return. Retired lieutenant Peter Hammer recalls hearing a rumor about Red fleeing to California. Ed Kisch, however, feels that Red most likely went to caddy at another golf club, possibly not too far away from Springfield. “I cannot believe that Baltusrol Golf Club was the only golf club that he caddied at in the area. He could have been at Canoe Brook, or he could have been somewhere up in Montclair. These caddies did not specifically stay at one club. They bounced. You have to realize that there’s a lot of money in clubs like Baltusrol, Canoe Brook and the club up in Montclair. These are closed clubs. At that time, if you wanted access, you had to be sponsored. You had to become a club member before you could become a golf member, and you could only play so many rounds of golf at that club. Now, I was able to find out at a later point in time that all of these members that belong to Baltusrol probably belonged to five or six other clubs because they had so much frickin’ money! They were using these as tax write-offs! They would belong to clubs in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. A lot of these caddies would caddy up and down the East Coast right about the time that these members would go from club to club because they got along good with the people that they were caddying for, but that didn’t mean they stayed there. Some of the caddies, when they caddied, would actually live in some of the motels over in Springfield out along Route 22. They made decent money.”
We believe that Kisch is not far off in his assumption. In the early 2000s, Weird NJ magazine received a letter from Jean McEnroe that mentioned a seemingly familiar character. “I’ve got a couple of stories that my father recently told me about from when he was a kid growing up in West Orange,” the letter read. “There is a lake in the town called Crystal Lake and he remembers a man that used to live up in the hills behind the lake, which is next to a bowling alley now. They called the man ‘Red’ because of his unkempt red hair and they said that he used to fish out of the lake and run back up to his shack to cook them. He used to chase the kids and tell them never to go up by his shack.”
Sometime in the late 1980s, a body was discovered inside of West Orange’s Eagle Rock Reservation, not far from Crystal Lake. West Orange police officers Larry Malang and Ray Rosania responded to the scene and found the body of a homeless man near the Highlawn Pavilion. “From what I remember about the man, he looked tall, and he was thin,” Malang, now retired, recalls. “He was hanging half in and half out of the window of a small shack that was maybe eight feet wide by eight feet tall. Apparently, he died while attempting to crawl out of that window. I remember not moving the man because of the unusual position of his body, so I don’t remember ever seeing his face.”
If “Baltusrol Red” Kier and the “Red” of West Orange were one and the same, this person would have had to travel less than twelve miles to his new makeshift dwelling in the woods. Also of note, at least four golf courses are located within a three-mile range of the site where the body of West Orange “Red” was discovered. These golf clubs obviously would have provided ample caddying opportunities for this wanderer.
While Ed Cardinal does not have any recollection of “Baltusrol Red” Kier, he does remember another strange character who roamed the Houdaille Quarry. “There was this weird guy who worked at the quarry as a watchman. He was tall and skinny and wore glasses. I think he drove either an open jeep or a small motorcycle. I believe there was a gate to get into the quarry, but the fire department, police, road department and people that used the shooting range back in the far corner had a key or access to the key. If you went into the quarry, that guard would always show up.”
“The guard’s name was Tommy Rillo,” says Ed Kisch. “He lived over in Summit. Tommy would have been anywhere from, say, twenty-eight to thirty-four years old at the time of the DePalma incident. He worked at the quarry, I think, because he was friends with the people that worked there from Summit. These were very friendly people up there. They all knew each other; they all got along good.”
The Baltusrol Golf Club, pictured in 1926. Courtesy of the Baltusrol Golf Club.
Peter Hammer also recalls the quarry’s watchman. “Tommy was handicapped. He was fourteen years old in a thirty-year-old’s body, but he was friendly with the police.”
“Tommy was a little slow, mentally,” Kisch continues. “I don’t believe he was impaired, but he was just…That was a good job for him. His job was to watch the equipment and lock the gates at night. He had a pickup truck that he would ride around the quarry. He had a Detex clock that he carried. There were keys in various spots at the quarry, and he would stick the key into the Detex clock, and it would make a punch mark in the paper on the time. This way, the quarry could tell that he was doing rounds. Basically, he was there to keep people that weren’t supposed to be in the quarry out.”
Ed Kisch does not agree, however, with Ed Cardinal’s recollection of one not being able to enter the quarry without this watchman immediately showing up. “Eddie Cardinal, for some reason, believes that nothing got past Rillo. I have to tell you, Tommy Rillo could be working up there, and you could ride around for a half hour, forty-five minutes to an hour before you could find Tommy. God knows where he was. He was in the quarry someplace. But we didn’t go looking for him. He did his thing there. That was between him and the quarry. Me and other guys from the department used to go there all the time without Rillo seeing us. We used to set booby traps for him and shit.”
Many in Springfield have long wondered how Tommy Rillo or any other Houdaille personnel never encountered Jeannette’s body during the six weeks that it lay on top of the Devil’s Teeth. According to Ed Kisch, Tommy Rillo never discovered the remains due to the fact that his duties involved guarding the various buildings inside of the quarry, and these duties would not have placed him in the area of that particular cliff top. “At the time that the body was found, I don’t believe that there were any buildings over there at all,” Kisch recalls. “Now, the only buildings that would have been on that side, maybe a hundred yards away from where the body was, were the buildings that some of the explosives were stored in. They would have been painted red. They were thick, heavy metal. They didn’t really store the explosives there for any period of time because whenever they did what they called a ‘shoot,’ the quarry would drill holes according to the specifications of the company that would go to do the explosion. Then, they would bring the explosives up, they would lock them in the shed, they would take them out and they would put them in the holes. They would fill the holes, and then they would do their blast. So, as far as at the time, back in 1972, there were no buildings on the side of the quarry where Jeannette was found. That was an area that Rillo would not have checked. It was all trees. It was overgrown. There were no buildings over there that the quarry owned.”
The Houdaille Construction Materials Company logo can be found on many pieces of abandoned equipment that still litter the area. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
When asked if he believes that Tommy Rillo could have been responsible for Jeannette DePalma’s death, Kisch answers in the negative. “I don’t believe Tommy was ever even questioned,” Kisch says. “That’s not to say that somebody didn’t question him, but I don’t believe he ever was.”
We were able to obtain the e-mail address of a Tom Rillo who currently lives not very far from Springfield. When we asked this man if he was the same Tommy Rillo who used to work as a watchman at the Houdaille Quarry, we received this cryptic reply: “No Jeanne… :)” We received no explanation for this confusing piece of correspondence.
Soon after the discovery of Jeannette’s body, a few of Springfield’s residents began to wonder if Jeannette had become the victim of a tragic accident due to certain police activity that often occurred inside the quarry gates. “The Springfield Police Department had a pistol range up in the quarry,” Ed Kisch recalls. “We would use that for a lot of police training anytime we wanted to, and the Springfield Pistol and Rifle Club would basically use it on a Saturday or Sunday.” Those in town who possessed knowledge of this make
shift pistol range began to quietly wonder if the supposed victim of witchcraft had actually been killed by a stray bullet, and the Springfield Police Department had covered up the death. Ed Kisch believes that this rumor is baseless simply on the grounds of the location of the range itself. “That range was totally on the other side of the quarry. If we say the body was found on the east side, the pistol range would be in the southwest corner of the quarry. In other words, they would have been shooting in the southeast direction. She would have been found in the northeast section of the quarry. So if you were to enter the quarry, you would turn to the right and drive along, go through the pits and come out the back to get to the pistol range. If you wanted to get to where was the body was, you would have driven into the quarry and over to the left.”
The rumors regarding the Springfield Police Department’s culpability in Jeannette’s death did not end there. As time went on, a tale was slowly spun that pointed the finger at one of Chief George Parsell’s sons. This particular piece of gossip eventually made its way to the DePalma family.
“What I had heard was that it had something to do with a chief of police at the time, his son,” John Bancey said during his 2004 interview with Weird NJ magazine. “The theory that they had was, and I can’t prove this, was that one of the police chiefs had a son who liked my aunt. She went to go to work, something happened, whatever it may be, and she ended up dead. I was told that he committed suicide a time later. I’m not sure; I can’t verify this. That’s what we thought had happened. We were told his son might have been the perpetrator, and he was so guilty—I was told he liked my aunt, but she had another boyfriend she went to the prom with. And he felt so guilty that he committed suicide. We believed that she was put in a place that somebody from the police department, or who knew the police department, would know because it was a high-up area, and it’s not far from the police shooting range at the time. That’s the old quarry. But we feel that maybe somebody placed a couple sticks around her to make it look like ‘Hey, this is what happened.’ But that’s bullshit.”
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 13