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Death on the Devil’s Teeth

Page 14

by Pollack, Jesse P.


  “I will guarantee you that rumor came from a cop,” says Ed Kisch. “There were a significant number of cops that hated Parsell’s guts because he was the chief of police, and these were the types of immature games that some of those cops played. One of Parsell’s sons lived in California with his mother. He worked for an airline, and every now and then, Chief Parsell would call him up and ask him to get him tickets to fly to Florida in the spring. I don’t know where the other son lived. He may have possibly lived in New Jersey, but he had no contact with his father. None whatsoever. That son did not get along with Chief Parsell.”

  We were able to verify that neither of Springfield police chief George Parsell’s sons committed suicide shortly after the death of Jeannette DePalma. Stephen Parsell is still alive and living in California, and Gary Parsell died in New Jersey in 2002, three decades after his father’s department first received the phone call about an arm found on Wilson Road. Another matter that makes this theory particularly dubious is the fact that Gary and Stephen were seven and nine years older than Jeannette, respectively, and would have had virtually no social interaction with her. This is highlighted by Kisch’s recollection of Stephen already living and working in California at the time of Jeannette’s disappearance and subsequent death.

  Another possible origin of this rumor is the fact that Jeannette DePalma and Gail Donohue used to accept rides from the Summit and Springfield Police while hitchhiking. “The cops knew me,” Donohue recalls. “We usually got a ride by cop down to the train station.”

  All in all, Ed Kisch does not believe that the answers to the mysteries surrounding Jeannette DePalma’s death lie with Red Kier, Tommy Rillo, the Parsells or any other publicly acknowledged person of interest in this case. In his heart, Kisch believes that the answers to these questions lie with a red Ford Falcon.

  Around the time that Jeannette had gone missing, the Springfield Police Department received an alarm call from a home located in the Springfield Top neighborhood. Working the early morning patrol shift, Kisch was asked to respond to the call. “It was early in the morning, maybe around six thirty,” Kisch recalls. “The sun was just coming up.” Turning his police cruiser onto Mountview Road, the patrolman noticed something strange out of the corner of his eye—a car parked at the base of the hill leading to the Devil’s Teeth cliff overlooking the Houdaille Quarry. “There was a red Ford Falcon parked in the area that would have been directly below where the body was later found. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What the hell is that car doing in there?’ but I kept on driving toward the house on top of Mountview Road. Had I not been on that alarm call, I would have been out of the car and where that Ford Falcon was. I went up to the house, checked it out and everything was fine. When I came back down Mountview Road, that Falcon was gone. No more than a half hour had gone by. Then, lo and behold, we find Jeannette’s body on top of the cliff, that same cliff, about six weeks later.”

  When asked if Jeannette had any friends who drove a red Ford Falcon, Melissa Benner replied, “Cindy told me that a guy in a red or orange convertible used to pick her and Jeannette up when they hitchhiked.”

  “I don’t think he drove a Falcon,” Cindy DePalma says, “but this guy Mike used to pick us up. He was local, had dark hair and was a couple of years older than us. Maybe seventeen or eighteen.” Today, Cindy DePalma cannot remember the exact make and model of this person’s car, but she says that it closely resembled an early 1970s Chevrolet Camaro. “Mike liked Jeannette a lot,” Cindy continues. “It made her uncomfortable.” When asked if she feels that this person was capable of murdering her sister, Cindy replies briefly and to the point: “Yes.” In conversation, Cindy describes this person as predatory and believes that, despite feeling uncomfortable around him, Jeannette may have accepted rides from him during the times she would hitchhike alone. Cindy DePalma says that she is unable to recall this person’s last name.

  In late June 2003, Weird NJ magazine received a letter from Rose MacNaughton,* a former resident of Springfield. In this letter, MacNaughton shed light on an individual whom she believes killed Jeannette DePalma—and this person bears more than a superficial resemblance to the predatory individual described by Cindy DePalma and Melissa Benner.

  “I have given this much thought and believe I should divulge the name of the person I suspect,” MacNaughton’s letter reads. “As I told you in previous correspondence, I am not the only person who believes this person had something to do with Jeannette’s murder. The person I suspect is Mike A. [We have chosen to withhold this man’s entire name out of privacy concerns for his family.] He lived on Littlebrook Road, Springfield. He believed he was a warlock and told me personally he was a warlock. When Jeannette was a freshman at Jonathan Dayton High School, he was a junior or senior. There was something very strange about him. He was the type of person who made your hair stand on end. He liked Jeannette, but she did not return his affection. As I wrote previously, he moved abruptly. To where, I don’t know.”

  We were eventually able to track down Rose MacNaughton over a decade after she sent her letter to Weird NJ magazine. Her recollections of Mike A. have not changed, and her belief in his guilt has not wavered.

  “I would bet my bottom dollar that Mike A. is the one responsible for Jeannette’s murder,” she says. “I have been convinced of this for forty-two years, and I am not the only person who feels this way. People that you have already spoken with that are friends of mine feel this way. I know some of them would not speak to you because they did not want to get involved. I knew Jeannette through Cindy DePalma. Cindy and I are the same age, and we went to school together. Jeannette was a year ahead of us. We all went to grammar school at Our Lady of Lourdes in Mountainside. I was never really good friends with her, but I went to her house a few times. We used to hang out and play pool in their basement. I also knew Melissa Benner. Melissa and her sister went to Our Lady of Lourdes with us. I’ve known Melissa’s sister since the fifth grade. I’ve known them very, very well for many, many years. Melissa knows full well who Mike A. is. Her sister knows full well who Mike A. is. Melissa knows—and I know this for a fact—that her sister and I believe that Mike A. was involved in this. Melissa probably does not want to dip her foot in this because she would have to bring her sister into it, and her sister does not want to deal with this in any way, shape or form. Jeannette would have very easily gotten into a car with Mike because she knew him.”

  MacNaughton reiterates that Mike A. lived on Littlebrook Road in Springfield, not far from Jeannette’s home. Littlebrook Road also directly borders the Watchung Reservation, the supposed meeting grounds for witches, warlocks and devil worshippers. However, what is more notable and more disturbing is the fact that Mike A. lived only two blocks and a six-minute walk away from the corner of High Point Drive and Summit Road—the corner where Jeannette was last seen alive.

  Jeannette DePalma was last seen alive here at the corner of High Point Drive and Summit Road in Springfield—only two blocks away from a young man who was dangerously obsessed with the occult and had allegedly assaulted one of Jeannette’s close friends. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.

  “The area where Jeannette would have been hitchhiking would have been on or around Summit Road,” MacNaughton continues. “You have to go up Summit Road to get to Mike A.’s house.”

  MacNaughton, like Jeannette, also occasionally accepted rides from Mike A. in his 1971 Ford Torino 500—a muscle car that bears a noticeable resemblance to an early 1970s Chevrolet Camaro.

  “He lived not far from where I lived, so he had given me a ride home from school a few times. He was a senior at Dayton when I was a freshman at Governor Livingston.”

  Just like the Mike Cindy DePalma remembers, Mike A. was eighteen years old at the time of Jeannette’s death.

  “At that time,” MacNaughton continues, “Mike and the people he hung out with were very into witchcraft and those kinds of things. I wasn’t into that at all. That was, pretty much, the beginning and end
of any relationship that I was going to have with him. He was into things that I was brought up to believe are wrong. I was initially impressed with Mike because he was a senior and he had a car and long hair.”

  While MacNaughton cannot remember exactly when or where she and Mike A. initially met, she can, however, clearly recall when she became aware of his dark fascinations.

  “The exact moment that I knew Mike was into witchcraft was one day when he and I were at my house in Mountainside. There was nothing sexual going on, but it got to the point where we were possibly going to kiss one another. At that time, I used to wear a diamond crucifix necklace. He looked at it and said, ‘I can’t come near you while you’re wearing that.’ Then I was 100 percent sure that this person was involved in things that I did not want to become involved in. That was the beginning and the end of that friendship. I remember that moment clearly. He was no longer a person that I wanted to be seen hanging out with or getting rides from.”

  During her interview with us, Rose MacNaughton discussed two individuals whom she believes participated in occult rituals with Mike A. MacNaughton also believes that these two people played a role in Jeannette’s murder. We have chosen not to publish the names of these individuals but have notified investigators regarding these allegations.

  According to MacNaughton, Mike A. quickly left Springfield shortly after the discovery of Jeannette DePalma’s remains in September 1972. “Mike and his mother disappeared from the area!” she recalls. “Mike’s father passed away either shortly before that or shortly after that, and he and his mother sold the house and moved away to, I think, New England.”

  During a June 2009 interview with Kevin Ranoldo, an independent researcher, Melissa Benner discussed her memories of Mike A. During these interviews, Benner claimed that Mike A. was “very aggressive” with many female students at Jonathan Dayton High School and had allegedly sexually assaulted some of them. Benner also claimed that Mike A. had attempted to rape her sometime in 1972, but she had managed to fight him off and escape. During these interviews, Benner also emphasized that Mike A. was strongly attracted to Jeannette and feared that her friend would become his next target. Melissa Benner reiterated these memories during several interviews with us.

  If Mike A., an alleged “warlock” with sexually aggressive tendencies toward his female peers, was in fact responsible for the murder of Jeannette DePalma, does this mean that the sensational headlines alluding to witchcraft and Satanism were actually not that far from the truth? Only one person knows for certain, and that person has been forever silenced by the grave. Mike A. died in 2010 at the age of fifty-six.

  “Here’s a twist regarding the telemarketing company that Jeannette and I worked for,” says Gail Donohue. “I forget my co-worker’s name, but she insisted that Jeannette called and said that she would be late for work on the day that she went missing. That was not told to me until four or five days after Jeannette’s body had been found. In fact, this girl did not tell me this until after the shit hit the fan with the witchcraft rumors, and I talked to the detectives about the sensationalism in the newspapers. I went into work crying my eyes out. This one girl said, ‘Well, that couldn’t have happened. Don’t you remember? Jeannette called in. They told you.’ I said, ‘She never told me anything!’ Jeannette and I were supposed to go to work together that day after hanging out with the boys from Echo Lake Park. We would have hitchhiked down to the train station and taken the train.”

  Is it possible that Jeannette had run into a friend while hitchhiking—a friend who had much more enticing plans to offer her that day? Perhaps she was driven to a payphone in order to call out of work for the night. But if so, why did Jeannette not call her best friend to break their plans? Is it possible that Gail’s co-worker was simply mistaken or, at the very least, incorrectly remembering the date of Jeannette’s phone call? These questions, like so many others, may be forever left unanswered.

  Gail Donohue is still convinced that Jeannette did not accept a ride from anyone she could have deemed a threat. “Jeannette was a toughie, but we all have an intuition about danger,” she says. “At least I do. You know, the classic hair on the back of your neck standing up. If you’re a hitchhiker, there is no way you’re going to get into a car feeling that way.”

  Like countless others, Lisa Treich Greulich believes that Jeannette was, indeed, killed while hitchhiking. However, unlike Rose MacNaughton, Lisa does not believe that her cousin’s murderer was driving a Ford Torino 500—or even a red Ford Falcon. “After Jeannette went missing, I had a premonition,” Lisa says. “I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. All of a sudden, my body went limp. I couldn’t move.” Lisa claims that she then saw a clear vision of her cousin hitchhiking along Mountview Road. “It was like a dream, but I knew that I was awake. She was just standing there with her thumb out when this guy in a big green Buick pulled over. He was straight-laced. He didn’t look like us hippies.” Lisa remembers this man having a blond crew cut and wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. “Jeannette seemed to be familiar with him,” Lisa continues. “She got into his car, and I watched them pull off.” What Lisa saw next caused her to experience a sensation of overwhelming dread. “The man parked his Buick at the base of a cliff in the woods. He and Jeannette both got out of the car at the same time and started walking toward this path in the woods near the cliff.” Then, almost as soon as it began, the vision ceased. “As soon as it ended, I was able to move again. I ran into my mother and stepfather’s room, screaming and crying. I tried to tell them what I had seen, but my mother didn’t want to hear any of it. She insisted that I was simply having a nightmare, but my stepfather believed me. He tried to tell my mother to listen, but she wouldn’t.” Lisa received the shocking phone call the very next day: her cousin’s body had been found lying on top of a cliff in the woods surrounding the Houdaille Quarry.

  Unbeknownst to Lisa Treich Greulich, a seemingly straight-laced man who drove a green Buick would later be found at the center of another high-profile crime, one that was considered by many inside the Union County Prosecutor’s Office to be related to the death of Jeannette DePalma.

  “When the DePalma file hit my desk, I almost immediately saw a connection,” says former assistant Union County prosecutor Michael J. Mitzner. “This case looked just like a homicide that we had over in South Orange—a young woman named Kramer.”

  7

  THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF

  JOAN KRAMER

  She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

  Sitting in the living room of her French countryside home, Marjorie Lange Sportes holds the 1966 yearbook for Kent Place, an all-girls preparatory school located in Summit, New Jersey. Contained within the book’s pages are the only photographs that Marjorie possesses of a friend lost long ago at the hands of a killer.

  “Joan was a beautiful girl,” Marjorie says, focusing on the portrait marked “Joan Leslie Kramer.” “However, one of her greatest charms was that she seemed completely oblivious of this fact,” she continues. “She would have had to be blind not to be aware of her good looks, but she considered them as just a fact of life and not an indicator of who she was or what she considered important.” Joan’s senior portrait is a fitting counterpart to Marjorie’s musings. The photograph shows an attractive young woman gazing off into the distance, a soft smile gracing her unblemished face.

  Marjorie was a year ahead of Joan at Kent Place, but due to both girls belonging to the school’s French Club, the two were able to strike up a friendship. “The meetings of these clubs were the only times where different age groups were able to really mix,” she says. “Joan had an upbeat personality and loved people. She was very open and easy with them and treated everyone as if they were a potential friend. I was a very shy social clunker at the time, and I remember being struck by her friendliness and naturalness. I’ve often wondered if this accepting attitude had somethi
ng to do with her death. It’s too bad that in all the newspaper articles about her death, she is always labeled a ‘socialite,’ which makes her sound as if she were a terrible snob. Nothing could be further from the truth. I suppose her parents were very well off and all that, but she certainly never went on about it. This in a school where the first question a fellow classmate asked me, when I was a newcomer in the eighth grade, was ‘How many maids do you have?’”

  At a mere eighteen years of age, Joan Kramer was already firmly establishing herself as a liberal feminist. A whole two years before the women’s liberation movement would gain significant national attention through the apocryphal bra burnings of the 1968 Miss America Pageant, Joan had already forged an identity that did not always sit well with her teachers and peers at Kent Place.

  “Joan approached me once in one of the school hallways and told me she’d like to talk to me,” Molly Hammett Kronberg, a schoolmate of Joan’s, recalls. “What she said was pretty wild. She said that she had recently broken into the office of either the headmistress, Miss Wolfe, or the assistant headmistress, Miss Wilcox, so she could look up the IQ scores of her fellow students. She had found mine, and it was very high. Therefore, she wanted to be my friend.”

  Deborah Kooperstein, a fellow classmate at Kent Place, has a very similar recollection of this event. “One day as we were walking back from the music building, Joan told me a secret. She had broken into Miss Wolfe’s office or the high school head and found her ‘file,’ which was filled with negative and damaging reports about her. She was a gutsy girl and not intimidated. While there, she looked at mine, and mine was filled with similar reports! She said that the administration would hurt our chances of getting into the colleges we wanted. In my case, I didn’t get into real college and ended up at a junior college.”

 

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