Today, Kronberg can only look back and laugh at the bold nature of her friend. “I was shocked but somewhat admiring that she had had the nerve to do that. I was startled by her frankness, to say the least. I was tickled by her telling me almost immediately that her brother Orin had done the same thing, or at least something similar, while he was at Yale.”
“Joan was very funny,” Sonia Leonardo Baxter recalls. “She could crack us all up in class. She was full of life; what I would call a ‘drama queen’ in the absolute best sense of the word. She filled up any room she entered. One could not ignore her.”
“Studying history, or English or French with Joan was never boring or passive,” recalls her friend and classmate Judith Small. “She probed and tested, she mocked and she brooked bullshit not at all. If there was a difference between what we were supposed to learn and what she thought made sense, she called it out. She dug deep, and when she thought she had to, she took risks. When we studied for a mid-year world history exam covering the French and Russian revolutions, we decided that, because we were desperately short on time, each of us would master one revolution. As I remember, I chose the French but also, out of caution, made sure I knew the basics of the Russian. Joan dove deep into the Russian and never looked back. I remember my heart sinking for her, seated not far away, when I broke the seal on the exam booklet and read the big essay topic: ‘Compare the Russian Revolution with the French Revolution.’”
Joan’s friends and classmates remember her as being a true rarity not only for her confidence and progressive views but for her outward appearance as well.
“I remember that she sunbathed with an aluminum foil device around her neck that attracted the sun,” Deborah Kooperstein recalls. “She had a deep tan as a result.”
Molly Hammett Kronberg, too, recalls her classmate’s physical appearance often standing out just as much as her personality. “I liked her exotic looks and manner. Joan was exotic for many reasons, one of which was because she was Jewish. There were very few Jews at Kent Place and not many more Catholics. It was a totally WASP school and, in those days, had no black or Hispanic students, though that has changed now. Joan was beautiful, with green eyes and light brown hair that had a sort of blond suffused through it. She wore big gold-hoop gypsy earrings, unlike the discreet studs we wore in our ears. She was just fabulous.”
Joan Kramer in 1966. Courtesy of Marjorie Lange Sportes and Nia Eaton.
Behind Joan’s seemingly self-assured exterior, however, was a carefully kept secret: she was suffering from lupus, a life-threatening disease that causes antibodies to attack healthy tissue. By the time of her senior year at Kent Place, Joan’s condition required her to ingest daily doses of cortisone pills.
“One thing we absolutely did not talk about was her blood disease, which I knew about but of which she never spoke,” Marjorie Lange Sportes says. “At the time, I had no idea what the disease was, nor of its gravity. Having found out later what it was, I’m kind of amazed it was being kept under control so well. I knew a nineteen-year-old girl who died of this disease, and I always thought lupus was pretty much fatal. That’s real luck, isn’t it? She won her battle against lupus only to be slaughtered by some psychopathic creep later on…”
Six years after graduating Kent Place, Joan was working on her doctorate in English at Columbia University in New York City. At the time, she was romantically involved with Bernard Davidoff, a fellow Columbia student, and talk of marriage was in the air. On the night of Tuesday, August 15, 1972, the two found themselves entertaining nearly thirty guests in Joan’s childhood home at 65 Crest Drive in South Orange, New Jersey. Her parents, Julian and Ruth, had decided to throw a summer party for friends of theirs, and the young couple had been invited to take part in the festivities. Clad in a low-cut, ankle-length orange and white cocktail dress, blue jacket and high heels, Joan was certainly a sight to be seen in her family’s comfortable home. To the unsuspecting eye, all seemed to be well with the beautiful young student, but unbeknownst to the partygoers, there was tension brewing between Joan and Bernard.
At some point during the party, an argument ensued between the two lovers, and Joan quietly slipped out of the house undetected, making her way out of her family’s neighborhood, which sat at the top of the large mountain on South Orange’s west side. Her heels busily clacking on the asphalt street, a frustrated Joan began the mile and a half walk into the village’s small downtown area.
Once on South Orange Avenue, Kramer turned left into a small alley behind Gruning’s ice cream parlor. A phone booth sat at the rear of the alley. Dialing a friend in Manhattan, Joan began to discuss the fight between her and Bernard. Hearing that Joan was significantly distraught, her friend advised her to calm down and catch a cab home. Joan agreed and told her friend that she would hail a taxi and head straight back to Crest Drive. The twenty-four-year-old graduate student then phoned her parents and told her family that she was “on a deserted street in Newark” and would be taking a taxi home shortly. The reason for Joan’s identification of South Orange as Newark during this telephone call has never been established.
The former Kramer home at 65 Crest Drive in South Orange. Photo by Mark Moran.
Joan Kramer walked to the rear of this alley to telephone a friend after leaving her parents’ home in the wake of an argument. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
Kramer then walked back out of the alley to the front of Gruning’s and made a right toward the mountain. For reasons that today remain unknown, instead of flagging down a taxi, Joan Kramer approached a vehicle that was stopped at the traffic light situated at the corner of South Orange Avenue and Sloan Street. This intersection sat directly at the base of the mountain leading to her parents’ home. Approaching the driver’s side window of the vehicle, she asked the motorist for a ride home.
“Where do you live?”
“I live on top of the hill.”
“Get in.”
This would be the last time anyone saw Joan Leslie Kramer alive. It was 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 16, 1972.
Two days after Joan had vanished, her parents began to receive a series of strange phone calls from a man claiming to have kidnapped their daughter. During the course of these calls, the unidentified man, who spoke with a husky voice in either a West Indian or African accent, made demands for a ransom of $20,000. If this amount was delivered, the man promised to set Joan free. Julian Kramer, the wealthy president of Suburban Foods Incorporated and the Tantleff Beef Company, agreed to the amount and asked the caller for proof that Joan was still alive and well. Kramer was very much aware of his daughter’s medical condition and feared that she would not survive long without her medication. In response to Kramer’s request, the caller stepped away from the phone, and a loud squeal was heard in the background. Convinced that the squeal came from his captive daughter, Julian Kramer made arrangements with the caller to have the ransom money dropped off at a secret location.
The train trestle at the intersection of Sloan Street and South Orange Avenue in downtown South Orange. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
Much to Julian Kramer’s surprise, the money was not picked up during the first two attempts to pay his daughter’s supposed kidnapper. Each time, the mysterious caller would claim that he could not locate the $20,000 that Kramer had left for him and that if he did not receive the payment soon, he would shoot Joan. “The next call you will receive,” the man said, “will be to tell you where you can find your daughter’s body.” A new meeting point was selected, and Kramer was told to be there at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 20. Joan’s older brother, Orin, who was standing nearby recording the phone call, decided to follow his father in his own car in a desperate attempt to catch his sister’s kidnapper. That Sunday night, Julian Kramer exited his car and walked to the predetermined spot, a phone booth across from Newark’s Weequahic Park. He stepped inside, and the phone immediately rang. Kramer picked up the receiver and heard the supposed kidnapper at the other end. “I’m watching you,
” he said. Kramer then set the ransom money on the floor of the booth and walked back to his car. Orin Kramer raced to the phone booth but did not make it in time—the $20,000 vanished from the drop-off point nearly as soon as it arrived there.
Sadly, Julian Kramer had just handed away a large sum of money to an imposter. The fifty-three-year-old executive would later learn that a “senior South Orange homicide detective” had taken the cash from the phone booth. Experts listened to Orin Kramer’s tapes of the ransom calls and determined that the foreign accent used by the caller was “phony.” The man who had been harassing Kramer for the last several days had not kidnapped his daughter, nor was she being held hostage by any such kidnapper.
In reality, Joan Kramer had been dead the whole time.
On Monday, August 28, 1972, the nude body of Joan Leslie Kramer was found lying facedown inside of Union’s Elizabeth River Park, only seven miles away from her parents’ home. At the time, this secluded, wooded area just off Salem Road was located behind several stores and factories and was not easily accessible by an automobile. Unlike the Houdaille Quarry, where Jeannette DePalma’s body would be discovered three weeks later, this area was never alleged to be a party spot or lover’s lane. Seventeen-year-old John Hasenauer and a friend discovered Joan’s swollen and discolored body sometime around 12:30 p.m. on that Monday while walking along a footpath near the Elizabeth River. The discovery almost did not occur, as Joan’s decomposing remains were obscured by several bushes located in that particular area. Once the Union County Park Police were notified, Detective Sergeant Richard Mannix raced to the scene in order to secure the area and interview Hasenauer and his friend. Searching the area around Joan’s body, Mannix discovered a three-foot-long piece of rubber hose within an arm’s length of the remains and, later, a pickaxe nearly one hundred feet away. While it was later determined by the New Jersey State Police’s crime lab that the piece of hose had nothing to do with Joan’s murder, the pickaxe was eventually determined to have been used in an attempt to bury Joan’s clothing, which was turned over to the police a day after her body was recovered. Joan’s orange and white dress, along with the blue suede jacket that she had been seen wearing last, were located in a grassy area across the street from the site of her remains by Nathaniel Fennell, a Union County Park Commission attendant. Fennell had found the discarded articles of clothing tangled in weeds near the banks of the river four days prior. It was also later discovered that Kramer’s wallet had been found in the Elizabeth River by three teenagers only one day after the young woman had disappeared. The youths did not report this discovery until after Kramer’s body was found. Two items, however, were not recovered. Joan’s shoes were missing, and like Jeannette DePalma, a necklace that she had been wearing was never found.
After Joan Kramer’s body was removed from Elizabeth River Park during the afternoon of August 28, 1972, an autopsy was immediately conducted by Essex County medical examiner Dr. Edwin A. Albano. Due to the extent of decomposition, Dr. Albano relied on dental records to make a positive identification. The knowledge of two preexisting scars on Joan’s body also aided the identification process. During his examination, Albano found no antemortem bruising on the body, but he did locate a large pressure mark on Joan’s throat. This pressure mark led Albano to dissect the neck in order to search for a possible cause of death. During the dissection, Albano discovered that a neck bone had been fractured, leading to the collapse of Joan’s windpipe. The immediate result of this was asphyxiation, which ultimately killed Joan Kramer. Further analysis aided Dr. Albano in determining that Joan had been murdered via manual strangulation, which was administered by a right-handed individual who was standing either in front of or to the left of her. In his report, Albano noted that Kramer had been dead for at least a week to ten days and that he would not be able to determine whether she had been sexually assaulted without the aid of additional testing.
Joan Kramer’s body remained undetected in this secluded location, just off Salem Road in Union, for nearly half a month. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
If Jeannette DePalma died due to strangulation, as per Dr. Bernard Ehrenberg’s assumption, that would mean that both she and Joan Kramer were murdered in the exact same way. This would not be the only obvious similarity. Both Joan and Jeannette were young, attractive women of average height and weight with long, straight, brunette hair that was worn with a part in the middle. Both women vanished within eight days of each other while allegedly hitchhiking, and both were later discovered dead, lying facedown in remote wooded areas only six miles apart. In both cases, necklaces were missing from the bodies.
These similarities were not lost on the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. After both cases were examined by investigators, the decision was made to utilize a telephone tip line exclusively dedicated to both the Kramer and DePalma cases. Assistant prosecutor Michael Mitzner told reporters that the “special police telephone number of 352-5300” had been set up to “receive information on the death of either girl.”
The final resting place of Joan Kramer. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
No tip or clue of any worth ended up being called in.
On Tuesday, August 29, 1972, following a simple ceremony held at the Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, the body of Joan Kramer was driven by hearse to the B’Nai Abraham Memorial Park in Union, where it was laid to rest beneath the shade of a large tree. “I remember vividly the sobs of Mrs. Kramer as Joan’s coffin was lowered into the waiting grave,” says Molly Hammett Kronberg. “She broke down completely. It was one of the most harrowing sounds I have ever heard.”
“It was hard when she died,” Sonia Leonardow Baxter says. “The first piece of our innocence died. We all mourned her. She held such promise.”
Judith Small is still hit very hard by the death of her friend. “Joan was the first to leave us, and because someone took her deliberately, her loss will always seem the most cruel,” she says. An accomplished poet, Small later channeled her profound grief into a poem that appeared in a 1976 issue of New Letters magazine. The piece, simply titled “Poem for Joan,” reads:
I do not want
to know what you were thinking the night
you disappeared.
Already I know too much:
the flickering light of a television
all afternoon
the wrists
of an old man in pajamas watching,
shuffling a deck, reshuffling
or in Spain last week
a child shifting
its weight in the womb,
the mother at the last minute pardoned, permitted
to live out her life in prison.
Always the exquisite
cowardice of the intellect,
pressing a tailored suit before
appointments with suffering.
There is
enough suffering.
From the vacant lot where your body was found, the smell
of cucumbers turning soft.
The moon’s skin
has an unhealthy sheen at the edge of
Newark, late in August.
I know now:
every driver on the freeway is a lunatic with teeth
invisible
as cucumber seeds.
I am frightened, Joan, and I want
to live bravely.
For grandfathers,
children, skylarks this
is a stinking country.
Sing to me
with a crow’s voice,
without loveliness, fiercely
earthbound.
“The poem has always been very important to me,” Small says, “as a kind of anchor, I think, as well as a way of trying to come to terms with the loss of Joan. I was able to send it to Joan’s mother, Ruth, after it was published, and she sent me a very warm note in response, which, of course, meant the world to me. I almost always include the poem when I give readings. In fact, I often start with it and have always fe
lt a strong response from audiences. Long ago, Ruth Kramer came to a reading I gave in New Jersey, so I was able to read the poem aloud to her as well. Over the years, the poem has become a way for me to keep the memory of Joan’s spirit alive and to share it with others. It has also given me a way to return, again and again, to the courage that, for me, defined her.”
Only hours after Joan Kramer’s burial, the former List home at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield mysteriously caught fire. Rumors began to swirl about arson. First responders claimed to have smelled kerosene while fighting the fire. Others accused the Westfield Police Department of secretly torching the house of horrors to stop Breeze Knoll from quickly becoming a grim tourist attraction. Others who were close to the List investigation told reporters that a group of teenagers who were engaged in a séance had accidentally knocked over a candle, setting the abandoned home ablaze. Today, the cause of the fire is still undetermined.
The former List home at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield. This photo was taken the morning after the bodies of John List’s family were found lying on sleeping bags in the ballroom. The house mysteriously burned to the ground nine months later, in August 1972. Collection of the authors.
As the Kramer family grieved, the South Orange Police Department continued to investigate Joan’s brutal murder. The Essex County Park Police began a series of foot searches inside of the South Mountain Reservation, while detectives from the Union County Park Police interviewed several residents of the Putnam Manor section of Union who claimed to have heard a woman screaming as she fled from a car around the time of the murder. This neighborhood sits less than one mile away from the area where Joan’s body was later recovered. Investigators also began to look into eyewitness reports of a young woman entering a car stopped at the intersection of South Orange Avenue and Sloan Street on the night Joan vanished. One such witness, a fifty-year-old widow named Mary Colato, met with Sergeant George Homa of the South Orange Police Department. Over the course of a three-hour session, Colato was able to provide enough information about the driver of the vehicle for Homa to create a composite sketch. Shortly thereafter, the department released this new sketch of their prime suspect to the news media. Local newspapers carried the sketch in their continuing coverage of the Kramer case.
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 15