One South Orange family recognized the man in the sketch as not just someone they casually knew but as their very own neighbor.
8
THE ACCOUNTANT
Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
That house was possessed. There was something evil in that house.”
Curt Knoth is haunted by the memories of his neighbors. Growing up in the suburban village of South Orange, Knoth can clearly remember the point in his childhood where innocence was not just lost but shattered. It all began when he saw a familiar face in the local newspaper: “When that witness sketch from the Kramer case appeared in the newspaper, everyone in South Orange knew right away that it was Otto Nilson…”
Otto Neil Nilson was born on October 13, 1934, in New York to Otto N. Nilson III and Helen Nilson. A graduate of Seton Hall University, Nilson served in the United States military and later married Carole S. Spangenberger. The couple had five children and chose to settle down in a home on Summit Avenue in South Orange. Otto supported his large family by working at an accounting firm while Carole took care of their children at home.
During their initial years in South Orange, the Nilsons were a popular and well-liked family who fit in well with the tightknit community. “Mr. Nilson was a very big guy and very sweet,” recalls Alex Mason,* a former neighbor. “If he came to our yard when the kids were playing ball, he would throw the ball around with them for a few minutes.”
“People liked the Nilsons, and everyone got along,” Curt’s sister, Audrey Knoth Muratore, recalls. “He was a nice guy. When we were little and had loose teeth, my mother would say, ‘Go over and see Mr. Nilson; he’ll take it out for you.’ Mr. Nilson was good at taking teeth out. We would always go over there when we had loose teeth.”
Curt Knoth has similar recollections. “We used to have these huge barbecues, and all the parents would sit around in a circle and drink all night long,” he says. “Everyone was always very excited to see Mr. Nilson come over the house. This was the whole World War II generation, and Otto was military, so there was appreciation for that. He was hilarious and had this really magnificent personality. Everyone would talk to him. I remember him throwing us around on his back. He looked like Clark Kent. At these barbecues, he was like the grand master of ceremonies.”
However, this would soon change.
“Around 1970 or so, Otto went bad,” Knoth says. During this period of time, Otto and Carole began to drink heavily. As a result, their children and home went neglected. “The house was actually shut down, or condemned or whatever you might call that,” Knoth continues. “All of the Nilson kids had to go to the hospital to get de-flead and have their hair cut and shampooed. It was disgusting. I mean, they would leave dirty dishes out on the table forever and just throw them away and use paper plates. I mean, it was bad. It was gross.”
“Mrs. Nilson was an alcoholic,” says Audrey Knoth Muratore. “She finally recovered after many years, but when you’re drinking like that, you just don’t get your shit together.”
Soon after, the Nilsons’ problems began to extend to their neighbors.
“There was an incident where my father went to a party and the Nilsons were there,” Audrey Knoth Muratore recalls. “Otto left, and my dad and this other guy had to drive Carole home. Otto met them on the front porch in his underwear. He was in kind of a rage. Now, my dad is about five-six and slim, and this other guy was only five-three. Mr. Nilson was a pretty big guy, and let’s just say that they knew if any fight was going to happen, they were going to lose. It was one of those scary situations.”
As his drinking worsened, Otto Neil Nilson became violent toward his family. “My best friend at that time was Nilson’s son Neil,” Knoth says. “One day in 1970 or ’71, we were playing with Hot Wheels in Neil’s room, and we heard a commotion upstairs in the attic where Mr. Nilson was working. We heard a big bang—a crash. Neil ran right upstairs. Mr. Nilson was there, and he had cut his hand. He had blood all over his hand. He looked very, very strange. I mean, he looked cuckoo. He screamed, ‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!’ and we went right back down the steps.” Something else about this incident disturbed the young Curt Knoth. “When we were downstairs, we heard voices up there. It sounded like somebody else was up there with Mr. Nilson, but he was alone.”
Carole Nilson began telling friends and neighbors that her husband had grown cold toward her and that the two were fighting more and more often. Eventually, she asked Otto to leave and filed for divorce. “Mrs. Nilson had some kind of restraining order, and Mr. Nilson wasn’t allowed back there. Of course, he would go back there once in a while, and there would be a big problem or hassle.”
One of these hassles stands out very clearly in Knoth’s memory.
“Sometime around 1972, Otto showed up at Carole’s house,” he says. “I think he might have smacked her around, and she called the police. My mother was right in the middle of that. We heard the sirens and saw Nilson’s daughter walking up to our house with her baby brother. She handed him to my mother. Neil and I walked down to his house, and Mr. Nilson came out the front door. South Orange and Maplewood Police drove up from both sides, and a fight ensued on the front steps. I mean, Mr. Nilson was a big guy. He took three cops and just threw them away. They took a clothesline from our neighbor’s house and tied him up with it. Mr. Nilson smacked Mrs. Nilson around more than one time. No doubt about that.”
By this time, Nilson had moved out of town to live with his mother. The village of South Orange, however, was not about to forget the thirty-seven-year-old accountant. A familiar-looking sketch that would appear in the local newspapers in August of that year would see to that.
“There was a witness sketch made of the person who picked up Joan Kramer in South Orange Village,” Curt Knoth recalls. “It appeared in the Star-Ledger, I think. I remember my mother looking at it and saying, ‘It’s Mr. Nilson.’ She said, ‘That’s him.’”
Audrey Knoth Muratore also remembers the witness sketch. “When that picture was in the newspaper that summer, I can remember saying to my mother, ‘Hey! That picture looks like Mr. Nilson!’ and my mother saying, ‘No, no, no! That’s not him! What are you talking about?’ But later on, I overheard her talking to her friends, saying, ‘Even Audrey thinks it looks like him.’ After that happened, my mother told me to stay away from Mr. Nilson and that if I saw him, to go the opposite way.”
Mrs. Knoth’s mind immediately turned to another young woman who had been murdered only a mile and a half away nearly six years prior—a young woman whose killer had never been found.
On the evening of Thursday, November 3, 1966, the body of seventeen-year-old Carol Ann Farino was found lying in a driveway on Sommer Avenue in Maplewood. She had been strangled with her own stocking. Maplewood patrol officer Anthony M. Surano Jr. tried in vain to save Carol Ann’s life by administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after Officers James O’Dowd and James Waddell quickly cut the silk stocking from her throat. At 9:05 p.m., twenty-one minutes after the discovery of her body, Carol Ann Farino was pronounced dead at the scene by Dr. J. Evans. Carol Ann’s body was then turned over to the local morgue.
Just like Joan Kramer, Carol Ann Farino’s shoes were never recovered. Just like Jeannette DePalma, Carol Ann Farino’s body was found across the street from a golf course.
If it is true that Jeannette did, indeed, die as the result of strangulation, all three women were killed the same way.
“I remember my mother and Mrs. Nilson talking about Carol Farino in my kitchen,” Curt Knoth says. “They both wondered where Mr. Nilson was at the time that this girl was murdered. It was that kind of conversation. A pretty intense conversation, too. You know, Mrs. Nilson was putting it together in her head that maybe he was killing other people.”
“My mom an
d Mrs. Nilson were very good friends,” Audrey Knoth Muratore recalls. “Mrs. Nilson was over my house every single day with my mother, having coffee. I can tell you that right after Joan Kramer was murdered, they were talking about him being the one.”
Billy Gregg, one of Nilson’s former neighbors on Summit Avenue, also recalls the rumors surrounding the accountant’s possible role in Farino’s death. “Before the Kramer murder happened,” Gregg says, “I vaguely remember either my mother or father telling me that Mrs. Nilson told one of them, or someone else that repeated it, that Mr. Nilson said something like, ‘What a shame about that girl that was strangled coming home’ before it was even reported.” Billy Gregg recalls hearing that the young woman had been returning home from a Catechism class on the night of her murder. Furthermore, Gregg remembers Otto Neil Nilson teaching Catechism classes at Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in South Orange. We were unable to determine whether Carol Farino was a student of Nilson’s, but according to a police report provided by the Maplewood Police Department, Farino had last been seen alive at George’s Restaurant on Maplewood Avenue on the night of her death.
“Several months later, Mr. Nilson showed up at our door,” Curt Knoth continues. “I was upstairs with my father at the time. At some point during my mother and Mr. Nilson’s conversation, it turned into an aggressive thing. It was a commotion, more or less. All I heard were voices and him saying something loud. Maybe he thought that my mother was telling the police what was going on, or Mrs. Nilson said something about the conversations that they were having about him killing other girls. I don’t know. I remember the South Orange Police being outside when he came into our house. They were following him. They knew something was going on. He was not our neighbor anymore, at this point. When I heard their conversation turn into an aggressive thing, I came down the steps, and about that time was when Mr. Nilson turned around and went back outside. I remember going up to the door, looking outside, and there were police there. There was a cop right in front of my house.”
Audrey Knoth Muratore also recalls this incident but insists that there was no police involvement. “He wasn’t arrested the night that he came to our house,” she says. “My mother just got him out, thank God. She told us that things got uncomfortable. He was saying things like, ‘Nobody loves me. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m losing my family. I’m in a bad way,’ and that kind of stuff. She was frightened. She just said, ‘It’s OK, don’t worry about it. Everything is going to be fine,’ and she just kept backing away from him. Not that he was making any sexual advances or anything, but he just kept coming closer to her. She basically just talked him off of the cliff, which was all that she could do, and he left on his own volition.”
Carole Nilson was not the only resident of 410 Summit Avenue who was beginning to suspect that her ex-husband was a killer. “When I was about ten or eleven years old, Neil Nilson and I went down to Mr. Nilson’s office in Maplewood,” Curt Knoth recalls. “Neil was upset about something. He was going to confront his father with something. I could tell. I asked him what was bothering him, and Neil told me, ‘I think my dad killed someone.’ We walked down to his office in Maplewood Village. It was on the top floor of a building. Neil was upstairs, and I was downstairs. A commotion happened. I ran up the stairs, and Mr. Nilson had his knee on Neil’s chest and his hands around his throat. He yelled at us both to get out of the office, and we did the same thing as the last time; we ran out and we ran home. Neil was heartbroken. He was ruined.”
“There were a lot of incidents with him during that period of time,” Audrey Knoth Muratore recalls. “There was the night where things got crazy after my father dropped off Mrs. Nilson, and then there was the night that he went to the neighbors’ house…”
In the early morning hours of July 7, 1974, the rage that seethed inside Otto Neil Nilson finally boiled over. Exiting his three-room apartment at 173 Maplewood Avenue, Nilson started the engine of his blue Buick and drove a mile and a half to his former home on Summit Avenue in South Orange. Looking to confront his ex-wife, Nilson smashed the front window of Carole Spangenberger’s house and broke in. Manically dashing from room to room, Nilson soon discovered that his ex-wife and five children were nowhere to be found. Staring at a framed photograph of one of his sons, taken while the child was crying, Nilson lost whatever remaining composure he may have had. Darting across the street, he managed to convince himself that his former neighbors, the Gregg family, were somehow responsible for his family’s absence. Carole Nilson often played poker with the Greggs, but in reality, the former Mrs. Nilson and her children were vacationing in Barnegat that weekend.
Just as the clock struck 2:00 a.m., Otto kicked in the front door of 415 Summit Avenue, destroying the door frame in the process. The resulting noise immediately woke forty-eight-year-old William Gregg from his slumber.
“I remember hearing the door break open, but I did not fully wake up,” William’s son Daniel recalls. “The front door was warped and often required a couple of hip-checks to open.”
“That night, I had fallen asleep in the TV room after watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert,” Billy Gregg says. “I jumped up when Nilson blasted through the front door and found him standing in the living room. He said, ‘Where’s your father?’ At that point, my father showed up on the stairway landing, and I said, ‘Neil wants to see you.’”
Brushing past the nineteen-year-old Billy, Nilson raced up the stairs to confront the confused teenager’s father with a forceful punch to the mouth. The blow busted William Gregg’s lower lip open and launched him backward into a wall.
“I ran up the stairs and jumped on Nilson’s back,” Billy Gregg continues, “and we all went backward down the stairs. I cut my elbow on the railing as we went down.”
“This was all in a matter of seconds,” Daniel Gregg says. “I jumped out of bed and saw this tussle. In my grogginess, I thought it was my dad and brother fighting, even though nothing like that had ever happened in my house. Thinking it was my brother, I grabbed the head of the bottom guy to pull them apart but soon realized that this huge, whiskery head wasn’t him and let go.” The Greggs’ struggle to subdue their nocturnal assailant then carried over into the living room.
Eventually, Billy Gregg was able to gain the upper hand and knocked Nilson to the floor. “My brother was a wrestler,” Daniel Gregg recalls. “He put Nilson in a choke hold while my father tried to smash his knees with his heavy briefcase. He was kicking wildly while my brother restrained him by the neck.”
“He tried kicking my old man,” Billy Gregg says. “That’s when I choked him and starting punching him in the forehead.”
“My mom was screaming to the police on the phone while holding an iron by the cord,” Daniel Gregg continues. “She was trying to bounce it on Nilson’s head.”
As Officers Bottona and Hahne of the South Orange Police Department entered the home, they found Billy Gregg still lying under Nilson, restraining him with a chokehold. “The cops came pretty quickly and pulled him up,” Daniel Gregg says. “He seemed to settle for a second but then had a quick violent outburst. He picked up the end table and swung it at somebody. That end table somehow ended up on our front lawn. We never figured that one out…”
Bottona and Hahne were able to subdue Nilson before any further damage could be done to the home or its residents and immediately placed him under arrest. As their intruder was placed into a squad car, William Gregg and his wife were taken by ambulance to Orange Memorial Hospital to be treated for their injuries. “My brother drove the two of us to the hospital because we were too cool to take the ambulance,” Daniel Gregg says with a laugh.
While being booked at South Orange Police Headquarters, Otto Neil Nilson provided no adequate explanation for his actions. Officer Robert Bottona would later describe Nilson’s mindset as “irrational” while filing his incident report. As Nilson was being processed, Detective Lieutenant Sal Bollaro, along with Detectives Anthony Fabrizio and Gi
lbert Scott, immediately noticed a striking similarity between the cuffed accountant and a composite sketch that had been sitting in the South Orange Police Department’s cold case files for nearly two years. All three policemen agreed that the man in front of them looked identical to the person who had allegedly picked up Joan Kramer on the night she was killed. An investigation into Otto Neil Nilson quietly began within the walls of South Orange’s Detective Bureau.
This violent and unprovoked incident would haunt the Gregg family for years to come. “We moved out of our house largely because of that incident,” Daniel Gregg says. “My mom kept seeing, or at least thought she was seeing, Nilson driving by, even though he had some kind of restraining order. It freaked her out, and she would put a chair in front of the door every night. It didn’t help that my father traveled for work. I also remember that a murder similar to Joan Kramer’s later happened, and police cars from that place, which might have been Bergen County, were at his house. I don’t think anything came of it, though. After we moved away, we’d occasionally hear or read something bad about him. It’s all a very sad story. He seemed like a really good guy to me before the divorce. He was active in the church, had a nice wife and five good kids.”
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 16