Otto Neil Nilson once resided in the small, three-room apartment on the second floor of this building at 173 Maplewood Avenue. Photo by Mark Moran.
After speaking with detectives and an Essex County judge, Nilson was charged with assault and ordered to undergo a fifteen-day psychiatric evaluation at Cedar Grove’s Overbrook Asylum. After his evaluation was completed, Nilson received a two-year suspended sentence and was ordered to stay out of South Orange and away from his ex-wife. Nilson agreed to the terms and returned to his small Maplewood apartment.
“We went to Nilson’s hearing for our break-in,” Daniel Gregg recalls. “The judge said he was free to go, and my father got up in the courtroom to protest but was rebuked. He was later called aside, and someone explained to him that when the police arrested Nilson, he was recognized as a suspect for another crime, and they had to let him go until they got the evidence they needed.”
Mere days after Otto Neil Nilson’s release from Overbrook Asylum, the nearby township of North Bergen would be rocked to its core by the disappearance and subsequent murder of two teenage girls.
9
THE BERGEN GIRLS
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge without Music”
She should have been home by now…”
The words danced around inside Wanda Pryor’s mind, mercilessly taunting her, as she paced around her small North Bergen apartment. Pryor’s daughter, seventeen-year-old Mary Ann, had left home around four o’clock that day. She had received a Macy’s gift certificate for her birthday the month before and wanted to buy a few things for a planned trip to her aunt and uncle’s home in Ortley Beach the next day. With the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus being only a short bus ride away, Mary Ann picked up the phone and called her friend, sixteen-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly. Normally, Mary Ann would have asked her best friend, Diane Siebert, to join her on her shopping trip, but Diane was out of town on vacation that week. Lorraine agreed to join her friend and said she would be over shortly. It was now five hours later, and both girls had not arrived home, nor had either of their families heard from them.
Suddenly, Wanda Pryor’s anxiety was lifted as she heard the front door of the apartment begin to open. Turning hear head toward the door, her heart began to race as her eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Nancy, walked in instead of Mary Ann.
“Where is your sister?” Wanda asked.
“What are you talking about?” Nancy replied, visibly confused by her mother’s inquiry. Nancy had seen her younger sister earlier that day and knew she had left to go to the mall with Lorraine, but surely she must be home by now.
“Your sister didn’t come home,” Wanda continued. “I’ve called everyone, and nobody knows where she is.”
An undeniable feeling of apprehension now began to overwhelm Nancy. Mary Ann had told her that she would be home around 5:00 p.m. It was now well after 9:00 p.m.
“That was not like her,” Nancy Pryor says. “If she was going to be late, she would have called. We contacted the police, but they said we had to wait twenty-four hours before filing a missing person report.”
Not content to sit around waiting for too long, Nancy Pryor decided to hit the streets the next morning to search for her missing sister. “By dawn, it was apparent that she wasn’t coming home,” Nancy recalls. “I went out to look for Mary Ann while my parents stayed home and manned the phones. I went up to the bus stop, and then I went by Lorraine’s house.” Lorraine’s older siblings, twenty-three-year-old Thomas and twenty-one-year-old Maureen, told Nancy that they had not seen or heard from their younger sister either. “I went all over the place,” Nancy continues. “I asked Mary Ann’s friends, and nobody saw her. It became like that for the next few days—no sleep, just worrying. Then, when we were finally able to file the report, the police insisted that they were just runaways. They were like, ‘Oh yeah, she ran away from home.’ We said, ‘No, that’s not like her.’ She had no reason to run away from home. She was happy. She was going down the shore the next day. There was no reason, but the cops kept insisting that she was a runaway. I don’t think the police did anything to try and find them, to be honest.”
As Nancy Pryor continued to search for Mary Ann and Lorraine throughout North Bergen, her parents continued to receive the runaround from the North Bergen Police Department. “They really weren’t keeping us posted,” Nancy says. “We would get occasional calls. Of course, we kept calling them, and each time, they would just say, ‘Yeah, we’re working on it, but we have no leads.’ The detectives felt that if they told us anything, it would ruin their investigation. They were afraid that we would say something to friends, family or reporters. They really didn’t want us talking to reporters. We were mostly kept in the dark.”
Once detectives became aware of Mary Ann’s long-distance relationship with a young man in Georgia, the investigation was immediately focused on her boyfriend, Sal Rubiano.
“Somebody called me up and asked me if it was possible that Mary Ann had run away,” Rubiano recalls. “They wanted me to let them know if Mary Ann was coming down to Georgia to see me. I told them I would let them know. I started to get nervous, but it didn’t make any sense [at] that time to think that anything bad had happened. If she was going to do something like that, I would have known she was coming on down. I knew nothing like that was happening because that’s not something she would have done. Our relationship was a long-distance thing. We would communicate with each other by phone. Long-distance phone calls were very expensive back in those days, but sometimes I would use my dad’s office phone to give Mary Ann a call. I wanted her to move down here with me, but she wanted to finish school first. She said her mother would kill her if she didn’t finish high school. That was a bit of a letdown.”
Once it became apparent that Mary Ann Pryor was not on her way to see Rubiano in Georgia, detectives from the North Bergen Police Department began to take a close look at Lorraine’s boyfriend, seventeen-year-old Ricky Molinaro. Ricky had been the last person to see the girls on Friday, August 9, 1974. Molinaro had given Mary Ann and Lorraine a ride to a bus stop at the corner of Slocum Avenue and Broad Avenue in nearby Ridgefield that day and watched them board the 4:30 p.m. bus to the Garden State Plaza Mall. Molinaro claimed that he did not see Mary Ann or Lorraine after that, despite a prior arrangement with Lorraine to pick her up at Nungessers, a popular intersection on the Bergen/Hudson County line, at 9:00 p.m. that night. Lorraine, Ricky said, never showed.
When we asked him for an interview for this book, Ricky Molinaro replied, “I don’t feel comfortable sharing personal things over a phone or e-mail. Sorry, can’t help.”
While the North Bergen Police Department questioned potential witnesses and issued a thirteen-state missing person alert for the teenage girls, the families of Mary Ann and Lorraine helplessly awaited any piece of information. The suspense began to take its toll on Wanda Pryor, who began to fear the worst. “I feel like they’re in the bushes some place,” she told a reporter from the New York Daily News.
On Tuesday, August 13, the Pryor and Kelly families received a hopeful piece of news. A waitress at the Couch House Diner in Union City told the North Bergen Police Department that she had witnessed two teenage girls matching the descriptions of Mary Ann and Lorraine dining at the establishment around five thirty that morning. Investigators felt that this tip held particular merit, as the waitress was able to accurately describe clothing similar to that which Mary Ann and Lorraine were last seen wearing. The North Bergen Police Department then went to the press and declared the girls to be runaways, with Lieutenant James Braddock announcing, “There is no longer any reason to fear that the girls are victims of foul play.” Braddock would regret this statement in a matter of hours.
The very next day, on the morning of August 14, 1974, a tenant of Ridgemount Gardens apartment complex in Montvale would make a horrific discovery. Exiting the building’s front door, fifty-nine-yea
r-old Enis Perry made her way over to her car, which was parked in the adjacent lot. Opening the driver’s side door, she noticed something peculiar out of the corner of her eye. In a sloping, wooded area only ten feet from the bumper of Perry’s car were two nude bodies, lying facedown and parallel to each other. The bodies were badly discolored, and each had a rope loosely tied around the neck. Most shocking of all, each girl had a glass soft drink bottle inserted into her vaginal cavity. Perry immediately raced back inside her apartment and phoned the police. Officer Carl Olsen of the Montvale Police Department was the first to arrive at the crime scene, and the patrolman quickly secured the area. Olsen observed a noticeable lack of blood on and around the bodies, leading him to believe that the two had been killed elsewhere.
“The bodies seem to have been placed—and I mean placed, not thrown,” Montvale police commissioner Thomas Maurer later told the New York Times. “It was a horrible scene. The bodies looked like two little dolls at Christmastime…” Marks found around the girls’ wrists and ankles indicated that they had been tied up before their murder, the ropes around their necks having possibly been used to hogtie the teenagers. As investigators combed the area for evidence, it soon became apparent that the two girls had been dumped without their clothing, shoes or pocketbooks. The only personal effects that appeared to have been left untouched by the killer were a necklace and a bracelet found on one of the bodies and a necklace found on the other. Montvale detectives got their first clue once they took a close look at Lorraine’s necklace: a gold chain with a pendant that read, “Lorraine and Ricky.” As investigators from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office made plaster casts of footprints found near the bodies, Montvale’s homicide detectives made contact with the North Bergen Police Department. Once the department was alerted to a possible match between the yet-to-be-identified bodies and the two missing teenagers, North Bergen detective Vincent DeCarlo raced to the Pryors’ apartment on Second Avenue. The forty-five-year-old detective hoped to reach Mary Ann’s family before the press did. Unfortunately, his attempt would be in vain.
“We heard it on the radio,” Nancy Pryor recalls. “We had that news station, 1010 WINS, on constantly. About five minutes later, they knocked on the door.” Detective DeCarlo was let into the Pryors’ apartment by a family friend. Nancy had been keeping vigil by the telephone while her father, James, paced around the apartment and her mother chain-smoked cigarettes, all hoping to be told that the bodies found in Montvale were not those of Mary Ann and Lorraine.
“Mr. and Mrs. Pryor, could you come with me, please?” Detective DeCarlo asked while standing in the apartment’s small kitchen. “We’d like you to try and identify the bodies.”
Wanda Pryor could think of only one response: “Can Nancy come?” DeCarlo agreed, and Wanda began to ready herself for the trip to the morgue. As she collected her things, the possibility of having to see her youngest daughter’s dead body before her own eyes finally set in. Wanda collapsed to the floor. Her family decided to take her to a doctor’s office on Second Avenue before heading to the morgue.
“As soon as we left the apartment building, the media was all out there already,” Nancy Pryor recalls. “I remember somebody shoving a microphone in my face and saying, ‘How do you feel?’ and I pushed him down, and said, ‘How the fuck do you think I feel?’ Some of the reporters were grabbing my arm and saying, ‘Come with us! Come with us! We’ll give you a ride there!’ because they wanted a story, but the detectives said, ‘No, you’re coming with us.’ They drove us down the street so that my mother could visit the doctor there. The doctor gave my mother a shot of what I think was valium because she was just so distraught that she would not be able to answer any questions or anything.”
The Pryor family then drove to the Bergen County Medical Examiner’s Office in Paramus. “When we got there, there was this sea of reporters,” Nancy Pryor says. “They all tried to stop me, but we just kept on walking. When my mother and I went in, my father waited in a separate area. He had a nervous disability, so we didn’t let him go with us.”
Wanda and Nancy Pryor were then presented with the jewelry that was found on the body suspected to be Mary Ann’s. “Right away, I recognized the jewelry,” Nancy says. “It was a chain with a little cross on it that her godfather had given her. There was also a little bracelet. I knew they were hers. That was eerie. I felt like this could really be them.”
The two were then brought to the viewing room of an autopsy suite where a curtain covered a large window. “They opened the curtain. The body was covered with a sheet up to her face. I remember looking at her and saying, ‘That’s not my sister.’ She had what looked like bruises on her face. She was in pretty bad shape. They said that the bodies had already been dead for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. So I guess, at that point, the body was changing a little. It just didn’t look like her. I mean, if you really looked at her, it did, but I wasn’t really looking at her. I just really wanted to see the body there and know for sure whether or not it was her, and the person I was seeing just didn’t look like her. I gasped and thought to myself, ‘Maybe it’s not her,’ but it was. They didn’t give me long to look, but after looking for a couple of more seconds, I realized that it was her. I knew from the jewelry, anyway. That was hard. The memory is still in my head, and I still have that cross.”
Mary Ann Pryor (left) and her sister Nancy in 1974. Courtesy of Nancy Pryor.
In an adjacent viewing room, Thomas Kelly identified the second recovered body as that of his sister. Thomas, Maureen and Lorraine, along with another brother, John, were orphans. Their father, Thomas Sr., succumbed to emphysema in 1968, while their mother, Frances, had died of cancer only two months prior to her youngest daughter’s murder. To further add to the tragedy of her killing, Lorraine Kelly’s body was found only four days shy of her seventeenth birthday. According to friends and loved ones, the young woman was still deeply grieving her mother’s death at the time of her disappearance.
Once she exited the Bergen County Medical Examiner’s Office, Nancy Pryor immediately became a changed person. “I had to grow up real quick,” she says. “I went from teenager to adult in two seconds, you know? I was the one handling the phone calls and all of the arrangements. My parents just couldn’t talk to anyone. I had to take charge.”
A shocked community stepped in to help the Pryor and Kelly families as Bergen County detectives continued their investigation. North Bergen’s Vainieri Funeral Home stepped in and offered services to both families completely free of charge. Other organizations offered a reward for information leading to the arrest of the girls’ killer. Acting on slightly inaccurate information, police in both Hudson and Bergen Counties began to mandatorily arrest hitchhikers. During an earlier interview with the New York Daily News, Wanda Pryor told reporters that Lorraine “likes to hitchhike.” Other media publications ran with this quote, misprinting it as referring to Wanda’s own daughter, Mary Ann. Soon after, even more newspapers began erroneously quoting Pryor as saying both girls liked to hitchhike. The Bergen County Record even went so far as to make the bold claim that, for Mary Ann and Lorraine, “hitchhiking was their pastime.”
“I never knew of Mary Ann hitchhiking,” says Sal Rubiano. “I never knew of a situation where she hitchhiked. Back in that era, hitchhiking was pretty common for us guys to get around sometimes. It was a different time where most of the time, it was pretty much safe for us. If we were going to a concert in Jersey City, a few of us guys might hitch a ride down there. We didn’t think anything of it back then. We really weren’t concerned about those things back then. But I don’t know of any situation where Mary Ann hitched. Now, Lorraine was a little more outgoing, so maybe she had hitchhiked before, but I wouldn’t be able to say for certain.”
Two days after the discovery of the bodies, Dr. Lawrence Denson, Bergen County’s chief medical examiner, made the determination that Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly died as a result of suffocation. Dr. Denson theorized that Pryor a
nd Kelly had been killed by their assailant placing something—possibly a hand, pillow or bag—over the mouths of the victims until they expired. Denson also concluded that the girls had been dead up to forty hours before they were discovered. This led investigators to believe that the bodies had been stored elsewhere for a period of time before being dumped, as Enis Perry noted that she had not seen anything lying in the wooded area near her apartment’s parking lot the night before she made the discovery. Test results showed that Lorraine had most likely been killed six hours before Mary Ann. Burn marks, possibly from a cigarette, were also observed on the body of one of the teenagers. If the same person who had murdered Carol Farino, Jeannette DePalma and Joan Kramer had, in fact, killed Mary Ann and Lorraine, he had notably amplified the brutality of his modus operandi.
On Wednesday, August 21, 1974, after a week of forensic testing, the families of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly were finally able to hold a funeral for the slain girls. Over two hundred people lined the pews of the Our Lady of Fatima Roman Catholic Church in North Bergen. Reverend George O’Gorman stood in front of the two white caskets and offered a warning during the eulogy. “If Mary Ann and Lorraine could speak this morning,” Reverend O’Gorman preached, “what a message they could give. Would not their words warn you of the loose and indiscriminate companionship of hitchhiking? Think and remember, so they will not have died in vain.” After their funeral rites were performed, the bodies of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly were transported by hearse to their final resting places. Mary Ann was laid to rest in Hackensack’s Saint Joseph’s Cemetery, and Lorraine was reunited with her mother and father in Long Island National Cemetery.
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 17