Sal Rubiano never got to say goodbye to his first love, Mary Ann. “I did not stay for the funeral,” he says, a somber tone filling his voice. “When I went up there, my head was in a damn cloud. Someone told me that the coroner was taking their time, and they didn’t know when the funeral was going to be, so my parents said that maybe I should come home. I had this ring that I had given Mary Ann. It was from when I was in the service. It was an air force ring. Nancy told me that she would put the ring on a chain for Mary Ann to wear. She said she would make sure that Mary Ann was buried with that. I felt good about that, but it’s a damn shock in your life that doesn’t go away. You hold onto it your whole life. It never goes away. She was the first person in my life that loved me. When I was in the service, I would get letters from her every three or four days. When mail call came in, I had a letter from Mary Ann. She would take the time to find all of this different stationery. The papers would be in the shape of a heart and in all different colors. I would get eight- or nine-page letters from her, and the next time around, it would be a different kind of paper. On Valentine’s Day that year, she had made me a heart-shaped cookie and sent it to me. I mean, by the time I got it, it was hard as a rock, but she sent that to me. That was the first relationship I was in where I felt like that person loved me, and I could do stupid things, and she would still be there.”
As the weeks went on, the investigators from Hudson and Bergen County had less and less to go on. The reported sighting of the two girls in a Union City diner ended up being a false lead, as both girls’ autopsy results conflicted with the waitress’s story. Detectives checked out numerous locations that were suspected to be murder sites, but in the end, all turned out to be dead ends. Throughout their investigation, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office was completely unaware of the similar murders of Carol Farino, Jeannette DePalma and Joan Kramer. Thanks to what many perceived as a police and media coverup, most people had forgotten all about these murders. However, in January 1975, the residents of South Orange would get a shocking reminder of the killing of Joan Kramer.
Mary Ann Pryor pictured only weeks before her death at the hands of a crazed killer. Courtesy of Nancy Pryor.
In the months since Otto Neil Nilson’s August 1974 arrest for assaulting William Gregg and his two sons, the South Orange Police Department had conducted a vigilant investigation into the Maplewood accountant and his possible involvement in the murder of Joan Kramer. On January 9, 1975, Mary Colato, the fifty-three-year-old resident of South Orange who claimed to have witnessed a man pick up a female hitchhiker in South Orange Village on the night of Kramer’s murder, was presented with a photograph of Nilson by detectives from the South Orange Police Department. After viewing the photograph, Colato identified the driver as Otto Neil Nilson. A judge issued an arrest warrant, and twenty-four hours later, on the night of Friday, January 10, investigators from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office knocked on the front door of Nilson’s Maplewood apartment. As the forty-year-old opened the door, an officer withdrew his handcuffs and said, “Otto Neil Nilson, you are under arrest for the murder of Joan Kramer. You have the right to remain silent…”
Otto Neil Nilson following his January 1975 arrest for the 1972 murder of Joan Kramer. Courtesy of the South Orange Police Department.
The investigators drove Nilson to the Essex County Sheriff ’s Office for processing. He was arraigned three days later by county judge Julius Feinberg at the Essex County Courthouse annex in Newark. Nilson chose not to enter a plea. Judge Feinberg subsequently ordered the accused to be held without bail.
As Otto Neil Nilson sat in an Essex County jail cell, a disturbed fifteen-year-old boy armed with an axe crept into the dining room of his Mountainside home. Any semblance of normalcy that had survived in this community since the 1972 murder of Jeannette DePalma was about to be shattered.
10
THE AXE MURDERER
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
The night of Saturday, January 14, 1975, was one marked by frigid temperatures, fog and occasional snow showers. These conditions, however, did not interfere with seventeen-year-old William Nelson’s plans for that evening. Racing up Mountainside’s Summit Road at upward of eighty miles per hour, Nelson and two other teenage friends were enjoying their weekend by living out the hot rod culture they so dearly admired. While the car sped toward the hilltop, a figure sliced through the glow of the vehicle’s headlights. The driver quickly swerved out of the way and continued on its path.
“Hey, that’s Gregg Sanders!” one youth shouted from the backseat. “Let’s go knock some sense into him!” The driver declined to stop, and Nelson, along with his friends, continued on into the night. It was a decision they would be thankful to have made for years to come. Unbeknownst to the three youths at that time, Gregg Sanders was armed with a knife. The fifteen-year-old hypnotically made his way through the snow toward a 150-foot-tall water tower inside of the Watchung Reservation. Climbing the narrow staircase that snaked its way around the tower, the boy made his way to the top, slit his left wrist and jumped.
“Someone must have spotted the body and called the Union County Police,” says retired Mountainside detective sergeant Jerome Rice. “I got a call about it around 11:00 p.m., and I showed up in plainclothes.” Mountainside patrolman Jack Yerich had reported to the water tower moments earlier after four teenagers flagged him down, saying they had found a body lying about fifteen feet from the base of the tower. “There were two uniformed Union County officers there already at the scene,” Rice continues. “I introduced myself and asked if they knew who the child was. They said no. They thought it was a murder. I said, ‘No, this is a suicide.’ I asked if they knew where the kid lived, and they said, ‘No, we didn’t touch the body.’ I told them to back up. I went into his pocket and found a piece of paper with the name ‘Sanders’ on it. No first name. I don’t know why he had it in his pocket. Seemed pretty reasonable if he wanted to be identified. Maybe that’s why he had it. That’s all he had, too. The name ‘Sanders’ didn’t mean nothin’ to me, so I called headquarters, and Lieutenant James Herrick said there was a Sanders family close by. This kid had to have walked there because there were no car or bicycle tracks. We got something out of one of the police cars, covered the body up and we continued the investigation.”
Fifteen-year-old Gregg Sanders leapt to his death from the top of this water tower inside of the infamous Watchung Reservation. Photo by Mark Moran.
Lieutenant Herrick theorized that the boy was most likely the son of Thomas and Janice Sanders of 1090 Sunny Slope Drive. Detective Sergeant Rice recalled this house as being only two blocks away from the home of the girl supposedly killed by devil worshippers in 1972. Rice can still recall the nefarious rumors surrounding the DePalma incident. “There was some voodoo-y bullshit found around the body there,” he says. “Chicken bones and crap like that. I did not get involved in that. You know that guy, John List, who killed his whole family in Westfield? Well, he was one house removed from the Mountainside/Westfield border. Otherwise, he would have been my job. I showed up at the scene the night that they found the bodies. That was the closest that I got to the whole thing.”
The forty-one-year-old detective sergeant decided to drive over to the Sanders residence along with Detective Sergeant Richard Mannix of the Union County Park Police. Less than three years prior, Mannix had been the first officer on the scene when John Hasenauer discovered the body of Joan Kramer. The two detectives decided to check in with a neighbor of the Sanders family before knocking on their door. “We wanted to check to see if the parents were in good health before we informed them of their son’s suicide,” Rice later wrote in his incident report. Once the detectives were told that neither parent suffered from a heart condition, the two made their way next door to the Sanders home. “I remember that well,” Rice says. “I slipp
ed on the ice checking the house out because their neighbors had turned their overhead lights out. I think Ritchie Mannix slipped, too.” After ringing the doorbell and making several unanswered phone calls to Thomas and Janice Sanders, the two decided to attempt to gain entry via the rear of the house.
Entering the backyard of the Sanders residence, Rice and Mannix found the rear kitchen door open. Mannix stood in front of the doorway and yelled, “Mr. and Mrs. Sanders, this is Detective Sergeant Mannix of the Union County Park Police! Is anybody there?” When Mannix received no answer, he reached into the blackness beyond the open doorway and felt for a light switch. His fingers met two switches, and he turned on the outside lights along with the indoor kitchen lights. Suddenly, the body of Thomas Sanders was illuminated before him. He was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, a fifteen-inch axe buried in the side of his head. Not wanting to disturb the gruesome crime scene that lay before them, Rice and Mannix made their way back to the front of the house and forced open the front door. To the right of the entryway, the detectives found Janice Sanders lying on the dining room floor with blood pouring from several axe blows to her head. Rice went back to his car to notify the Union County Crime Lab and Dr. Bernard Ehrenberg, who was still serving as the county’s medical examiner.
“It looked like Gregg had an argument with the father,” Rice says. “Then he turned around while the father was sitting at the dining room table and came up behind him with the axe. He might have hit him once or twice. The father, even with being hit by the axe, got up, and either he started running away from the kid or he started chasing the kid because there was blood from the dining room to the front foyer, to the living room and then to the kitchen. He was hit there at least a total of five times. The mother heard the commotion. After the father collapsed in the kitchen, the kid went to the bottom of the stairs. When the mother came down, she went into the dining room where her husband was doing paperwork, and Gregg snuck up behind her. He hit her with the axe about twenty times. But he didn’t have the strength that he had when he hit the father. These were lighter blows. More than enough to probably kill the poor woman after a few. The kid then buried the axe in the father’s head.”
As investigators searched the Sanders home, Detective Sergeant Rice found Gregg’s bedroom. On a small desk, Rice found a handwritten note. It read:
To Whom It May Concern:
I am sorry for the trouble I have caused.
I am not in any way mad at my parents.
I just can’t take it anymore.
Well, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.
Good Luck,
Gregg Sanders
Behind the desk, Rice noticed a small curtain covering the wall. “The kid must have popped a hole in the wall and put his desk in front of it,” Rice says. “There was a curtain hanging down, so he must have just pushed the curtain aside, and he could go into the room. It wasn’t a room, per se; it was the overhang of the house. They put up a wall, and the overhang was just there. There was bare rafters and stuff. It was kind of a crawlspace.” Inside of this crawlspace, the detective made a shocking discovery. “All this bullshit was in there,” Rice says. “All of his books on Adolf Hitler, pictures of the swastika, Mein Kampf and all that.” Investigators also found a two-foot-high wooden panel made by Gregg that was inscribed with a large swastika and the words “Amerikanische Nazi Partei.” Also found were Nazi armbands, a six-page handwritten collection of Adolf Hitler quotes, a mattress, a lamp and several empty liquor bottles.
When we submitted an Open Public Records Act request to the Mountainside Police Department asking for the Sanders case file, we received a heavily redacted five-page report. Curiously missing from this report was any reference to the Nazi paraphernalia found in Gregg Sanders’s bedroom. When we requested an itemized list of the evidence found inside the Sanders home, we were told by a municipal clerk that the “information requested is exempt from disclosure.” When asked why such information was exempt, especially considering that the Mountainside Police Department had already released five pages of graphic crime scene reports without hesitation, the Borough of Mountainside had its law firm, Post, Polak, Goodsell, MacNeill and Strauchler, P.A., send us a notice claiming that “no such a report” of crime scene evidence appears in the “Borough file.” Attorney John N. Post then expressed his “hope” that we would not file an appeal based on his firm’s decision. Despite this, we believe Jerome Rice’s account of the discovery of these items to be true.
In addition to the gruesome details of Gregg’s parents’ murder, descriptions of his secret Nazi shrine were leaked to the press as well. As if a suicide following a double axe murder were not enough to completely horrify the communities of Mountainside and Springfield, the news of a teenage Nazi sympathizer walking in their midst for years seemed to prove that things would never be the same in the quiet suburbia of Union County.
“I believe the uneasiness caused by the DePalma incident had calmed down quite a bit by the time the Sanders incident happened,” says former Mountainside resident Roy Simpson. Simpson knew Gregg personally, and they even played on the same baseball team together. “He was on my Little League team about two years before he killed his parents and himself. I wasn’t particularly close friends with him, but I remember him. What I remember about him—and this is one of the reasons why I was not particularly close friends with him—is him being kind of a wise guy. He was kind of a bully. I remember him being kind of, you know, a wise kid. A wisecracker, I guess. Maybe even a little bit on the cruel side. There were rumors going around town that there were two Nazi-sympathizing families in Mountainside and that the Sanders family was one of them. My sister, who was in high school at the time, had mentioned this rumor to me right around the time of the Sanders incident. It might have been before; it might have been after. It certainly was the talk among the townsfolk. I don’t feel comfortable saying the name of the other family because I never heard any verification. It’s a horrible thing to say about a family. When this happened with Gregg, I believe that the police found a bunch of Nazi paraphernalia that he had in a little tiny cubbyhole, or something like that, in his room.”
“At that time, Mountainside was, and probably still is, very Leave It to Beaver,” Mary Starr recalls. “It was a very quiet, intellectual, middle-class community. It was a very nice place to grow up. You did not have extremes. To have something like this happen, particularly because there were a number of Holocaust survivors who lived in Mountainside, it just shook the town. We were just flabbergasted. We had nothing like Skokie. We had nothing like skinheads or neo-Nazis. That was something we only saw on the news. Not here. Not in our town. To have something like that come out was absolutely shocking. We were all stunned. We all thought Gregg was a little weird and was not the nicest person in the world, but we didn’t think he was capable of this. I’m not a psychologist of any kind, and I don’t pretend to be one, but this had all the hallmarks of someone snapping and going over the edge. Nowadays, he might have been a kid who would have just grabbed an AR-15 and started shooting. It amazed us that he could have set up this shrine without his parents knowing. Then again, kids that age can be very secretive.”
The residents of Mountainside and Springfield began to look for answers to why and how something as horrific as this could have happened. “Gregg was around three or four years younger than me,” William Nelson recalls. “He didn’t attend any of the local schools. His parents wanted him to be at Pingry, which was a private school in Hillside. He had a sister named Wendy who was around my older sister’s age. My sister knew her, but not real well. From what I understand, Mr. Sanders started working as a maintenance man in a bank when he was a young man. He started at the low end of the totem pole. He eventually worked himself all the way up to becoming the president of the bank. He had high aspirations for his children. My understanding was that Mr. Sanders and his wife were very strict. Gregg and Wendy were not given a lot of freedom. They were required by their pa
rents to study very hard. Mr. Sanders went from nothing to being the president of this bank, and I guess he wanted his children to have the same opportunities that he had. So the kids constantly had to study. If Wendy wanted to go to a party down the street, she wasn’t allowed to. That is the situation that the Sanders family was going through, as far as I understand. I never saw Gregg outside of his house a whole lot. Not a lot of people had the opportunity to really know him because he wasn’t the ‘normal’ kid of the neighborhood. In those days, if you were a kid, you were out all day long, playing with your friends and having a good time going from one house to another. That wasn’t something that Gregg and Wendy were allowed to do. They were required to be in the house studying and learning, so we really didn’t have a lot of interaction with that family. The only time you got to see Gregg and Wendy was in the morning at the bus stop. My younger brother went to Pingry for a while. He knew Gregg a little better. As far as my brother was concerned, Gregg was a little strange. Eccentric, I would say, but I don’t think anybody saw anything like this coming at all. To find out, after the fact, that Gregg had a crawlspace in the attic of the house where he kept his little shrine and Nazi propaganda—that was a shock. He was never known to have any strange likings for things like that. That was something that nobody seemed to know about or was really talked about. As far as we knew, he was just a poor kid that was kept inside his house all the time.”
Denise Parker also remembers Gregg Sanders. “He was a little, skinny kid,” she recalls. “My ex-boyfriend went to Pingry with him. He was the one being whipped by the bullies before Gregg got there because he was a professional ice dancer and was very, very metrosexual. He told me that his life became manageable once Gregg showed up at Pingry because the bullies shifted their focus from him onto Gregg. He felt bad for him, but his life changed so much. Everybody stopped picking on him and went to Gregg.” Parker also recalls her own personal connection to Gregg’s last night on earth. “He walked right in front of my house and up my driveway on his way to commit suicide,” she says. “I was on the scene the day that his body was found. I actually followed his footprints in the snow all the way to the tower. I went up there, and his brains were within a fifty-yard radius. There was a dent in the ground where his head hit, and his brains were scattered like an umbrella all through the woods. There was blood everywhere. They said that he cut his wrists before he jumped, so I was trying to find the knife or whatever he cut his wrists with. I figured he threw it, so I was trying to be the hero and find the weapon, but I never did.”
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 18