The shocking news of Gregg Sanders’s final acts made headlines across the United States. Collection of the authors.
“Gregg was a brilliant, brilliant kid,” Mary Starr says. “He was nerdy, and unfortunately, the nerds were the ones who got picked on. He was shy, but he was also a bully. He did a lot of acting out, and I bet that was because of what was going on with his family, especially with his dad. You know, kids who are victims of whatever kind of abuse will act out and will sometimes act out in very inappropriate ways. I am assuming Gregg acted out by bullying others simply to deal with the pain inside of himself because he had no control over what was going on at home. He wanted control over others. He wasn’t the nicest person in the world. I remember telling him to leave the younger kids alone at one point. Once he started at Pingry, however, I did not see him all that much. I remember him more from before he went to Pingry. Pingry was, and probably still is, very competitive and very elitist, but at the same time, Gregg was also elitist. He liked to throw around the fact that he was smarter than everybody else. I also knew his sister Wendy, who was two or three years ahead of me. She and I took piano lessons from the same teacher. We spent an hour together every week, but it was a didactic situation, and we did not talk all that much. She was a nice girl and pretty talented. I think she survived only because she was in college when this all happened. I remember hearing that she changed her name fairly quickly because I’m sure she was being hounded and just wanted to disappear. Can you imagine having to deal with that for the rest of your life? It was so incredibly sensational.”
At Gregg’s autopsy, Dr. Bernard Ehrenberg was able to conclude that the teenager had not been under the influence of alcohol or drugs of any kind when he murdered his parents. Eventually, the bodies of Thomas, Janice and Gregg Sanders were cremated, and a small memorial service was held in the garden of the Mountainside Community Memorial Church. Once the Mountainside Police Department’s investigation was concluded, the Sanders home at 1090 Sunny Slope Drive was thoroughly cleaned and put up for sale. Lastly, the stairs leading to the top of the water tower along the Sierra Trail inside of the Watchung Reservation were permanently removed. For decades, the tower had been a popular lover’s lane where teenagers could enjoy themselves in private, all while gazing in awe at the Manhattan skyline. With his suicide, Gregg Sanders ensured that no one would ever be afforded this particular pleasure again.
In the wake of the List murders, the killing of Jeannette DePalma and now the Sanders incident, the residents of Union County began to wonder if a curse had somehow been laid on the land. Many feared that the communities of Westfield, Springfield and Mountainside could never return to the Norman Rockwell image of middle-class suburban paradise that they once were.
“The Sanders murder definitely cast a large shadow over Mountainside,” Roy Simpson says. “It was definitely a hard thing to squelch. I mean, how many years ago was Lizzie Borden? People still talk about that. But I do remember that the talk about the DePalma case died out really quickly, especially for something as shocking as the murder of a young girl. I have to admit that was odd.”
Hank Warner agrees with Simpson’s sentiment. “The police in this town never did anything about that case,” he says. “It’s a shame because somebody on the police force or detective force has an idea of who did kill her. Somebody didn’t do their homework or follow through on this, or they just shut the book and forgot about her. They swept something under the rug about this. I’m just telling you, it just seems kind of peculiar that this was never, ever settled. If the detectives did their homework, they would find out who did this.”
The metal staircase that wrapped around this water tower was removed shortly after Gregg Sanders leapt to his death from the top step. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.
“People freely talked about it in town for about two weeks, and then it was never mentioned again,” Roy Simpson continues. “It was never, never brought up in school. The neighborhood gossip died a very, very quick death. That probably didn’t strike me as very odd at the time because I was busy being an eleven-year-old and doing things like playing ball in the street, but now I do find it very odd that it was swept under the rug so quickly. You know, as a father, I can’t even imagine. If my daughter died under mysterious circumstances, I would be all over the news trying to find out what’s going on. I now live in a town that’s very similar to Mountainside, and if something like that happened in our town right now, it would be the talk of the town for years. So, as an adult looking back, it’s strange. Very strange.”
11
THE TRIAL
Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.
—Titus Maccius Plautus
On Wednesday, July 9, 1975, the homicide trial against Otto Neil Nilson finally commenced. Anthony R. Mautone, Essex County’s assistant prosecutor, began his opening statements by highlighting the fact that while no one had witnessed Joan Kramer’s murder, she had been seen entering Nilson’s car on the night of her death. “It would be reasonable to infer that the man who picked her up at 12:30 [a.m.] is the man who killed her,” he said. “Just as if you walked into the kitchen and found a jam jar open and your little boy with jam all over his face, you don’t need any direct evidence to know that he was in the jam. That’s the way this case is.”
John Cleary, Nilson’s public defender, tried to garner sympathy for the defendant during his opening statements. “Let’s not make it two victims,” Cleary urged the jurors. “Let’s not make Otto Nilson the second victim. You’re going to have to listen and not form any conclusions until you’ve heard all the evidence. You have to appreciate the quality of the testimony, not the quantity. Is it credible or incredible?”
Problems arose almost immediately. During the six months that he spent in prison, Nilson grew a thick, scruffy beard. This presented significant trouble, as Mary Colato, the prosecution’s star witness, had allegedly observed Nilson as clean-shaven on the night of Joan Kramer’s murder. At a pretrial hearing two days before, Essex County Superior Court judge Sam A. Colarusso had requested that the defendant shave before arriving in court the next day. Nilson declined.
Despite his refusal to shave his beard, Colato still identified Nilson as the man who had picked up a hitchhiking woman at 12:05 a.m. on the night Kramer vanished. Incensed by this seemingly unlikely positive identification, John Hughes, an assistant deputy public defender acting as part of Nilson’s legal counsel, asked South Orange detective Anthony Fabrizio on the stand if Colato had taken a polygraph test. Fabrizio recalled Colato taking one such test but could not remember the exact date. The prosecution then pointed out that not only had Otto Neil Nilson taken a polygraph examination himself, but he had also failed this particular test when questioned about Joan Kramer’s murder.
Cleary blasted Colato’s testimony as “dangerous and frightening.” The public defender openly asked the court how the witness could “get an identification on him in the space of one traffic light.” Colato insisted that she could identify Nilson in that amount of time—and after nearly three years—due to the fact that the defendant had approached her inside of Adam’s Tavern on Forest Street in the city of Orange earlier on the evening in question. Colato, who was having drinks in the tavern, claimed that Nilson had approached her at the bar and offered to buy her a round. She allegedly declined this gesture. When asked by the defense if she recognized Nilson as being an usher at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in South Orange, which also happened to be Colato’s parish of choice, she replied in the negative but was quick to point out that she did not attend services very often. Colato also told the court that she had observed a South Orange police officer enter the Bun ’N’ Burger restaurant on Sloan Street while she was sitting next to Nilson at the traffic light and that this officer could corroborate her story.
South Orange patrolman Stanley B. Dalton was called to the witness stand on Monday, July 14, 1975. During his testimony, Dalton denied ever being anywhere near the
Bun ’N’ Burger on the night of Kramer’s murder. The patrolman told the court that he had actually checked himself into Orange Memorial Hospital for an eight-day stay on August 14, 1972, a full day before the incident in question. In a significant blow to Colato’s testimony, Officer Dalton produced medical records that supported his claim. Today, however, the Kramer family remains unconvinced. “Dalton perjured himself,” says Orin Kramer. “He snuck out of treatment at the hospital and saw the whole thing. He tried to cover it up.”
Nilson’s neighbor, Curt Knoth, has similar recollections: “Stan Dalton was a drunk and a dirty cop.”
To this day, many who were close to or involved with the Kramer case feel that Dalton was faced with a difficult choice. Rumors about Dalton’s alleged alcoholism were flaunted around South Orange, and some feel that this led to his admission into Orange Memorial Hospital for treatment. Some allege that he was able to sneak out of the hospital undetected for a drink at the Bun ’N’ Burger only one day after becoming a patient, and this was when he had witnessed Kramer entering Nilson’s car. Those who subscribe to this theory believe that Dalton feared losing his job and pension if he admitted to breaking out of Orange Memorial Hospital to drink, so he chose to deny the allegations while on the witness stand.
Despite Dalton’s testimony, Colato continued to maintain that Otto Neil Nilson was the man who had pulled up alongside her at the intersection of Sloan Street and South Orange Avenue on the night of August 15, 1972, and that he had given a ride to a young woman who said she lived on top of the hill. Colato claimed the she could not identify the woman as being Joan Kramer, as the woman was standing outside of her field of vision.
One witness who could identify the young woman as Kramer, however, was James Tillett, a former security guard. Tillett had been working at a South Orange apartment complex on the night of August 15, 1972. After his shift ended, Tillett walked down the north side of South Orange Avenue in order to catch a bus ride home to Newark. While walking toward the bus stop near the train trestle at the Sloan Street intersection, Tillett claimed that he observed a young woman wearing an evening gown walking on the same side of South Orange Avenue. When shown a photograph of Joan Kramer, Tillett remarked that there was “no doubt” in his mind that she was the same young woman. The former security guard was also able to correctly identify the clothing that Kramer had worn on the night of her murder. Tillett then testified that he watched as Kramer walked quickly across the street and approached a car that was stopped at the traffic light beneath the train trestle. According to Tillett, some words were exchanged, and then Kramer entered the vehicle. Tillett told the court that he got a good look at the vehicle and its operator. “He was dressed up real nice,” Tillett said. “A real together dude.” He went on to describe the driver as being clean-shaven with dark hair and a jacket. Tillett estimated that the man was somewhere around thirty to thirty-five years old and that he resembled a businessman. Tillett, however, could not positively identify the driver of the car as being Otto Neil Nilson. While he “favored” Nilson as the man he saw picking up Joan Kramer three years earlier, he pointed out that the driver of that vehicle was clean-shaven while the defendant before him was bearded.
In addition to Mary Colato, one other person in the courtroom happened to recognize Otto Neil Nilson: Julian Kramer. “When Nilson was brought into the courtroom, my father looked at me and said, ‘I know that man,’” Orin Kramer recalls. “I asked my father how he knew this person, and he told me that after my sister had been killed, this man had directly delivered some papers to him at his office in Newark.”
As Julian Kramer and his son watched from their seats inside the courtroom, James Tillett continued with his testimony. Tillett told the court that he had seen Joan Kramer enter a dark green car with a vinyl top and that this vehicle was in “very good shape.” Mary Colato described Nilson’s car as being either “dark green or dark blue” but could not discern whether the automobile was a hardtop or a convertible.
In fact, Nilson did own a green 1964 four-door Buick at the time of Joan Kramer’s murder. However, investigators were not able to examine this vehicle due to the fact that Nilson had traded it into an automotive dealer three months after Joan Kramer and Jeannette DePalma disappeared. Joan’s family viewed this act as very suspicious.
In response to Tillett’s and Colato’s testimonies, the defense called three witnesses to the stand, each claiming that Otto Neil Nilson’s Buick did not have a vinyl top, nor was it in “very good shape.” Eugene Insogna, a former co-worker of Nilson’s, recalled the Buick as being “beat-up.” John Waddell, a representative of the Buick Motor Division, testified that the model belonging to the defendant did not feature a vinyl top. Alexander Alves, whose Jersey City auto dealership agreed to take the Buick toward a trade, recalled that he had valued the vehicle at a mere twenty-five dollars due to its condition.
As the specifics of Otto Neil Nilson’s green Buick were being discussed during the trial, no one in attendance could have known that a green Buick had featured heavily in a haunting vision experienced by the cousin of Jeannette DePalma, the girl from Springfield who had been killed one week before Joan and only six miles away. In addition, it may never be known whether the prosecution was even aware of the murders of Jeannette DePalma, Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly or their many similarities to the killing of Joan Kramer. Anthony Mautone did not respond to requests for comment, and when we sought the transcripts of the Kramer homicide trial from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, we were told that after an “intensive” fourteen-day search of the office’s off-site storage facility, no records of the trial, Otto Neil Nilson or Joan Kramer’s homicide could be located, and all were presumed lost or destroyed. We were told the same thing by the Union County Police, formerly the Union County Park Police, when we requested Detective Sergeant Richard Mannix’s incident report documenting John Hasenauer’s discovery of Joan Kramer’s body.
On Tuesday, July 15, 1975, the prosecution and defense in the trial against Otto Neil Nilson gave their final summations. John Cleary, Nilson’s public defender, told the jury that Mary Colato was “dangerously mistaken” when she identified his client as the man who had picked up Joan Kramer on the night of her murder and implored them to cease to the “six-month nightmare” that the former accountant had endured in jail since January. Cleary also went on to demean Joan’s family by implying that Nilson had been arrested only because Essex County investigators wanted to bring an end to the pain felt by the wealthy and popular Kramers. “I think because of the nature of this case and the prominence of the girl, the prosecutor’s office felt under pressure to make at least some arrests and charge someone with the offense, especially after the length of time involved,” Cleary said.
Assistant Essex County prosecutor Anthony Mautone deflected Cleary’s criticisms by reminding the jurors that James Tillett had positively identified Kramer and her clothing and that any complications regarding Mary Colato’s identification of Otto Neil Nilson could be boiled down to the fact that the defendant refused to shave his beard after being instructed to do so by Judge Colarusso. Mautone also cited Joan’s autopsy report, which stated that she had been killed less than two hours after eating dinner at her family’s home in South Orange. “The person who picked up Joan Kramer is the person who murdered her,” he said. “There was no time for anyone else.”
After Cleary and Mautone concluded their closing statements, the jury began its deliberations. Judge Colarusso barred the twelve jurors from returning a first-degree murder conviction, as he was not convinced that Kramer’s murder was premeditated. Two hours of heated discussion among the jurors passed without a verdict being reached, so Colarusso decided to dismiss the seven men and five women until the following morning. He instructed them to act as if they were sequestered, not speaking with the media or reading any newspaper accounts of the trial proceedings. Several reporters observed two of the female jurors leaving the courthouse in tears. No explanation
for this incident was ever given.
On Wednesday, July 16, 1975, the twelve jurors in the trial against Otto Neil Nilson reconvened. About 2:30 p.m., after hours of further deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict: not guilty. Tillett’s failure to positively identify Nilson, along with Colato’s failure to identify the victim, had effectively destroyed any chance of the jury finding that the defendant had, beyond any shadow of a doubt, killed Joan Kramer. The testimony of Patrolman Stanley Dalton did not help the situation, either. After the verdict was read, Nilson quietly leaned toward Cleary and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Otto Neil Nilson was immediately released from custody and found his mother, Helen, waiting on the steps of the Essex County Courthouse. Also waiting was a crowd of reporters, all eager for a comment. “I’m glad it’s over,” he told them. “It’s hard to adjust to freedom after you’ve been locked up so long. Right now, all I’m concerned about is that I’m outside and I feel fairly well. I’m just glad that it’s over. As soon as I saw the jury come in, I felt pretty good.” When asked what he was doing on the night of the murder, Nilson told reporters, “I can’t say for sure what I was doing that night, but I know I was at least twenty miles away in Jersey City, where I was living at the time.”
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 19