By this point in time, Sceurman and Moran had forgotten that the magazine had received and published a letter that vaguely referenced Jeannette only a few years before. In late 1997, Weird NJ received a letter from a fan named Billy Martin. The short letter, entitled “In the Watchung Mountains,” read:
There was an alleged ritual sacrifice, I think, in the Houdaille Quarry near Springfield. A local dog brought a body part home to it’s [sic] master which led to an investigation. I don’t know if it is true or just a local myth…
Martin’s letter would later appear in Weird NJ Issue #9, released in October of that year. More letters would eventually grace the desks of the two editors. These new letters, however, all began to arrive in envelopes missing a return address. Some were sincere and helpful:
The Garden State’s most unconventional tour guides: Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran. Their magazine, Weird NJ, rescued the DePalma case from obscurity in 2003. Collection of the authors.
You’ve only skimmed the surface. Everyone in the area knows about Gregg Sanders, but there was also a girl named Jeanette [sic] who was picked up while hitchhiking in Springfield, and was ritually murdered by a satanic cult…
If I remember correctly, she was a very, very religious girl and many felt that she was a target for Satanists. I can remember reading all about it in all the papers. Her name was Jeannette DePalma and she was found on an altar…
Jeannette lived in Springfield, her family lived on the top of the mountain, that is up Mountain View Road from Shunpike Road. When her body was found it was not on an alter [sic], there were logs around her body. Keep digging for information, she needs to be put to rest finally. Sorry I can’t give you my name for more reasons than one but the information above is true.
Other letters were far more eccentric, to say the least:
Hi Mark,
Depalma. [sic] J? Jeanette? [sic] Joanne? 1971 or 1972, yawn. The Star Ledger was not even a SPERM. Try 1970 or 69. There were only two papers that serviced that part of Union County. The Newark Evening News and the Elizabeth Daily Journal. But no one remembers Barringer High, in Newark. All they know is Malcholm Shabaz [sic]. So how can you expect someone to remember an unsolved case like this.
I’m tired, think I’ll go back to bed.
Using these letters as a starting point, Sceurman and Moran began to dig through the microfilm archives held at the Elizabeth Public Library. The two were able to find all of the Elizabeth Daily Journal’s coverage of the DePalma case. When we returned to those archives in 2012, we were shocked to find that the September 1972 microfilm reel had been deliberately damaged. An unidentified person had physically torn the last week of that month from the reel. This week contained the majority of the newspaper’s coverage of Jeannette’s murder and the only references to the Kramer murder to be found within articles pertaining to the DePalma case. Someone either wanted a grim souvenir of one of New Jersey’s most infamous killings or did not want future sleuths to discover any connection to the murder of Joan Kramer. This mysterious thief had been so eager to steal the piece of preserved journalism that he had torn the reel’s cardboard case in the process.
As 2003 rolled on, Sceurman and Moran received enough information to begin work on a long-form article detailing the DePalma case. Soon after the two began conducting interviews, they aroused the interest of the Springfield Police Department. “Shortly after the publication of these letters, we received a call from a detective at the Springfield Police Department,” Moran later wrote in Weird NJ. “He said that he was looking for clues in the case of Jeannette DePalma, and wanted to know if we could help him! The detective told me that unsolved murder cases were never closed, and that the police had to track down any new leads that came their way. Apparently, someone brought an issue of Weird NJ to the attention of the police and they wanted to know the names of the people who had written the letters to us so that they could question them.”
Moran explained to the detective that all of the letters were unsigned and contained no return address. The journalist then asked how much this detective actually knew about the case.
“Not too much,” the detective replied. “All records prior to 1995 were destroyed due to flooding during Hurricane Floyd…”
The detective’s story did not convince Weird NJ’s readers. “This has ‘cover-up’ written all over it,” wrote one such subscriber.
I truly believe that whole excuse about the great deluge of ’99 is completely ridiculous. Was Noah passing by in his arc? Those silly Springfield cops. Upper class people live in Springfield. The town doesn’t have the money to maintain municiple [sic] buildings? Nice try. All that bullshit about Satanism is just a smoke screen to take the minds and attention of the people off of the truely [sic] guilty by creating a scare—or should I say scam?
The DePalma family did not believe the Springfield Police Department’s flood excuse either. “They always say that there was a flood,” Jeannette’s nephew John Bancey told Weird NJ in 2004. “Come on, that’s bullshit. There’s no more records? There’s got to be records in the prosecutor’s office.”
During the preparation for this book, we sought an official response regarding the supposedly lost files. Open Public Records Act requests were sent to both the Springfield Police Department and the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, each asking for a copy of the DePalma case file. After being told over the telephone that the office was enthusiastically considering releasing “most, if not all” of Jeannette’s case file, we were later denied access to any and all of the requested records via e-mail:
Three young Springfield residents playing in the street during a 1980 flood. This flood possibly destroyed Jeannette DePalma’s original case file. Photo by Ed Cardinal.
Unfortunately, our Office is not going to waive the “criminal investigatory record” exemption under our OPRA statute for the records you seek on the Jeannette DePalma file. The decision was made for a variety of reasons. Most notably is the fact that the investigation is still open. We greatly appreciate your patience in affording us the time to review your request and reach a considered decision.
If you have any questions, please let me know and I will attempt to answer them to the extent I am able to do so. By way of this email, our Office considers your request closed.
SDAG/AAP ROBERT VANDERSTREET
Union County Prosecutor’s Office.
Once the Springfield Police Department received our Open Public Records Act request, representatives once again claimed that the file had been destroyed in 1999, when Hurricane Floyd flooded much of Union County.
“That file was not destroyed during Hurricane Floyd,” retired Springfield lieutenant Peter Hammer insists. “That file was missing all the way back in the mid-1980s. When I took over the Detective Bureau back around 1985, I asked for all of Springfield’s cold case files so I could brush up. I was brought all but two case files: the Beverly Manoff file and the DePalma file. The evidence techs told me they couldn’t find it.”
Months later, in January 2014, we once again heard from Peter Hammer. “I was at the Springfield Police Department last December,” Hammer wrote in an e-mail. “I hear that your research may have caused them to locate the case file and some other evidence that was stored in the attic of the old Girl Scout house. The Detective Bureau offices were located there, but not the evidence room. My guess is you rattled some cages…”
Armed with this new information, we sent another Open Public Records Act request to the Springfield Police Department, this time citing Hammer’s e-mail. On January 29, 2014, Detective Lieutenant Judd A. Levenson replied with the following e-mail:
I have received the request that was recently sent to Chief of Police John Cook of the Springfield (NJ) Police Department. Request was for access to available documents pertaining to the death of Jeannette DePalma in 1972. The information you received from a retired police officer pertaining to this agency recently locating any evidence pursuant to this death investigation was not
correct. As to police reports, this agency suffered a catastrophic loss of old police files when the police department went under 7 feet of water and raw sewage as a result of the serious flooding associated with Tropical Storm Floyd in September of 1999. Some police reports were recently located during the recent renovations of the police HQ in 2009– 2010. As this official cause of death determination made by the medical examiner’s office is listed as “undetermined” this matter is considered to be classified the same as any unsolved homicide. Accordingly no reports held by this agency can be released. Furthermore, the current policy in Union County NJ is that the Union County Prosecutor’s Office Homicide Unit is the primary investigative agency for all active and or unsolved homicides or suspicious or undetermined types of death cases and this agency therefore has no ability to release or grant access to any documents, even if this could be done, without the prior authorizatuion [sic] of the prosecutor’s office. Pursuant to the NJ Open Public Records Act and the provisions of N.J.S.A. 47:1A-3.a, your request for any documents or access to documents is hereby denied for the aforementioned reasons.
Sincerely,
Detective Lieutenant Judd A. Levenson
“Judd may have thrown me under the bus for a good reason,” Hammer says cryptically. “That department has had a lot of problems…”
“That is Judd Levenson’s way of saying that he is not going to get involved in this,” says Ed Kisch. “I can tell you about Judd and how he would react to things, and Judd would not delve into that case one iota. This was politics.”
Kisch says he is used to fellow policemen dismissing their duties as law enforcement officers in order to further an ulterior agenda.
“In 1997, I attended a juvenile officers meeting,” Kisch recalls. “By this time, I was a juvenile officer. Changes were being made to put the juvenile officers back on the Juvenile Conference Committee. This was mandated by the state of New Jersey. The juvenile officers were to act as advisors to this committee in the event that they had any questions about an accused juvenile and his or her actions. An assistant Union County prosecutor who attended this meeting felt that if any juvenile officers were allowed onto this committee, it could be a detriment to any juvenile sitting before them if he or she was asked and admitted to other crimes. This assistant prosecutor’s opinion was that the only way that the juvenile officers could be in the room was if they ‘left their badges at the door.’ If anyone at this meeting would not agree to this, it would be a deal breaker in regards to the juvenile officers being put back on the committee. Being the cop that I am, I immediately spoke up and said, ‘Well, I guess this is a deal breaker.’ I took an oath to uphold the laws in the state of New Jersey; nowhere did it say that I could pick and choose when to investigate any crimes admitted to me or in my presence. Let me tell you something—the badge never comes off.”
EPILOGUE
Standing on the Devil’s Teeth today, it is hard not to imagine the countless people who have stood here before, staring at the rusted-out trucks and Quonset hut below, completely unaware that they were standing on the site of a supposed ritual sacrifice.
The Houdaille Quarry is now owned by the State of New Jersey. When we visited the site in 2014, we were met by gun-wielding Union County police officers. Despite this heightened police presence, the abandoned quarry and its surrounding woods remain a haven for Springfield’s homeless population. The sleeping bags, discarded empty food cans and soda bottles that can be found throughout those woods are a testament to this. The area is littered with many other curiosities—faded pull-tab beer cans, a thirty-year-old Sucrets tin, an infant’s tattered sweater.
The quarry now looks slightly different than it did in 1972. For one, the area has become much more densely wooded. “I am not advocating the desecration of forested woodland,” Ed Cardinal says, “but I would bet that if you cut any one of those trees down, you would find less than forty-three rings in them.”
Yet in spite of their age, the echoes of the last four decades seem to be held within these trees.
In June 1989, John List was finally apprehended after seventeen years on the run. He had been living in Colorado and Virginia under the name Bob Clark and had even remarried. He was eventually tried for the murders of his family and found guilty. During List’s trial, Dr. Steven Simring, who had previously diagnosed Otto Neil Nilson as a paranoid schizophrenic, testified that List had murdered his family as the result of a “mid-life crisis.” Sentenced to life in prison, List died on March 21, 2008. His body lay unclaimed in a Middlesex County morgue for some time before finally being interred beside his mother in Frankenmuth, Michigan. Killer and victim finally reunited in death.
The charred remains of the List home were demolished in September 1972. Truckloads of blackened debris were being hauled off as Jeannette DePalma’s body was being lowered from the Devil’s Teeth, only three miles away.
Otto Neil Nilson died on March 2, 1992. Acquaintances of his recall being told that the fifty-seven-year-old former accountant had taken his own life. Some claim that he was actually murdered by a fellow patient while confined to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, while others maintain that he merely succumbed to a heart ailment. We could not locate any record of a final resting place for Nilson. We were also unable to find a single solved or unsolved homicide in the State of New Jersey that even vaguely resembled the murders of Jeannette DePalma, Joan Kramer or Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly in the years following Nilson’s committal.
Nancy Pryor still lives in New Jersey and actively pursues any available information related to her sister’s unsolved murder. In June 2013, we contacted Sergeant Russell Christiana of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office regarding the homicides of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly. During the conversation, we detailed the similarities between the Pryor/Kelly case and the cases of Jeannette DePalma and Joan Kramer, along with the criminal activities of Otto Neil Nilson. Sergeant Christiana agreed that the cases were all “very similar” and that he would further investigate Nilson. As of 2015, Christiana is no longer assigned to the Pryor/Kelly case, and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to questions regarding any possible investigation of Nilson.
On Wednesday, July 9, 2014, Darlene Bancey vanished from the Lakewood Personal Care Home in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, where she had been living. Her body was found in a lake behind the facility early the next morning. A coroner later ruled that Bancey had died as a result of drowning. According to her family, the autopsy also detected in her system the presence of medication that had not been prescribed to her. An investigation later revealed a history of safety and emergency training violations at the personal care home. Fire drills had not been properly performed by Lakewood staff, and an incident where two residents violently assaulted each other went unreported in January of that year. Bancey died only one week before a previously scheduled second interview with us was going to take place.
Sam Calabrese, once in charge of the DePalma investigation as a detective sergeant with the Springfield Police Department, died on December 8, 2014, having successfully avoided answering a single question regarding the death of the young girl.
The Union County Prosecutor’s Office has been aware of Rose MacNaughton’s letter regarding Mike A. and his possible involvement in the murder of Jeannette DePalma for over a decade. At no point during this period of time did any detective or representative contact Ms. MacNaughton in order to investigate Mike A. further. Inquiries we sent regarding which investigator is currently handling the DePalma case have gone ignored.
Despite these setbacks, independent investigators and armchair detectives continue to research the DePalma case in the hopes that a resolution will soon be reached. Some argue that the case has never been closer to being solved. However, with the Springfield Police Department and the Union County Prosecutor’s Office continuing to remain silent after four decades of perceived indifference and deception, it is easy to see why others do not share the same optimism. Still,
significant developments have been made, and new pieces of information continue to be slowly revealed by those who remember the girl on the mountain.
While murmurs of Mike A.’s reputed interest in the occult now swirl in the ether, one is left to wonder whether it is once again conceivable that Jeannette DePalma actually was murdered by devil worshippers.
It is certainly possible. But then again, isn’t everything else?
With the profound lack of concrete information regarding her final hours on earth, the list of possibilities definitely rivals the list of impossibilities. Perhaps Jeannette DePalma was doomed to forever be the vague warning that parents, both present and future, would give to their kids:
Don’t talk to strangers.
Don’t hitchhike.
Don’t go into the woods.
Look what happened to Jeannette DePalma…
A cautionary tale for paranoid suburbanite families everywhere.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Photo by Rhyin Polen.
Jesse P. Pollack was born and raised in the Garden State and has served as a contributing writer for Weird NJ magazine since 2001. Also an accomplished musician, Pollack’s soundtrack work has been heard on Driving Jersey, an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary series. He is married with two children. Death on the Devil’s Teeth is his first book.
Photo by Rich Robinson.
Mark Moran graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City, where he studied fine art, illustration and photography. In the early 1990s, Moran teamed up with Mark Sceurman to create Weird NJ magazine, the ultimate travel guide to the Garden State’s local legends and best-kept secrets. The magazine has since spawned several books and a History Channel television series. Moran lives with his wife and their two daughters in suburban New Jersey.
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