The year was 1972 ; the place , suburban Springfield , New Jersey . One September day , a bizarre murder shattered the Ithiel Town ’s sense of safety , and gear up in motion a furor - tinged mystery that ’s become a local fable — and now , the subject ofa newfangled lawful - criminal offence book .
Was 16 - year - old Jeannette DePalma belt down as part of a demonic ritual — or was she simply a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time ? Fascinated by the decades - old frigid case , writer Jesse P. Pollack and Mark Moran , both have it off for their oeuvre with offbeat traveling magazineWeird NJ , decided to further search its many crook , turns , and historical oddities inDeath on the Devil ’s Teeth , name for the foreboding rock formation where DePalma ’s soundbox was discovered . ( That ’s it , pictured above . )
We caught up with Centennial State - author Pollack , a New Jersey native , to learn more about this startling narrative .
io9 : You ’ve been spread over strange and strange New Jersey stories for near 20 years for Weird NJ . Why did you decide to pick the Jeannette DePalma execution mystery for your book ?
Jesse P. Pollack : It actually start before I started writing for Weird NJ . I pop writing for Weird NJ in 2001 , and about three or four old age before that , Mark Moran , my co - source , and Mark Sceurman — the editors of the magazine — got a foreign letter of the alphabet about a supposed human sacrifice in the prey over in Springfield , and the cops discover the body because a dog brought a body part home . They printed the letter and then a couple of years later , other letters started coming in — all anon. with no return address — saying , like , “ Yes , this did happen , and her name was Jeannette DePalma , and she was kill on an altar . ”
finally Mark [ Moran ] started looking into it because he last had a name , but the cops would n’t give him any information , and there were very few articles about it in the local newspapers . Mark was capable to indite up about a one - varlet story — and that open up the floodgates for even more of these uncanny , anon. letters , saying things like , “ She was a Christian young woman who was targeted by diabolist , ” and others say “ She was a drug - addled , hippie wild baby . ”
I conceive what really drew me into all of this was — regrettably , in the world we subsist in , it ’s not that uncommon for teenagers to go overleap and turn up dead . And in the seventies and 1980s , even the 1990s , it was n’t that rare for Satanic Panic to take storage area and be blame . But [ in the DePalma murder ] , every account has a conflicting account — even if it ’s just the fact that half of the law say the case file is missing or destroyed , and the other one-half say , “ We have a copy but we ’re not conk to annotate on it . ” And , there were so many people who want to share info with the magazine , but were so afraid of the repercussion that they refused to go on the track record . That really is what drew me in ; I make love this was not move to be an average cut - and - dried inhuman - case murder .
apparently , when expatiate the article into a al-Qur’an , you had to have people go on the record . Was it hard convincing your source to do so ?
It was an interesting double - edged steel . Once we got ahold of people , they had no problem talking to us . It would all come jet out , what they would remember from back then . Some of them would let us use their real names , because they said they never believe in the Satanist aspect . But the majority of them need us to change their names , because of their kinsperson or the character of job they had , and they did n’t want to be associated with a infernal execution . Wherever possible in the script , we did use existent public figure , but for at least half of them , we had to change their name , and those are mark with asterisks in the Holy Writ .
The case became an urban legend of sorts because of those Satanic and witchery rumor . Were you able to find out if any of those rumour were actually true ?
Here ’s the affair about that : while that aspect was a big part of why Mark and I were draw to it , we had the plebeian sense to say , “ Yes , it ’s a eldritch murder , but do we candidly believe it was a coven of black - attired witches , or Satanists with burning torches ? No , probably not . ” We set out to [ gather all the account ] , put them on the table , weed through them , and really get to the bottom of this .
Where all the [ furor hearsay ] came from , is very complicated but I ’ll prove to break it down into a CliffsNotes version . About nine month before Jeannette went missing and turned up deadened , there was a bozo who lived only two miles away in the next township over , Westfield , whose name was John List . He was deeply in debt , though his family know in this grandiose sign , and he had a very eldritch personality — he was a timid man , a very pent-up Christian . He decided that his family line would be better off if he pop them and send them to heaven , as opposed to — in his mind — being publicly shamed for being misfortunate . So he shot and killed them all and arranged them all in the dance palace of the business firm , and fly for 18 years .
The narration catch even weirder when , after the bodies were found , it came out that List ’s girl — who was Jeannette ’s age — fancied herself a beldam . Her schoolmate told the newspapers that she take she was part of a coven that had some sorting of altar in the woods . So , I cogitate people were already on edge in Union County , think , “ What are our teenagers doing when we ’re not look ? Are they worship the devil , or do they mean they ’re witches ? ”
When Jeannette ’s body is finally found — after a dog brought her weapon system home — an unidentified source at the Union County Prosecutor ’s Office separate two newspapers that supposed “ supernatural objects ” were found around Jeannette ’s body , and they were looking into if these symbols were the same as the unidentified symbols that were supposedly found at the List star sign .
The “ symbol ” that were discover around Jeannette is another strange part of this whole thing . Mark and I tracked down the two officer who were first on the scene on this clifftop , who incur her consistence , and their stories do n’t equal . The first said she was lying face down , and there was a large cross above her made out of tree arm , and Stone were arranged in the anatomy of a halo around her head . The other officeholder said he did n’t see anything like that . And the newsprint claimed she was find in a coffin - shape border of rock and roll , and that with child cross was there , but in addition , there were also smaller crosses around her made out of twigs . So … with the circumstance of the List guinea pig happen the twelvemonth before , and the witchery component there , it was n’t hard for the public to say , “ Was this girl the victim of the same furor ? ”
Another large part of that is , the whole surface area in Union County borders a stretch of wood called the Watchung Reservation ; it ’s a government - protected expanse with tramp trails that are open to the public . Throughout the seventies and up into the 2000s , there were news report of “ devil adoration ” in that dapple of soil . There are police force written report and newspaper accounts to back that up . So it was all hold up on in this hot smear of weird , extrasensory action .
With that in brain , when Mark and I took a look at these things that were purportedly determine around Jeannette , one thing that really discover us was that — for a supposed Satanic sacrifice , this girl ’s body was surrounded by Judeo - Christian symbolisation , like a crossing and a halo . It seemed more like a remembrance , or a jury-rigged grave . But just when we imagine there was really nothing to the Satanic facet of this case , we got a message from one of Jeannette ’s friends who said this guy that used to pick her up when she was hitchhiking called himself a warlock . It ’s just such a strange case like that . You ca n’t really say if it was Satanic or not .
Did the police ever have any strong suspect ? Do you opine the typesetter’s case will ever be solved ?
None that were ever reported in the newspapers , but we found out later on that there was a man who was brought in for inquiring regarding Jeannette ’s death . He was a transeunt last in a shack in the woods near where her body was found , and he worked as a caddy at a nearby golf course . Back in the 1970s , if hoi polloi wanted to caddy , all they had to do was show up on the jet that aurora , and you made good money in gratuity . And this guy wire was doing that . The police went to find him , but he ’d depart in a haste . Something had really spook that guy cable . They afterwards cover him down and interviewed him , but decided that he most likely did not do the slaying , so they permit him go . He was never go steady in Springfield again .
As far as the caseful being solved , not to toot our own automobile horn or anything , but if anyone is going to once and for all solve this case , it will be on the back of the research Mark and I did . We essentially had to start from scratch the way that the police would have to . The law would not give us her case file , as I observe earlier , some claimed it was destroyed when Hurricane Floyd hit New Jersey in 1999 ; others said they had a copy , but would n’t lease us look at it because it ’s technically an open investigating .
As far as conclusively solving it , the particulars of the suit are — you ’re working with a body that was so deteriorated that they could not identify a causal agent of last . There ’s not going to be any DNA evidence . It would really have to fall via a confession at this point . I do n’t acknowledge what suspect the Union County Prosecutor ’s Office has now , but as far as Mark and I go , the three suspects that we distinguish in [ Death on the Devil ’s Teeth ] are long since dead . While we have a pretty practiced estimation about what unfortunately happened to this young woman , I do n’t think the books will ever be formally closed on it .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKfG6aWc4oo
All photos courtesy of Jesse P. Pollack , except John List portrait , acknowledgment : AP Photo
New Jersey
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