Jeannette DePalma had just turned 16 when she went missing in Springfield Township and was found dead three months later in September of 1972.Courtesy Ed Salzano
When the unrecognizable body of Jeannette DePalma, 16, was found atop a steep, wooded hill that the locals called the Devil’s Teeth in 1972, rumors spread quickly that the Springfield girl was killed in some sort of satanic rite or witchcraft.
Police sources leaked to the press that they had found signs they thought might be related to the occult, including crosses made of sticks and branches arranged in a coffin-like outline around her body. The coroner’s report mentions a “rock formation surrounding the body.”
The Star-Ledger reported that police even brought a witch to the site to inspect for signs of the occult.
But crime scene photographs released for the first time this week seem to debunk those claims, showing that DePalma’s body was simply lying in a dense, brushy area in Houdaille Quarry, facedown with an arm draped over a downed tree branch. There are branches lying across one another by her head, but they do not appear to be arranged in a purposeful way.
Jeannette Depalma, whose suspicious death remains a mystery, was found dead with one arm over the branch that is being moved in this crime scene photograph.Provided by UCPO
Jason Coy, a history professor at the College of Charleston who researches witchcraft and superstition, said he can’t find any sign of the occult or any other symbolism in the jumble of brush and branches. It suggests that investigators, looking for something sinister, saw patterns that weren’t there, or perhaps their initial descriptions of the branches near her body became exaggerated or misconstrued in the retellings of the scene.
Coy was one of several experts featured in “Death on the Devil’s Teeth,” a 2015 book by Mark Moran and Jesse Pollack, who had written about the case for Weird N.J. magazine. Coy recalled being shown a sketch of the crime scene then, drawn based on the memories of people who were there, depicting many crosses around the body.
“Everything in that sketch that was marked out as a cross, in these crime scene photos just looks like a pile of underbrush that happened to be in a kind of pattern,” he said. “I think it’s a perfect example of how sometimes in someone’s memory, if they are influenced by the idea that something could be occult, they remember things that way.”
Authorities called it a suspicious death from day one, but the cause of death was never determined — due partly to the decomposed state of the body when she was found. The cold case was never ruled a homicide and has never been solved.
On Monday, 18 months after a public records request by NJ Advance Media, the Union County Prosecutor’s Office released a trove of documents from the case file that have never been publicized.
Among them are photographs of the crime scene and the remaining evidence — including Jeannette’s sandals and the contents of her purse found nearby — as well as a report of a driver who said she picked up a hitchhiking girl who matched her description the night she went missing.
DePalma’s parents reported her missing Aug. 7, 1972, after she left home to catch a train to visit a friend in Summit, according to newspaper reports at the time. Her body was found Sept. 19, 1972 after a dog came home with a human arm in his mouth, police said.
This police diagram obtained through a records request shows how Jeannette Depalma’s body was found amid several downed branches in the woods, as well as the location of personal items that may have been dumped from her purse roughly eight feet away.Provided by UCPO
Long after the media coverage died down, the cold case remained an open wound for Jeannette’s family, friends and the tight-knit community where many people started locking their doors. Details were scarce and speculation was rampant.
“I mean, the biggest thing that we now know from this conclusively is this is 100% not an occult killing,” Pollack, one of the authors, said of the released documents, which he also requested and received Monday from the prosecutor. He said he had previously interviewed several police officers who dismissed the claims of satanic symbolism, and the photos support that.
So why were some people so willing to believe a girl was sacrificed in some kind of witch or satanic rite?
Depalma’s death was about eight years before the period starting in the 1980s known as the Satanic Panic — when now-debunked stories of ritual child abuse dominated the media and some in law enforcement were looking for signs of the occult everywhere.
But fears of satanism and witchcraft were on the rise already in the 1970s, Coy said, in the wake of pop culture influences like “Rosemary’s Baby” and coverage of the Manson Family killings and Anton Lavey’s “Satanic Bible” in 1969. Even rock bands like Black Sabbath frightened older generations and spurred Evangelical leaders to warn of the rise of satanism, he said.
“You start to see it becoming more of a concern of law enforcement and religious leaders and that kind of thing. Youth culture in the early 1970s fostered a fear of dangerous, drug-crazed hippies,” Coy said. “I think this is a good example of how the police, the media or whoever might have been quick to suggest an occult connection that may not have been there, or probably wasn’t there.”
There were also local murmurings that teens in the area were practicing witchcraft and animal sacrifices had been found in the nearby Watchung Reservation. A year earlier, across the state in Millville, a 20-year-old had asked his friends to drown him in a kind of satanic ritual, according to police.
The friend, one of two convicted of killing Patrick Michael Newell, told police Newell asked them to tie him up and throw him in a pond because he “belonged to a ‘Satan Worshippers Sect’ and said he had to die violently so that he would be put in charge of ‘40 leagues of demons,’” according to the Vineland Times Journal.
No drug tests
The photos also call into question one officer’s theory that Depalma’s body was found at a teen party spot, Pollack said. In addition to being extremely hard to get to, the area appears to be dense brush with no signs people had been there, such as a firepit.
The officer had theorized that Jeannette had overdosed on drugs with friends at the spot and been left for dead, Pollack said. Documents released Monday show that in 2004, an investigator for the prosecutor’s office posited in a memo that “it would appear that the most logical cause of death is drug overdose,” though he listed no evidence that suggested it.
While that may have been their most recent theory, police at the time did not have Depalma’s remains tested for drugs, the documents reveal.
Then-medical examiner Dr. Bernard Ehrenberg sent a scalp sample to a forensic laboratory, initially asking on the request form for tests for alcohol, heavy metals, barbiturates and narcotics. But he or someone else crossed out the latter two drug tests on the form and they were apparently never performed.
The specimen was “not suitable” for alcohol testing but tests did find an elevated level of lead, reports show. A doctor told police it was not near lethal levels and could have come from dirt contamination of the body, according to the documents.
Police described this item found with other personal possessions near Depalma’s body as a “vial of unknown substance” but it’s not clear if it was ever tested.Provided by UCPO
Police noted in evidence inventories that they recovered a “vial of unknown substance” among her possessions, but it does not say whether they suspected it contained drugs or ever tested it.
DePalma’s family has rejected the overdose theory, maintaining that she was a good girl who didn’t use hard drugs and was very involved in her church.
The police narratives and evidence inventory also support the idea that someone was with Jeanette on the top of the Devil’s Teeth, or possibly carried her there. They show that her personal items, including makeup, an inhaler and the vial, were found about 8 1/2 feet away from her body. Her purse and a cross necklace she wore were never found, despite a search of the woods, according to the police records.
“I used to never think anyone carried a body up there. But the amount of overgrowth and how secluded that spot looked, it seems like the body was hidden. Especially when you take into account that the purse seems to have been dumped out next to the body,” Pollack said.
But the spot is so remote — so difficult to reach that a fire truck with an aerial ladder was used to retrieve the body. It’s not the easiest hiding spot to get to. “It’s one of those cases where every question you answer opens up three new questions,” Pollack said.
Police found Jeannette’s badly decomposed body in Houdaille Quarry on a remote, rocky bluff known by locals as the Devil’s Teeth.Courtesy of Jesse P. Pollack
Witness describes possible sighting
Adding to the mystery is a memo detailing a police interview with a then 19-year-old woman who told police she picked up a hitchhiker whom she believed to be DePalma on the night she disappeared.
Reached by phone Monday, Robin, who asked that her last name not be used, recalled the night in question. She said she was driving from Kenilworth to her apartment in Berkeley Heights around 10:30 or 11 p.m. on Aug. 7, 1972, when she saw a very small, young, dark-haired girl hitchhiking on the corner of Morris and Springfield avenues in Summit.
“I pulled over and I said, ‘why are you hitchhiking so late and where are you going,’” she recalled. “She said, ‘I’m going to Berkeley Heights to meet some friends.’”
Robin told the girl she could only take her as far as her own apartment on Kuntz Avenue off of Springfield Avenue and the girl replied that was fine because she was meeting friends just a block away at the intersection of Springfield and Snyder avenues.
The girl was very quiet in the car, fidgeting with a necklace and her pocketbook strap, Robin said. The girl got out of the car on Springfield Avenue and Robin recalled seeing her walking toward a small group of young people near the traffic light on Snyder Avenue.
When she heard about DePalma’s body being found, Robin said she realized she matched the description of the girl she had picked up. Robin had marked it in her calendar — a habit of hers to keep track of when things happened — and showed that to police when they interviewed her.
While Robin on Monday couldn’t recall details about the girl’s appearance beyond her small stature and hair color, police wrote that she said the girl was wearing dungarees, a light-colored top and sandals. Police said DePalma’s body was discovered wearing tan dungarees, a blue shirt and sandals.
Police also wrote that the encounter happened around 8:30 p.m., but Robin said she was sure it was later because it was fully dark and she was surprised to see the girl hitchhiking at that hour.
Ed Salzano, a former Springfield resident who has investigated the case on his own and runs the Facebook page “Justice for Jeannette,” said that if the girl was Depalma, it raises the question of where she was all day and suggests that the people she met might have valuable information. She had told her family when she left earlier in the day that she was going to a friend’s house in Berkeley Heights, but the friend told authorities she never arrived.
Salzano — who said he still believes there could be a satanic connection — unsuccessfully sued the prosecutor’s office in 2019 to perform DNA testing on DePalma’s clothes or confirm rumors that the evidence had been lost previously. He said he hopes the office will check for DNA on the sandals since they at least remain.
The Springfield Police Department evidence room was flooded by Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and some evidence was destroyed. According to correspondence between police and the prosecutor’s office after the flood, DePalma’s clothes were not among the items that were inventoried after the flood.
The Union County Prosecutor’s Office declined to discuss the documents on the record, but has said that there are additional records it plans to release in the future.
The case remains open and anyone with information is urged to contact the Union County Prosecutor’s Office at 908-527-4500.