Situation Jeannette DePalma: “There are some who believe that she was murdered by Satanists”

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Jeannette DePalma (August 3, 1956 – August 7, 1972) was an American teenager who is believed to have been murdered sometime on or around August 7, 1972 in Springfield Township, Union County, New Jersey, United States.

The case, currently unsolved, has become a matter of significant controversy due in part to coverage in Weird NJ magazine and in the 2015 book Death on the Devil’s Teeth.

To this day, her death remains a mystery. The New Jersey coroner’s office still has not classified it as a homicide, and there are some who believe that she was murdered by Satanists.

Jeannette DePalma was born on Aug. 3, 1956, and lived an upper-middle-class life in the New Jersey suburb of Springfield Township. The DePalmas, raised Jeannette and her siblings in a devout Christian household.

They lived in a beautiful house on Clearview Road, where the Manhattan skyline was visible on a clear day, but far enough from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple to make the crime rate nearly non-existent.

Four days before she disappeared, Jeannette DePalma celebrated her 16th birthday. The celebration was largely unremarkable, as the teenager was closely associated with her faith. As such, “partying” was off the table.

On the afternoon of Monday, August 7, 1972, Jeannette DePalma left her home on Clearview Road in Springfield Township, Union County, New Jersey, telling her mother that she was going to take a train to a friend’s house. She never made it there, never called her mother to let her know she’d be running late, and never made it home. So, her parents filed a missing person report with the Springfield Police Department the following day.

On Sept. 19, 1972, a dog returned from a frolic in a wooded area with an object in its mouth, and started “playing with it” on the lawn of a nearby apartment building in Springfield, New Jersey.

Moments later, the pet’s owner went to inspect what appeared to be a “large bone” and screamed when she realized it was “a human arm,” according to police reports obtained by The Daily Beast. The Springfield Police Department was called to the scene, and attending officers later recounted what they saw upon arriving at the woman’s home.

“She took me to the rear door of her apartment and in a bluish bag she handed me the arm of a female, the lower left arm. On the fingernails was a whitish nail polish.” Officer J. Schwerdt said in the report.

Search parties scoured the Houdaille Quarry behind the residential building. And then, in a part of the Houdaille quarry known as The Devil’s Teeth, a body was found face down and — allegedly — surrounded by wooden crosses and logs positioned in a coffin pattern. Other eyewitness accounts suggested that there was a pentagram and other “occult objects” in the makeshift coffin.

The body was fully clothed — and so badly decomposed that an initial cause of death could not be ascertained.

“Around the body were logs across the head down the right side and a small branch under both feet,” Schwerdt stated in the report.

Chief Medical Examiner Bernard Ehrenberg was also called to the scene where he pronounced the girl, who was unidentified at the time, dead.

Dental records later confirmed that the body belonged to 16-year-old local high school student, Jeannette DePalma, who was reported missing by her parents on Aug 7, 1972 – four days after her 16th birthday.

“She was found… lying face down with a rock formation surrounding her body,” Ehrenberg wrote in his medical examiner’s report.

He determined that an autopsy could not be performed because of the “marked state” of decomposition. X-rays of her skull were taken, though, and there was no evidence of fractures, bullet holes or traumatic injuries. For this same reason, a cause of death could not be determined so was listed as “suspicious” rather than as a homicide.

Samples of Jeannette’s clothing were packed up and sent to the federal government for further analysis.

According to the FBI crime lab report on Jan 3, 1973, officials tested Jeannette’s clothing, including her blouse, slacks and underwear, as well as the soil from the scene, and compared them with hairs collected from her dresser drawer and on her body.

The FBI’s microscopic and chemical analysis found that were no “apparent foreign hairs” found among Jeannette’s clothing.

The lab workers didn’t find drugs or poison in any of the samples.

There were, however, stains found in her underwear, bra, blouse and slacks that “were too decomposed for conclusive blood and semen examinations,” according to the crime lab report.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

In an article published on Sept. 30, 1972 in the Home News Tribune, the Associated Press wrote local authorities were “investigating the possibility that black witchcraft and Satan worship were involved in the death” of Jeannette. The report was attributed to an article in the Daily Journal of Elizabeth that was published a day earlier.

The article also quoted Jeannette’s parents, as “someone who tried to lead others to Jesus” and said that she was involved in community work to aid drug addicts and planned on attending a Bible college.

According to the newspaper’s report, “a number of sacrifices involving dead animals” were reported around the Watchung Reservation, which was less than 2 miles away from where Jeannette was found. In the park around the same time, Union County Park Police had found “burning candles, a bowl of blood and feathers and pigeons with their necks snapped.”

On Oct. 3, 1972, the Courier News ran an Associated Press article reporting that Union County law enforcement officials may have brought a witch to the site of Jeannette’s death.

“I never did hear if the witch found anything,” the family’s pastor, Rev. James Tate of the Assemblies of God Evangel, was quoted, “but I know she was there at the scene.”

According to newspaper accounts and interviews, there were self-professed witches and warlocks in New Jersey at the time. An Associated Press article published on Halloween in 1972 interviewed a woman named Lilith Sinclair who founded her own “grotto,” or group of Satanists, as an off-shoot of the San Francisco based Church of Satan.

The New York Daily News was no better with their coverage, either. On Oct. 4, 1972, the newspaper interviewed the Rev. James Tate, who insisted that the “Devil’s Disciples” killed poor Jeannette when she tried to spread the Good Word about Jesus Christ. “She was so religious that she would often talk to friends and acquaintances about God,” he said, adding that when the heathens were lectured about the power of Christ, “their fanaticism arose and they killed her.”

By all accounts, Sinclair’s grotto was based in the small Middlesex County borough of Spotswood and had more than 30 members. The witch who was reportedly brought to the site of Jeannette’s body was never named.

Donald Schwerdt, though, was one of the Springfield police officers on the scene when Jeannette was found.

Salzano was a close friend of DePalma’s nephew John Blancey—who lived with his aunt at the time of her death. He said the pair took it upon themselves to try and solve the case when it appeared police had reached a dead end. Blancey died about four years ago, which made Salzano even more determined to uncover the truth about what really happened to DePalma, despite of having never met her.

Salzano said he has spoken to many of DePalma’s friends, family members and acquaintances, as part of his independent investigation into her death. And, according to him, there’s one common thread: “They’re all scared to death,” he said.

Of what, he says he doesn’t know, but Salzano insists there’s a “gigantic coverup” and that almost everyone he has spoken to with knowledge about the case or DePalma shares his belief that “a satanic cult targeted Jeannette and killed her.” He said DePalma was a “devout Christian” who “would preach to the other people about leaving satanism and witchcraft behind.” He believes this made her a target and even has an unverified theory about the timing of DePalma’s death.

What Really Happened To Jeannette DePalma?

The Satanic ritual murder theory is, of course, the most popular one, but others abound about what really happened to Jeanette DePalma. One theory was that Jeannette — who was a recovering addict — accidentally overdosed while hanging out with her friends, who subsequently dumped her body in the quarry in a panic. Another theory holds that Jeannette was the victim of a crime of opportunity and that she may have been killed by the same man who killed Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly, both of whom were found in heavily wooded areas like Jeannette DePalma.

Interest in the case died down until the late 1990s, when the Weird NJ magazine (which is, today, a website) began reporting on the case after receiving several letters that allegedly gave exclusive details to the writers. The editor, Mark Moran, subsequently teamed up with writer Jesse Pollack to write what is considered the definitive book on the subject, Death on the Devil’s Teeth.

In the book, Moran and Pollack reveal that their research led to several previously unknown suspects, evidence of a cover-up, and even connections to other previously unsolved murders.

After publishing an article, Moran received a flurry of anonymous letters offering chilling information about Jeannette’s murder.

One said: “I was a young teenager when the discovery of Jeannette DePalma happened and lived in the next town.”

“About two years prior, there was much talk in my school about a cult in the surrounding area. They were known as The Witches.”

“They must have let it be known in the area that they planned to kill a child on or about Halloween, either by kidnapping and sacrificing them or by poison. I remember being anxious about this because I went trick-or-treating in those days.”

Another letter, from a relative of a local policeman, read: “When the dog brought the arm home and the search for the body started, they found arrows carved in the trees that would lead you to the body.”

“All around her body were dead animals tied to trees with string and some in jars. Shortly thereafter there were reports of animals being mutilated and hung in the same fashion in the Watchung Reservation, which is also very close to the scene of the crime.”

“The Watchung Reservation or the ‘Res’ has been reported to be the center of devil worship activity for years.”

Most of the evidence about the Jeannette DePalma case, however, was allegedly destroyed in Hurricane Floyd. That didn’t stop Moran and Pollack, and they continued to research the case. After Ed Salzano — who runs the “Justice for Jeannette DePalma” Facebook page — unsuccessfully sued the county to obtain DNA evidence in February 2021, Moran and Pollack finally obtained the case files from the Union County Prosecutor’s Office under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Still, her cause of death remains unknown, and her death has not officially been declared a homicide. It seems the mystery of Jeannette’s murder will never be solved.

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