Death on the Devil's Teeth: An Interview w/ author Jesse P. Pollack

CC_Jesse

Speakers: Benjamin Morris & Jesse Pollack

Benjamin Morris (00:00):

Jesse, welcome to Crime Capsule. It is so great to have you here.

Jesse Pollack (00:04):

Thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited to sit down and talk about this case with you.

Benjamin Morris (00:08):

Yeah. And we have to say right up front that we were very sorry to learn that this morning, your co-author, Mark Moran, who was going to join us, was diagnosed with COVID today. And I'm just so sorry.

Benjamin Morris (00:25):

I think we all here in Crime Capsule land, just want to send him a big old get well soon, hope he feels better and gets back in the saddle as soon as possible.

Jesse Pollack (00:35):

Yeah. It finally got him. He lived through the whole pandemic for the last four years almost, without catching the Rona as they say. But time ran out. But he sounds like he's doing alright, and I hope he feels better real soon.

Benjamin Morris (00:52):

Alright. Well, thanks for holding down the fort with this particular case here.

Benjamin Morris (00:58):

Now, we'll get to Jeanette in a moment, but the two of you guys, you and Mark, you guys actually have kind of a fun origin story, which is centered around this amazing magazine that is published out of your home state.

Benjamin Morris (01:15):

Tell us about Weird New Jersey, and then tell us how you guys met.

Jesse Pollack (01:21):

Yeah. Well, Weird New Jersey was started all the way back in the very early '90s, I want to say '92 or '93 by Mark's co-editor and Weird New Jersey founder, Mark Sceurman.

Jesse Pollack (01:32):

And it was literally just a typewritten newsletter that he would Xerox and staple together in his home and give to friends, just like, "Hey, here's like a travel guide, essentially of all the bizarre spots in the state."

Jesse Pollack (01:48):

Like everything from personalized property to ghost legends and true crime stories like the one we're going to discuss. And it just took off.

Jesse Pollack (01:59):

And a couple issues into him doing this, he met up with Mark Moran who was a graphic designer and photographer, and a fan of Sceurman's newsletter. And the two of them decided to join forces and turn again, what was really like a zine in the like '80s, like DIY punk sense into a full fledged magazine.

Jesse Pollack (02:25):

And it really struck a nerve with people in weird New Jersey. And I was one of them. When I was about nine or 10 years old, my grandparents, they had a trailer at a campsite up in upstate New York. And every summer we'd go up there for a couple weeks.

Jesse Pollack (02:43):

And one morning we stopped at a news stand to grab some coffee and some breakfast, and my grandmother saw an issue of Weird New Jersey on the stands. Four bucks, like a hundred pages of cool stuff. She was like, "Oh, Jesse will like this." And she grabbed it for me to read on the two hour ride up to the campground.

Jesse Pollack (02:59):

And oh my God, it was just like it opened up parts of my brain I didn't know existed. I was just floored by just how much rich lure and historical oddities were literally in my own backyard.

Jesse Pollack (03:15):

So, it was only a matter of time between me just being a casual new fan of the magazine and starting to submit letters and articles myself. I believe the first one that I wrote that was published was all the way back in 2001. So, I would've been 13. So, I've been writing for Weird New Jersey since I was a child.

Benjamin Morris (03:45):

There is almost no greater pleasure in the book world or in the writing world, than to go from being an avid reader of a periodical or some kind of publication to actually being a partner with it, to being a contributor.

Benjamin Morris (04:03):

It's like it's one of these Mount Olympus that when you climb, like you just feel like you're on top of the world.

Jesse Pollack (04:12):

And that's the great thing about Weird New Jersey, because pretty much 80% of that publication is made up of reader submitted content. So, everyone really kind of feels this strange sense of joint ownership in it, I guess is the closest term I could come to.

Jesse Pollack (04:30):

It really builds a sense of community there. Like, "Oh, hey, I had something published by Weird New Jersey." Or, "Check out this photo I sent in, or this artwork that I drew for this issue." It really is a collective team effort led by Sceurman and Moran who we all affectionately know as the Marks.

Benjamin Morris (04:55):

Now, apart from being interested in the strange, the bizarre, the uncanny, et cetera, et cetera, what kind of background were you bringing to this work of writing for Weird New Jersey?

Jesse Pollack (05:10):

At first, it wasn't anything groundbreaking. It was nowhere near on the level of what eventually became Death on the Devil's Teeth. It was like strange stuff. Like I want to say the first thing that I had published ... no, that was the second thing.

Jesse Pollack (05:25):

The first thing that I had published in the magazine back in 2001 was a story that my father had told me. My father grew up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

Jesse Pollack (05:38):

And those of you who lived in Perth Amboy, if there are listeners out there from the general area, know that there was a pretty large mental hospital in the general area. And back then, they would let the patients, I guess we could call them, out for like lunch and stuff.

Jesse Pollack (06:01):

So, like if you were a kid that like hung out on the streets or didn't have a car yet and walked everywhere, you would run into these very interesting characters. Most of them were nice. They didn't cause too much trouble, except for a few that would boost a car and drive it backwards down Amboy Avenue and stuff like that.

Jesse Pollack (06:20):

And there was a character that someone else had written into Weird New Jersey about, in a previous issue who they called ... it was a weird name. I think they called him Fanicious or something.

Jesse Pollack (06:31):

But they said, "Yeah, there was this guy in Perth Amboy called Fanicious, and he used to stand on the corner of an intersection and mime like he was bowling.

Benjamin Morris (06:39):

What? No way.

Jesse Pollack (06:41):

Yeah. And I showed it to my father. He goes, "His name wasn't fucking Fanicious, his name was Bowler Jim. I saw him every day." And so, that opened up him telling me about Bowler Jim and this other guy named Crazy Larry and all this other stuff.

Jesse Pollack (06:53):

So, I kind of just wrote down everything he told me and organized it into this little letter, and sent it in, and the Marks accepted it. So, it was like stuff like that, kind of like urban legend, like crazy characters.

Jesse Pollack (07:06):

There was an intersection in the town of Railway where I grew up, Harrison Street and St. George's Avenue. And on that intersection, it was the only street that didn't say George's Avenue was George Avenue. So, if you looked at it the right way, it looked like it said George Harrison Avenue.

Jesse Pollack (07:24):

So, I wrote in about that, just like kind of cool little weird things like that.

Jesse Pollack (07:30):

But I was mostly interested in that magazine for the paranormal content because I was a big horror buff. Even as a kid, like I would swipe my mom's old first edition Stephen King's that she had laying around. And of course, Goosebumps was huge as a kid when I was growing up.

Jesse Pollack (07:48):

So, I was just a total ghost story addict when it came to Weird New Jersey. But a few years later, this whole true crime case kind of just landed in the lap of the editors over there, and it turned into this strange saga that's still going on today.

Benjamin Morris (08:08):

It's funny that you should mention that because just in the last few weeks, we've had Tom D’Agostino on as a guest on the show, and writing about sort of paranormal New England. We had an extended spooky season, which ran after Halloween rather than before.

Benjamin Morris (08:23):

Well, his book dealt with a lot of the unexplained, sort of the things that you find on local roads. New England's Route 44 in particular.

Benjamin Morris (08:34):

And it's interesting, Jesse, because your book is kind of like a perfect bridge between the spooky season of the several months passed and we're moving into a cold case season.

Benjamin Morris (08:46):

And the Jeanette DePalma story has elements of both actually. And it's really fascinating to see how you've managed to sort of thread that needle, so to speak.

Benjamin Morris (08:58):

I'm curious, just right from the jump, when did you first hear about Jeanette DePalma?

Jesse Pollack (09:06):

I heard about it after the editors at the magazine did. There was a period of a couple years in high school where I kind of caught up in other things. Like I was in a band, and I had a car and a girlfriend. So, I was busy doing things that teenagers do in their cars with girlfriends, et cetera.

Jesse Pollack (09:24):

And so, I wasn't really like the right-

Benjamin Morris (09:28):

Shooting fireworks, obviously, right?

Jesse Pollack (09:29):

Well, I mean, that was later. That was in college. Tossing fireworks out of the car at 2:00 in the morning. That was more dirt bag bottle kids time.

Benjamin Morris (09:38):

We've all been there.

Jesse Pollack (09:39):

Yeah. You get bored, especially living in the college town of Dover, Delaware. It's just like, "Hey, it's Wednesday night. What do you do?" "I don't know. Let's throw M-80s out of a moving vehicle. That's safe."

Benjamin Morris (09:52):

Pretty [French 00:09:52] as far as things go.

Jesse Pollack (09:54):

Oh yeah, as the French say, it was very [French 00:09:57].

Benjamin Morris (09:58):

Absolutely.

Jesse Pollack (09:59):

What basically happened was I was getting ready to move from the East coast out to the Midwest where I live today. And I was packing all of my stuff up, and I found my box of all my old issues of Weird New Jersey. Now, this was late 2011.

Jesse Pollack (10:17):

And so, I was trying to find an issue that I had a small little article in that came out in 2004. It was issue, I want to say 22. So, I'm like trying to find it. I find it in the box, and I find my article real quick, I probably had the page number memorized or something because I was just so psyched every time something I wrote made it in.

Jesse Pollack (10:40):

And flipping through this magazine I came across this like seven page spread that Mark Moran had done, and it was called Who Killed Jeanette DePalma?

Jesse Pollack (10:52):

And I'm flipping through it. And like you had mentioned earlier, it was not only a true crime case, but it had elements of the supernatural and the occult. It read like a real life Twin Peaks. And I'm just reading it and saying to myself, "How did you forget about this story?"

Jesse Pollack (11:11):

Like I don't know, maybe, let's see, in 2004, I would've been 16, or just about to turn 16. Maybe I just like was so focused on, oh my God, I got another article in the issue. I didn't care about anything else and just put it away. But I'm reading it and going, “I want to know more about this story. This story is insane.”

Jesse Pollack (11:32):

So, I got ahold of Mark Moran and said, "Hey have you guys heard anything else about this Jeanette DePalma case in the last seven years?" And he said, "No. The letters and news about it kind of just trailed off over the years." And I said, "Well, someone must have written a really good book about this by now."

Jesse Pollack (11:54):

And I went on Amazon and Barnes & Noble to look, and sure enough, no one had.

Jesse Pollack (11:58):

So, I was in this really weird position of, well, I would really like to read a book about this case. I guess I'm going to have to write it.

Benjamin Morris (12:08):

It's the oldest advice. It's like if there's something that you haven't yet read that you want to read, I mean, saddle up, cowboy. Let's go.

Jesse Pollack (12:47):

But circling back, it was so weird because it wasn't like an issue of me having like all the confidence in the world as a researcher or a writer to go, "Oh, well, I'm going to unearth this cold case and write the definitive book on it."

Jesse Pollack (13:06):

It was more like, "Well, I saw that movie Zodiac, and I read the book, and if a cartoonist can become like the so-called authority on one of the world's most intriguing cold cases, maybe my goofy self can put out a decent investigation on this. And who knows, maybe if I put all of the information in one place, it'll shake something loose."

Jesse Pollack (13:30):

And so, early 2012, I started to put some serious work into it. And to kind of circle back a little more, the basics of the case are this. In August, 1972, there was a 16-year-old girl by the name of Jeanette DePalma in Springfield Township, New Jersey, which is in Union County where I grew up.

Jesse Pollack (13:55):

Springfield is literally 20 minutes from my house where I lived throughout my childhood and still visit from time to time because I still have friends and relatives in the area.

Jesse Pollack (14:06):

So, it was a very like down home case to me. It wasn't just, "Oh, this is New Jersey, this is cool." It's like, "No, this is in my backyard."

Jesse Pollack (14:15):

So, basically, she vanished while hitchhiking on August 7th, 1972. She was on her way to go visit a friend in Berkeley Heights. Never came home that night.

Jesse Pollack (14:26):

Classic story that people have heard a million times, unfortunately, whether they're consuming their true crime media through podcast, books, or television specials.

Jesse Pollack (14:35):

The family calls the police, the police go, “She's probably a runaway. We can't do anything for 24 hours. Call us back tomorrow if she doesn't come home.” So, the investigation is immediately soiled just from that. From law enforcement laziness.

Jesse Pollack (14:51):

And there was nothing for six weeks until ... and this is a very, very gruesome part of the story. It was so gruesome that I almost didn't believe it was true when I started working on this.

Jesse Pollack (15:06):

But essentially, a dog brought her forearm home to its owner in an apartment building only a few hundred yards away from where her body was eventually found.

Benjamin Morris (15:20):

It's a funny thing, Jesse, because you open your book kind of with that moment, and it just felt very cinematic. I mean, the kind of thing that sort of cold open and there's a dog by a lakeside and it's running, or ...

Benjamin Morris (15:36):

And the old theories of narrative say that there are two basic stories. A stranger comes to town or hero leaves home. In this particular case, it's sort of like the dog bringing this piece of her arm back. I don't know if it's both of those theories of narrative at once. It's kind of like elements of the two?

Jesse Pollack (16:02):

Well, it definitely was a catalyst. It exploded the case wide open because there was no one working it. And this is kind of like the dirty little secret in Springfield that a lot of people are very embarrassed about.

Jesse Pollack (16:14):

This was a child that was declared missing after a forced delay by whoever took that phone call the night that she disappeared.

Jesse Pollack (16:23):

And by the cops own admission, I mean, this was said to me by more than one retired Springfield police officer who I interviewed and quoted directly in the book.

Jesse Pollack (16:33):

They said, "We were not looking for her. Do you know how many kids used to like run away from home because they were off at their parents. And then come back a week later? We put her name in a card, put it in a file, issued a be on the lookout the next day."

Jesse Pollack (16:46):

"And that was it. We were not pounding the pavement. We were not knocking on doors looking for her."

Jesse Pollack (16:51):

And this arm being brought back home to that apartment building, forced everyone to basically go, “Uh we've got a problem here. This is no longer some kid ran off to the city to live with friends, or she's staying with a girlfriend because her parents grounded her and she didn't want to deal with it. No. This is either she died accidentally or a homicide.”

Jesse Pollack (17:21):

And that was very murky, even when they found the rest of her remains, because she was literally pretty much skeletonized when they found her. This was a very hot and humid New Jersey summer. And she had been laying out in the elements for six weeks.

Jesse Pollack (17:36):

And they found her inside this ... now, there are many conflicting reports on this, but the truth of the matter is it was an active work site.

Jesse Pollack (17:46):

If you look up this case online, you'll find websites, and podcasts, and YouTube videos done by people that have done very, very little research, or worse, they have AI do their research for them.

Jesse Pollack (17:57):

And they all say, "Oh, she was found in a spooky, abandoned rock quarry." No, it wasn't abandoned. It was a work site. And that's important. We'll touch on that later.

Jesse Pollack (18:08):

But it was literally a cliff edge. Like if you go into this area of the Houdaille Quarry on Shunpike Road in Springfield, it literally goes up a very large hill. You enter the woods on the right hand side of the road, and then you climb up another large null about 40 feet into the air.

Jesse Pollack (18:32):

And then at the cliff edge, it's a straight vertical drop of almost 50 feet. And right at the top of that null was where her body was found.

Benjamin Morris (18:42):

This matters too, because there's some theories of the case which suggest that if she was ... it's a few miles between where she had begun and then where she was headed. And she was hitchhiking.

Benjamin Morris (18:54):

And there's sort of one theory that says, “Well, maybe the killer killed her and then had to carry her body up that far.” And that changes kind of who you start to look at as far as potential suspects.

Benjamin Morris (19:08):

But one of your arguments is that anyone who makes that claim has absolutely no knowledge of the local terrain. Like just doesn't understand how the topography works in that area at all. It's just not possible.

Jesse Pollack (19:20):

And that's why I have always been incredibly dubious of anything the police say about the circumstances in particular of this case. Because there's a clear divide in what former and current law enforcement say about the circumstances there.

Jesse Pollack (19:41):

You will either have one faction who says, "Oh, no, she was partying with friends there, and she dropped dead, and her friends panicked and just left her there," which is ridiculous.

Jesse Pollack (19:51):

She vanished on a Tuesday afternoon, and her body was found in an active construction site. You are not going to party inside an active construction site at midnight or whenever she would've ended up in there.

Jesse Pollack (20:08):

We know she wasn't killed immediately after leaving home. There were sightings of her in the neighborhood in general area that day, sightings that have been more or less confirmed.

Jesse Pollack (20:21):

And there is a possible sighting of her maybe even making it to Berkeley Heights. There's really strong evidence for that, but nothing conclusive. But either way, we know she was most likely still alive when the sun went down that day.

Jesse Pollack (20:35):

So, the idea that she was going and partying there is absolutely ludicrous to me, especially when there are so many other options.

Jesse Pollack (20:43):

Like I spoke to Jeanette's nephew. And Jeanette's nephew straight up said, "If she wanted a party in the woods, there was a big patch of woods on the side of the house that my grandparents never went into. She could have gotten away with it there."

Jesse Pollack (20:58):

You talk to other locals. I haven't found a single one of Jeanette's peers, of which I've interviewed nearly a hundred of them over the years. Not a single one of them has ever said, "Oh, yeah, we used to party in the woods bordering the quarry all the time."

Jesse Pollack (21:09):

No, they partied in the Watchung Reservation, or Echo Lake Park or something like that, or the comfort of their own homes.

Jesse Pollack (21:16):

And that leads into the second faction that law enforcement will say. They will say, "Oh, well, yeah, she must have been partying at one of her friend's house and she died there. And they drove her to the quarry and hoisted her dead limp, dead weight body on their shoulder and dropped her on top of a hill." It's ridiculous.

Benjamin Morris (21:43):

Suburban teens in New Jersey in the 1970s are not acting like sharp as climbing Mount Everest here. I

Jesse Pollack (21:57):

Yeah. Anyone who's grown up in that area knows that if you want to get rid of a body, there are other options in those woods itself. Forget about like, "Oh, you could just go dump it in the Watchung Reservation and no one will ever find it."

Jesse Pollack (22:12):

But if you wanted to dump a body and make sure that the evidence was washed away from it, and that the aquatic wildlife would take care of disposing a lot of it, there was a creek slash stream 40, 50 feet away from the hill where she was found.

Jesse Pollack (22:31):

You could have just dumped the body in the water or you could have buried it. There was no attempt made to conceal these remains. And also there is nowhere to really park your car for any extended period of time. I talk about this in the book.

Jesse Pollack (22:48):

When I went there in 2014 to take photos for the first edition of the book, we parked on that side of Shunpike Road. There's no lot or anything. You literally pull onto a shoulder, most of which is grass.

Jesse Pollack (23:05):

And we were in there for a matter of an hour or two, and 13 uniformed Union County police officers showed up with guns drawn and had us come down from the hill. And thank God they had good eyesight, because I was holding a folded up camera tripod in my hand at the time, and I thank God every day they didn't think it was a long gun.

Jesse Pollack (23:28):

So, you're going to get noticed. Like a neighbor called the police right away when we were there taking pictures. Someone would've noticed a car is parked there and a bunch of kids are getting out and dragging a body in there.

Jesse Pollack (23:42):

And if you notice in those two scenarios we just discussed that have been put forth by the police, and the police only. The residents do not believe these stories and never have. It's always the police. "Oh, she must have dropped dead there doing drugs, or she dropped dead at someone's house."

Jesse Pollack (23:59):

It's always her fault as far as the Springfield Police and the Union County Prosecutor's office are concerned. Because in my opinion, they don't want to deal with the murder. It's a lot of work.

Jesse Pollack (24:11):

It's work that they already lost a ton of time on because they did not take it seriously the night she went missing. And they lost another six weeks in between her disappearing and her body being found.

Jesse Pollack (24:23):

So, it was just a lot easier to go, “Eh, she's probably some hippie. She probably OD'ed on something and died.”

Jesse Pollack (24:30):

Then it doesn't raise the murder stats in the town. It doesn't cause a panic, especially among the upper crust element in Springfield and mountainside, which were very prevalent then and still are today. And it's just better for the powers that be.

Jesse Pollack (24:48):

And I know that sounds really conspiratorial to some of our listeners who may not be familiar with this case or have read Mark's and my book. But there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that arose out of that that really points towards what I'm putting out there, essentially.

Benjamin Morris (25:10):

No, for sure. And I think it's important to take those perspectives into account. We so often rush to judgment in so many ways, and we believe the first thing we hear, not the most credible thing that we hear. And in this particular case, that tendency corrupted the investigation from the very beginning.

Benjamin Morris (25:29):

And the thing that everybody knows about Jeanette DePalma is, oh, her body was found in some kind of strange arrangement with all these different sort of objects.

Benjamin Morris (25:41):

And there's a layout and it, as you detail extensively in the book, ties directly into those cultural fears, the Satanic panic, the kind of let us all immediately assume the absolute worst rather than looking at just the evidence.

Benjamin Morris (26:01):

And I thought it was so interesting, Jesse, that you took such care to point out the multiple different versions of how her body was actually found. And that from the get go, you had competing accounts. That's not supposed to happen in forensic analysis.

Benjamin Morris (26:21):

I mean, there's how you find it and you document it that way. You shouldn't end up with three different contradictory accounts, right? From the beginning.

Jesse Pollack (26:30):

Well, it was because again, law enforcement wanted this to go away. It was the press that kind of, and it's a weird thing too, because it wasn't from the jump people were saying like, "Oh, yeah, no, she was surrounded by bizarre objects, or she was on a quote unquote altar."

Jesse Pollack (26:49):

It was, "Missing girl's body found dead in the woods after six weeks. She's almost skeletal. The autopsy didn't conclude anything. Wow, what a tragedy."

Jesse Pollack (27:01):

And it was quiet for another, I want to say 11 days. And then all of a sudden there is this burst of newspaper headlines all over the Tri-State area. We're not just talking about the local papers, like the Star-Ledger or the Home News Tribune or the Springfield Leader or anything like that.

Jesse Pollack (27:20):

It was all the way the New York Daily News, the New York Post. I think The Times even had a small little piece on it. But all of a sudden it was news flash, “The Springfield police are investigating the possibility of quote ‘black magic and witchcraft’ in the death of Jeanette DePalma.”

Jesse Pollack (27:39):

And it was all of this kind of cloak and dagger shit. Like, "Oh, we have an unnamed source who says that she was found in a strange arrangement of sticks and stones in the quarry." And other people say, "Oh, no, it was an altar."

Jesse Pollack (27:54):

And then like the further people would dig into that, including up to Mark Moran when he first started looking into it in 2002, you would get stories from locals saying like, "Oh, yeah, no, I heard that there were like animal sacrifices all around her. There were like rabbits hanging by their necks from the trees, and rodents and jars."

Jesse Pollack (28:17):

Weird shit like that that was obviously nonsensical. And I didn't take too much stock into it.

Jesse Pollack (28:23):

But it was interesting, like you said, in like the social phenomenon. This was right around the time of like The Exorcist. I'm not sure if the book was out yet. The movie definitely wasn't yet. But like the Rosemary's Baby exorcist kind of years, the proto Satanic panic. I mean, this was only three years after Manson.

Jesse Pollack (29:07):

One, the cops would not comment on it anymore once the witchcraft slash satanism headlines started coming, then suddenly it was no comment.

Jesse Pollack (29:19):

They could have shut this down immediately if they had either released a crime scene photo, like I eventually got them to release with the body blacked out. Or even just a diagram, showing, no, it wasn't an altar. No, it was not a deliberate arrangement. Like they were saying, like, "Oh, it was logs around her in the shape of a coffin." "No, it was a big cross on her head."

Jesse Pollack (29:45):

They could have stopped all of that panic, all of that fear, all of that conspiratorial talk, if they had just said, "No, none of that's true, and here's why." And there were ways to do that without being disrespectful to the family or being morbid or grotesque. They refused.

Benjamin Morris (30:02):

Or compromising the investigation either. Because it was ongoing and it technically it still is ongoing, so, yeah.

Jesse Pollack (30:09):

Well, the biggest part about that is if you believe what some of these retired cops have told Mark and myself, there were a few detectives that took it kind of seriously. They did bring a self-identifying witch to the crime scene to look at those sticks and stones. And to be like, "Hey, is there any like a cult connection here?"

Jesse Pollack (30:28):

Nothing came of it. But of course, it got leaked to the press, which the cops off even more. So, they really tampered down on no comment after the witch story leaked.

Jesse Pollack (30:38):

But again, the other factor that gave all of those rumors legs were there was some documented and confirmable strange activity in that general area that led up to this hype. I'm referring to, there is a large patch of woods in Union County.

Jesse Pollack (31:01):

It's so funny. It's like something out of a horror movie. It's a trope at this point, but it's sacred Native American land. It's called the Watchung Reservation. And we're talking horse stables, hiking trails, surprise lake, there's a deserted workers' village there, stuff like that.

Jesse Pollack (31:22):

But in the '70s, going all the way up through the '90s and beyond, there was an issue with, now, were these really cultists or were these mentally disturbed residents or teenagers that listened to a little too much Alice Cooper? Take your pick.

Jesse Pollack (31:38):

But either way, they were finding animals strangled and stabbed in those woods, and they would be laid out with like bowls of blood or an offering of wine.

Benjamin Morris (32:04):

So, what was it like for you guys to do all of that legwork yourself?

Jesse Pollack (32:13):

Well, the legwork was the most important part because we were not dealing with a case that other historians in any genre, let alone true crime, would've had the benefits of.

Jesse Pollack (32:26):

Like if you're writing a book about say George Washington, say your Doris Kearns Goodwin or something like that, you have mountains of archival work to work with. Not just the first data points of entry with surviving documents and all of that stuff.

Jesse Pollack (32:45):

You have other books you can draw on, the research of others that you can stand on the shoulders of giants if it were.

Jesse Pollack (32:53):

We were going in cold. There was no previous book written about this case. This was the early years of newspaper archives being uploaded to the internet. And I mean, there was maybe a dozen articles archived on there.

Jesse Pollack (33:10):

It got to the point where there was such a drought of information online available about this when we were writing the book, that we were going to libraries with a sack of quarters in our hands to go use the microfilm machine.

Jesse Pollack (33:25):

I learned how to use microfilm working on this book. I mean, it felt pretty cool. I felt like, yeah, this is like something you would see in a movie about a dogged journalist going through the archive. But you had to do that. You had to do the legwork because we did not have a case file to work with, because now ...

Jesse Pollack (33:47):

We're kind of backtracking here a little bit, so I won't stray too far from the farm. But back when Moran started working on this in the early 2000s, it was not long before the Springfield police called him and said, "Hey, we understand that you guys have been writing about this story. We want all of the files and information you guys have."

Jesse Pollack (34:09):

And he basically said, “Well, you guys are the cops. You have everything, right?” And they said, "Well, no." He was like, "What do you mean no?" And they said, "Well, we lost everything in a flood during Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The evidence room flooded and the case files destroyed along with some of the evidence."

Jesse Pollack (34:29):

So, that was what they told us. No case file exists. We were kind of skeptical about that for very good reasons that we can get into later. But as far as the official stance, there's no case file. It's not even, "We have a case file and we're not going to let you see it." It was, "No, it's gone. It does not exist on this earthly plane anymore."

Jesse Pollack (34:54):

So, Mark and I essentially took the stance of we have to build a new case file. We're no longer journalists at this point. I'm not going to sound full of ourselves here and say we're kind like cops, but we had to essentially do police work on this.

Jesse Pollack (35:10):

So, it was, we have to gather all of the existing archival information, which again, was just newspaper clippings and go and re-interview everyone who was still alive and willing to talk.

Jesse Pollack (35:23):

And you kind of touched on that too. We did find plenty of people who were still alive, a significant portion said, "No, I'm not talking about this. This is too dangerous." Which of course only made us want to look into it further. But there was the other subset that were like, "Well, I'll talk to you, but please do not use my name."

Jesse Pollack (35:47):

And then the remainders were people that were very helpful and for whatever reason, weren't too freaked out by this whole spookiness of it. And said, “Yeah, you can use my name.”

Jesse Pollack (35:57):

But we literally had to do what a cop or a journalist as the story breaks would do. It's get out there. We did not have Wikipedia to rely on. Mark and I created the Wikipedia page for Jeanette. Like there was nothing about her online other than the Weird New Jersey coverage.

Jesse Pollack (36:18):

And that all came about in a weird way too, because it wasn't until '97 that someone wrote into the magazine about this. So, the magazine had been going for about five years by this point. And it wasn't even like, “Oh yeah, when are you guys going to talk about Jeanette DePalma? Like here's all this information. Like do something with it.”

Jesse Pollack (36:39):

It was literally a one paragraph letter that a reader by the name of Billy Martin wrote in, and he was responding to a previous issue that had talked about the Watchung Reservation.

Jesse Pollack (36:52):

And all the letter said was, "Yeah, really good article on the Watchung Reservation, but you guys only scratched the surface. I remember in the '70s, there was a ritual murder where a dog brought a body part home and they found the rest of the body in the woods."

Jesse Pollack (37:10):

So, there wasn't even a name, there was no location, just woods in the general area of the Watchung Reservation and 1970s.

Jesse Pollack (37:20):

Now, this is '97. There's no Google yet. There's no Wikipedia, there's no online newspaper archives. So, they didn't really have anything to go on for a little bit. And finally, they just decided, "Well, let's just print Billy's letter and see if we get any responses to it."

Jesse Pollack (37:37):

And they did. There was another reader who wrote in and said, "I remember that story. Her name was Jeanette DePalma, and she was found on an altar."

Jesse Pollack (37:45):

So, that kind of kicked everything off where it took from '97, '98-ish until 2002 when Mark wrote his first one or two page spread which led to the larger seven page spread in 2004. So, it's like the snowball effect. It just kept building and building and building.

Jesse Pollack (38:07):

And that was, again, a major motivation for me wanting to do it in book form, because well, look what a collective nine pages of magazine coverage generated. Imagine if we re-interview all these people and put out a book, what will shake loose from there?

Benjamin Morris (38:26):

Jesse, there are multiple definitions of a cliffhanger, and I think you've just added one more to the list. And we are going to leave this week right there on that cliffhanger, what indeed would shake loose if you put all this out into a book? And we're going to find out next week when we come back.

Benjamin Morris (38:49):

So, thank you so much for joining us and taking this through this truly bizarre case that has more twists and turns than the New Jersey turnpike. So, thank you.

Jesse Pollack (39:01):

Thank you. It's been as much of a pleasure talking about a horrific and tragic murder as it can be.

Jesse Pollack (39:07):

But it's always good to keep this information out there because as you mentioned earlier, as far as the official record is concerned, this story is still an open-ended story. It's technically an unsolved case. Justice delayed is justice denied as they say.

Jesse Pollack (39:25):

So, thanks for having me on to talk about it.

Benjamin Morris (39:28):

You got it. We'll see you right back here next week.

Jesse Pollack (39:30):

See you then.