Death on the Devil’s Teeth Read online

  Springfield’s Mountview Road. Photo by Jesse P. Pollack.

  A scream pierced the mountain air.

  “The call came in around eleven o’clock,” Schwerdt recalls. “Dispatch radioed me that this woman had found an arm on the lawn of the apartment complex where she lived.” Schwerdt’s first impression was that the woman was simply the unwitting victim of a practical joke.

  “I honestly thought it was a prank,” Schwerdt says. “I figured it was going to be a mannequin’s arm because this lady was always being harassed by a few of the kids that lived in the apartment complex. They would do things like throw her trash all over the lawn. They were just awful to her. So when I got the call, I figured it was those kids again, and maybe they poured some ketchup on a mannequin arm or something.”

  There was a slight squeal of the tires and then the throaty moan of the Plymouth Fury’s four-barrel carburetor as Schwerdt turned around and headed for Wilson Road. Passing the abandoned Springfield Swim Club, he made his way up the mountain on Shunpike Road. As Schwerdt approached the block of apartments, the tree line quickly began to envelope him, blocking out much of the sunlight. Had he been a superstitious man, Schwerdt might have taken this as an omen. He parked his patrol car in the small lot on Wilson Road and made his way toward the rear of the unfinished apartment complex, his polished shoes glistening in the early afternoon sun as they clicked against the asphalt. As he got closer to the gruesome item in question, Schwerdt quickly discovered that his original assumption was far from true. “When I got there, the arm was lying in the grass,” he recalls. “I looked at it, and I said to myself, ‘This is human.’ I could see the fingernails and the color of the skin.” Schwerdt immediately grabbed his camera and took several photographs of the forearm. “I could tell that the arm had been out in the elements for a while. The flesh was real leathery, and it was a sort of maroonish red in color.”

  The rear of the Baltusrol Gardens apartment complex. Jeannette DePalma’s arm was discovered by the building’s superintendent just beyond the bushes to the left. Photo by Michael Vaccaro.

  Once Schwerdt finished taking photographs, he returned to his patrol car. Clutching his radio’s handheld microphone, Schwerdt called out to dispatch. “You better send the detectives up,” he said. “We got an arm here, and it’s no joke.”

  Patrolmen Edward Kisch and Dominick Olivo heard this call over their radios and immediately raced to the apartments to provide backup. Fellow officers described Kisch as having good intentions and being very serious about his work. Today, fellow retirees remember the then-thirty-year-old officer for being able to mind his own business and do his job well. The same retirees remember Olivo affectionately as “Dom.” In his later years, the robust patrolman reminded some of his colleagues of actor Erik Estrada’s portrayal of Officer Frank “Ponch” Poncherello on the hit NBC television drama CHiPS.

  Once Kisch and Olivo arrived at the apartments, Schwerdt returned to the elderly superintendent and asked how the arm had ended up on the lawn. The superintendent told the officer that her dog had most likely brought it home. Schwerdt asked if he could have a look at her dog, and the superintendent nodded, asking him to follow her to her apartment. There, Schwerdt made a surprising discovery. “The lady brought me over to a puppy—and I mean a tiny puppy. That really threw me off. There was no way that this little thing could have brought that arm home.” He then proceeded to knock on each door of the apartment complex, asking the tenants if they had any pets. Eventually, Schwerdt found one resident who owned a large Dalmatian. “The tenant told me that she had let her dog out to run earlier that morning, and we determined that this Dalmatian had most likely brought the arm home from wherever it had been roaming.”

  Standing next to Kisch, Olivo stared at the rotting forearm lying on the ground. After pausing for a moment, the thirty-two-year-old officer felt uneasiness in his stomach. Turning to face Kisch, Olivo remarked, “I think this could be Jeannette DePalma.”

  “Why do you say that?” Kisch asked.

  “Ed, she’s the only missing person we’ve got in town. She’s listed as a runaway.”

  Kisch nodded.

  Once a satisfactory number of photographs of the forearm had been taken and the surrounding area had been examined, Kisch placed the detached extremity in a cardboard box and drove it back to the municipal building, where it would wait until the rest of the body could be located.

  Back at the Baltusrol Gardens apartment complex, members of Springfield’s Detective Bureau had begun to arrive on the scene. Schwerdt and Olivo were instructed to resume their regular patrol duties, while George Parsell, Springfield’s chief of police, began coordinating with his detectives to conduct a search for the rest of the remains. The fifty-year-old police chief, described as a huge and lumbering man of few words, made the decision to borrow a bloodhound from the Ocean County Sheriff ’s Office for use during the planned search. Approximately four hours after the initial discovery of the forearm, the search party was organized and ready to go.

  “My shift ended at three o’clock,” Schwerdt remembers. “After that, I went home, changed my clothes and we all met back at police headquarters. We had the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, the Ocean County Sheriff ’s Department with a bloodhound and our group of men. It was decided that we better have a search party check the roadbed of Interstate 78, which was just being built at the time. It was only dirt.”

  “Basically, all of us were dispatched to that area up there,” Ed Kisch recalls. “We tried to coordinate a foot search on what I guess you could call the north side of Shunpike Road, and then we all switched over to the south side. Now, we’re not talking a lot of men. We’re talking two, three or four at the most.”

  An initial sweep of the abandoned Springfield Swim Club yielded no results. “We broke up into teams to search the quarry area because that was right by where the apartment complex was,” Schwerdt recalls. Located only a short distance away from Wilson Road, the Houdaille Quarry was then—and still is today—a vast open area with its surrounding woods running adjacent to nearly the entire length of Mountview Road. The Houdaille Construction Materials Company had purchased the property from the North Jersey Quarry Company two decades prior, and the quarry had since become known for its wealth of greenockite. The quarry was also known to locals for the makeshift shooting range that the Springfield Police Department used on weekends.

  The Springfield Swim Club, which had long been abandoned by the time this photo was taken in 2000. Investigators originally searched this area for clues after Jeannette’s arm was recovered. The site is now the home of a large luxury apartment complex. Photo by Mark Moran.

  Lieutenant Roy Earlman and Investigator Glenn Owens, both of the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, soon arrived on the scene. The Springfield officers were split up into pairs, and the search began. Investigator Owens, described by Kisch as Union County’s own “evidence guru,” was there to determine whether this arm had once belonged to the victim of a potential homicide. He tailed the officers as they made their way along the unfinished dirt roadbed for Interstate 78, which ran through the quarry. Owens was determined to find any potential clues or pieces of evidence.

  A short time later, Schwerdt made another gruesome discovery.

  “We were over by the quarry, searching the bed that had been laid out for Interstate 78, when we found the upper portion of the arm,” Schwerdt recalls. “It must have fallen off while the dog was carrying it home.” Schwerdt sensed that the rest of the body must be nearby.

  While Schwerdt searched what would eventually become Interstate 78, the rest of the search party made its way through thick brush and across high hills in search of the remains. Even with bright rays of sunshine peeking through the trees, these particular woods possessed an eerie atmosphere of stillness. The few sounds that could be heard were the footsteps of the search party, often accentuated by the quick swoops of the machetes that were being used to clear the masses of overgrowth a
nd thorn bushes.

  Leaving the dirt roadbed, Schwerdt and fellow patrolman Andrew Calabrese entered the Houdaille Quarry. Soon after, Schwerdt and Officer Calabrese noticed a lofty bluff overlooking the quarry floor. Determined to find the rest of the body, Schwerdt began his ascent to the top of the hill. “I had a job getting up on top of this hill,” he recalls. “I had to keep pulling on shrubs and little trees to get myself up on top of this knoll. I was the first one up, and once I got to the top, I spotted the body right away.”

  Catching his breath, Schwerdt stood and gazed at the severely decomposed corpse lying on the ground in front of him.

  “The body was lying facedown on a flat area on top of this hill,” Schwerdt recalls. “I’d say that this area was maybe twenty feet around. The body was clad in a blue T-shirt and tan slacks. I immediately remembered that this was the description of the clothing that Jeannette DePalma was wearing on the day that she went missing. The body had no shoes or socks on. There were flip-flops, but they weren’t on the feet; they were lying by the body. Animals had eaten most of the flesh off of her feet and all around her head.”

  As a patrol officer, Donald Schwerdt was no stranger to death. In the past, he had been called to the scenes of several accidents and suicides, but there was something strikingly different about this situation. Something eerie. What Schwerdt allegedly discovered arranged around this body would become a matter of controversy and intense scrutiny over the next four decades.

  Researcher Michael Vaccaro and author Jesse P. Pollack approaching the spot where Jeannette DePalma’s remains were discovered in September 1972. Photo by Ann Pollack.

  “There was a wooden cross over her head that was made out of two sticks. There were also some stones arranged around the top of her head in the shape of a semicircle. Almost like a halo.”

  As patrolman Andrew Calabrese joined him on top of the hill, Schwerdt reached for his walkie-talkie and radioed his fellow officers, letting them know that he had located the rest of the body. A horde of investigators quickly made its way up the hill, arriving within a matter of minutes. “It was just bedlam up there,” Schwerdt recalls. “Everyone wanted to get up there to see what was going on.” Detective Howard Thompson arrived with his camera and began thoroughly photographing the scene. Schwerdt stood still, trying not to get in Thompson’s way. As the other officers and investigators began to surround him, he could not help but stare at the body, which seemed to be almost magnetically drawing the investigators closer and closer.

  “I was searching the area of the Baltusrol Gardens apartments when Don Schwerdt called out over the radio that he had found a body,” Ed Kisch recalls. “I drove over to Mountview Road, entered the woods, crossed a creek and went up the side of this big hill. And let me tell you, this hill was steep! It was a very steep angle. I can remember slipping three or four times getting up there. The body was high up on this hill. The area was a little flat at that point on the top. You could look down toward Mountview Road, which was the road that ran from Shunpike Road up to Tree Top Drive. You could look down into the quarry. The property, at that time, belonged to the Houdaille Quarry. It was an area that would not be accessible to any normal means of traffic because of where it was. In other words, no hikers or anything are really going to go there. Once I got up to the top, I saw that Don Schwerdt was still there. I believe Howard Thompson also was up there, and we were all viewing…um…what was there. It was a body—I couldn’t tell you whether it was male or female, although it was suspected that it might have been a female because there was a pocketbook there, and the body was partially clothed. The clothing was in so-so shape, but the body was pretty deteriorated.”

  Schwerdt bent down to get a better look at the remains. He immediately noticed that its remaining arm was resting underneath the head, which was now little more than a skull adorned with long, dark, matted hair. He stood, contemplating the bizarre arrangement of sticks and stones that were resting around the corpse. In his mind, these items did not appear to be there by chance.

  Gazing at the remains, Schwerdt’s concentration was broken by a fellow officer’s chilling observation.

  “Don, this looks like witchcraft…”

  2

  THE BODY

  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

  —Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  While Don Schwerdt knew nothing about witchcraft, he did know that there was something very strange about the objects he saw arranged around the corpse. “It definitely was not normal to see a wooden cross and stones like that around the top of the head,” he says. While Schwerdt was observing the scene around him, Ed Kisch noticed a pocketbook lying near the remains and instinctively picked it up. He opened the pocketbook and immediately began to search its contents for any trace of identification or drugs. Neither was found. Setting the pocketbook back on the ground, Kisch turned to Schwerdt and asked if he required any further assistance from him. Schwerdt shook his head, and Kisch decided to head home for the day.

  By now, a swarm of police officers and investigators, all from the Springfield Police Department, the Union County Prosecutor’s Office and the Union County Sheriff ’s Office, had begun to crowd around the body. Schwerdt was then enlisted by Detective Sergeant Sam Calabrese, brother of Patrolman Andrew Calabrese, to help keep everyone else away from the remains.

  “Once the Detective Bureau came on the scene, we were pushed aside, and everything became secretive,” Schwerdt remembers. “The Detective Bureau did their own thing, and it wasn’t discussed with us. They treated the rest of us patrolmen like a bunch of dunces.”

  While Schwerdt began ordering the other responding officers away from the body, the detectives discussed what the appropriate next step would be. They decided that trying to carry the corpse out of the wilderness would be too risky. The cliff where the body was lying was surrounded on three sides by treacherous slopes littered with overgrown thorn bushes, and the fourth side was a steep, forty-foot drop to the quarry floor below. The investigators eventually decided to lower the remains to the quarry floor by means of an aerial truck ladder.

  “That was the easiest way to take that body out of there,” Ed Kisch recalls. “The side of that hill was just too steep, so we called the fire department and had them use their ladder truck to remove the body from the quarry side.” Springfield’s fire chief, Robert Day, was radioed and asked to stand by while the detectives awaited the arrival of Union County’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Bernard Ehrenberg. It would be Ehrenberg’s job to perform the formality of officially declaring the partially skeletonized remains as dead.

  Abandoned equipment litters the floor of the Houdaille Quarry. The Devil’s Teeth cliff can be seen in the background. Photo by Mark Moran.

  Ed Cardinal, a seven-year veteran of the Springfield Volunteer Fire Department, was on a SCUBA training assignment in Ledgewood when he became aware that his fellow firefighters were standing by to help recover a body that had been found on top of a wooded cliff in the Houdaille Quarry. Cardinal knew the cliff well.

  “The Devil’s Teeth. That’s what it was called back then,” Cardinal remembers. “It was originally known as the Devil’s Skull back in the 1920s. When my dad was a kid, he told me about an old dirt road that extended from Summit, over the hill where Shunpike Road crosses what is now Route 78, then south, passing the east side of the mountain where the body was found and then down toward Trenton.

  “Somewhere on the side of the mountain lived a man by the name of Andrew Jackson. He was known for bringing bog iron up from South Jersey and smelting barbells, sash weights and other items along that trail. As a kid, my father and his friends would walk that trail, looking for old barbell plates and dumbbells, which had been poorly cast and discarded.

  “While traversing that mountaintop, my father and his friends found a natural depression in the bluestone where the overburden of soil had been blown or washed away. Th
at rock hollow would fill with rainwater and become a natural birdbath. He told me about how kids would scoop the dirt and mud out of the depression, and subsequent rainstorms would keep the water fresh. This allowed them to sit around in the water like a hot tub, but eventually, the bird crap and mud would turn the water foul.

  “In the autumn months, the spot became a dreary place. More often than not, turkey buzzards could be seen circling the spot, looking for drowned mice and other creatures, and the bowl of the rock depression would dry out, taking on the appearance of the inside of an inverted half skull. That’s how the place came to be known as the Devil’s Skull.

  “That spot was always a strange and a dismal place,” Cardinal continues. “Even when they built the apartments nearby on Wilson Road, people said, ‘Who would want to live there?’ And this was long before Route 78 was cleared. There was an abandoned pool and swim club right behind those apartments as well. A really dismal, spooky place. It later became the town’s leaf dump.

  “Decades later, when the Houdaille Construction Materials Company started mining the area, the steam shovels with clamshell buckets would dump their loads of overburden and waste rock along the edge of the Devil’s Skull. Back then, there weren’t very many trees there, so when the small piles of waste were lined up in a row, they looked just like teeth along a jaw. The Devil’s Skull now became the Devil’s Teeth, and that’s where they found the body.”