Jeannette DePalma turned 16 on August 3, 1972, and four days later she walked out of her family’s home in Springfield Township, Union County, New Jersey, saying she was going to a friend’s house. She never arrived. Six weeks afterward her body was found on a rocky ledge above a quarry that local teenagers called the Devil’s Teeth, and within days the case had become a story about witches. Half a century on, nobody has been charged with her death, and the photographs that were supposed to prove the occult story have finally been seen.
What happened
On the morning of September 19, 1972, a dog that roamed the woods behind an apartment complex on Wilson Road came home carrying a human forearm. Searchers followed the trail into the overgrown land around the Houdaille Quarry and found the rest of the remains lying face down near the top of a cliff, in a spot so steep that firefighters needed a ladder truck to recover them. Dental records confirmed that the remains were Jeannette’s. Decomposition was so advanced that the medical examiner could not fix a cause of death. Strangulation was suspected but never confirmed, and FBI tests on her clothing found nothing beyond her own hair.
The witchcraft story
The sinister version took shape in print. On September 29 the Elizabeth Daily Journal asked in a headline whether she had been sacrificed in a witch rite, reporting that pieces of wood near the body, at first thought to be there by chance, were now being read as symbols: sticks crossed above her head and branches framing her like a coffin. On October 4 the New York Daily News carried the theory of the Rev. James Tate, pastor of the church she attended, who believed devil worshipers had killed her because she had tried to preach to them. He admitted it was his own idea. Rumors spread that detectives had consulted a witch.
The panic had local fuel. Nine months earlier John List had murdered his mother, wife and three children in nearby Westfield, and his eldest daughter was said to have declared herself a witch. The Watchung Reservation, the wooded park beside the quarry, already had a reputation among teenagers for seances, animal sacrifices and devil worship. Police, meanwhile, chased ordinary leads, including a homeless golf caddie known only by a nickname, who was located after weeks and cleared. Some officers later floated the idea that she had overdosed at a party, though nothing at the scene supported it. The case went cold.
Weird NJ and the missing file
The story resurfaced in 1997, when Weird NJ printed a reader’s letter about a ritual killing near the Springfield quarry. A flood of replies followed, many anonymous, describing an altar, animals hung from trees and arrows carved in bark. When the magazine’s editors asked the authorities, they were told the file and evidence had been destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999. Two contributors, Mark Moran and Jesse P. Pollack, kept digging and in 2015 published Death on the Devil’s Teeth, which weighed the cult theory against more ordinary possibilities without settling on one.
The file had not been destroyed. After a public records request in 2019, the Union County Prosecutor’s Office released most of it in February 2021, crime scene photographs included. Weird NJ’s review found no crosses of twigs, no ring of stones, no slaughtered animals and no altar. The supposed crossed sticks were two large rotten logs, one lying along the body and one beyond the head, and the so-called coffin was an irregular pattern of fallen branches in dense undergrowth. The photographs also contradicted the party theory: the spot was thickly overgrown, with no sign of a gathering. What the evidence list did show was the contents of her purse dumped in a pile about eight feet from the body, while the purse itself, any money and the cross necklace her family said was missing from her body were gone.
The explanations
The record now points away from the supernatural and toward an unidentified killer who may have taken her purse and necklace. The occult framing appears to have come from a hopeful reading of fallen wood, a pastor’s private theory and a community already primed by the List murders and talk of Satanism. A lawsuit filed in 2018 to force new DNA testing of her clothing was dismissed in 2019 because the person bringing it was not a relative.
Where it stands
The case remains unsolved, with no official cause of death and no arrest. Its strangeness now lies less in witchcraft than in how long a missing file, a lurid set of rumors and an unexamined pile of photographs kept the truth out of view.