Sixteen-year-old Jeanette DePalma, a student at Jonathan Dayton High School in Springfield Township, New Jersey, left her home on August 7th, 1972 after telling her mother that she was going to take a train to visit a friend. When Jeanette failed to return home by that evening, her worried mother reported her missing.
Jeanette would not be found for six long weeks, and the circumstances surrounding her discovery are still a source of much exaggeration, folklore, and controversy.
On September 19th, a man out walking his dog unwittingly came across the remains of Jeanette DePalma when the dog came running toward him carrying a decomposed woman’s arm in its mouth.
Jeanette’s body was lying on top of a cliff in Houdaille Quarry which some locals apparently called “The Devil’s Teeth.” According to the coroner, the remains bore no obvious signs of violence; a definitive cause of death could not be established and officially stands as “unknown,” though strangulation was put forward as a possible scenario.
No traces of drugs were found in the victim’s system, though oddly, the body contained an unusually high concentration of lead, a detail which has never been satisfactorily explained.
Reports of the scene immediately surrounding the teenager’s body have become wildly inflated over the years, to a point where it now seems impossible to sort fact from fiction. By some accounts, Jeanette DePalma was found lying within a series of logs laid out in a coffin shape, and ringed by several small crosses fashioned from sticks.
Other accounts take things a step further, claiming that trees around the victim’s body had been marked with arrows pointing toward it; that there was a halo of stones placed around her head; or that the body was surrounded by dead animals and other occult-style accoutrements.
All of these possibly embellished stories have served to give the case a somewhat mythical quality in the media, fueling speculation that Jeanette DePalma might have been killed by a satanic cult as a sacrifice. This motive was particularly endorsed by local preacher Reverend James Tate, who also happened to be a friend of the DePalma family, and who some amateur sleuths maintain should also be a person of interest in the case.
Apparently, the only solid lead that was followed up on at the time of the murder was the questioning of a homeless man in the area known only as Red, who had allegedly fled from his camp near the crime scene shortly after the discovery of the body. After a thorough investigation, however, police were convinced that Red was not the culprit, and released him.
In later years, allegations that the authorities were covering up the motive and/or the killer have remained rife, though varying police accounts claim that either the Jeanette DePalma case files were completely destroyed in 1999 in Hurricane Floyd, or that copies of the files still exist despite the original copies being lost. Investigators have routinely denied a connection with the occult in the murder, and some researchers have even speculated that the girl could have fallen prey to a so-far-unidentified serial killer.
In the 1990s, long after the case had gone cold, the editor of Weird NJ magazine, Mark Moran, became interested in the crime and started writing about it, after which he began receiving numerous anonymous letters talking about the case, ostensibly from people who lived in the area but were too afraid to report what they knew to police. Most of these letters reiterated the belief that Jeanette DePalma had been killed by Satanists or a coven of witches, and that authorities were complicit in a cover-up.
As of this writing, there has been no further progress on the investigation, and it remains a complete mystery what happened to Jeanette DePalma and why her body was reportedly left lying in a symbolic coffin on The Devil’s Teeth.
Crime Immemorial 