In the summer of 1972, a recent high school graduate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania would meet a ghastly end at the hands of a probable gang of savage killers.
Seventeen-year-old Dolores Della Penna had been an honors student at St. Hubert’s Catholic High School, though she had received her diploma only a little more than a month before. She had plans to study to be an X-ray technician once autumn came, but in the meantime, she was focusing on her summer vacation. In fact, she had only just returned from a short trip to Florida with her family, and was looking forward to spending some time at the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey. Tragically, she would not live to see any of her plans realized.
Shortly before midnight on July 11th, 1972, witnesses reported seeing Dolores being dragged to a car near her home in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. She appeared to be unconscious. It was the last time she was seen alive.
Not long afterward, the Soltys family had just arrived at their vacation home in Jackson Township, New Jersey when their dog scampered over to them with a woman’s severed arm dangling from its mouth. The horrified family then discovered part of a woman’s torso a short distance away. All of the victim’s organs had been removed, and whoever had dismembered the body had removed the fingertips as well, presumably to hamper identification.
Eight miles away, another man came across a pair of severed women’s legs amid the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and investigators were eventually able to identify the victim as Dolores Della Penna. She had been tortured and possibly gang raped, and her death had been due to dismemberment. Her head was never located.
Perhaps the most persistent rumor surrounding the butchery of Dolores Della Penna was that she had somehow run afoul of a gang of drug dealers who accused either her or her boyfriend of stealing from them, and took a brutal revenge. This scenario seemed to gain some credibility in 1992, when an inmate at a prison in Graterford, Pennsylvania—who was sixteen at the time Dolores Della Penna was slain—told authorities that he had been present in a Kensington garage on the night of July 11th when Dolores was kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately beheaded with a machete. This witness affirmed that a gang of nine drug-dealing bikers had participated in the murder, which had been undertaken for purposes of revenge after an informant told the gang that Dolores had stolen drugs from him.
From the testimony of this witness, police identified six possible suspects in the homicide, though half of them were already dead at the time of the inquiry. As of this writing, not enough evidence exists to formally charge anyone with the crime.
In an extremely unsettling coda to the case, a mysterious bust of a woman’s head was abandoned in a construction area on the site of the East Hampton Library in New York. The statue was rather light, apparently fashioned of some sort of painted clay, and depicted the face of what appeared to be a middle-aged woman.
The eeriest detail about it, however, was an inscription on the back of the bust that read, “My Wife Forever Della Penna.” It remains a mystery whether the statue—which had been made not long before being found at the construction site—had any connection to the death of Dolores Della Penna, or is simply the product of a bizarre coincidence.
Crime Immemorial 