(Image: WeirdNJ.com)
It was Monday, August 7th, 1972 in Springfield Township, New Jersey.
Raven haired, sixteen year old Jeanette DePalma waved goodbye to her mother and said that she was taking to a train to visit a friend.
She would never be seen alive again.
She failed to arrive at her friend’s house, and never made it back home.
Her parents, of course, filed a missing persons report.
Everything was quiet, until six weeks later, when a dog from the local area retrieved a severed, decomposing piece of DePalma’s right arm, from a cliff at Houdaille Quarry.
The cliff was known to locals as “The Devils teeth”.
The teen’s skeletal remains were found encircled by various suspected occult objects, including sticks and branches said to have been placed around her in a coffin like structure, as well as in the shape of crosses.
Others residing in the immediate area claimed that sticks had been laid in the shape of pentagrams and the remains of mutilated animals surrounded the body.
Investigation showed no signs of bullet wounds, knife wounds, broken bones or other.
High levels of lead were found in the body, however for whatever reason is undisclosed.
The death was ruled as suspicious and remains a homicide.
There have been no leads on who the suspected killer could be.
A homeless man, known to locals as Red, was said to have abandoned his camp around the time of Jeanette’s disappearance, however he was ruled out as a suspect and no other leads were ever found.
Still reeling from the shock of the Bogeyman of Westfield, and taking the locals mutterings of mutilated animals and occult symbolism into account, local newspapers began reporting stories of the occult and spinning them in stories of sacrifice. Coupled with the Evangelical link between the DePalma family’s pastor and an alleged Watchung reservation based witch’s covern, the theories started to fly.
Nobody knows who is responsible for the death of sixteen year old Jeanette DePalma to this day.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_DePalma
http://weirdnj.com/stories/mystery-history/jeannette-depalma/
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