Swell AI Transcript: CC_Jesse 2.mp3

Ben: (00:01)

Jesse, welcome back to Crime Capsule. So glad to have you. Thanks so much for having me back on. Let's just jump right into this book issue, because there's some things that need to be said to appreciate why your volume is so noteworthy. Now, for those folks, our listeners, who do not normally spend their waking hours toiling over manuscripts and page proofs and footnotes and endnotes and all those other things that make the making of books such a weary endeavor, It has to be said right up front that it's rare enough for a book to go into an updated or revised edition. But it's especially rare for the history press in particular to do an updated, revised, enhanced edition based on, you know, what they had published previously.

They just, as a publisher, they're not known for doing that. And in fact, they tell you right up front, they say, you're going to have to make a really strong argument for why we would ever do a different version of your book than the one that we're putting out. initially. It's just part of the way they do business and it's understandable and it just means that you have to have all your ducks in a row right when you, you know, sort of click send on the final, final, final version. You have to be absolutely confident that this sucker is gonna stand the test of time and that there's nothing more to say, et cetera, et cetera, okay. You guys first published Death on the Devil's Teeth in 2015. And here we are, seven, eight years later, and you're holding this updated edition in your hands. Why, Jesse? I mean, you've parted the Red Sea. How did you do it?

Jesse: (01:57)

Well, it also needs to be said to thank God for History Press. Because when Mark and I teamed up to work on this book in 2013, I'd been about a year into my research by this point, and I said, you know, I got to bring Mark in on this because he was working on it years before me. And it's the right thing to do. Because one, this was his baby at the magazine. And two, you know, again, two heads are better than one, and he had already done some legwork. It's like, let's see what we can both come up with and see where it takes us. And again, this is 2013. By the time we had a draft ready, it was 2014. And it was before the big true crime boom. Everyone, we couldn't even get an agent. We queried something like 50 agents and 49 said no.

It was kind of like the Beatles when they were trying to get a record deal where they were telling them, nah, guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein. We were being told true crime's on its way out. No one reads that. Everybody's embarrassed. It doesn't sell. But we got one agent who said, no, I want to know more about this story. I think this needs to be a book.

And that was our agent, Eric Meyers. And he ran into the same problem that we ran into securing him. He tried shopping it to all of these publishers. And they were like, no, Eric, sorry. We love Weird New Jersey. But yeah, no, true crime just doesn't sell right now. And History Press was the only one that would take a chance on us. They said, no, we could see why this is a pretty compelling story. So they gave us a chance. And very lucky for them, too, because I'm sure that, you know, this book has helped them through sales. It's been a steady seller for about a decade now.

And if we had ended up with someone else that was just like, no, sorry, house policy is we don't do revisions, you know, write another book and try shopping it around, but we're not going to let you update and revise it. Then a lot of this stuff probably would have been dead in the water or relegated to a podcast, maybe. So not that there's anything wrong with podcasts, but if you really want to get stuff like on the record as a document, a book really helps. So History Press was great with us for that, but to answer your question, it was very soon after the book was published. We're talking The book was published July 20th, 2015.

By August 15th, I was getting phone calls from former prosecutors in New Jersey that were like, Hey, uh, you know, I got your name from your publisher. Um, I was picking up a book in Barnes and Noble to go on a beach vacation. And I was like, Oh, this looks interesting. And I remembered working on cases that are featured in this book. This wasn't a prosecutor that worked on Jeanette's case, but Joan Kramer's.

The other murdered woman from a town only six miles away who vanished the same week under very, very similar circumstances. And he was telling me, he was just like, listen, the book is really well written and really, really well researched, but there's a suspect you don't know about. And so he gave us information on this other suspect and made a really compelling case for it. And once we were getting phone calls like that, Mark and I decided pretty early on, like, hey, we're going to have to put out like a second edition, because if we're getting calls like this in the first month, like who knows where we're going to be a year from now. So we basically had a meeting with History Press and told them everything I just told you about the prosecutor and letters that were now coming into the magazine about it from readers. And we just said, listen, we don't need to do this right away.

But in a couple of years, we would really like to put out a revised and expanded version of this because more information that's significant is flowing out. And the gentleman we spoke to there, I want to say it was Adam Farrell or Farrell. I don't want to say his name wrong. He said, I'll bring it up to the board. Normally we don't do this, but you're making a really compelling case for it. And luckily he came back and said, you've got the green light. Let us know when it's ready. And every time we thought it was ready, just before we would hit send, send the manuscript to history press, some other thing would burst out, this new flood of information.

And thank God we were smart enough to be like, well, let's keep delaying it and see where this goes. Because finally in 2020 or 2021, somewhere in there, After years and years and years of the powers that be in Springfield and Union County claiming Jeanette DePalma's case file was destroyed, we kind of forced their hand through the Freedom of Information Act and got them to release the case file to us. And that constituted in an almost complete rewrite of the book. It was insane.

Ben: (07:11)

Yeah, and we're going to come to that moment, because in this updated edition, chapter 13 is arguably There are no smoking guns here, right? The case is still unsolved. But chapter 13 has the most wisps of smoke floating around it as far as, you know, just showing how everything got screwed up or covered up in the first 30 years of this case's, you know, handling. And so let me just ask you right up front, because I'm I was genuinely fascinated by your chronicle in chapter 13 of all of these different encounters that you had. Are you guys just like Jedi masters of a FOIA request? Like, can you fill one out, like, in your sleep, blindfolded, with one hand behind your back? By now, yeah, we've done enough of them. Every other paragraph, you're like, the authors of this book filed a FOIA, the authors of this book filed another FOIA, you know? It's just like, it's incredible the volume of work that you did there.

Jesse: (08:19)

Because they just kept denying us. They thought that we were idiots. They just thought that we were bumpkins, or worse, some of them thought, oh, I don't have to comply with FOIA if I don't want to. And that's just not the case. Like, yeah, there are certain things that are FOIA exempt, But we were dealing with some of these, you know, township and county cops that were, that thought, Oh, well, if I don't want to speak to you, I don't have to. And then you pull up a statute, you know, to them and be like, well, no, actually under the FOIA act, you have to hand this over. And here is the code saying why, and I'm going to CC the township lawyer on it if you don't agree. And then they'd start giving you little bits of information.

And it got to the point where there were people we were talking to in the Union County Prosecutor's Office, who I won't name because I don't want to cost them their job, but they were saying like, look, we don't understand why they're giving you so much pushback on this, but here's some helpful hints and tips for certain language and wording to put in these FOIA requests that will definitely catch the eye of the township lawyers that have to review this stuff. And once we got some of that information, then the floodgates started to open that carved a path, as it were, for the case file being released. We basically had to dog them on it for a decade, and I'm pretty sure That the negative press that the prosecutor's office in the Springfield Township police were getting contributed to that I don't want to I don't want to really say like we were such good investigators that we we finally got it I think a lot of it was These guys are making us look bad. Just give it to them and shut them up.

Ben: (10:05)

You know, when you frame the discussion in another way, or you know, were the camera angle, you know, like 10 degrees to the left, one would have to say, We're making ourselves look bad here, right? We're shooting our own reputation in the foot, not these guys over there are doing it to us. But that's a different kettle of kippers.

Jesse: (10:26)

Well, a lot of these guys, these commanders or captains, these are old school gumshoes from the 60s and 70s. These guys never retire. They just keep getting promoted. You really got to screw up to get forced out as a cop in certain areas of New Jersey. And even then, that's still a big maybe. So these guys just keep rising in the ranks and some of them have that kind of old school mindset of, oh no, if I don't want to give it to you, I don't have to. Until like a township lawyer again tells them like, no, you have to do this. Number one, it's the law. Number two, if we don't, this guy's a journalist. And he's going to put it out there that we did not comply with federal and state law on this Information Act request, and it's going to make us look bad. But again, because some of these guys are old school, they're like, I don't care if we look bad. I'm a cop. It ain't my job to worry about media relations. You know, it wasn't really until there was some new blood at the prosecutor's office that we really started to make headway, like people that weren't even born yet when Jeanette died. Like, as cruel as this is, as cruel as this sounds, we kind of had to wait until some of these people died off until we could, you know, make some traction here, or at the very least retired.

Ben: (11:46)

One way to win is to run out the clock. So what I really want to ask you, Jessie, what did you find?

Jesse: (11:54)

It was just an entire wealth. I mean where to even start well the crime scene photos Was the biggest part of it because I could tell they were really dragging their feet on that because once we kind of like called their bluff on a few things because Everything didn't come out all at once there was a suspect in the case of Way back in the early days of the investigation in 72, this drifter by the name of Red Keir or Red Keira, sorry. And what we had been told, this was the real smoking gun for the case file to come out.

We interviewed a retired Springfield police officer named Ed Kish about this, and he said, Yeah, no, I remember that guy. He was a caddy over at the golf course, and he let it slip that oh yeah, we had a wanted poster made for him and we distributed several copies to the public now a lot of entities at the state and government level find ways to keep information from getting out by saying like oh no that was a document that was created for internal purposes that was never for public consumption so that's not That's not eligible. But here now, I had a cop telling me, no, we had a document that was created for the public. So I was like, I want to see that document, because that guy was very mysterious. Like, I mean, his name is Red. It was a nickname he was known by. To this day, we still don't know what his real name was.

I mean, the cops do. We don't. So I sent a FOIA request to the prosecutor's office for the wanted flyer. And suddenly they were like, we're caught essentially like he's asking for a document that we have no legal grounds to keep from him. So they sent me a copy of it and that is what definitively proved that the case file was not quote unquote missing or destroyed. It was like, well, hey, they just sent me a Xerox of a wanted flyer from that case file. So it's there.

So once we had that confirmation that the case file did in fact still exist, we started dogging them on everything. And we were researching all of these loopholes with FOIA, like, well, listen, you can't send a FOIA request and say we want any and all case files. You never use the phrase any and all. You have to make an itemized bullet pointed list of the very specific document you want. and so we started getting information that way, but we could tell that they were dragging their feet on the crime scene photos. Now, we didn't want the crime scene photos because we were ghouls and we get off looking at stuff like that, but as we talked about in the episode last week, a major lynchpin in this case was Well, was this a murder of opportunity by a run-of-the-mill serial killer, or was there an occult element here?

Ben: (14:52)

Was there a ritualistic element, right, exactly.

Jesse: (14:54)

Yeah, and that whole ritualistic element was born from these rumors of, oh, well, she was found on an altar, or, you know, she had sticks and stones deliberately arranged around her. And the only thing that could prove or disprove that was the crime scene photos. Because like we talk about in the book, if you remember, we interviewed two cops that stood in front of that body at the same exact time, and their stories did not match.

Ben: (15:19)

Yeah, and you even have diagrams to prove that. It's incredible.

Jesse: (15:23)

Well, yeah, because we got four. There was a diagram from what the newspaper said the crime scene looked like there. We made a diagram based on what one cop said and one based on what another cop said and one based on what a family member said when they were brought there. So again, like you said, it's like this really weird circumstance that does not happen very often where no. Like, could you imagine if, like, say, the Kennedy assassination. If we were looking into the Kennedy assassination 40 years later and no one could agree on what car Kennedy was shot in and who was sitting next to him.

It was that level of absurdity. It was like, oh yeah, we could confirm that her body was found in the woods, but we're not going to tell you anything else about it. And all of the witnesses say something different. So we wanted those photos just to prove or disprove if this occult angle, if it were, was even worth exploring. I had always been skeptical of it, but I'm also, you know, my job is to be an objective researcher as much as that is possible.

So if I was handed a crime scene photo, that showed she was laid out in an arrangement of objects or on a makeshift altar, I would have to eat my words for all of the years where I said, nah, that's satanic panic bullshit, and start following that angle. So I finally just said to the prosecutor's office, I said, look, if you're worried about sensitivity, we're not trying to see the body. We just want to know what was found around her in the woods.

So we would be very happy to accept redacted versions of this of these photos with the body blacked out once we showed we were reasonable enough there they said fine fine we'll black the body out and you can see her well i mean see that see where she was laying right and once we got it and then we got the crime scene diagram that was made by one of the detectives on the scene it was very clear like yeah there were some sticks around her but They had fallen there years beforehand. It was old, dried, rotted out wood. There was no real pattern. It wasn't coffin shaped. There were no crosses around her. There was no pentagram or anything. It was just a body laying in the woods.

That was it. That was all. What we did find that was interesting, though, was we had been told by Ed Kish, one of the patrol officers that was on the scene that day, he said he was adamant about this, too. He said, oh, yeah, no, I picked up her purse to see if there were any drugs in it.

There was nothing in there. I dropped the purse on the ground and I went home. Well, we found out from the case file, the photos in the diagram and the itemized evidence list, no, no purse was recovered, but all of the contents of her purse were found in a pile six feet away from her body. As if someone picked up her purse, dumped it out and walked off with it. Now, your listeners might be saying, well, why would her killer do that? Why dump out her purse and then take the purse with him?

If you were to ask me, I would say he was destroying evidence because her family told me years and years prior to us getting this case file that there had been like scuttlebutt within the family that, and again, I don't remember if this was, well, Let me backtrack, so scratch that.

Her family didn't really make it clear where this information came from, but something was related to them back in the early days that the purse straps may have been used to strangle her. So when I found out that that purse was missing and it was the only thing that was missing from her body other than a cross necklace she had been seen leaving the house wearing that day, that's when all these theories about, oh no, she was an overdose, she died accidentally there, went out the window. The purse being missing is proof that someone was there with her and may have killed her with it. It was removed.

They scoured those woods looking for evidence. They were crawling on their hands and knees, according to the police reports, trying to find anything. They never found that purse, but they found a pack of tissues, Ben, that were next to the body that fell out of her purse. Those didn't blow away, those didn't get destroyed by the wind, so it's not a matter of, oh, well, you know, maybe the purse got blown away or something, you know what I mean?

So that was a huge revelation, that just tossed out all of the drug overdose stuff in our mind. But the interesting thing that came out of there too was the revelation that there was a witness that was spoken to in the early days of the investigation, I want to say in late 72, that hinted towards Jeanette possibly having made it to Berkeley Heights. We knew from the jump that she was going to visit her friend, Gail Donoghue, and we had always assumed, well, she was probably kidnapped in Springfield before she ever made it there.

Because we had witnesses in and around Springfield who had run into her that day. She had knocked on a couple doors looking for a ride. And it just kind of, the trail ends there. But we had never heard from anyone from Berkeley Heights that said, oh yeah, she made it here. Um, and her friend went to her grave saying, no, Jeanette never made it to my house that day. But all of a sudden there's a document in the case file from a woman named Robin. She asked us not to use her last name. So I won't. And she said, um, that she had been reading the newspaper. accounts of her body being found and saw the date August 7th. And she said, I'm pretty sure I picked up a girl matching that description hitchhiking on August 7th and she asked to be brought to Berkeley Heights.

And she said, I kept a little desk calendar and I went and flipped back through it and saw, yeah, picked up, you know, hitchhiker dropped her off in Berkeley Heights.

And I called her. She's still alive. I was able to look her up using her name and her location, and we talked. She wasn't even aware that my book existed. She didn't know who I was, and I just asked her to tell me. I was like, I'm not going to ask you questions. Just tell me what you remember of that day. While she is telling me this over the phone, I have her signed affidavit from 1972 in my hand. And I'm looking at it as she is talking to me. She remembered 99% of it to a T without prodding. So I knew I could trust her that she wasn't making stuff up or just parroting stuff that she read in weird New Jersey. She said she didn't read the magazine. And that was enough for me to believe, OK, maybe she did make it there. So that was important.

I don't know. The whole case file was just an insane revelation. You know, a lot of stuff that we thought was true ended up not being true or, you know, mistaken at the very least. You know, again, the witness in Berkeley that took her to Berkeley Heights, Uh, there was stuff about the apartment where the, uh, the arm was brought, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, the, the, the funniest thing about it, it was so stupid. again, you talk to these cops and they're always just like oh, yeah, no, we're convinced she died of a drug overdose and If you read the book like you have list, you know listeners Basically, I interviewed every friend of hers that I could find and they all said no Jeanette smoked pot here and there but she never did anything that can kill you in one dose, you know, she was 16 she didn't exactly have access to heroin and hoity-toity Springfield and So, um, but, but the cops were still adamant about this and I'd always wondered why in addition to, you know, the, the general laziness that I talked about in the previous episode, I found a very interesting document from, uh, 2003 and an internal document from the prosecutor's office.

Some detective that had gotten this case dropped in his lap. Basically, he made it his personal crusade, I want to say, to have this declared as a drug overdose. So there's internal memos between him and a medical examiner where he's just like, we've got this body in the woods, and she had a high lead content in her remains. So that leads me to believe this was a drug overdose. I need your confirmation on this. What drugs could have killed her and left lead behind? And this medical examiner is just like, none, that's not a thing that happens.

Now, of course, that was an internal document, so that's not gonna make it out to the public. But these cops talking out of their asses and saying, no, this was a drug death, did. But the medical examiner, and we interviewed medical examiners when we put the first edition of the book out too. I talked to Dr. Cyril Wecht, who worked on the House Assassinations Committee for JFK's assassination. He was consultant in the death of JonBenet Ramsey and all this stuff. And he told us like, no, there's no narcotic you can take that leaves behind lead in your system.

I talked to Dr. Judy Melinek, who worked on the autopsies and identifications of 9-11 bodies at the World Trade Center. She's like, no, that doesn't happen. But you mentioned she was found in the woods. She goes, if they got that test result from testing her skin, a skin sample, there was a lot of lead in the soil back then from lead paint and car parts being discarded and stuff. So that could have just been a contaminated sample, like dirt got in the flesh sample and that brought the lead out.

Well, turns out it was a skin sample. Once the case file was released to us a couple of years ago, we found out that it was her scalp that they tested it.

So that, that mystery was solved. Like, Oh, it was, it was a dirty contaminated skin sample. But again, the cops used that weird lead result as their justification in saying, Oh no, she was a drug overdose. It wasn't even a murder for decades.

Ben: (26:10)

There's always an agenda somewhere and, you know, half the work is sniffing it out. Let me ask you, Jesse, I need to ask you the same question that I asked you half an hour ago, just we're going to look at it seven years down the road. When the updated version came out, right? So this is about a year or so ago that you guys published the state of the case, right? I mean, with all of these new pieces of evidence and and the new theories and you know even more that had come forward and so forth and we're not going to go into detail here because you know the listeners can find out for themselves when they read the book it's extraordinary how much you did unearth but when you published the 2022 edition what was the reaction then um it's been a lot more quiet than the first one because again

Jesse: (27:08)

When you put the first book out on a case for the very first time You know that's gonna make waves but like you had mentioned a revised expanded edition is so uncommon that a lot of like The book reading public doesn't really like get that like they hear like oh and a new edition is out Oh, they put like a new cover on it probably or like Like, they don't really, like, unless you're in that world, like, revised edition, what does that mean? So, like, it's been kind of, like, slow. We've been getting a lot of good feedback, obviously, because of the revelations in the book, but it's not like the press are really knocking down our doors because they want to talk about, you know, the serial killer that we interviewed in jail about this, you know what I mean? So that was kind of surprising.

Ben: (27:58)

But again, that's just I don't know maybe if we much done working on it because well Jesse one thing that I just have to say by way of saying thank you so much for joining us is that at the end of all of the acknowledgments and introductions and prologues where you describe how this book came to be you and Mark both have a lot to say about how You have really found it to be an honor to work on a case that had been forgotten and to bring it back to light. And it's quite clear that the work you've done thus far is only a shadow of the work that is to come now that these things are out there and people are thinking about it and talking about it again. And so, you know, thank you for just helping her story not to be forgotten. It is so important and we are grateful that you

Jesse: (28:48)

We're able to share that with us and thank you very much for saying that and I do want to throw in here because we didn't really get a chance to talk about it too much, but Jeanette's family was instrumental in this whole process it was very important that whatever we were doing with this story was something that they were comfortable with and and they helped us out with, you know, not just interviews and photographs and eventually helping us get some documents, but just knowing that we were doing this for a noble cause. I know closure is like such a cliche word, and if there even is such a thing in a horrific murder of a child, but knowing that we were doing this for them as opposed to, hey, I think we can make a lot of money with a book, That's what made all of this worth it, because like we talked about in these last two episodes, it was a long, complicated road. We had everything against us. I mean, Mark and I were getting death threats at one point, but knowing we were doing this to help a family that was grieving and had been denied answers and denied justice, it made it worth it. And I think I speak for Mark when I say we would do it all over again.

Ben: (30:05)

Well, it certainly shows in what you have left with us for now. So thanks again, and we will look forward to catching up again soon.

Jesse: (30:14)

Thank you.