For
decades, Jeannette DePalma seemed destined to become nothing more
than a vague cautionary tale – her death being the stuff of
campfire stories – until the late 1990s, when anonymous letters
began to flood the office of a local independent magazine entitled
Weird New Jersey. As Weird New Jersey’s Mark Moran and Jesse
Pollack tried to research this almost mythic cold case, they
encountered numerous obstacles, such as the Springfield police
claiming to have lost all of Jeannette’s case files during
Hurricane Floyd, and the hesitancy of the slain teenager’s
acquaintances to go on the record and tell what they knew. Undeterred, these researchers carried on, and shocking discoveries would be made. Now, more than four decades after the murder of Jeannette DePalma, the truth can finally be told. Death on the Devil’s Teeth is the result of nearly two decades of research conducted by Weird NJ correspondent Jesse P. Pollack and Weird NJ co-creator Mark Moran. Once a barrage of anonymous letters referencing the murdered teenager began to pour into the offices of Weird NJ in the late 1990s, Moran decided to conduct an investigation into her death. Through a series of articles published in the magazine, Weird NJ rescued the grisly cold case from certain oblivion, and attracted the attention of Jesse P. Pollack, a correspondent with the publication since 2001.
