About this episode

The episode explores the unsolved murder of Jeannette DePalma and the myths surrounding it.

In September 1972, a dog emerged from the woods of Springfield, New Jersey carrying a decomposed human arm. The remains belonged to sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma, who had disappeared 43 days earlier. Almost immediately, her death became something else. Newspapers reported a coffin made from branches, wooden crosses, a pentagram, mutilated animals, and whispers that Jeannette had been sacrificed by a Satanic cult. For nearly fifty years, those stories became inseparable from her name. But when the original case photographs were finally released, the alleged ritual scene disappeared. Tonight, we examine the unsolved death of Jeannette DePalma, the predators hunting Northern New Jersey's highways in the 1970s, and how an ordinary pair of fallen branches helped transform the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl into one of America's earliest Satanic Panic legends.

Topics covered

• unsolved murder
• Satanic cults
• 1970s crime
• New Jersey history
• urban legends

Keywords

• Jeannette DePalma
• murder
• Satanic cult
• New Jersey
• 1970s
• urban legend
• crime

Mentioned in this episode

Places: New Jersey

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