Dead End at Toms River: A Bizarre Murder Mystery

A BLOODY INQUEST INTO THE MUTILATION CAPITAL OF THE COUNTRY
By Maury Z. Levy

ON SUNDAY THE TURKEY BUZZARDS flew low to the pines. You could hear their wings flapping a few hundred 
yards away as they swooped down into the garbage that 
hid in the trees. They are big, lazy birds, the turkey 
buzzards.

They were not an unusual sight to the people who lived 
in the dirty white cottages on Oakwood Drive or to the 
people in the wooden piney shacks on Crescent Avenue. 
Oakwood is a straight arrow off Route 571, a dead-end 
turn from the Phillips 66 station. Crescent is a big loop 
from 571. You pass the shacks first, the ones with the 
Russian names out front in this strange settlement called 
Rova Farms, where the people are peasants who live off 
the land, eating from little vegetable gardens fertilized by 
the dust of the road that passes a few feet from their 
doors.

It’s a very insular community that revolves around the 
big church around the corner on the Cassville-Freehold 
Road, a stately structure topped with big golden onion 
domes. Behind the church is a nice clean cemetery where 
the Russian peasants have buried their dead for almost 
100 years.

You can see the tips of the golden onions from the 
point where Oakwood and Crescent run into each other 
and end. There are traces of a crude dirt road leading off 
that intersection into a hole in the woods. It’s a street 
with no name, a road that’s the width of one car, if you’re 
crazy enough to try to drive it. It’s murder on your wheels.

You curve past old beer cans and rubbish and you wind 
around the giant worn-out truck tires to the blond wood 
Emerson television set with the busted picture tube that 
sits two blocks back in the middle of the road that goes 
nowhere. Dead end.

These woods have been the dumping ground for a lot of things. The trees are very tall and very thick. So most 
people didn’t give a second thought to the turkey buzzards. 
Maybe an early season hunter had left his prey to rot or 
maybe there was something edible in the roadside trash.

But by Wednesday in what had been a very hot and 
humid week, things began to get a little strange. The 
humidity put a heavy lock on the air and a terrible smell 
started coming from the woods. The radio dispatch room 
in the Jackson Township police station got a couple calls 
about it. They sent a man out in a car. He drove up 
Crescent and down Oakwood. He smelled it too.

ON SATURDAY Steve Soltys brought the family down 
from Jersey City. Soltys finished work at 5:00 and came 
home and changed to get the blood off his clothes. He and 
Helene put the two kids and the dog in the car and drove 
to their summer cottage on Oakwood Drive, about eight 
miles west of Lakewood and a short holler from Toms 
River, the Ocean County seat.

While the family unpacked, Soltys let the collie out. 
But Yukee started charging through the woods after rabbits. Steve Soltys, 34, had to run out and get him. He got 
close enough to see the dog had something in his mouth. 
It wasn’t a rabbit. He came up closer and it looked like 
an arm, it had fingers and everything. First he thought it 
was part of a doll. And then he saw the fingernails. They 
were long and well-manicured and were covered with very 
bright red polish. It was a human arm.

He followed the dog another few yards and found the 
other arm. Steve Soltys was getting very sick in his 
stomach. He went about ten yards more and saw what 
the newspaper would later describe as the torso.

At one time it had been a torso, the headless, limbless 
body of a human female. But now it was a carcass, little 
more than a bunch of bones wrapped around a spine. 
There was a hole at the top and a hole at the bottom and 
nothing in between. It was like something Steve Soltys had 
seen in a slaughterhouse. All of the insides had been taken 
out and the body had been skinned.

Soltys started to shake and he turned white and he ran 
back to the house and called the police. Lt. Frank Hughes had been on these cases before, bodies in the woods. He’s a graying veteran of the Jackson police. But he’d never 
seen anything like this before.

“Look at the sockets of the arms,” he said. “The holes 
are clean. Usually when you mutilate somebody you just 
cut the arms off and some of the bone is left in the socket. 
This thing wasn’t a mutilation. The sockets are clean, the 
arms are perfect. No, this wasn’t a mutilation, this was a 
carving. The guy who did this knew how to carve meat.

Look at the fingertips. He cut off the under layers of skin 
so there’d be no way we could get prints. And he took 
the head with him so we couldn’t get anything from bone 
structure or teeth X rays. This son of a bitch knew what 
he was doing, all right.”

The Jackson police called in the Ocean County detectives from Toms River. They were quickly followed by 
state police and the FBI. And some people came over from 
Philadelphia, some detectives who’d been working on the 
case of a missing girl from Tacony. With them on the 
60-some-mile due-east ride was Dr. Marvin Aronson, the 
Philadelphia medical examiner. Aronson had called ahead, 
and he knew there was next to nothing for identification. 
So he took a long shot, the only shot he had. He brought 
with him some Xrays of the spine. The killer hadn’t taken 
the spine, just the flesh that covered it. The picture 
matched.

DELORES DELLA PENNA WAS 17. She was a pretty girl 
who liked to wear faded jeans and halter tops and very 
bright red nail polish. She had just graduated from St. Hubert’s High School on Cottman Avenue. She had just 
returned with her folks from a trip to Disney World. Two weeks before they found her, she was packing her bags to 
go down the shore for the summer, down Wildwood.

On the night of July 11th, somebody grabbed her on 
Rawle Street, 25 steps away from her house. There was a 
struggle into a car and then a very long ride down some 
lonesome back roads. She ended up at the seashore, but 
about 100 miles north of where she was supposed to be. 
She ended up, what was left of her, in the wild woods 
near a very strange place called Toms River, a place 
where murder has become a way of life.

As in most crimes of this sort, a lot of people who never 
knew the victim got very deeply involved. Steve Soltys 
will never be the same. It was Sunday and the turkey 
buzzards had left. But the area around his summer cottage 
was crawling with dogs this time, dogs and detectives, 
each looking for other pieces of the girl and for any clues 
to the identity of the person who carved her up.

Steve Soltys couldn’t take it any more. He packed the 
family up and they drove back to Jersey City. The vacation was over. The next day Steve Soltys went back to 
work. He was a butcher.

THE SEARCH DRAGGED ON. About a week later an old 
man walking along a dirt road about eight miles away 
found the legs. Positive identification was made when the 
bright red polish on the toenails matched bright red polish 
on the fingernails. The legs were found in Manchester 
Township, off Route 571 about three miles from Route 70.

Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have taken 
very much to figure out who the arm belonged to. But 
then, Toms River isn’t a very normal place. Unofficially, 
Toms River is the murder and mutilation capital of the 
world. The chamber of commerce and the cops really 
don’t like it when people, especially outsiders, say things 
like that, but it’s true. When they find an arm or a leg 
just lying around, there’s no telling who it might belong 
to. Despite the nice weather, it’s not been a very pleasant 
summer in Toms River and the dozens of little beach communities that spin out from it. Really, it’s not been a very 
pleasant decade.

A week before they found the girl from Philadelphia, a 
fisherman was casting along the surf at nearby Island 
Beach. He reeled in a human leg.

Police thought the leg belonged to a white female. It 
was not very badly decomposed, so it couldn’t have been 
there too long. The state police brought in a helicopter to 
search the ocean for other parts of the body but it started 
to get dark and the tides changed, so they gave it up.

The leg, which was separated below the knee, was sent 
to Toms River Community Memorial Hospital, which 
seems to specialize in this sort of thing. While tests 
were being run, investigators checked all the missing persons alarms in Ocean and Monmouth Counties. It was a 
big job.

A week later they matched things up. The leg was identified as part of a dismembered body found a month earlier 
in parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. It belonged to a 
James Sweet of Brooklyn.

A New York sewer worker found the torso, minus head 
and arms, wrapped in a sheet not far from Sweet’s Brooklyn home. A few days later, a head, believed to belong to 
Sweet, was found in a Manhattan garbage can.

No one in Toms River has been able to figure out how 
the leg got down there. There are two schools of thought. 
Either somebody murdered Sweet in New York and 
brought the leg down or somebody murdered him in Toms 
River and brought the rest of the body up. No one is 
quite sure, so now it’s just another routine case on the 
Toms River books.

YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND a little bit about Toms River 
itself before you can even start to understand why things 
like this are so commonplace. Toms River is almost half­
way between New York and Philadelphia on the road to 
Seaside Heights. A lot of New York vacationers pass that 
way, which might help explain the piece of the man from 
New York. There are also a good number of people from 
Philadelphia.

The best that police can figure is that the killer of the 
latest Philadelphia girl took a hack route down, probably 
571. That way he would have missed the police patrols 
and speed traps on Route 70.

It’s a long, lonesome drive east on 70. There is almost 
nothing but tall pines from Medford Lakes to the ocean. 
Not even a gas station if you get stuck. You just have to 
sit there on the side of the road arid hope that the first 
person who stops for you is a cop.

The drive is like the scenario from a bad dream. You 
know you’re getting close when you pass Mount Misery. 
You start watching for the turnoff to Toms River. Most 
roads in New Jersey just have numbers. This one has a 
name. It is called Double Trouble Road. If you take it 
straight, you end up in a town called Double Trouble. The 
first fork goes to Toms River. There’s not much difference.

There are more pines and every once in a while there is 
a clearing and a dirt path that goes into the woods. God 
knows what’s back there. Some homes are being built 
along the road, mostly one-story slab types for older folks. 
The area is very big on retirement communities for people 
who come down and wait to die.

You pass a lot of pineys, a lot of strange, dirty-looking 
People who look like they belong in Appalachia. Many of 
them live in shacks, some in log cabins. None of them 
ever look up at you.

You follow the signs to Toms River and you know 
you’re there because the final direction sign says, “Dead 
End.” There is a small marina facing you as you conic in. 
It’s filled with fishing boats, some of them nice-sized, so 
you know that some people there have some money.

The main drag only runs for a couple blocks as a commercial area. There are a few clusters of small shops, a 
clothes store that’s a little behind the times, a nice new 
bank and an old-fashioned drugstore on the corner of Washington Street. There is a poster that greets you in the 
window of the drugstore. It’s one of those movie billboard 
things that tells you what’s playing at the local theater. In 
this case it’s the Toms River Drive-In. The movie is called 
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t.

If you continue on, you pass some small, old, nicely-shrubbed two-story houses as the street becomes tree-lined 
on the way out to a big highway where things are building 
up around a Two Guys shopping center and a Gino’s and 
a McDonald’s, all of this to serve a permanent population 
of about 44,000 and a transient population, especially in 
warm weather, of several times more.

But if you take that first turn down Washington Street 
by the drugstore you miss all of the commercialism. The 
buildings here have colonial pillars and clean red brick. 
They are official buildings. Toms River is the seat of 
Ocean County. They have little cannons and things out on 
the front lawns to memorialize battles from the Revolutionary War.

It’s an old town, Toms River. It got its name in 1727 
from a Captain William Tom, who was put in charge of 
things there by the English. Some say the town was really 
named after an Indian, one Thomas Pumha, who had a 
whole tribe here once. This used to be very much Indian 
country, but the locals don’t cotton much to Indians or 
any other outsiders.

Toms River is very much a hick town. Many of the 
women still wear their hair in buns, looking like they 
should be working in the library. And many of the men, 
never having heard the wet head was dead, look like they 
belong in a gas station.

There are a lot of quaint little flower beds outside the 
main county building, where you can still park for a 
penny. Not all of the people inside are so quaint.

CALVIN WOOLLEY is chief of county detectives. He looks 
like the southern cop in the Dodge commercials. But he’s 
in plain clothes. He sits behind an old desk chomping a 
cheap cigar, waiting a good three seconds before answering each question. You can hear his mind working through 
the sounds of silence. He’s not sure whether to lie to you 
or to just boot you out on your ass.

He’s fingering the file of his latest case. Traces of arsenic 
had been found in the blood of the wife of a reputed 
underworld leader and also in a soda bottle she drank 
from just before her death. This happened at her summer 
home in Toms River. The woman’s name was Carolyn 
Lardiere. She was 52.

Her husband John, 65, has been in prison for a year on 
a contempt charge because he refused to answer questions 
of a state commission investigating the Mob. The commission had tied him in with the organization of the late Vito 
Genovese. He was a reputed lieutenant of a North Jersey 
rackets boss. The investigating commissions say Lardiere 
was involved in organizing Teamsters Union locals.

Calvin Woolley has been having a rough time with this 
murder because none of the relatives have been willing to 
talk. It runs in the Family. And when they told Lardiere 
that his wife had been killed, he refused to believe them. 
He still thinks she’s alive, that the story of her death is a 
plot to trap him into talking.

Calvin Woolley holds to the line of every other local official we spoke to. He says there is no Mob presence in 
Toms River. Sources inside the FBI say differently, much 
differently. They say the area from Toms River to Asbury 
Park is a summer haven for the Mob, not to mention a 
dumping ground for its victims, which is something that 
Calvin Woolley didn’t want to mention.

“Yeah,” he says, “the old Celso farm in Jackson Township. I think they found a body out there once.”

The 1967 FBI investigation in Jackson Township is 
one of the better-kept local secrets. A source in the Jackson police department says he knows of at least three 
bodies that were found, but his department doesn’t have 
any names or any proof because the FBI took the whole 
thing over and wouldn’t let the local lawmen in.

“The reds sealed off the whole area,” the Jackson man 
says. “We knew there was something big going on there. 
Christ, they had at least 300 men in the area.”

FBI sources say only that two bodies were found. They 
were found out on rural Cook Road, both the victims of 
Mafia enforcers. Neither of the bodies was ever positively 
identified, but one was believed to be Kenneth Later, 50, a 
New York stockbroker who had vanished four years 
earlier.

The body was found in a 55-gallon drum of acid. The 
drum had been buried beneath the concrete floor of a 
chicken coop across Cook Road from the 100-acre, weed-
infested Celso farm.

The other body was found in a pit that had been filled with mash from an old bootleg still. The property was 
owned by Joseph Celso, 49, a convicted bootlegger, and 
his wife Rosa. Both were taken into custody and then 
released.

Meanwhile, the FBI kept digging. They were looking 
for the body of a missing gangland playgirl named 
Barbara Delmar. Mrs. Delmar also had disappeared four 
years earlier after leaving her home in Danbury, Connecticut. Authorities there say a reputed lieutenant in the 
Genovese family telephoned her and, after the call, she 
packed her suitcase and left. She told a niece she was going to New York City and that she wouldn’t be back for 
four or five days.

When police questioned her husband about his missing 
wife, he didn’t seem too concerned. “Oh,” he said, “she’s probably with Ken Later.”

Only the FBI seems to know whether Barbara Delmar’s 
body was ever found, or how many more along with it. 
”We expect to find more bodies, though not necessarily 
on the same farm,” an FBI spokesman said at the time.

Local officials say they don’t know how many bodies 
were eventually found, but they’ve got enough of their 
own problems to worry about. Calvin Woolley says there 
have been over 40 murders around Toms River just in the 
past six or seven years, many of them mutilations. He 
seemed hard-pressed to remember any of the details.

“Let’s see,” he said, scratching his head rather unconvincingly, “there was the Girardi case. This guy stabbed 
some woman 40 times. Not much else I can remember, though. Give me 
some time to think.”

We told him we’d be back later on, 
that there were a few things we 
wanted to check out, but that we 
wanted to grab a cup of coffee 
first. We went back to the main drag 
and drove down Route 35 a few 
blocks to the Driftwood Diner. A few 
trucks and cars were parked outside. 
We went in and got a booth and 
ordered.

We figured we’d get some local 
color with our coffee. We asked the 
waitress if she remembered any local 
murders. She turned green. “Hey, 
that’s a pretty sick joke,” she said. 
When we finally convinced her we 
didn’t know what she was talking 
about, she told us the whole story. 
”Right here,” she said, kicking the 
floor, “it happened right here. They 
just found part of him last month.”

JOHN BELL WAS 36. He was supposed to have taken over the diner 
from John Lynch, a father of five. It 
was the summer of ’71. Late one night 
they got into an argument over the 
financial arrangement. The argument 
became very heated. Lynch pulled 
out a gun and shot Bell to death. It 
was a while, though, before anyone 
ever figured out Bell was missing. 
They picked it up in bits and pieces.

Somebody found a big bag along 
a highway in Virginia. Inside were 
the head and torso of John Bell. A 
short time later, a camper found two 
arms and one leg in Shawnee State 
Park in Western Pennsylvania. The 
gun used to shoot him was found in 
Neshaminy Creek in Bristol. And the 
last part wasn’t found until over a 
year later. A fisherman in Schnellsburg, Pennsylvania, found the left leg.

We never did finish the coffee. On 
an empty stomach we drove back to 
see Calvin Woolley. Ah yes, now he 
remembered the case at the diner. 
John Lynch is now serving 20 years 
for second-degree murder.

We asked Woolley why. Why in 
Toms River was mutilation so common, so popular? Certainly every 
town has its share of murders, but 
why the little pieces?

“Yeah,” Woolley said, “well, you 
know we asked Lynch about that. 
We asked him why he cut this Bell 
guy up in all those pieces. And he 
came up with a pretty good answer. 
He said he wanted to get rid of the 
body and it was easier to carry that 
way.”

The crazy thing is that if you hang 
around Toms River long enough, stuff 
like that starts to make sense. It’s 
weird. The people there just seem to 
take these things very matter-of­
factly .

Like we were in the local library 
trying to find some information they 
didn’t have and we started talking to 
the librarian, a nice family lady, about 
the area.

“There sure are an awful lot of 
woods around here,” she said. “I went 
with my husband last week to one of 
the state parks nearby here. It was a 
really deserted place. There weren’t 
any other people around. There was 
nothing there but trees. ‘Gee,’ I said 
to my husband, ‘wouldn’t this be a 
great place to dump a body?” She 
was still giggling when we left.

Calvin Woolley blames the woods 
for many of the bodies. “It’s so open 
here, so barren,” he says, “this whole 
area is just a natural dumping ground. 
Nobody but hunters ever goes in. We 
certainly can’t get police cars in there 
to patrol. We’re right between New 
York and Philly, so we get it from 
both ends. Who knows how many 
bodies are out there in the woods, 
bodies nobody will ever find. You 
could look forever.”

Some historian made a survey 
about that once, over 100 years ago. 
A small boy named Warren Conklin, 
age six, the son of a hunter, went 
into the woods back in the summer 
of 1860 to bring dinner to his father. 
The boy got lost. Hundreds of people 
searched for him for three months. 
His decayed body was found close 
to a spot that the searchers had passed 
many times, the woods were that 
thick. They still are. The historian 
who recorded the case did some interesting mathematics involving the 
number of people who searched, the 
amount of time and the amount of 
ground. He figured it would have 
taken one man 17 years to cover as 
much ground.

Warren Conklin was the first recorded death of that sort in the Toms 
River area. He certainly wouldn’t be 
the last. In the century that followed, 
Toms River would know death better than any town around. The bodies 
just keep popping up.

On our last visit to Calvin Woolley’s office, the chief was trying to 
think of numbers. “A lot of people,” 
he said, “just a lot of people. Hell, 
there are eight of ’em right here in 
this room.” We didn’t understand.

“Right over here,” he said, pointing to a cardboard box that said 
Kendall Motor Oil on it. We walked 
over and looked in and there in little 
plastic bags and Dixie cups were the 
remains of eight people. Parts of bones. Pieces of skulls. “You mean 
there are eight human beings in this 
box?” we asked.

“Naw,” Calvin Wooley said, “we 
thought they were human beings at 
first. Turns out they were Indians. 
Somebody found them in a park. 
Guess they must be a couple hundred 
years old. We’ll probably give them 
away to a museum or something. They 
don’t do me no good sittin’ around 
here. They just clutter up the office. 
I’ve got enough bodies to worry about 
without having to worry about Indians.”

THE BODIES I UST KEEP popping up. 
Nobody would give us an official 
count. No one’s really sure if there is 
one. By Calvin Woolley’s top-of-the­head count, there’s been between 40 
and 50 discovered since 1965—but 
there’re probably a lot more than that.

On August 19th, 1972, a group of 
surveyors found the decomposed body 
of a young man in a wooded area 
near Route 72. The body, though 
fully clothed, bore no identifying 
papers. The county medical examiner 
estimated the man had been dead 
from one to two months. The dead 
male was between 17 and 25 years 
old, medium height, slight build. He 
was found behind a drive-in movie 
about 100 yards from a gravel pit.

On May 23rd, 1972, Mrs. Margaret 
Lyon, 74, was beaten to death with 
a grub hoe. She lived in a local senior citizens’ housing project.

On March 20th, 1972, state police 
announced a body had been found 
by a man walking his dog in nearby 
Lebanon State Forest, the third body 
found there since August, 1971. All 
three bodies had been shot with .32 
caliber guns and all had their throats 
slit. All three bodies were male, all 
in their 20s. In August, 1971 a torso 
was found in the forest. A complete 
body in the same area in October.

On December 26th, 1971, the Rev. 
John L. Wessell, 33, was walking out 
of Toms River Community Memorial 
Hospital when he was shot to pieces 
by a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran 
with a shotgun. Wessell had just 
come from a counseling session with 
his attacker.

On June 6th; 1969, Paul Sass, 56, 
owner of a dry goods store in Freehold, was gunned down with a shotgun near his home in Lakewood. A 
motive was never established, a suspect never found.

On August 10th, 1966, local residents became concerned over three 
killings in the space of a week. Mrs. 
Dorothy McKenzie, 45, of Toms River 
was shot to death in a car in back 
of the Regent Diner. Two days before, 18-year-old Ronald Sandlin, a 
gas station attendant in Lakewood, 
was kidnapped and killed. Five days 
earlier, the nude body of 18-year-old 
Donna DeRier, a Hawthorne coed, was found near Allaire State Park. 
She had been bludgeoned to death.

On May 14th, 1966, three teenaged 
boys bicycling along Cooks Bridge 
Road in Jackson Township saw something floating in a branch of the Metedeconk River. The object turned 
out to be 17-year-old Catherine Baker of Edison Township, who had been missing for two months. Police arrested a suspect who was found 
hanged in jail the next day. After Miss 
Baker’s body was discovered, local 
police logged about 100 reports of 
bodies being found in one section of 
town or another. There were reports of bodies on the beach and in a Toms 
River shopping center.

On February 5th, 1965, Irwin C. 
Brown sold a tavern in Philadelphia. That day he was seen smiling and 
flashing a large roll of bills. He was 
never seen alive again. His body was 
found, minus the bankroll, in the 
woods off Route 539 in Stafford Township. He had been dead three 
days.

On October 3rd, 1964, hunters 
found the body of Anthony Scanella 
Jr. of Trenton in the woods of Jackson Township. His killer made the 
mistake of picking the first day of 
deer hunting season to dump the bullet-riddled body. Some hunters got a 
make on the car and the killer was 
caught and sentenced to life.

On August 26th, 1963, a passerby 
found the body of a teenage girl in 
the woods off Route 70 in Manchester Township. The body had been tied with an electric cord, strangled and 
burned. It took investigators two months to identify it as that of Leola Jones, 18, a babysitter from Neptune. 
The body was identified through use 
of a dental chart.

On September 15th, 1965, Mary Ann Klinsky, 18, of West Keansburg was found on a slope of the Garden State Parkway. Her nude body had 
been raped and beaten. Her clothing was never found, leading police to 
believe she was killed elsewhere and 
dumped on the parkway.

On June 9th, 1962, Phyllis Jones, 
an attractive student at the Hedgerow 
Acting School in Philadelphia, disappeared from the beach at Barnegat 
Light. A passerby found her body in 
a desolate area of Lacey Township 
near the pit where the state dumps 
illegally-killed deer.

The list goes on and on. And the 
further back you go the more bodies 
and pieces of bodies you find. Some 
people around Toms River would 
have you believe that all of this is 
just coincidence. Maybe.

But we very carefully, just as the 
police probably have, traced the 
route of the latest killer, picking it up 
in Tacony and following it all the 
way down the back roads to Jackson Township. And it was no coincidence. He had to have been in that area before to know those back roads so 
well. He knew where he was going. 
It was an almost perfect crime. The 
cops around Toms River were impressed by that.

The girl from Tacony with the 
bright red nail polish had never been 
to Toms River before. She had never 
seen the people from New York and 
Philadelphia sail their boats out of 
the marina toward Seaside Heights. She had never seen the wooden 
shacks or the little white cottages or 
the big brown pines. But like so 
many before her she ended up here.

The summer was ending when we 
left Toms River, the air had a nice 
nip and a lot of people started going 
home. For most of them it had been 
a very nice summer. Many of them 
never even knew about the girl from 
Tacony. The papers here really didn’t 
play it up much. They only play up 
unusual things in Toms River.