2. The Memory Palace
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Karen Falasca was only 13 years old when she went to her sister Denise's funeral at St. Mary's Church in Closter, New Jersey. I never saw so many people in my life. There were people there that we knew, and there were people there that we didn't know. All kinds of characters. Detectives were there too, looking for scratches on faces or cuts on hands. Signs of a violent struggle. And there were a lot of reporters.

The media was all over us. They were hiding behind tombstones at the funeral. We were all in such a state of grief. We were wearing black dresses that were a little bit short. They snapped photos of us. They put them on the front pages. And we got bags and bags of hate mail from people telling my father that he deserved this, you know, the way he let these girls dress. She was looking for it.

Inside the church, Karen and her sisters had one last moment alone to say goodbye to Denise. I remember the three of us kneeling at her casket, wishing that she was sleeping and that she would wake up. I felt disconnected from the whole world. She was beautiful, but she was dressed in a way she wouldn't have been caught dead in the clothes that she was wearing. They dressed her like a Pollyanna dress.

She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was dressed in this button-up shirt that buttoned all the way up to her chin to hide the ligature on her neck, which really wasn't hidden. You could see where she had been strangled. Her face was asymmetrical. It was just a little bit crooked. People started filing in to pay their respects. And Karen remembers seeing Denise's ex-boyfriend in the crowd, a guy she doesn't want to name.

Let's call him Max.

Karen told me that Max was quoted in the local newspaper after Denise's murder. Years later, as Karen looked back, she remembered just how weird Max was acting.

My name is Anthony Scalia. From Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Denise Didn't Come Home.

The body of a teenage girl found strangled in Saddle Brook, New Jersey yesterday was identified as that of 15-year-old Denise Velasco. She was murdered. Somebody tortured her and murdered her. It's all her beauty. For what known reason, we would never know. I had a guy that drove by me real slow and gawked at me. He was like the devil himself. He scared me.

I really go back to that last week that she was alive. A lot of crazy things happened that week. There's some real people to look at right under our nose. I think I know who killed her. Chapter 2, The Memory Palace.

Hello? Hi, Karen. Hey, can you hear me okay? Can you say something really quick? Uh, hello, hello? Okay, yeah. One, two, three. On my first few phone calls with Karen Falasca, I learned that we had a lot in common. Growing up in Bergen County, large Italian families. Both of my grandparents were immigrants, and, uh... Yeah, I know, I saw your pictures. Your family looks a lot like my family. Yeah. Yeah.

I just found our conversation so fascinating. I remember canceling plans to hang out with my friends or my girlfriend because it was time to talk to Karen. Yeah, I already told my girlfriend. I was like, I can't. I'm having a phone call tonight. You know, like, I'm in it. Oh, God, she hates me already. No, no, no.

I never wanted the conversation to end. There were some nights where she kept me on the phone until like 2 o'clock in the morning. I'm laying in bed, you know, the audio equipment's all away. The interview's over, and we just kept talking. It was only a couple phone calls in when Karen told me that she knew who murdered Denise. And I could tell she was nervous to talk about it. You know, I think I just have to be really careful about...

Like, my theory is my theory based on everything that I saw and that I've been able to piece together as an adult. I think your theories are crucial to the story because it's the side that no one's heard for 50 years. And it's people that are still alive. There's some real people to look at, and those people were never even questioned. They should have been the first people questioned, and they were never even questioned.

So I sat in my little makeshift recording booth in my parents' basement as Karen took me back to 1969. We had pretty much run of the house, you know? Partied very much in that house, you know? And we could clean it up really fast, too, you know? My parents went out for the night, and all the kids came over, and it was a pretty big party. I don't know, 20, 30 people. They were drinking beer, not me.

Everybody ran out the back door.

But there was one kid who didn't run, Denise's boyfriend at the time, Max. Which blew my mind.

Denise had been dating Max for almost a year.

Max was very good-looking, seemingly perfect, smooth, cool, composed. He liked Denise, and he came and asked my dad if he could take her out. He had a car. My dad would let her go in his car, which was really unusual for my dad.

There's this really handsome guy that everybody loves and every girl would want to be with, you know. And here he was in our living room with our Denise. And at the time, I liked him very much. And I looked up to him.

But the fairy tale didn't last. Later that summer, Denise started hanging out with someone new. On the 4th of July, we went to the fireworks as a family.

Somehow Denise wound up over in the parking lot of Memorial Field talking to Max. The next thing you know, there's a big fight in the parking lot. And everybody went over there. When we got over there, we realized it was Denise and Max in his car. She was like pushing him off of her, fighting, and it was a physical struggle.

Mm-hmm.

I think when Denise was trying to say she didn't want to be with him anymore, that was how I think he took it. If I can't have you, then no one can. Hey, Witness listeners. This is Josh Dean, your host of the season Fade to Black. And I'm here to tell you about a new mystery mobile game to give you something to do when you finished the latest season of Witnessed. Everyone loves a good family mystery, especially one with as many twists and turns as June's Journey.

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As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts.

That's what Karen Falaska and her sisters were doing on Saturday, July 12th, two days before Denise was killed. It was Max.

Denise and him were yelling back and forth at one another, and she slammed the phone down. And then Max came over and parked on the side of the house. She went outside to talk to him for just a little while. I was like Harriet the spy. I went outside and I was hiding in the bushes along the side of the house because I was watching them. I staked those guys out.

Ron was that new guy Denise had just started dating.

Denise started acting real funny. We were asking her, what's wrong with you?

We put Denise upstairs in the big bedroom.

And we were trying to get everything done and keep an eye on her. But the next thing you know, we heard her screaming. And she was yelling out Max's name and saying, no, no. Diane and I ran into her room to find out what was going on. And she was literally hanging out her window, like almost falling out the window.

Karen remembers that on the night of the murder, before she and Denise left the house to catch a bus to the movies, Denise got a phone call.

She had another fight with this guy, Max, on the telephone. She did throw his high school ring and his ankle bracelet and whatever in her purse. And then we kind of just huffed out the door together. She slammed that phone down and we left the house. She looked at me and she said, "I have to go do something." My feeling was she was walking to meet Max. My thought was she was going to give him back some things that he had given her and then go meet her new friend, Ron.

According to Karen, Denise said she would meet her later that night at a friend's apartment. Then she walked off down Old Hook Road. Karen was left at the bus stop alone. And that's when she saw that creepy guy in the blue sedan. He passed by a few times before speeding off down Old Hook Road in Denise's direction. So while I was waiting, Ron passed me by as I was standing at the bus stop. And I waved him down. And he pulled over and I ran to his car and jumped in.

Ron was that new guy Denise had just started dating. He said, where are you going? I said, I'm going to Bergenfield. But Denise is on her way to meet you, I think. And he went, well, I just drove that way and didn't see her. Ron gave Karen a ride to the movies. She saw Ice Station Zebra, and then she went to meet up with Denise. We walked into the hallway of this kind of run-down apartment building. We knocked on the door. The door opened, and I saw...

Karen says she glanced into the apartment. She didn't see Denise, but she was surprised to see someone else, Max. Up until that point, had you ever seen Max and Ron in the same room? Never.

I want to know what was going on that night in that room. Eventually, Ron came out to give Karen a ride home. He was crying.

The next day, Denise's body was found beaten and strangled on the side of the road beside a cemetery. And the following morning, Bergen County detectives came to the Falaska home. The next thing I know, this detective is dragging me away and saying to my father, Jack, I got to talk to her. Jack, I got to talk to her right now. And my dad going, OK, Rudy, go ahead. I needed help and protection. And what I got was dragged off to a police station interrogation room.

But Karen was just 13, and she had just learned that her sister had been murdered. They were saying, where did you go the night that you and Denise left the house?

And I said, "I went to Bergenfield." And they were like, "How did you get there?" And I just did not remember. I was saying, "I took the bus." What Karen didn't remember at that moment was that Ron had picked her up at the bus stop and driven her to the movies in Bergenfield. Detectives were questioning Ron in the next room. They would go in the next room and he would say, "I picked up Karen." And then they would come back to me and say, "How did you get to Bergenfield that night?" And then I said, "I took the bus."

To the detectives, it looked like Ron was lying. The cops kept Ron, a 17-year-old kid, all night long and into the early morning. He was exhausted and emotionally distraught. Finally, at around 3:00 a.m., he broke down. I was alone when it happened. I guess it happened in Saddlebrook. Did you kill her in the car in Saddlebrook? Yes. Where? Off Route 46. For a minute, the cops thought they had their guy.

But then they asked Karen one more time, did Ron drive you to the movies? There were no other witnesses who could put Ron and Denise together that night. And there was no physical evidence on her body like hair, blood or fibers to connect him to the murder. It became clear that Ron's confession was false. Eventually, the police let him go.

Anthony, there were hundreds of people at my house. And there were people driving up and down the street, pointing at the house. When Karen came back from the police station, her house was a circus. There were reporters all over the place, in the yard, in the house. There were neighbors, friends of my parents, relatives. And I had a big family. And Karen remembers seeing Max among all those people. He was there with his friend. And I went straight to them.

Karen says that Max took her to a local cafe, that he was quiet and looked extremely tired.

And that's when Karen noticed something else. I saw this really deep gash of a wound on his hand. It was an open, gaping wound on the palm of his hand. Max told her he messed up his hand fixing his car. But Karen would always think about that gash. Over the years, it would loom larger in her mind. And it would become crucial to her theory that Max had murdered Denise.

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In the days and weeks after Denise's murder, Karen told me that Denise's ex-boyfriend, Max, started hanging around their house a lot. And he seemed to want to spend a lot of time with Karen. Max came over to my house and said to my dad, Mr. Pulaska, can I take Karen for a ride? Get her mind off of all this crazy stuff. And he said, sure. And I drove off with him. ♪

Karen said that Max took her to a car park overlooking the Hudson River. We used to have a name for that place. We used to call it The Rock. He took me up to The Rock. It was dark. It was getting dark out. And he moved real close to me, like real close to me and was staring at me. And it was really bizarre because he was a lot older than me, a lot older than me. He kissed me hard, really hard. He kissed me so hard he split my lip.

It was awful. It was terrifying. I had never kissed a guy and didn't want to kiss him, but he just kind of forced it on me. Like, I got upset. I started to cry and he got angry. Said, let's go. And he just basically threw me in the car, drove me home, pushed me out of the car, drove off. And he never talked to me after that. Like, acted like he didn't know me after that.

It was just evil. It was just, I killed her and now I kissed her sister or something like, I don't know. What do you think his intention was? I have no idea to this day. But when I look back on it, those events were so scary. I really feel like I was in a lot of danger. By that point, Karen and I had been talking for weeks. Now, I just wanted to make sense of everything she told me. Now, I'm just wondering, like, because I'm just trying to figure out from my own...

Sort of rational. It's crazy, and I know it's crazy. Was Karen saying that Max killed Denise alone? Was she saying that Ron was in on it? That seemed crazy to me. That these teenagers who didn't even know each other had gotten together and murdered a young girl and dumped her on the side of a road? It's not that I have this wild imagination. I swear to you, I really don't. I had seen a lot of things that add up to something in my mind. But I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong.

But it really adds up in my mind. I was starting to wonder if there was any way to confirm these memories. If I wanted to, let's say, request the case files. Oh, yeah. Well, you'd never get them. You'd never get them in a million years. Really? Oh, no, it's not releasable. I said, OK, no case file. Not happening. What's next? Newspaper articles. I did everything the hard way.

I could have just made a newspapers.com account, typed in Denise Velasca, and got every article ever written. What did I do? Not that. I went to the Hackensack Library. I was like, excuse me, ma'am. I want newspapers from 1969. And they were like, oh, okay, that's in the archives in the basement. I was like, okay. So I go down to the basement. They open up this drawer. I thought it was going to be paper, you know? And it was like these little canisters of film. I was like, what the fuck is that? They said it's microfilm.

So now I'm scrolling through film of these newspapers, and it's all yellow and dirty. So what did Karen tell me? She said she left the house around 6 o'clock to make the 7 o'clock movie. So I went to the newspaper and I found movie listings, you know? I found Ice Station Zebra playing at the Bergenfield Palace movie theater. And I looked at the show times, and it said 7 o'clock. Karen was right. So I kept flipping until I found the paper that came out the day after Denise was found.

July 16th, 1969. And it said, you know, 15-year-old girl from Closter found strangled in Saddlebrook. And I was like, okay, here we go. Karen had told me that after Denise's murder, Max tried to distance himself a lot from this case.

I think in the first or second article, there was a quote from Max saying he hadn't seen Denise in over a year. She'd gone with a different crowd. He wasn't in touch with her anymore. I was like, oh my God, this is exactly what she's been talking about. It just verified everything she had said. Like, here's this guy within days of the murder really distancing himself from the situation. Karen knows what she's talking about. So I keep flipping and I find another article.

And it says, this is not the first time a teenage girl has been found strangled in Bergen County. This murder is similar to the murder of Irene Blaze, who was killed four months ago, a mile away from where Denise's body was found. And it's similar to the 1968 murder of a young girl named Jacqueline Harp. And before that, there was a 1967 murder of a woman named Nancy Vogel. And I start going through and finding those articles, looking and seeing what matches up.

You know, age. 13, 15, 18. Look. Two out of the four had a similar look. Every woman here has been strangled. Truly, in that moment, sitting there with the microfilm, with that dumb look on my face, is when I realized Denise's case could be connected to at least three other murders in Bergen County. This could be the work of one man.

There could be a serial killer roaming the streets of Bergen County that no one has found. And I said, holy shit. On the next episode of Denise Didn't Come Home, I do some digging into the other murders in Bergen County. These unsolved cases haunted the Bergen County prosecutor's office for many years.

and find a trail of destruction left by a monster. Two carefully decapitated female bodies were found at a Westside motel. The room was then set on fire.

Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of Denise Didn't Come Home ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Just click subscribe at the top of the Binge Cases show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to learn more.

Denise Didn't Come Home is a production of Truth Media in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment. I'm your host, Anthony Scalia. The show is produced by Ryan Swiker and me. Story editing by Mark Smerling. Kevin Shepard is our associate producer. Scott Curtis is our production manager. From Sony, our executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman.

And thanks for listening. ♪