Denise Didn't Come Home | 1. Stay With Me
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There are a lot of lawns in Bergen County, New Jersey, where I grew up. Riding your bike around in the summertime, you see yard after yard of pristine green running up to houses edged by flower beds. On the surface, everything is manicured and perfect. Everything is okay. Always has been, always will be. But underground, the roots of these lawns run deep, stretching down like fingers into the dark. Bergen County has a history that I never knew.

until I grabbed a blade of grass and started to pull. It's the morning of July 15th, 1969. A 13-year-old boy is riding his bike home from a baseball game in Saddlebrook, New Jersey. He takes a shortcut through St. Mary's Cemetery, pedaling past its headstones. And then he notices something on the other side of the chain-link fence, lying in the tall grass. The young girl was on her side, half-clothed.

She was covered in bruises and cuts, beaten and strangled. There was a red mark around her neck from the chain of her crucifix, and someone had left a bloody handprint on her leg. Within the hour, police swarmed the scene, hunting for evidence. They canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses, but no one had seen anything. It would take a day before the girl would even be identified. She was 15-year-old Denise Falasca,

Denise's murder shocked the community and sparked a county-wide hunt for her killer. Weeks went by, then years. The case stayed unsolved. And then, decades later, it reached up out of the dark and grabbed one of the least likely people I could ever imagine getting involved in a murder investigation. Me. Check one. Check one.

Almost 50 years after Denise Velasquez's murder, I was standing outside of this little white house in the quiet suburbs of Boulder, Colorado. And I was super nervous. I'd come all the way from New Jersey, a place where I'm really not that used to leaving. I was struggling with the microphone and the cables. I was full of pancakes from the IHOP where I drank way too much coffee. And I was about to meet Denise Velasquez's sister, Karen, for the first time.

At that point, Karen and I had spent hundreds of hours on the phone together talking about Denise's case. And over that time, we'd become really close. But we had never actually met in person. Hi. Nice to meet you. Karen's daughter answered the door and led me into the living room. It was a beautiful day and the sun was shining through these big windows. Should I hang out here? Yeah, of course. And that's when I saw Karen for the first time. Hello.

That's okay. So nice to finally meet you. How are you doing? I'd seen photos of Karen on Facebook and everything, but she looked nothing like that now. She was so frail.

I remember having this feeling that if I went in to go hug her, it was going to hurt her or something. And I had a real bad dizzy spell. This morning? She looked like she weighed less than 90 pounds. Because Karen was dying of cancer. So I was just laying in bed with oxygen. Trying to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love you. It's so good to see you. I know I look terrible, but... No. At least we get to see each other.

So beautiful out here in the sun. Wow, it is gorgeous out here, isn't it? Karen and I went outside so she could smoke a cigarette. And she started talking about Denise. It's hard to let go when somebody dies the way she did. At the age that she did. At the height of beauty that she was, you know. Like everybody kept saying, let it go. Put it behind you. It's over, you know. But Karen could never let it go.

Later, on the couch in her living room, her sister Trish brought me a binder of everything that Karen had collected on Denise's case. Here it all is. I guess that's a good place to start. This is like a treasure chest of information. I tried to tell you. No, this has been a very busy woman. That's what this is.

The amount of material was staggering. There were these newspaper articles about the crime, her theories and suspects, her attempts to run them out. There were photos in there of Denise and her family over the years. There was a motherload of investigation. Oh my God, Karen, I didn't know you did this this much. But there were things in that file that also made me sad.

I could see all the different rabbit holes that Karen went down. Places that she looked that were just so far away from anything relevant to the case. You could see how desperate she had been for answers. Okay, guys. I wasn't obsessed, but I was determined. I could write a book with what's there if God would give me more time. It was Karen's life's work to tell Denise's story, but her time was running out. I always said, I'd like to do this again.

before I die. But here I am at this stage of my life going through this. Unbelievable. I was really just so healthy a few weeks ago. This story is what has needed to be done and what no one ever cared to do. Is there anything I can help you with? No, I just woke up a little different this morning. I was stressed on that visit. Stressed because of how sick Karen was. Stressed about taking up her family's time with her.

And also, I didn't think I was ready to tell the story without her. I'd always thought of this as Karen's story. I didn't even want my voice in it. Are you in it? Yes. You better. No, you don't. There will be a narrator. I'm not sure if it's going to be my voice or not. Because it's you, Anthony, and this is a true story. And you have a good voice, and you've got to get it out there. It's

So then yes. Okay, good. Yeah, I'm really excited. I hope that I get here for the final everything. Is there anything that you would impart to me? Any sort of wisdom? Anything you can think of? Oh my gosh, Anthony. Don't be afraid when you get that feeling inside of you to go after something. Don't be afraid, you know, because everything will...

find a way in its way, if it's meant to be. Thank you so much for everything. It's really been amazing. Absolutely. It really has. It for sure has. When I left Karen's house that day, I thought I was close to the end of this story. I had no idea how far I had to go. That it would take me five more years to finish. That Karen's obsession would become mine.

I would talk to almost everyone who was involved with her sister Denise's case. I would learn everything I possibly could about the night that she was murdered. Eventually, I would even talk to the man who killed her. I would learn so many things that Karen wanted to know. And I would learn other things that she didn't want me to know. And on this journey, I would think about Karen's words a lot. That if I got that feeling inside of me that I needed to go after something, I shouldn't be afraid.

This is me doing what Karen told me to do. This is the true story of what happened to Denise Velasca. But it's also the story of what happened to my friend, Karen. My name is Anthony Scalia. From Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Denise Didn't Come Home. Chapter 1. Stay with me.

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Wow. This is the first time I called Karen Falasco.

It was back in 2017, a year and a half before I visited her in Colorado. I was only 13 when Denise was killed. Oh, really? Yeah. So I was pretty young. Karen told me that she grew up in a little red house in the upscale town of Closter with her parents and four sisters. Cheryl, Diane, Trish, and Denise.

We all looked a lot alike and we looked sort of like variations on a theme. We all shared our clothes and shared our lives with each other. And it was almost ridiculous, you know, how we were almost one. I should probably just step back and tell you, I was so in love with my sisters. I was so happy to be a part of whatever it was we were. I woke up happy every morning, happy to be one of them.

The five Velasco girls were very pretty, very popular. A lot of boys liked us. And if they weren't interested in one, then they were interested in the other.

You know what I mean? We were angels with crooked halos.

Denise was, uh, she was cool. She was just born cool. She had all the moves. She was beautiful. She was witty and she had a dry sense of humor. She just was a very happy 15-year-old girl that was just cool. We had a big room. It was the attic of the house and my dad refinished it into like a dormitory.

That room was pure magic. It was our world up there. There was a lot of great music coming out, and we loved it all. We'd play music up in the big room, and she loved to dance. She loved Motown, and she loved, like, all the new music that was coming onto the scene, like The Beatles, of course, and Cream, The Doors. She really did love music, but she couldn't sing a note. She couldn't carry a tune. It sounded like someone stepped on her tail or something.

I watched her every move and I ran to her when I was scared. I looked to her for guidance or advice. I just really looked up to her. So there's a lot of memories like that. And a lot of times I really go back to that last week that she was alive and a lot of crazy things happened that week. Karen started to tell me about the last time she saw Denise alive. It was a warm evening just before sunset.

on July 14, 1969. I was going to see the movie Ice Station Zebra, and she wanted to come with me. My dad had said she could come with me, and mainly probably just so that we had a buddy system. And then we left the house together. I did think she was coming to the movies with me. But we got to the corner, and she told me she had to go do something. And I said, please stay with me. And she said, no, I have to go do something, and don't follow me.

Karen watched as Denise walked away, turned down Old Hook Road, and disappeared. Karen says she sat down at the bus stop, and while she was waiting, she saw this guy pass by in a blue sedan. He drove by me real slow and gawked at me. Then he flipped a U-turn and came by me the other way. Just drove by me real slow and gawked at me. A lot of guys did that back then. I didn't know what to do.

Karen watched as the car turned down Old Hook Road, where Denise had just gone. Take her out.

Karen went to see Ice Station Zebra in nearby Bergenfield. When she came home later that night, Denise wasn't there. And then I had to tell my dad that Denise didn't come with me to the movies and that I didn't know where she was. That's when it all began. We searched for her the whole next day. Everyone we knew, everywhere we hung out, every place she would be, everyone she knew,

I couldn't believe what Karen told me next. That her dad brought her with him to the morgue to help identify the body. Karen was only 13. We were in a room full of 60 other sets of parents that had a runaway or a missing child.

And we thought, "There's no way that this is going to be her." And when we walked in, all of us said, "It's not her." She was a very symmetrical girl. And there was something unsymmetrical about the body that was laying in front of us that made us think it wasn't her. And then we all had to look again. My dad just fell to the ground. It was her. She was unrecognizable.

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After Denise Velasquez's murder, detectives interviewed more than a hundred people, from the hippie teens that Denise hung out with to her current and former boyfriends. They tracked down witnesses who saw a girl walking down Old Hook Road.

But nobody saw what happened to her. There was little evidence to go on. Less than a week after Denise was killed, leads were already running cold. There was a house full of people. It was like a free-for-all. I mean, crazy.

That night, mankind was about to share a great triumph. A man was about to walk on the moon.

I remember it vividly. Relatives in the house trying to generate some excitement around the event of the moon landing. And we just didn't care. We were like, who cares? Who cares? Denise is dead.

When that man stepped out onto the moon, I actually felt like I woke up in a different world. In the days and weeks that followed, the moon landing dominated the headlines, while articles about Denise's murder got fewer and farther between. The police department just stopped investigating. It was like, well, we don't have any leads, we don't have any clues, and unless someone confesses, we're stumped.

My sister Diane and I would be like, they're not doing anything. How can this happen? How can somebody just murder Denise and nobody does anything? Karen told me that she and her sisters begged her dad to put more pressure on the police department, but his spirit was crushed. He would just say, just leave it. She's gone. She's dead. Just leave it. And that perplexed me. I'm like, how do we do that? How do we do that?

For a long time, every time the front door would open, somebody would cry.

Because it just felt like she should come through that door. The damn thing was like a bomb went off in the middle of the house. It really blew our family apart. Each of us individually in our own way. My mom had a drinking problem and after Denise it just got exponentially worse.

The five Velazquez sisters had been close. Losing Denise changed them forever. We were not innocent anymore. There was nothing starry-eyed or dreamy-eyed about us anymore.

You know, my sister Diane became addicted to heroin. She was emotionally vacant. Nice house, but no one was home. You know what I mean? My sister Cheryl kind of slowly lost her mind. My younger sister Trish just kind of stopped talking. She just really quieted down and really just went into this kind of shell that she's still in today. I don't think I ever got over it. I would have dreams about her that were just intensely real.

Karen would replay that night over and over in her mind.

That last moment when she and Denise parted ways. It hounded me. Why didn't I follow her? Why didn't I follow her like I always followed her? Why did I listen? I could have kept it from going down. And she thought a lot about that man in the blue sedan. That car would forever be burned into her memory. I saw him and I stepped forward and I made an aggressive move to get him away from me. And I always wondered if I just sent him straight to Denise.

I just felt like it shouldn't have been her. It should have been me. It's sad that, you know, really we went a whole lifetime. I mean, it's been 47 years. I would have hoped that we would have found some answers while everybody was still here. By the time I started talking to Karen, almost all of her family had passed away. I'm sort of standing here alone now. They're all gone, pretty much. I will go to the end of my life and carry this burdened by the weight of how she died.

Karen told me she had tried for years to get the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, the department in charge of Denise's case, to do more. To me, it just felt like they never tried. They're still not trying. Is it really impossible to solve her case? She said she was still calling them almost every week. They want me to go away because it's just really me over here keeping our case alive.

And if I go away, if I leave them alone to believe me, they'll never look back at Denise's case. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't a detective. I knew I couldn't solve the case for Karen. But I could do what Karen said the police had never done. I could listen to her. Talking about it with you in this way is kind of helpful right now. I'm glad. I don't want to make it seem like, you know, I come in and

I bring up all these terrible things and then I leave. Terrible things, they're always there. I've gotten used to that and I really have developed some kind of armor for it, you know, over the years. I mean, this, what we're doing right now, what you and I are doing right now, this needs to be done. I want this to be done and I really hope that we can do a really good job for Denise.

And I just believe that you're the person to do this. You know, she comes along and stirs people's hearts. And that's why your heart is being stirred. You're yawning, you're full of energy, and you're ready to look at this thing with fresh eyes and flesh out the story that's in there. Because when I die, it will die. The whole story. And it shouldn't die. There's some real people to look at right under our nose. And those people were never even questioned.

That's on the next episode of Denise Didn't Come Home.

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That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Binge Cases show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. 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. Kenny Kusiak did the mix. Sound design by Kenny Kusiak and Ryan Swikert. Music by Kenny Kusiak, Epidemic Sound, and Marmoset. Our title track is Gimme Some by Weevil. If you're enjoying Denise Didn't Come Home, don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find the show.

And thanks for listening.