Interview: Jesse P. Pollack
A Crime Writer and Filmmaker’s Quest for Truth in the American Dark
“No one will ever know what ‘In Cold Blood’ took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.”
— Truman Capote
On the cusp of the 1990s, David St. Clair published Say You Love Satan (1987), a best-selling paperback released at the apogee of the 1980s “Satanic Panic” movement. Its evil tale centered on Ricky Kasso: a Northport, Long Island, New York, teenager — perpetually clad in rock concert tee-shirts — who murdered his childhood friend Gary Lauwers in June 1984. The since discredited “Satanic sacrifice” motive was realized as a revenge killing over the theft of drugs from Kasso.
The chronicles of Kasso’s anti-social behaviors (fictionalized in the films Black Circle Boys and Ricky 6) weren’t the first time irresponsible journalism created a narrative to fit the religious-driven panic industry. The purpose of Ronald DeFeo, Jr.’s murder of his family in the Long Island suburban village of Amityville on November 13, 1974, had less to do with Satan and more with his need to cover up the theft of family finances. As with David St. Clair’s work, Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977) is since discredited.
At the time of Rick Kasso’s publicized, June 4, 1984, arrest, he was clad in the jersey of his favorite band: AC/DC. A year later, on March 17, 1985, an AC/DC baseball cap was discovered at a Southern California murder scene. The “clue” belonged to one of Satan’s most-feared recruits: Richard Ramirez. In conjunction with his propensity for scrawling Satanic symbols on his victims for kicks, as well as a pentagram into his own palm, the “Night Stalker” became the “Christian Scare” industry’s ubiquitous poster child — one who wasn’t on an assignment for Satan: he committed, admittedly graphic, burglaries to support a cocaine habit.
Today, QAnon represents society’s new, digitized moral panic. In the pre-Internet epoch of Paul and Jan Crouch’s UHF-TV transmitted TBN fervor against rock music, author-psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder incited the Christian Scare zeitgeist with Michelle Remembers (1980), a since discredited best seller concerned with his patient, Michelle Smith: a victim of Satanic ritual abuse by her own mother. The moral panic of SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) cases climaxed with bogus holocaust survivor Laurel Rose Wilson’s equally discredited, Satan’s Underground (1991), in which Wilson alleged she was a “baby breeder” for a Satanic cult’s sacrifices.
In Lucifugian lockstep with St. Clair and Pazder was self-proclaimed investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist Maury Terry with The Ultimate Evil (1987). Terry insisted David Berkowitz didn’t act alone: the “Son of Sam” killings were perpetrated by “The Children” (aka “The Family,” depending on the source) and the ex-postal worker was a member of the Charles Manson-connected, Satanic clan that served as an outgrowth of Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston’s Scientology splinter group, The Process Church. That book, too, was discredited as result of the organization’s successful defamation lawsuit against Terry.
Equally discredited was the parallel moral panic of numerous day-care sex abuse cases that flourished throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Beginning with the Kern County and McMartin Preschool cases in California in 1982 and up through the Wenatchee, Washington, cases in 1994, each were rooted in Lawrence Pazder’s coined “Satanic Ritual Abuse” terminology. During the course of those modern-day, McCarthyesque witch-hunts, Bernard F. Baran, along with Dan Keller and his wife Fran, were railroaded to prison terms in their individual cases before exoneration; others, unable to prove their innocence in a timely fashion, died in prison; meanwhile, a still unsolved, suspected “vigilante” act resulted in the murder of Kaare Sortland after his own acquittal. Lives destroyed, not by Satan and his “followers,” but by anxiety-driven, divorced and unwed single mothers entering the workplace; guilt-ridden for having to leave their children in the hands of strangers.
A frequent “expert” cited during the era was Vietnam naval veteran Michael Alfred Warnke. He launched a fruitful evangelical career on the heels of The Satan Seller (1972), an autobiographical account of his recruitment as an orphan into a Satanic cult — where he rose to the level of a “high priest” presiding over rituals. As with Laurel Rose Wilson, aka Lauren Stratford, before him: the renowned Christian magazine Cornerstone discredited Warnke’s outlandish claims in 1992.
St. Clair’s plagiarized, fabricated tome and Wilson’s fictitious work served as bookends to the horrifying true stories regarding the November 1981 Milpitas, California, murder of Marcy Lee Conrad at the hands of Anthony Jacques Broussard (inspiring the film River’s Edge); the New Year’s Eve 1983 murder of a mother and her two sons by James Jollimore after listening to the music of Ozzy Osbourne; between 1985 to 1990, the ex-Black Sabbath lead singer defended lawsuits filed by the parents of teenagers John McCollum and Michael Waller, each alleging Osbourne’s music encouraged their suicides; another suicide-by-music trial in 1990 concerned the “subliminal messages” of British metal band Judas Priest causing the December 1985 shotgun suicides of Nevada teens James Vance and Raymond Belknap.
The Satanic Panics continued into the 1990s as Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., and Jason Balwin, three non-conformist teenagers dubbed “The West Memphis Three” by a bleeds-it-leads press, were railroaded to prison sentences through inept police work for the since disproven, May 5, 1993, “ritual murder” of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. As with AC/DC, Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osbourne before him, Marilyn Manson became a musical scapegoat for the shots that rang out at Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20, 1999, at the hands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
No one took responsibility for Ricky Kasso and his fellow outcasts. The village’s parents and teachers, religious leaders and doctors gave up; they failed to raise their child; embarrassed, the community blamed Satan to cover up their mistakes: for a story about trauma and disconnection doesn’t sell newspapers.
The truth — that events occur in our lives at random, without reason or divine intervention; that horrific events are neither a punishment sent down by God from heaven or torture belched upward from hell by Satan, but part of the human condition — is more frightening than Satan.
One of the journalistic lights conquering the media dark is Jesse P. Pollack: a New Jersey-based author, musician and filmmaker well-versed on how the mere mention of “Satan” warps police investigations. Working with Weird NJ magazine’s editor and co-founder Mark Moran on an investigation of the decades-old, “ritualistic” cold case murder of Springfield Township, New Jersey, teen Jeannette DePalma for a series of articles, Pollack published his first true crime best-seller based on the controversial case, Death on the Devil’s Teeth (July 2015, The History Press).
In addition to contributing to the pages of Weird NJ, as well as scoring the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary series Driving Jersey (2010), Pollack’s common-sense journalism prevails with his authoring The Acid King (October 2018, Simon Schuster).
A responsibly written, nonfiction account of Ricky Kasso’s life and the media fervor that engulfed the troubled teen, Pollack’s second book substitutes the speculations and plagiarisms of his Christian Scare predecessors with firsthand interviews of Ricky Kasso’s friends, family, and investigators who worked the case. Positive literary reviews for Pollack’s approach to debunking the original, scandalous print and television reporting on the DePalma and Kasso cases transitioned the true crime writer into the director’s chair for the first time (alongside his director-writer partner, Dan Jones) with a 2021 feature film documentary based his best-selling Kasso tome.
Prior to beginning production on what would become the more-encompassing, Amazon self-released version of The Acid King (2018), Pollack worked on — and this time, helped solve — the “Princess Doe” murder: another true crime case investigated by Weird NJ in 2014, one that haunted New Jersey since July 1982. As with Jeannette DePalma, the leads were cold on that early 1980s case — to the point the unsolved murder of the unidentified young woman was believed to be a second teenaged girl who vanished without a trace in the late 1970s. A book on the case was intended as Pollack’s follow up to Death on the Devil’s Teeth; it never found a home with a publisher, as a variety of agents and editors advised Pollack the case was too old, lacked national appeal, and that the true crime market, cooled.
Perhaps, if Satan was involved, the tragic tales of Dawn Olanink, the unidentified murder victim, and Linette Marie Jata, the missing teen, would be on bookshelves alongside the true crime tomes on Jeannette DePalma and Ricky Kasso.
As his book on the Depalma case, Pollack’s book on Dawn and Linette was more extensive than its magazine companion. The case was solved last year when DNA testing identified Olanick. At that point, she had been Princess Doe for over thirty years. How the case was resolved is a story so outlandish — that Pollack, with his longtime writing career at Weird NJ where he’s seen it all when it comes to Jersey weirdness — struggles to believe. Turns out, while there wasn’t a Satanic element to the story, there was, in typical Garden State fashion, an otherworldly one.
Desperate for leads, a detective on the case collaborated with a psychic who volunteered to help on the case, even wanting to “legally adopt” Princess Doe’s remains — a legally impossible process — and have her interred at the Arlington National Cemetery. The psychic claimed she could create aged-progressed photos of missing people through her psychic visions — which were later discovered to be National Center for Missing & Exploited Children-renderings she Internet downloaded, then tweaked the color and contrast levels to give them a “photographed-from-my-mind” Kirlian glow.
“The detective brought this ‘psychic’ to Princess Doe’s grave with a tape recorder to conduct an EVP (electronic voice phenomena) experiment,” Pollack recalls. “They asked a series of questions while the tape rolled, one of which, ‘What is your name?’ Later, when the tape was played back, they could hear a ghostly voice say ‘Linette Miller.’ The ‘power’ of suggestion on the psychic’s part: probably. The detectives on the case Googled the name and were shocked to discover there was, indeed, a ‘Linette Marie Miller’ in the database that matched Princess Doe’s basic physical description. Convinced this was a ‘crack’ in the case, the authorities located Linette Marie Miller’s sister and began the process of securing her DNA for comparison against Princess Doe’s in CODIS.”
Meanwhile, during the research of his feature on Princess Doe for Weird NJ, Pollack began tracking down leads; within days he discovered Linette Marie Miller dated a man with the last name “Jata” and possibly married him at some point. That lead Pollack on an online records search for a “Linette Marie Jata” and, sure enough: arrest records from the late 1980s and early 1990s glared from his computer screen.
Knowing this ruled out Jata as having been Princess Doe, as Doe had been murdered in July 1982, Pollack worked with authorities on verifying the arrest records and discovered they were not a clerical error; the birthday and physical description matched Linette Marie Miller. Apparently, she merely ran away from home, met a man named “Jata,” got married, and never contacted her family again.
That information assisted the lead detective and his psychic sidekick to locate Linette’s death certificate: she died in destitution at an AIDS hospital in New York City. The hospital was unable to locate any relatives. No one claimed her body. Linette — who vanished in the late 1970s — was buried at Potter’s Field on Hart Island, Bronx, New York, almost two months after she died. A very sad end to Jata’s and Olanink’s stories, but Pollack’s research on the case gave their respective families closure.
“The outcome on Princess Doe is probably my proudest moment as a writer and researcher — even after making a movie based on one of my books,” says Pollack. “A lot of journalists try cutting their teeth writing true crime, but how many can say they helped solve a cold case?”
Does this mean Pollack pursues not a J.D Salinger existence, stockpiling unpublished manuscripts for the mere joy of writing, but for the notoriety true crime writing can offer when the case is solved?
“Well, there is joy in discovering the truth,” Pollack counters. “The goal of my books was to give a voice to two New Jersey women who were tossed aside and forgotten.”
Pollack’s quest for truth came into play courtesy of an MTV twist to the case: one that added that desperately needed “Satanic” element for anyone to care about Dawn Olanick’s tragic fate.
During the 2000–2001 first season of the network’s paranormal reality series, Fear, an infamous fifth episode aired, “Camp Spirit Lake” (aka Camp NoBeBiSco in Hardwick Township, New Jersey), with a fictionalized account of the Princess Doe case.
“The show took the contestants to the camp and told them it was the location where Princess Doe was found ‘chopped up in several pieces by Devil worshippers’,” Pollack remembers. “When we heard that, knowing what we knew working the case at Weird NJ, Mark Moran called the network, advising them that nothing presented on the show was true; there was no occult element. Mark’s complaining about it and getting Weird NJ’s readers to call-in-protest got the show cancelled. But it’s run of the mill for New Jersey: every murder in the area is ‘Satanic’ in some way. Even with the Satanic nonsense in the DePalma case, it was false: Jeanette was the victim of a serial operating in the area at the time, with four or five other murders that matched her M.O.; a girl was kidnapped, strangled and dumped in the same way Jeanette was — six miles away in the same week in another county over. At the time, the authorities had no idea as the counties didn’t communicate with one another to make the connection.”
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of agents and editors when cultivating a bestseller? Instead of a book, perhaps a follow up to Pollack’s upcoming film, The Pleasant Point Tapes, with another based-on true crime screenplay on the Princess Doe mystery? All the David Lynchian elements are there: a dead body, a missing girl, a down-on-his-luck crime reporter, a grizzled detective, a questionable psychic, and some downhome, Golden State-cum-Twin Peaks-bred graveyard ghosts. Even a faux-reality show subplot. Maybe toss in a blame-the-Big Red Eye sidebar and an attack by the crazed Argentinean wild parrots terrorizing the town of Edgewater.
“Well, you may be onto something,” Pollack laughs. “But the problem with the story, however true: is it disrespectful to toss in this paranormal, spooky ghost story into a tragic, real-life murder? Then there’s the MTV element with their disrespecting Dawn Olanick. Possibly a fictionalization of it could work, making it ‘retro’ to the time. I spent a year and a half investigating the case and writing the book. In fact, I had Princess Doe in my thoughts for over fifteen years at that point.”
Jesse P. Pollack’s true crime-solving journalism, and eventual film career, began with an appreciation of fellow New Jersian-transplant-by-way-of Illinois Daniel Cohen. The over 200 books written by the ex-Science Digest magazine editor on subjects as diverse as the paranormal, urban legends, the occult, historical and biographical works sparked Pollack’s interest in the otherworldly. His ongoing quest for fear lead to his devouring the suspenseful works of Stephen King: perfect fodder for the true crime works — and later films — to flow from Pollack’s laptop. That King pull-quote-promoted one of his favorite films, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, is a bonus for the ex-Blockbuster Video clerk.
Then, in 1998, at the age of ten, Pollack’s grandmother became his greatest influence: an impact that would cast him as the “true crime guy” — a path he never intended for his writing career.
Pollack’s grandparents took him on vacation to an upstate New York campground — where there were no VCRs or TVs; you brought your own entertainment. Remembering her precocious grandson loved UFOs and ghosts, she purchased a four-dollar copy of Weird NJ to read during the trip. It opened a whole new world.
“I had no idea there were so many great stories in my own backyard about all these myths and mysteries,” Pollack recalls. “One of the stories in that issue my grandmother plucked off the shelf with our snacks was the case of Princess Doe.” The crime scene images — of Doe’s face obliterated-by-baseball bat — stayed with Pollack.
“In 2012, I was moving to another state, and I discovered a box of my Weird NJ back issues,” Pollack continues. “I started to fan through an issue from 2004 with a seven-page spread on Doe written by Mark Moran, the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine.” It was around this time, after the success of his book on the DePalma case, when friends, fans, and agents asked about Pollack’s next book.
“I was certainly interested in true crime, but never intended to be the ‘true crime guy’ as publishers refer to me. I was, however, surprised no one wrote a book on Princess Doe. Since it was still unsolved, I thought, maybe, I could shake something loose. Sadly, it was not the slam dunk I had hoped. Then Ricky Kasso showed up.”
Pollack spent three years on The Acid King for Simon & Schuster — from his first day of research in December 2015, to turning over his final manuscript to his publisher — which appeared on shelves in October 2018. His debut, Death on the Devil’s Teeth, appeared on shelves in July 2015. Based on the journalistic math, Pollack waded in the Satanic-accoutered dark for six years — not counting the time spent working on the Jeannette DePalma case for Weird NJ magazine; longer if you add up the Princess Doe case. Not exactly suitable subjects for a well-adjust lad with a wife and two children, along with a menagerie of pets.
In the frames of The Acid King documentary, journalist Dave Breslin — the author of a November 1984 Rolling Stone exposé on Kasso’s exploits, “Kids in the Dark” — tells of many sleepless nights while preparing the Satanic-driven article. When it comes to geographical regions inducing nightmares — from its Civil War cemeteries to Native American folklore, to the feared Jersey Devil haunting the Pine Barrens to the Garden State’s version of bigfoot with Big Red Eye, to The Sandy Hook Sea Serpent to Edgewater’s flocks of wild parrots, to errant waterside petroglyphs, Winslow’s bottomless “Blue Hole,” and a collection of mansion and beach-bound ghosts — New Jersey, as well as Long Island, is the land of nightmares.
“Oh, I had horrible nightmares the whole time I was writing both. True crime, while it unsettles me like any normal person, I had more of a stomach for it back when I was twenty-five and not married when I started Death on the Devil’s Teeth in 2012. Fast forward to 2015 when it hit the shelves and I was married with kids. Having kids changes you; you gain a new sense of empathy with these people. It also opens moral and ethical questions: Am I accepting blood money for writing about these cases. I am callous for putting these out there for entertainment value?”
Prior to the advent of today’s digital streaming platforms utilized by independent studios (such as Wild Eye Releasing, which post-Amazon distributed The Acid King, as well as the upcoming The Point Pleasant Tapes), the low-budget filmmakers of old working outside the L.A.-based studio system had difficulties in distributing their wares. Those filmmakers resorted to self-financed “roadshows” as they traveled the film from town-to-town, “four walling” screen time.
“We distributed the first cut of The Acid King on our own through Amazon,” tells Pollack. “Today, you don’t need permission; you can self-finance and shoot your own film on smartphones, forgoing proper digital cameras and lighting, if you wish. The digital and VOD platforms are tailored for niche interests that can choose to binge or watch a little bit at a time. That is perfect for us, at 1289 Films, where we don’t have to deal with a network; you put it up through Internet streaming and let the audience discover it. That’s what happened to The Acid King: the audience discovered [the Amazon cut] by word-of-mouth, clicking round. Movie sites, such as Film Threat and Dread Central, gave [the Wild Eye cut] positive reviews, comparing us to the similar Paradise Lost films about the West Memphis Three.”
Today, while vanity companies such as 1289 Films won’t receive — outside of film festivals — traditional theatre screenings from independent distributors, those hard media opportunities Pollack speaks of are readily available, in some cases, to the little guy. But there’s a devil in the details: the distributor only handles the distribution to retailers. If today’s digital filmmaker wants to get the film produced, their journey is no different than the celluloid warhorses of outdoor drive-in old: they beg along the yellow bricks, as did Sam Raimi all those years ago with his “Midnight Movie” blockbuster, The Evil Dead (1981).
“We shot The Acid King for $7000.00,” tells Pollack. “It was, as was Reservoir Dogs for Quentin Tarantino, and Raimi’s Evil Dead, my ‘film school.’ We could have gotten more funding — if we told investors that ‘Ricky was in a cult,’ as instructed, which we wouldn’t do because he wasn’t: he was an abused kid living like a feral child in the woods until he finally snapped and killed a friend over some stolen drugs. We don’t need a film with a roaring bonfire and robed cult members, all set to a heavy metal soundtrack.”
While a commendable effort for a novice filmmaker, Pollack’s debut is not without cinematic and narrative flaws. The Acid King — as with “New Black Wave” freshman Matty Rich’s Sundance splash with Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Christian-based Sherwood Pictures’ Alex Kendrick generating secular box office millions with his $20,000-produced debut, Flywheel (2003), and Sam Raimi’s arrival with The Evil Dead (1981) — despite those flaws, found an audience that realized the filmmaker’s future potential.
Regardless of Pollack and his co-director Dan Jones’s sincerity to set the Ricky Kasso story, straight, their self-distributed-version, at a one hour fifty-minutes running time — with one-too-many talking heads, as well as sound and cinematography issues — discourages streaming. The thirty-plus minutes excised from its 2021 streaming relaunch removes superfluous interviews and Satanic Panic tangents; instead, for those who never read the book precursor: they get Ricky Kasso’s story.
“Those initial Amazon reviews stung,” Pollack confesses. “Then Dan and I agreed. There were sound issues. The narrative was too long. We trusted those reviews and created the more critically accepted version you see today.”
So, with their “film school” completed, 1289 Films begins their next production: the West Virginia-shot The Point Pleasant Tapes.
A crowdfunded extension of Alan Landsberg’s ’70s TV documentaries, Pollack realizes the “found footage” genre’s titular film, The Blair Witch Project (1999), will pop in filmgoers’ minds, but hopes his take on the “Mothman” legend will appeal to the Paranormal Activity franchise (2007) crowd. As with many major studio films COVID stalled the self-produced film in October 2022. The production restarted at the end of 2023, continuing until the summer of 2024. The film will see release in the winter of 2024.
To overcome the corona-frustration, Pollack began writing his third book, Room 100: Sid, Nancy, and the Night Punk Rock Died (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing), chronicling the tragic relationship between Nancy Spungen and Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious. Beginning research in April 2018; he submitted the manuscript in July 2023. The book will arrive on eRetailer shelves in the summer of 2024 for preordering with a November 2024 release.
“Nancy’s death is as tragic as Jeanette DePalma’s and Gary Lauwers’s,” Pollack stresses. “She’s been reduced to a footnote in a few mammoth history books on punk rock or a few pages in a musician’s memoir. No one has written a book on the crime, investigating the unanswered questions. It’s the longest I’ve spent on a book: from research to finished manuscript.”
Fortunately for Pollack, the joy of conquering another true crime tale warmed the marrow-cutting chill of New Jersey-inspired weirdness more frightening than a paranormal-belched entity.
As QAnon conspiracies and Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean paradise entered the social discourse in 2019, Death on the Devil’s Teeth regained interest — as Pollack endured new digital criticisms that his work on the Jeanette DePalma case covered for “pedophiles kidnapping and sacrificing teens.” The book’s once praised comments for exposing the truth: that it was, in fact, a serial killer and not a Satanic cult responsible, now ponder, with a deep sincerity: “Where was Jeffrey Epstein in 1972?”
Then, five years after the book’s publication, the case took another turn.
Acting on a lead, Pollack began corresponding with the infamous New York Ripper, also known as the Torso Killer and the Times Square Killer, who terrorized New York and New Jersey from 1967 to 1980. In the spring of 2021, that convicted New Jersey serial killer, Richard Cottingham, made written statements alluding he abducted and murdered Jeanette DePalma while hitchhiking. Pollack forwarded the claims to the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, who, to this day, still have not met with Cottingham, claiming they are busy with current cases. Cottingham’s statements appear in the 2022 revised and updated version of Death on the Devil’s Teeth. As of December 2022, authorities have offered no updates on the case.
Truman Capote once stated he cared not what other people said about him, provided it isn’t true. The truth in the case of Jesse P. Pollack is a long, strange trip since his eleven-year-old self and a group of friends — some who now comprise the crew of 1289 Films — purchased a Bolex Super 8 camera from a neighborhood garage sale to make their own, childhood-Spielbergian version of F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu.
Pollack may deal in tales of cold blood — but he’s a true-crime fighter in an American dark where man succumbs to the Seven Deadly Sins, using their freewill to destroy lives. Perched behind his laptop, Pollack wades through the blood where others dare tread. He uses his freewill as a journalist and filmmaker to bring justice to the forgotten.
— R.D Francis
R.D Francis is the author of the books The Ghost of Jim Morrison, the Phantom of Detroit, and the Fates of Rock ’n’ Roll, and its sequel, Tales from a Wizard: The Oral History of Walpurgis. You can learn more about his works in music and film on LinkTree.
“Satanic Panic” book banner images courtesy of Dell, St. Martin’s Press, and Pelican Publishing, respectively.
