Chapter 1 | Criminal Mischief

00:00:00
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. On November twenty second, nineteen ninety five, a hunter named Peter Erickson walked the woods of Carmel, New York, fifty or so yards in from Fields Lane. He was out there that morning with a buddy of his name, Bruce. It was the first day of a hunting season in Putnam County, and the two friends were setting up a tree stand that morning. That's the perch that hunters hinden waiting for a deer.

00:00:44
Speaker 2: My buddy was down below. He's afraid to height, so he was handing me stuff and I was up in this tree and all of a sudden, I look out in the road and there's like twenty cop cars pull up, you know, all at once, and then they start walking into the woods, and you're like, what is going on here?

00:01:05
Speaker 1: The Carminlson County seat of Putnam. It's still a pretty small town enough so that Peter knew some of the cops who swarmed the woods that morning.

00:01:15
Speaker 2: I recognized a few of them, one of them pat. His name was Pacistaldo.

00:01:20
Speaker 1: Pacistaldo a detective for the Putnam County Sheriff straight out of a drugstore novel. He slicked his hair back in a tight pompadour and wore a top coat even when it was warm. Oh and he moonlighted on weekends as an Elvis impersonator in several of the local dives.

00:01:41
Speaker 2: The guy kind of looked like Elvis a little bit, But that's why he was so memorable to me. It wasn't my friend. I was like an acquaintance that we knew from working there in the jail periodically doing electrical work. So as they were coming in, I said, if a you doing, what's going on? And he goes, well, somebody found something in the woods.

00:02:02
Speaker 1: Earlier that morning, another hunter had stumbled over something in those woods. He bent to check it out. It was the skull of a preteen girl.

00:02:13
Speaker 3: He had found that skull, took it home, took it home.

00:02:18
Speaker 1: Later that day the hunter called the cops. And now, as Costalgo told Peter and Bruce, he was out there looking for her body.

00:02:31
Speaker 3: So we're like, no way.

00:02:33
Speaker 2: You know, this is Putnam County. Back then it was a quieter town. You don't hear this stuff here. So my friend Bruce and I said, do you mind if we kind of look around.

00:02:45
Speaker 1: And help you.

00:02:46
Speaker 2: So he goes, uh, yeah, no problem.

00:02:49
Speaker 1: Cops rarely let civilians walk their crime scene. According to Peter, though, that's what happened here.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: So I'm walking look in and my buddy Bruce goes, hey, come over here.

00:03:05
Speaker 1: Castaldo and the other cops rushed over to Bruce. He was crouched in the clearing between the trees, over a mound of sticks and leaves that looked composed. He lifted one of the branches and a chunk of the ground cover came up. He saw something underneath it.

00:03:23
Speaker 2: It was her skeleton. There's a tremendous amount of debris as well. I mean, you see the skeleton, but it's not like this bright white thing that's sticking out in the woods. There was a mandible the lower part of the jaw, and her morale was tied in the mandible was sitting on the ground. There was hair there. You could see there was hair there, dirty blonde like hair, just laying there in the leaves. It was the rib cage. It looked like it's kind of sickening. I mean, it looked like the rib cage was mostly intact.

00:04:01
Speaker 3: This skeleton was small too. It was It was a small skeleton.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: It was horrible.

00:04:10
Speaker 1: The body belonged to a twelve year old girl, a girl going missing a full year prior. Her name was Josette Right and it was Costaldo they put in charge of finding her. The cops taped the site off and gathered forensics. They were clothes draped over the body, including the coach she was last seen wearing. It was badly moldered, with plant where it's growing through it. Her broad been tied around her head. Forensics pros would later say that it had been used to gagger, along with her underwear, which had been stuffed in her mouth. Her hands were bound in a complex odd tie. A sash cord ran from her wrist to both her neck and ankle, yanking her right foot back behind her and not far from her body, cops found a hunting knife rusted in the damp. I'm Paul Salatarov, and for thirty three years I've written for Rolling Stone magazine. I go after racist cops who shoot and kill on her black kids. I investigate me on Nazi's bent on genocide in Virginia, and social media tech lords who look the other way, while the cartel's poisoned children on their platforms. Now, when you write those kinds of stories, one after another, you build a layer of callous around your heart. But this story has pierced the skin and will not give me peace. I keep hearing the voices of girls who'd warned the cops about a demon, a hundred of girls hiding in the woods. And I keep hearing the voice of that demon in the woods, a voice that's still in my head five years later. You'll soon meet him in this sea. In fact, he's lurking here in this episode.

00:06:11
Speaker 4: You my madness, laughter, my fears, sorrows, depths are endless.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: In this.

00:06:31
Speaker 5: Valley of the years.

00:06:40
Speaker 4: I want to see revelation.

00:06:47
Speaker 1: I want to know holy water.

00:06:53
Speaker 6: I'm reading out desperately. Shune to the one who's holding the stars, to the one who is holding.

00:07:10
Speaker 4: Holding the stars.

00:07:26
Speaker 5: This is the Devil's quarry.

00:07:47
Speaker 7: I was in the group homing Caramel. I'd say we were pretty tight with the crew that was there. You know, we all came from different backgrounds. We were all kind of there for same reasons, but for.

00:08:01
Speaker 1: Different Rachel was seven or eight when her mom's new boyfriend crashed into their lives. Within weeks, he was abusing both Rachel and her mom. It's why she landed in the group home a few years later. That home was known as Saint Cabrini, and it proved to be a blessing for Rachel.

00:08:22
Speaker 7: When it came to Carmel, it was like kind of like a clean slate for me.

00:08:28
Speaker 1: Cabrini was a haven for the yanked out girls of Putnam County, the ones who had been abused by man in their house were ignored by their drug distracted mother. They ranged an age from eleven to eighteen, but looked out for each other. Like sisters. Rachel and the others loved to hang on the big stone porch out front, smoking menthols with the boys who stopped by. That porch is where she first met Josette. Right.

00:08:55
Speaker 7: She was an average ten eleven year old. You know, she had long blonde hair.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: Rachel is one of the first people that Putnam cops spoke to after Josette's body was found. Rachel, by the way, is a pseudonym. You'll see why she needs one soon enough. As it happened, she was classmates with Josette's sister, who was four years older than Josette. Their house was the Hank Spot on weekday afternoons.

00:09:25
Speaker 7: It was the house to go to, you know, it was the party house. It was a place where kids went to hang out to get drunk. There was people there all the time.

00:09:36
Speaker 1: Well hanging at that house. She met Josette's mom, Susan, and spent time with her boyfriend, Freddie. Freddie wore a ponytail, who was missing three front teeth and had a nasty scar under his lip.

00:09:49
Speaker 7: He was very free spirited, I guess want to say. You know, he spent a lot of his life in jail, and he was very for his age, kind of sure.

00:10:02
Speaker 1: The house was the sort of place where the adults often behaved like teens instead of authority figures. They partied just as hard as the kids they were raising, shared their beer and Newports with him, and brought around men like Freddy. How did Freddy support himself?

00:10:19
Speaker 7: I think he did odd jobs. I think he was a carpenter. He did do carpentry work. He also said he was a reverend.

00:10:29
Speaker 1: Did Freddie strike you as religious?

00:10:31
Speaker 7: No, you he wasn't godly at all. You're covered in tattoos and you know, I remember them being on his arms and they were like Jeilhouse tattoos, So you know, like the tattoos that after years they just looked like blah. That's kind of like how I remember his tattoos being like some you can't even make out exactly. He tell you it was a horse, and you're like what.

00:10:57
Speaker 1: The Putnam cops took a run at Freddy after joe His body was found. His mugshots are in the case file, as well as pages of handwritten notes about him. One of those pages describes his jail house tats and that wasn't all worse on Freddy's forearm. It was a circle of clansmen burning crosses. And there's another note in that file apparently Freddie had founded a white supremacist gang while in prison. There's also a number of people said that Freddy held neo Nazi hughes.

00:11:32
Speaker 7: Well maybe that's what he was a reverend in.

00:11:38
Speaker 1: I couldn't corroborate that Freddy was ordained in anything, but it was easy enough to confirm that he'd done a serious stretch in prison. Do you know what he went to prison for?

00:11:48
Speaker 7: I honestly killing a man for killing him man, I want to say killing a man.

00:11:53
Speaker 1: There aren't any murders on Freddy's sheet, at least none I could find, and there aren't any details on his egg evaded assaults, the counts that sent him to prison. But there are statements in that file from Josette's friends. They said Freddie often called Josette nasty names, and one of them said he slapped her hard in the face after she asked him for pizza money.

00:12:17
Speaker 7: I know that she didn't like Freddy.

00:12:21
Speaker 1: Josette's dad was in California and been out of the picture for years. Her mom worked two jobs to support three school age kids and often left Josette to her own devices.

00:12:33
Speaker 7: She wanted to be seen, and her mom probably was the person she needed to be seen by.

00:12:41
Speaker 1: To keep herself busy, Josette wandered the streets. She was constantly seen walking the town at all hours alone, from the age of ten. Carmel, New York, is a town surrounded on four sides by the lakes of the Hudson Valley. It's an hour or so from midtown Manhattan, as one of the more well off towns in Putnam County, but Carmel isn't a suburb for CFOs. It's where cops and firemen move their families. In the white flight panic of the nineteen seventies, they built their homes on banks of Lake Carmel. Then it advertently fouled the waters with the runoff from their cheap septic tanks. I've spoken to a number of locals who swam the lake as kids. They tell me they'd come down with weird sinus problems or gastric flare ups that hung on for a week after they took a dip. Still, you can certainly find beauty on Carmel. There's the post guard, perfect town square with its quaint old courthouse and banners hanging from lampposts to the Sons who went to War. They're twisty roads up dense green hills where lakeviews sparkle between the trees. But drive the main drag in either direction, you'll pass strip malls with down her shuttered stores. From the first time I walked here, I had the sense I was being watched. There's a vibe here you don't get in the posher towns west of Carmel, A deep going suspicion of strangers. A mile up the hill from carmel'stown square stands the house where Josette lived. On her walk down that hill, she'd passed the girls home.

00:14:26
Speaker 7: On her left, she walked by the group home a lot. We were like a pit stop. I guess I think that's how we ended up starting to talk to her, and she became like talking to all the group home girls.

00:14:40
Speaker 1: Having seen firsthand what her home life was like, Rachel got why that group home was Josette's pit stop.

00:14:47
Speaker 7: It gave her something to do. She wasn't just walking around aimlessly, or she wasn't, you know, by herself.

00:14:55
Speaker 1: Something the lost girl herself. Rachel felt for Josette became a kind a big sister to her. She made time for at the group home and bought her snacks at the deli. The two of them formed a bond that deepened the following year. When Rachel left Cabrini and moved back home, her mom would rented an apartment in Carmel, a ten minute walk from the group home. Within weeks, if not days, Josette showed up there.

00:15:23
Speaker 7: She spent a lot of time with my mom as well. My mama taught her how to crochet and just you know, passing the time together. My mom would make everything like potholders, napkins, blankets, scarves, you know, like she would make everything. But I remember her just teaching her, how do you like just do a single stitch, or to do a little box.

00:15:49
Speaker 1: And they'd sit at a table together.

00:15:52
Speaker 7: My mom never sat at a table show. We sat on the floor, so they probably sit on the floor.

00:16:00
Speaker 1: After a while. Josette was over there all the time.

00:16:03
Speaker 7: She was a part of the household and you know, eating dinners together and things like that. Yeah, she belonged. She was very energetic, she was very loving, she was very kind. I don't know why I think of a horse, but she was very a gentile person, you know, was just looking in the pastor looking to belong somewhere and and feel like she did.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: But several months later, in the summer of ninety four, Rachel and her family decided to move to Pauling, half hour drive from Carmel. The day they finished packing, Josette showed up at their front door.

00:16:50
Speaker 7: She was there as we were leaving, and I remember her saying, just take me. They won't even notice I'm gone. I was like, we can't, we can't take you. I told her that she couldn't come with us.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: She was crying.

00:17:04
Speaker 7: I think we both were should have just taken her, you know. It crusted me. I worried about her. They worried about her.

00:17:18
Speaker 1: After she moved away, Rachel lost touch with Josette. Then, four months after she left, Rachel got news from her mother Josette had gone missing, just vanished. October third, nineteen ninety four. It was the last day Josette was seen in Carmel. She stepped off a scool bus in front of her small ranch house at three o'clock that afternoon. The house, per usual, was packed with teens, Josette's two older sisters their friends. Putnam detectives would later interview those teens. Once said Josette had argued with her sister Chloe before walking out of the house. Josette, she said, admired Chloe and tried to mix in with her click, but the older girls would have none of it. That day, nasty words were exchanged, according to those teens. Joseph called her mom, saying she was going over to a friend's house. Then she went to the basement and made a second call. She briefly left the house and stood on the porch, waiting there in her thin brown jacket. When no one showed up, she went back in the house. There she did a very odd thing. She went up to her sister, Shelley, stood in front of her staring, then said goodbye and left. At three forty five, she went walking down the hill, headed toward the shops downtown. That night, when she didn't come home for dinner, her mom, Susan, called around to Josette's friends and knocked on the doors of their houses. None of them had seen her since school let out, so Susan asked her daughters if she should call the cops. Her oldest girl, Shelley, nixed the idea, saying that cops do nothing till forty eight hours have passed. Nonetheless, Susan called the next morning when there was still no sign up Josette. Pa Castaldo, the others impersonating detective, was a sign to find Josette, but he had no training in missing person searches. He'd spent the bulk of his career as a deputy and detective in a narcotic squad, so with no leads to go on, he focused on the town's drug dealers, starting with Anthony to Pippo, I.

00:20:00
Speaker 3: Would not really argue that I was a successful drug dealer. I wouldn't even argue that I broke even you know, I covered some costs, but mostly ingested more than.

00:20:14
Speaker 1: I was ever intent. Anthony was all of eighteen when Josette Wright went missing, at six or five and two hundred and thirty pounds. He walked and talked like an underground wrestler, which was exactly the sort of vibe he was going for. He and his boys got up the crazy stuff together. They staged many WrestleManias in their yards, breaking chairs and tube lights over each other's skulls. They ditched class to get high and sell we to their classmates, and any money Anthony made never amounted him much was used to fund his rave trips to the city. You know, the music was like.

00:21:00
Speaker 3: And then they would have these laser lights and these smoke machines. You got five thousand kids and they're just in there in half of them don't even know they're there, and the other half are just dancing until they drop.

00:21:12
Speaker 1: And his buddies would walk the South Bronx at night, the cop weed an angel dust and dance still dawn at the Rays and Chelsea clubs, so.

00:21:21
Speaker 3: Like the city ones are early the best ones, and it's like just it's it's it's an experience, you know.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: I was. They drive home with Carmel high off their heads, seem to have everything, including the Cross County Parkway.

00:21:36
Speaker 3: Listening to the music on the way there, listening to music on the way back. We're driving our vehicle smoking space base. Now we're mixing the crack and the dust and off the cloud.

00:21:47
Speaker 1: Night in a town with a little or no violent crime, Anthony had his run ins with the cops.

00:21:56
Speaker 3: My first real encounter with the cops was it was criminal mischief. I threw a metal garbage can at the window of a Metro North train and then the cops all of a sudden came and they started running after us, and so I ran and I got in the woods and they.

00:22:16
Speaker 1: Were bringing the dog, Rebel, the canine.

00:22:19
Speaker 3: So I'm like fox, I tried to bury myself in these leaves, and I'm like, the fucking dog comes right up there, she find something like you got me. It takes me in jail, and it felt like, you know, it felt kind of like a badge honor. That was crazy. I had just shaved the sides of my head and I had all this leaf particles on it, and I was itchy, and I guess I probably ran into some poison, ivy or something. I would love to have all of my mug shots back.

00:22:49
Speaker 1: You could say Anthony had a rep around too.

00:22:54
Speaker 2: They stood out based on their clothes and actually this was probably cutting edge at that time to have them bag, you know, hanging you know, your butt hanging out. They looked exactly like unsavories.

00:23:07
Speaker 1: That's Peter Erickson again, he's one of the hunters who was in the woods today Joset's bones were found. You remember seeing Anthony and his boys around town.

00:23:18
Speaker 2: They had that type of look like they were the type of kids that were selling drugs and school kids as they were walking up from the school of the Delhi not kids i'd want my daughter.

00:23:25
Speaker 4: To come home with.

00:23:27
Speaker 2: And I would assume at that time a lot of people had that same opinion.

00:23:37
Speaker 7: You couldn't you couldn't miss Anthony. He's huge. I'm sure they like stereotyped him to be a thug or you know, a hood rat or however you want to call him. But yet he was always soft spoken, you know, like he's he was this big guy, but yet so teddy bears.

00:23:55
Speaker 1: Rachel got to know Anthony on that group home porch he dropped by of with a dozen or so girls who lived there.

00:24:03
Speaker 3: Saint Cobrini's group homeer was on Seminary Hill Road. We'd hang we'd hang out and talk and you know, sometimes we'd sneak off a little bit and smoke.

00:24:13
Speaker 1: Or make out whatever.

00:24:15
Speaker 3: And from a young guy, there's a lot of young girls, it's like, you know, hey, you don't know, you don't want to smoke pot? Yeah, they were already having pot problems, so that's what we did.

00:24:25
Speaker 1: Anthony was often there with his best friend Andy. Andy was a lot smaller than Anthony, maybe five seven in boots, but at a short king's confidence around girls around guys. Though he had a quick, fused temper.

00:24:39
Speaker 7: Andy he was more of the well, what you know, I'm not I'm not trying to you know, like, but if if you had a problem with him, he wanted to know why. And I remember Anthony and Andy with this big old juke box, you know, like they would just be doing nothing and get blamed for something like something just as walking up and down a hill with a juke box, you know, like Watery Order.

00:25:09
Speaker 1: Or Detective Nostaldo suspected Anthony was more than just a two bit dealer. Anthony found that out one cold winter morning, three months after jezz Hat disappeared.

00:25:21
Speaker 3: I'm walking down three on one.

00:25:23
Speaker 1: Now.

00:25:23
Speaker 3: Three on one is a road that goes to Cold Spring. It's a long road. I didn't have my license yet. I just had a permit, and I didn't.

00:25:31
Speaker 1: Have a car. He was walking home from a girlfriend's house where he just spent the night. Now, if you ask him, Anthony was a player in the day. He says he kept a notebook with the numbers of three hundred girls, but he either didn't have it on him that day or none of those girls would feel his calls. Courthouse. I'm walking in It's a long walk. I don't want to walk the whole thing. I'm stressed out about it. It's six seven, maybe eight miles to Caramel, and I'm way out of place at a way out of an hour, like early fucking seven thirty eight o'clock. I'm walking twenty minutes into it. Anthony found himself surrounded.

00:26:14
Speaker 3: I get four cop cars. They pull up all different ways like weird, right, and then an unmarked car and then it's Castaldo. Well, the first thing you don't want to do when you're surrounded by four cop cars and you're not doing nothing is run. If I ran, they know I got something. I'm not running.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: Besides, this time he was clean, by dumb luck.

00:26:39
Speaker 3: I didn't have anything. If I did, it was probably half a joint.

00:26:43
Speaker 1: Castaldo rolled his windowed down to talk to Anthony.

00:26:47
Speaker 3: He's like, you had to need to Pipo. Yeah, come with me, so I get I get in his car. He was, you know, a big Italian guy. You know, he seemed like a kind of scary guy. But he's being polite to me.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: Anthony thought he was being taken for a tuna. That was Castaldo's wrap around town. A cop with heavy hands. Castaldo had a different message in mind.

00:27:15
Speaker 3: He says he's investigating this missing girl, Josette.

00:27:18
Speaker 1: Right. Anthony knew her. Of course, he'd seen her hanging with the group home girls and wandering the streets of Carmel at all hours.

00:27:29
Speaker 3: You know, you would see Josette walking around. You see Josette in the deli there, the Glenida Delhi and the Launs you met and this little area.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: You remember one time in particular.

00:27:42
Speaker 3: I was sitting on the church steps, like a lot of times, the girls from the group home around three point thirty would go to these steps, and she was crying and I could tell it was probably something from home. But I wish I asked, And I always thought that, like my whole life, if I could have just asked one question, you know what's wrong. But she asked me for a cigarette. I knew it was wrong, but you're crying, girl, You're already smoking, and I know what you're doing out here, so I have it, and I gave her a cigarette.

00:28:17
Speaker 1: You let the cigarette for her.

00:28:19
Speaker 3: She had longbod hair and blue eyes twelve for twelve year old.

00:28:24
Speaker 1: But Costaldo wasn't asking about her appearance. He wanted leads on her disappearance.

00:28:31
Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't really know I know the girl, I don't really know anything. I haven't heard anything. He says, if you do, please call this and he gave me his card.

00:28:41
Speaker 1: By the time Castaldo dropped him in downtown Carmel, Anthony's stomach was a nots all those detectives to drop a business card. They were clearly on a mission and not for crime stopper tips. What Anthony couldn't have known then was how far those costs would go to put Joseph writes, murder on someone or that he Anthony, what's been the next three decades searching for actual killer? That killer has been lurking in plain sight forever, but the Putnam cops won't touch him, and never did. And so five years after I first wrote this story, I'm mispossessed by it. As Anthony in twenty twenty one, I've laughed in your face if you'd asked me about the devil. But soon, very soon, you'll know what I know. That the Devil is real and walks among us. The Devil's Quarry is a production of Love of for Good in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Company Number One. I'm your creator and host Paul Soli Taroff. Executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis and Gilbert King from Rolling Stone Films. Our executive producers are Alexandre Dale and Sean Woods. Our producers are Karakornhaber, Hannah Beale, Jackie Pawley, Austin Smith and Kathleen Horn. Our editors Joel Lovell. Fact checking by Lucy Croning. Our sound designer is Brit Spangler and our engineer is Austin Smith. Additional reporting by Kathleen Horrant. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio at a marketing and operations Jeff Cleibern, publicist Nathaniel Baruch, art director Andrew Nelson, Social media manager Sarah Gibbons. Legal review provided by Claris Law and Gibson Done. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Roja Studio. Vocals by Rob Reddy of California. Corns written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Harrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility