He wanted me to kill him. She’s crying, she’s trying to do something with her, and he said he couldn’t spend his life in jail. Somehow or another it popped into my mind that I should kill her, and so he wanted me to stab him with a knife. The voice belongs to Jennifer Warts, fourteen years old.

The man she is describing is known to the public as the Cherry Hill killer. It might seem at first that she stabbed him in an act of desperate self-defense, but the truth is far more disturbing. He told me not to look. I could hear the blows.

I was covered in blood. On October 6, 1995, police found Jennifer sitting quietly on the front porch of her house after someone called 911. Nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to discover inside. The scene behind me is one that nightmares are made of.

It was difficult to recognize that she was even human. Four years earlier, in February 1991, a woman named Dee Rosenthal vanished from her seventh-floor apartment at the Somerset Tower in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. There was no sign of forced entry. She was simply gone.

What made it all the more disturbing was that Dee had been Jennifer’s next-door neighbor at the time, and the disappearance had shaken the young girl completely. Police were taking no chances with the man they suspected, believing him to be extremely dangerous. Today, the Cherry Hill killer is still alive. It has fallen to Jennifer, the only survivor, to take him down before he can make another victim.

Seven years before the attack on Jennifer, Rebecca Warts and her daughter moved into the Somerset Tower following a difficult divorce. They settled into a seventh-floor apartment in Cherry Hill. My father was kind of in and out of our lives. I think that my mom was very lonely at that time.

Rebecca did not stay single for long. She met an eccentric janitor named Eddie who worked in the same apartment complex. In no time, he moved in with them, and together they formed a new happy family. He was full of smiles and laughter, and she was happy around him.

But this did not last. Eddie had a few quirks, certainly, but as time went on, his behavior became increasingly erratic, especially toward Jennifer. Once we lived in the apartment, he definitely changed. He was very controlling, just very strange, just very weird behavior.

Despite his occasional antics, Eddie gained Rebecca’s trust over time and was tasked with watching over her daughter while she worked on the weekends. It was during these weekends that Jennifer’s abuse at Eddie’s hands began. Even at only seven years old, she knew she had to do something. She gathered all of her courage and revealed everything to her mother.

Rebecca coldly told her that she had simply imagined things. But Jennifer was not fooled. She knew the things Eddie forced her to do were wrong. I’m like, what is happening, what are you doing?

And I got really angry with my mom. On February 26, 1991, three years into Jennifer’s ordeal at the Somerset Tower, police knocked on the door of her mother’s apartment. They explained that four days earlier, their next-door neighbor had disappeared without a trace. Detectives were now investigating every resident and employee in the building.

Earlier that day, they had interviewed Eddie and were surprised to learn that he personally knew the victim. How long did you know her in the apartment complex? I would say she was there a year. Did you ever meet her?

I bumped into her a few times in the hallway. At least I liked her. No, I thought she was pretty nice. Dee Rosenthal, an autism therapist who had immigrated to the United States from Canada less than a year before, was last seen on February 22.

According to her brother, Blaine, she had chosen to move to New Jersey to accomplish her dream of joining the Elwin Institute of Philadelphia, a clinic tailored for mentally disabled children. But her brother knew the United States could be a little rough around the edges compared to Canada, so he insisted she pick an apartment on the top floor of a secured building. If there was anything I could have done to get her not to go to the US, I thought, give her a year, give her two years, and then she’ll come back. I was wrong.

At that point, the police had two suspects in mind, both part of the apartment complex’s maintenance team. The first was Steve Gomez, Dee’s boyfriend. The second, Charles Reddish, was simply too strange for the police to ignore. The thing is, to most people, he was known by another name: Crazy Eddie.

Something just wasn’t right with Eddie. The man claimed he had spent the night of February 22 with Jennifer’s mother in their apartment. Police spoke with Rebecca Warts, and she told them that Charles Reddish had been home in their apartment all night long. The prosecutor could not help but notice Jennifer’s fear when Eddie was mentioned in front of her mother.

I’ll never forget the look on her face. I wanted to do anything I could to protect her. Before the police had a chance to conduct a second interview with the Warts family, they moved out of the building. It may seem suspicious now, but at the time, many residents left Somerset Tower after what happened to Dee.

The circumstances surrounding her disappearance did not add up. When detectives ran forensics on her apartment, they were baffled by the results. What they found was a pristine apartment. There was no forced entry into the house, no blood spatter, no shell casing.

Even the bed was made. There was no physical evidence whatsoever. The only piece of evidence of value they gathered was hidden inside Dee’s datebook. She had tucked a receipt for $80 from an automated teller machine into the book.

But what really convinced them that she had not simply run away was the testimony of her downstairs neighbor. An elderly lady who lived alone woke up around four in the morning and heard a thud on the ceiling of her apartment. It would have been the floor of Dee’s apartment. With no other suspects or clues, the case slowly went cold.

But the incident captured the imagination of the American public. Various TV shows and publications picked up the story, including NBC’s massively popular Unsolved Mysteries series. From her new home north of Cherry Hill, Jennifer could not help but feel sorry for Dee and her family. For years, they had no idea what had happened to her.

She just was missing. To most, the police had clearly done everything they could. But this was not enough for Dee’s brother, Blaine Rosenberg. That’s all.

I wouldn’t give up. I traveled to Cherry Hill 67 times. I went into local bars, local restaurants with her picture. As the years passed, Blaine tried his best to balance his personal life and his quest to find his sister.

Eventually, his obsession got the better of him. When I got home, my wife said, Blaine, I want you out of the house. This is no joke. Get out.

The disappearance of Dee cost me everything. As Blaine hit rock bottom, so did Jennifer and Rebecca. Since the family had moved, they came to understand why Eddie had earned his “crazy” epithet. The man was totally out of control, constantly acting like a child and shooting violent insults.

His anger toward Rebecca kept growing, to a point where even if she never saw him directly hit her, Jennifer knew her mom was also a victim of his. I felt like whenever my mom would try to stand up to him, he would throw a fit, just get angry. Jennifer had endured Eddie’s abuse for seven agonizing years, and now her own mother was being thrown into the mix. She knew this could not last any longer.

After arguing for hours, Jennifer eventually convinced Rebecca that she needed to leave Eddie. Everything was planned in advance, but Rebecca made one crucial mistake: she told Eddie about it. We were to be moving into my grandmother’s house. She promised me that he was never going to be there.

I would never have to see him. I was ecstatic. On Jennifer’s last day of school, Rebecca got her daughter to pack all of her things and promised her that she would be waiting by the schoolyard at 6 p. m.

, right after her last field hockey game. I walked off the field, and her car was there. But Eddie was driving. So I immediately got angry, yelling at her that I knew this was going to happen, and why could she never keep her word.

And she just said, Jennifer, get in the car. The silence in the car was heavy. In the rearview mirror, Jennifer could not help but notice that Eddie was fixating on her. She could not pinpoint what, but something felt terribly wrong.

I just knew that he was going to do something to stop us from moving. But I never imagined what would happen. Once they arrived, Eddie claimed that all he wanted was to have one last dinner together as a family. But Jennifer was worried.

We get there, and I said, there’s not even anything made. There’s no dinner here. What are we doing here? Eddie sloppily tried to pull together some form of explanation before insisting that he needed Rebecca’s car for groceries.

Before she could answer, he left with the keys in a hurry. Now that they were alone, Jennifer tried to convince her mother to leave before his return. But Rebecca ignored her. In a fit, Jennifer ran upstairs to her room.

Without fully realizing it, the teenager fell asleep. Hours later, in the middle of the night, a loud noise suddenly woke her up. It was about 2 a. m.

Something was really, really wrong. Jennifer stood up and started walking down the stairway. As she grew closer, the noise became clearer and louder. Midway through, she realized what was happening.

It was the sound of him punching her mother in the face. I don’t know how long he had been hitting her. I don’t know, but it was already too late. Before she had time to react, Eddie suddenly stopped.

He turned around and came toward her with rage in his eyes. Eddie grabbed Jennifer by the back of her hair and dragged her into the living room. As she grew closer to her mother, she could not even grasp the state she was in. I don’t know if she knew that I was there.

I don’t know that she saw me. I know that her jaw was broken. Her arm was broken. I was asking him to please not hurt her.

Please just let us go. Eddie threw the young girl onto a chair next to the couch where Rebecca lay. He turned back to pick up a drape and a small hatchet he had laid on the floor. As he slowly walked toward her, Jennifer started panicking.

I just immediately started yelling for him to stop. He draped the sheet over top of me, and I just remember curling up in a ball from under the drape. Jennifer could hear her mother breathing. She knew she was still alive.

But within seconds, Eddie began striking Rebecca with the hatchet. I could hear the blows. I felt her blood. After what seemed like a lifetime, he took the sheet off of me and took me upstairs.

Eddie dragged her into the bedroom. There, he did his worst to the traumatized and defenseless teenager. I wasn’t out of his sight for another four to five hours. He tortured me for that time.

I was covered in blood. I didn’t really think that it was ever going to be over. As the sun was rising, Eddie stopped and sat next to Jennifer. Amidst all the horrible things he had done to her that night, what he was about to ask her next was simply too much for the young girl.

And then he asked me to kill him. I said that I couldn’t do that. So he said that he would just kill me, and then kill himself. Faced with an impossible dilemma, Jennifer summoned her courage and attempted to guide Eddie toward a third option.

Just like a hostage negotiator, the fourteen-year-old used de-escalation tactics to calm him down: listening carefully, asking questions without judgment, and showing understanding. Jennifer slowly convinced Eddie to spare not only her life but also his. I said, if you turn yourself in, they’re going to give you a deal. They’ll go easier on you.

You can just say that you had a moment of insanity. Hesitant, Eddie stood up and started pacing around the bedroom, hatchet in hand. He was visibly shaken by her words, almost like he was slowly coming to realize what he had done. Against all odds, she persuaded him to give himself up.

He called his own mother, who then called the police. He said to get dressed, and that we had to go outside and wait for the police, that they were on their way. I was in shock. We went out on the front porch, and I wasn’t even sure that he still wasn’t going to do something before the cops came.

He was so unpredictable. It must have been a surreal experience, sitting there with the man who had just killed your mother. When the police arrived, they immediately separated Jennifer from Eddie. Their next concern was Rebecca.

James Ronca, one of the prosecutors in charge of the case, recalls Eddie’s strange reaction when police asked him about her whereabouts. Reddish made some cryptic statement about the victim being inside. Asked if she needed an ambulance, he said, No, it’s too late for that. Once in the hands of the police, Jennifer had a hard time assessing what had happened.

Even Ronca, an experienced prosecutor, had never dealt with a victim so mentally shocked before. Jennifer was very traumatized. She was still wearing her field hockey uniform, looking just so absolutely forlorn. After Ronca finished interviewing Jennifer, reinforcement from the Cherry Hill Police Department arrived at the station.

Detective Brian Malone, the same man who had questioned Eddie four years earlier at Somerset Tower, was asked to interview him once again. We drove up to Burlington County. They allowed us access to him in a room, and we brought a tape recorder. For the most part, Eddie and Jennifer’s versions of the events were roughly concordant, until the assault in the bedroom.

Eddie refused to admit what he had done to Jennifer. Did you have sex with Jennifer? Why would Jennifer mention it? That’s why I always liked her, you know, she’s cute.

He is literally laughing as he talks about a fourteen-year-old girl. Following Eddie’s full confession regarding Rebecca’s murder and Jennifer’s assault, Detective Malone, who had never forgotten Eddie since Dee’s disappearance, knew there was more where that came from. I thought at this point he would be particularly vulnerable, so they started asking Charles Reddish again about the disappearance of Dee Rosenthal. To the surprise of the prosecutors and the detective, Eddie immediately confessed.

After four years, he finally told what had happened. I’ve been asked some questions regarding the disappearance of Dee Rosenthal at the Somerset House Apartments in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Figured it’s time people know the truth. For some reason, I took the stairs to the roof.

I swung down onto the balcony of Dee’s apartment. When she spotted me, she let out a scream, and he realized she was going to recognize him. At that point, he made the decision to kill her. There was a minor struggle, and she fell off the bed, which was the thud the lady downstairs heard.

I knew that she passed away. I went to the kitchen, found $80 exactly in her pocketbook. I took that, and I peeked out to the hallway. Nobody was around.

I took her in a shopping cart down and out the back door of the apartment complex. He brought her out through these doors across the parking lot. Could you describe where you took Miss Rosenthal? Off Route 130, there was a dirt road that you could drive back there, and I carried her from the car into the weeds and left her there.

They later found out that every year, the Delaware River was dredged, and the dredge waste was pumped into this area. By the time they got there, Dee would have been under between fifty and seventy-five, even up to a hundred feet of dredge materials. After the search for Dee’s body was abandoned, the two cases fell into the hands of prosecutor Albright from Cherry Hill and Ronca from Burlington. After meeting his attorney for the first time, Eddie immediately recanted both confessions.

Even if he had not, a confession alone was not enough to sentence him in New Jersey. Under our law, you can’t convict a person on their word alone, i. e. , their confession.

You have to corroborate the confession. This is when the rigorous police work that had taken place in 1991 came into play. Even if Eddie had removed all traces of Dee’s murder after the act, there remained one little thing he had forgotten: the ATM receipt the police found tucked behind the cover of Dee’s datebook. He specifically tells the Cherry Hill detectives that he took $80 out of that pocketbook.

For me, that was the ultimate, the cherry on the corroboration sundae, that ATM receipt. And I couldn’t wait for the jury to see that. Since Jennifer had survived Dee’s fate thanks to her own negotiating skills, the first trial was a swift one. The jury took less than forty minutes to come back with a guilty verdict after hearing her testimony.

For the murder of Rebecca and the assault of Jennifer, Eddie received a life sentence. Meanwhile, Albright was preparing for the second trial. She wanted more than a double life sentence. She was aiming for the death penalty for Dee’s murder.

So legally, justice is done. But in real life, what is justice when you’ve lost your family member to murder? With his confession recanted, Eddie had a very good chance of being found not guilty. His lawyer used all the tips and false sightings the police had received after Dee’s appearance on Unsolved Mysteries to misrepresent the case.

He was attempting to fool the audience into thinking that Dee was alive and well, that she had simply abandoned her family and her career to start anew elsewhere. I wanted the jurors to know that Dee was not some flighty young thing who just decided one day, you know what, I’m tired of Cherry Hill, I’m tired of my job, I’m tired of my family. Because to believe that she was still alive, you would have to believe all those things. And it worked.

This angle, joined by the ATM receipt, sufficed to convince the jury. Jennifer and Dee’s brother Blaine, though emotional, celebrated their victory. I cried my eyes out. The first time I really cried my eyes out was when we put up a marker.

We had flowers. It was over. Until 2004. A review of the court proceedings proved that the judge presiding over the case had made a mistake in his address to the jury.

This was enough for the court to ask for a retrial. And Albright knew that the New Jersey jurisdiction was about to abolish the death penalty. I convicted him once, and I was pretty sure I was going to be able to convict him twice. With the death penalty’s impending abolition, avoiding a trial was the soundest option.

So, after talking with Blaine and Jennifer, the prosecutor offered Eddie a deal: plead guilty to Dee’s murder and receive a sentence that would keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Eddie was finally sentenced in the summer of 2005, ten years after his initial arrest in 1995. During that time, Jennifer rebuilt her life from the ground up. She moved in with Shannon, one of her adult sisters, and ultimately got the chance to experience a normal life.

She attended Catholic school, joined a cheerleading team, and made many friends along the way. Not only that, but Shannon and her two other sisters all formed a strong support system around Jennifer. As a teenager, I really worked very, very hard to not let it affect me as an adult. Jennifer continued to thrive and eventually even became a mother herself.

But her past ordeal took on a new meaning after she gave birth to her two daughters, especially in the way she perceived her own mother’s tragic death. Now as a mother, it’s a different type of pain. I think of my girls getting married. My mother never got to see any of her girls get married.

That’s how it affects me now. Just missing the things for her. Although Jennifer got some form of closure after Eddie’s arrest, the same could not necessarily be said for Dee’s family. Without a body, they may never know what really happened to her.

All they have is Eddie’s word. After learning of Dee’s murder, as horrific as what happened to me was, at least I know what happened. To honor his sister’s memory, Blaine started a foundation bearing her name, which provides support services to women experiencing physical or emotional abuse. Overall, he chose to focus on her legacy more than anything else.

There were a lot of memories that I’ll never forget. I miss Dee. I will never forget Dee. The same is true for Jennifer.

There is no way to be sure, but Rebecca was probably also a victim of Eddie’s abuse long before the murders, which could have led to some of her questionable decisions in the past. Some may say she could have done much more to protect her daughter, but it does not mean there were no moments of genuine love between the two of them. These earnest memories deserve to be celebrated. I miss my mother every day.

Going to the beach with her, singing with her, dancing in the kitchen. But I like to think of that.