Denville woman?s long-debated role in solving Morris murders comes to TV
BY ABBOTT KOLOFF
DAILY RECORD
A public relations blurb advertising a new TV show claims Nancy Weber, a Morris County psychic, was contacted by stumped police officers to solve a famous murder case from the early 1980s. It claims a traditional investigation wasn't going to solve the case of two woman abducted and stabbed to death two weeks apart, and that Weber came up with clues to the murderer's identity.
The advertisement for "Psychic Investigators," premiering tonight on the Biography Channel, apparently contains some truth and some exaggerations.
There are conflicting accounts about the role Weber played in perhaps the most notorious criminal case ever in Morris County -- the 1982 murders of Amie Hoffman, of Parsippany, and Deirdre O'Brien, of Mendham Township, at the hand of a man police said appeared to be a budding serial killer, James J. Koedatich.
Weber, 62, of Denville, acknowledges that she did not solve the case. She says she did come up with clues to Koedatich's identity that were ignored by some law enforcement authorities. She said she saw Koedatich in visions and he appeared to be driving a car filled with snakes in the back seat, and those snakes appeared to be staring at him.
"To me that meant he was delusional and hallucinating," Weber said in a telephone interview this week. "I believe him to be one of the real sociopaths of the world, what I would think of as soulless -- he was driven to kill. He, himself, to me was a nest of snakes."
Weber said she makes her living as a psychic, mostly helping people deal with medical problems and also teaching classes involving spiritual issues. She said she often works with law enforcement on criminal cases and gets so many calls from around the country after she appears on TV documentaries that she needs a staff to handle them. She said she has always had psychic ability, that she remembers a spirit talking to her in her crib and that the spirit disappeared for years before returning to be her teacher for a few years when she was in her 30s.
She said it might have been a projection of her personality, or it might have been an actual spirit. She said she asked it what it was.
"It or he always claimed to be my teacher," she said.
'No role'
Law enforcement authorities who were in charge of the Koedatich case say Weber had no role in the investigation and may have been given information by an officer working on the case that she passed off as revelations. They say Koedatich was caught by old fashioned police work, a combination of his own mistakes and an examination of evidence.
"She played absolutely no role," said Lee Trumbull, 66, the Morris County prosecutor at the time.
Michael Rubbinaccio, now the Morris County prosecutor who at the time was in charge of prosecuting major crimes, also said he never heard Weber had anything to do with the investigation. Russell Vanderbush, in charge of homicide investigations for the prosecutor's office at the time, said Weber's information "wasn't credible." He went on to say he and another investigator watched a Court TV portrayal of Weber's role in the investigation a couple of years ago and were upset that it made her appear to have a big role in the investigation.
"It made us sick to our stomachs," Vanderbush said.
Koedatich, serving a life sentence in New Jersey State Prison, was caught after he claimed he was assaulted by a man who answered the description of the killer being sought by police. Police later determined he had stabbed himself, perhaps an attempt to divert attention away from himself.
Unusual tire mark
Koedatich's arrival at the Morris Township police station in January 1983 gave authorities the evidence they needed to make an arrest. Police already had tire marks from his car, taken at the scene of O'Brien's abduction, which happened two weeks after Hoffman's murder. They determined that Koedatich cut off O'Brien to force her off the road, then slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting a sign on the side of the road.
"Then he backed up and that left a beautiful right, rear tire mark," said John Kinnecom, 55, a former Morris County Sheriff's officer, once in charge of the county jail, who was an investigator at the time of the Koedatich investigation.
It was an unusual tire mark that left a unique pattern. Kinnecom, whose job was processing crime scenes, scoured junk yards looking for a similar tire. Then one night he was called to the Morris Township police station to examine a car belonging to a man claiming to be a stabbing victim.
"Bingo," Kinnecom said. "That's the tire we were looking for."
Weber's clues
Weber, meanwhile, had been riding around to crime scenes with a couple of police officers working on the periphery of the investigation. One of them was Bill Hughes, then a Mount Olive police officer and now a state police trooper. Hughes said Weber came up with information that eventually would have led to Koedatich's arrest. He said she told him the killer's name started with a "K" and ended with "ich." He said she started coming up with a profile, that the killer was of Eastern European descent, that he had lived in Morristown, that he had worked in a garage, that he had killed before in the South.
Koedatich had served 11 years in prison for second-degree murder in Florida.
Hughes and another police officer took Weber to the rest area on Route 80 in Allamuchy where O'Brien had been thrown out of a car and left to die. Hughes said she walked over to the spot where the killer's car had been parked, according to a truck driver. She described in detail what had happened, Hughes said, how O'Brien banged on the door of the truck. Police had some details of what happened from the truck driver, and also from O'Brien, who lived long enough to talk to a state trooper. Weber's accounts, he said, included some things not generally known.
"She knew stuff about the homicide that only investigators knew," he said.
Police questions
But some law enforcement officials question how she came by her information.
Vanderbush said he believes another police officer, not Hughes, might have been feeding her information, or that she might have heard some things on the police radio while driving around in a police car. He said Weber showed up at the Morris Plains police station where police were investigating what looked like a third abduction because they had found an abandoned car. He said Weber said this was a third murder -- but it turned out to be the result of an argument between a man and woman.
Weber said she never referred to it as a murder, just that she had seen something that looked like an abduction while under hypnosis earlier that night. She said she never got to tell Vanderbush what she had seen in the vision.
"He threw us out of there," she said.
Vanderbush says it is possible that Weber got part of Koedatich's name because it was circulating among law enforcement officials at the time because of his criminal history. But Hughes said that information wasn't widely circulated because he never heard it before the arrest. Hughes also said Weber came up with some information that is difficult to explain away. He said she asked to be taken to the Mendham Township police station because she was certain the killer was angry with police there because he'd been given a traffic ticket. She said the officer who gave him the ticket had a name that began with a hard "C."
Becoming a believer
Thomas Costanza, 50, now the Mendham Township police chief, said he did give a speeding ticket to Koedatich around the time of the murders. He said he called the Morris County task force working on the case because the car, a turquoise Chevy, matched a description given by the truck driver after the O'Brien murder. He said he was told there are a lot of similar cars, and to let the driver go after writing up the ticket. Costanza said he never knew Weber had any part in the case until a couple of years ago, when Court TV did a documentary.
"I'd never heard of her," Costanza said.
Some law enforcement officials said psychics don't have a place in criminal investigations, and Trumbull said they appear to be mostly publicity-seekers, showing up only for big cases. But one local law enforcement official said Weber helped him solve a case that didn't get publicity in the early 1980s, that of a divorced father who ran off with his three children. The mother asked the investigator to accept Weber's help.
"I didn't believe in psychics," said Lou Masterbone, a former investigator with the Morris County Sheriff's Department.
Weber told him the children were on a sandy street in a California town. He asked her for the name of the town and Weber looked at her dog, named Ramona. She told him the house was on E Street in Ramona, Calif. That sounded right, she said. Police found the house, which was on a sandy road near the water, but the family had moved to Hawaii. The father was arrested in Hawaii and the children were brought home to their mother. Masterbone said that made him a believer.
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Source: http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... 203/NEWS01
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