A Nasty Pair Of Murders

Ocean Grove is a small beach town of 3,134 people on the New Jersey shore, in Monmouth County and inside Neptune Township. In the early hours of 2 April 1983 a jogger called the police, and Patrolman Kenneth Wittenhower was sent to a vacant lot beside the boardwalk. There he found a young black woman lying face up, naked except for a bra knotted around her neck, her clothes balled up in a doorway of one of four abandoned bathhouses. Her face was so badly beaten that she was identified through dental records as 19-year-old Cheryl Alston. The night before, her mother brought her home from the Grand Union grocery store at about 11.30. Cheryl went three doors down to see a friend called Princess and came back at about 12.30 a.m. to sit on the stoop. Her aunt Angela came home from work at 1.30 a.m. and asked where she was; they searched the neighbourhood and went to bed at about four. On the Sunday her mother reported her missing at the police station and was told she was dead. The autopsy on 2 April found multiple blunt-force injuries, penetrating wounds to the left eye, nose, face and mouth, fractures of the facial bones and jaws, and a three-inch wound to the forehead exposing the skull. Horizontal contusions on her chest were consistent with a two-by-four, and a dented, bloodstained two-by-four was found nearby. Footprints ran from the bathhouse to the body and down to Spray Avenue. The examiner decided the strangulation had only caused unconsciousness and that the blunt trauma killed her. Three and a half weeks later, on 26 April 1983 at about 9.20 p.m., 47-year-old Carol Penneston went to a night computer class at Neptune High School. The next day she did not go to work and never returned to her apartment in Asbury Park. A week later the police told her family that her car had been found in an accident and impounded, with a fingerprint that was not hers on the rear-view mirror. A man who had found her purse outside his shed showed them the shed on 3 May, and inside it, near an industrial building, they found her body. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled; the medical examiner found a sneaker imprint on her chest, fractured ribs and damage to her heart, and gave ligature strangulation as the cause of death. this part of the story is covered for now He was 17 when Cheryl Alston was killed and 18 when Carol Penneston was killed. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now He said they met on the beach, smoked marijuana and agreed to sex, and that he beat her when she refused a second time. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed His lawyer William Gurdy argued that drink and marijuana meant there was no purposeful murder. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now