Denise Didn't Come Home - A Woman's Search For Her Sister's Killer
October 7, 2024·4 min
Host Anthony Scalia introduces himself as a journalist who previously worked on the Firebug podcast series. He describes Denise Didn't Come Home as a new series produced by Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment. The story is set in Closter, New Jersey, a quiet suburban town, on a warm evening in July 1969. Teenage sisters Karen and Denise Falaska left their home together to see a movie. At a corner, Denise unexpectedly told her 13-year-old sister Karen to go on without her, saying she had something to do and would meet her later. Denise never came home. Her body was found the next day, strangled, in the nearby town of Saddlebrook. Karen, who describes herself at 13 as a starry-eyed girl who idolized her older sister, remembers the moment vividly. At the corner, after Denise walked off, Karen noticed a car whose driver was staring at her in a way she found deeply threatening — 'like the devil himself.' She made an aggressive gesture to scare him away, and has spent the following decades tormented by the fear that she may have redirected the driver toward Denise. Local news reports confirmed Denise's identity as the strangled teenager. Community members and investigators describe assuming the killer was a stranger, a psycho, but the case went cold. A law enforcement voice admits the investigation produced no leads, no clues, and no path forward unless someone came forward to confess. At that point, Karen resolved to find the killer herself. Scalia met Karen in 2017 and spent years with her chasing leads and gaining access to the full history of the case. Their investigation uncovered new developments and long-buried secrets. They determined the perpetrator was a suspected serial sexual predator who was active on an almost daily basis. The most dramatic element of their investigation: they ultimately tracked down and spoke directly with the man responsible for Denise's murder. In audio from that interview, the killer states that he alone knows exactly what happened, and disputes the idea that there is no such thing as a perfect murder — a claim he backs up by asserting he committed many.
