Def: (Grok):
Warren: “An interconnected system of burrows where rabbits live, often used metaphysically to describe a maze-like structure”.
Warren: A township in Somerset County, New Jersey, located on the first ridge of the Watchung Mountain Range and perched above US Route 22.
Warren: An English surname for someone who lives in or manages a game preserve or “Warren”. It has roots in the Germanic word Warin, meaning “guard” or “protector”.
Part One – New Jersey Archives
In March 1896, The Reverend Tyler Makepeace Thistle and his wife Martha are living in a small cabin behind the First Episcopal Church on Mount Horeb Road in Warren, New Jersey, when an unthinkable tragedy strikes.
Reverend Thistle is on his way back to his cabin in the early hours of the morning after visiting their Privy. He shivers against the March cold, his brows wrinkled while he contemplates Sunday’s sermon topic – Love Thy Neighbor. As he weaves around ice patches on the gravel pathway, he hears Martha scream from inside the house. The bloodcurdling terror of her outburst causes him to sprint forward and bound up the back stairs into their rustic kitchen. What he sees freezes him in place.
Martha has fallen through the clapboard floor and is clinging on the water pump handle over the water basin, twisting and writhing in pain. Her lower body – from the waist down – is hidden below shards of splintered flooring that are slicing into her stomach like knives, causing her to hemorrhage blood as she fights slipping down the hole with all her might. She is being sucked down into the earth by some unknown force.
Reverend Thistle rouses himself and grabs both her hands, pulling her upward despite Martha’s increasingly frantic screams and worsening bleeding about her midriff. She starts screaming “Don’t let it get me….”, then starts coughing up blood.
Finally, their son, Josiah – who’d been outside the cabin completing his chores – runs into the kitchen and helps his father pull his mother out of the jagged floor chasm.
When they lay the poor woman on her bed, they are shocked at what they see. Her clothing is shredded from her waist down and her skin has been flayed off in large pieces as if she’d been caught in a farm combine. Dull, sickeningly whitish sections of her leg femurs are exposed and her left foot dangles from a strip of flesh barely attached to her ankle. Deep, bleeding perforations and gashes cover her lower chest and stomach, and she is soon spasming from shock. Martha’s speech is slurred and incoherent – but she keeps choking out screams until she faints. Her sole plea is – “Don’t let it get me…”
It takes the better part of three hours for Josiah to fetch the local Doctor from Basking Ridge. Doctor Grimes arrives just in time to pull a blood-soaked bed sheet over Martha’s lifeless body and pronounce her dead from “severe blood exsanguination”. He writes in his notes that “…there is clear evidence of claw and talon ravishment of her legs and torso with peeling of the flesh off bone surfaces…resulting in profound loss of blood.”
As he mounts his horse, Grimes bids the Reverend Thistle and his emotionally devastated son Josiah farewell – but not before he has his say. He addresses the Minister in a strident voice that invites no debate, his face a mask of resolve.
“It’s happening again, Reverend. I’ll be speaking to Sheriff Brewster directly…we must call a special Masonic Lodge meeting. This Evil must end. May God preserve us all.”
It’s 1968 and growing up as a young man in Central-Eastern New Jersey is difficult. If you’re eighteen years old, bad news: New Jersey has a twenty-one-drinking age. Solution? The Goethals Bridge. A short hop from Elizabeth, NJ across the Goethals Bridge to Staten Island, New York and voila! You can buy all the beer you want because New Yorkers drink at age eighteen. Pay another fifty cents bridge fee, pop back into New Jersey and find a cool and comfy place to pound your beers. Life is looking better.
On a warm September 4, 1968, Jimmy Lynch, Paul Aiken, Tommy Zurn, Betty Singer, Sue Ochieowskyj (pronounced Ochowski) and Ann Brinkerhoff are winding their way up Washington Valley Road in the Watchung Mountains. They’re in a four-speed (Hurst “T” shifter) 1966 Dodge Charger (440 CID) – with a trunk full of Rheingold and Budweiser beer. They’ve just completed their Staten Island booze run and now are headed to their favorite party spot – a vacant cement landfill behind an old, boarded-up fire station at the Watchung Circle in Somerset County, New Jersey. It’s a place where tons of cement debris obscure a collapsed entry into what look like tunnels. Actually, it’s a series of subterranean burial sites dating back to the Revolutionary War in 1776 – all interconnected and branching deep into the town next door: Warren, NJ.
Local kids just call it “The Tombs”.
At their turn-off, Jimmy Lynch drives the Charger carefully down a rutted, dirt access road past what looked like cathedrals of discarded and rusted reinforced-concrete bridge sections. The detritus and ruins of urban decay. He doesn’t want his new Cragar mag wheels scratched or gouged by debris as he searches for a safe place to park nearby. He heads towards a tree line and finds an ideal patch near some towering Pines and Maples. These are standard wood-growths throughout the Watchung “Reservation” environs.
Before long everybody is carrying their flashlights, coolers and make-out blankets and descending into the creepiest, dankest and musty maze of underworld that ever drove bored teenagers to do stupid things. The guys are eager to get loaded and lucky – and the girls are looking to get scared. And kissed and groped a bit. Excitement awaits. Just some Linden and Cranford, New Jersey kids looking to blow off hormonal steam. Like a Bruce Springsteen song.
The tunnels are wet and narrow in sections, but everybody pairs off and finds their own comfortable niche deep inside enough to experience that haunted “Tombs” vibe. It’s a sure-bet recipe for physical contact. Soon cans are popping, and moans are murmuring. Flashlights are turned off to save batteries. Somebody turns on a Steppenwolf tape. Somebody lights a joint – then everybody does. Hours pass.
This is the point in the story where all factual coherence is lost. Being former law enforcement, I reviewed the Somerset County Prosecutor’s official file and interviewed one of the lead Detectives that was assigned to the matter. The records are confusing and frustratingly incomplete.
What we know – or think we know – is that there was screaming. Deafening, desperate screaming and howls of pain reverberating inside the tunnel branch the kids were scattered inside. Police found the severed head of Sue Ochieowskyj deep inside the maze, far beyond where the group commenced their revelry. It had been scraped clean of flesh, and her eyes were missing. Part of her brain was extruded from a crush opening at its back. It looked like it had been gnawed on. Her skeleton was pieced together from the bones scattered throughout the killing scene.
Sue Ochieowskyj wasn’t the only victim. Paul Aiken and Ann Brinkerhoff were crudely and violently dismembered – their limbs literally torn from their sockets. All of the victims were drained of blood, and their skin was flayed in a methodical and expert manner. All the victims lacked kidneys, hearts and livers.
Aiken’s legs were locked around his scourged head, and his joints were snapped backwards like twigs. His spinal column was ripped out and thrust inside Ann Brinkerhoff’s disemboweled torso. The bones of all the victims revealed deep scrape and gouge marks as if they’d been clawed apart and chewed on by some kind of Mesozoic-era Velociraptor. Brinkerhoff’s face was removed whole and hung up on the tunnel wall like a mask-trophy.
Tommy Zurn, Jimmy Lynch and Betty Singer were found that night walking barefoot, half-naked and covered in blood – down Washington Valley Road about three quarters of a mile away. None of them spoke. Betty Singer finally whispered some monosyllabic utterances a few days later.
Zurn and Lynch stared straight ahead and only pointed in random directions. All three kids were transferred to the psych ward at Runnels Hospital in Berkeley Heights and kept under heavy sedation. Tommy Zurn died from an untreatable blood infection five years later. The deep and always-suppurating gashes he’d suffered in the Tombs attack never healed and finally finished him off. His Death Certificate cited “Blood Sepsis of uncertain etiology” as the cause of his demise. Jimmy Lynch’s parents took him to Florida to start his life over. He became a fisherman. A fisherman that never spoke too much. Betty Singer died of stomach cancer in 1973.
Police opine that when the attack occurred – by what they don’t hazard a guess – the kids were all disoriented, shocked, drunk and under the influence of marijuana. Their clothes were probably down around their ankles and their flashlights not immediately at hand. Whatever went to work on them was strong – and could see in the dark. It had a taste for human flesh, blood, bone marrow and sinew. And it was never caught.
The Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office still carries the matter on its books as a “Cold Case”. They cordially invite anyone with further information about it to call them.
To be continued…
Copyright, Jon Croft 2025
bogironpatriot.com
vlchek1@gmail.com
