The faint, rhythmic thud of a hatchet striking flesh and bone echoed through the quiet suburban home in the predawn hours of October 6, 1995. For 14-year-old Jennifer Wertz, the sound was the horrifying soundtrack to the final, brutal act of a seven-year nightmare. When police arrived at the Cherry Hill, New Jersey residence following a frantic 911 call, they found the teenager sitting calmly on the front porch, still wearing her field hockey uniform, her small frame drenched in the blood of her own mother.
The scene inside was so gruesome that even seasoned investigators were shaken to their core, describing it as something pulled directly from the darkest recesses of a nightmare. The victim, Rebecca Wertz, had been savagely beaten and murdered with a hatchet by her boyfriend, a man the community knew as “Crazy Eddie,” but the true depths of his depravity were only just beginning to surface.
The man responsible, Charles “Eddie” Reddish, was a 46-year-old janitor who had insinuated himself into the Wertz family’s life years earlier. To the outside world, he was an eccentric, if not slightly odd, maintenance worker at the Somerset Tower apartment complex. But behind closed doors, he was a controlling, abusive predator who had systematically tormented Jennifer since she was just seven years old.
The 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 was a dark secret that festered within the family, a secret that Rebecca, perhaps out of her own fear or loneliness following a difficult divorce, refused to acknowledge. When Jennifer finally gathered the courage to tell her mother about Eddie’s horrific behavior, Rebecca coldly dismissed her daughter’s claims, telling her she had simply imagined things. This denial created a chasm of mistrust and left Jennifer utterly defenseless against the man who was supposed to be a father figure, setting the stage for the tragedy that would eventually consume them all.
The roots of this violence, however, stretched back four years before the murder, to another disappearance that had baffled authorities. In February 1991, Dee Rosenthal, a 40-year-old autism therapist who had recently immigrated from Canada, vanished without a trace from her seventh-floor apartment at the Somerset Tower. Her apartment was pristine, with no signs of forced entry, no blood spatter, and no physical evidence of a struggle, leaving detectives with a baffling cold case.
The only clue was an $80 ATM receipt tucked into her datebook and the testimony of a downstairs neighbor who reported hearing a heavy thud on the ceiling around 4 a. m. on the night of her disappearance.
At the time, Reddish was interviewed as a person of interest, but he had an alibi: Rebecca Wertz, who swore he had been with her all night. The family soon moved out of the complex, and the case went cold, leaving Dee’s brother, Blaine Rosenthal, to spend years traveling to Cherry Hill, plastering the area with her picture and desperately searching for answers.
On the night of the murder, Eddie had promised a final family dinner before Rebecca and Jennifer were set to move out. It was a cruel ruse. After a tense and awkward meal, Eddie claimed he needed to run an errand, taking Rebecca’s car keys and leaving the mother and daughter alone.
Jennifer, sensing the palpable danger, begged her mother to flee, but Rebecca ignored her pleas, and the exhausted teenager eventually fell asleep upstairs. She was jolted awake around 2 a. m.
by a loud, sickening noise. Creeping down the stairs, she witnessed the unthinkable: Eddie was savagely beating her mother. In a rage, he turned his attention to Jennifer, grabbing her by the hair and dragging her into the living room, where he threw her into a chair next to the bloodied and broken body of her mother.
He then picked up a hatchet and a drape, covered Jennifer with the sheet, and proceeded to execute Rebecca with a series of brutal blows, the force of which splattered blood across the terrified girl.
The horror did not end with Rebecca’s death. Eddie then dragged Jennifer upstairs to a bedroom, where he subjected her to hours of unspeakable torture. For four to five hours, he inflicted unimaginable pain upon the defenseless teenager, leaving her covered in blood and convinced she would never see the sunrise.
As dawn began to break, Eddie stopped, and in a chillingly calm manner, he made a request that defied all logic: he asked Jennifer to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him. He told her he couldn’t face a life in prison. When she refused, he threatened to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her and then himself.
Faced with this impossible, life-or-death dilemma, the 14-year-old did something extraordinary. Summoning a level of composure and psychological acuity that would impress seasoned hostage negotiators, she began to talk him down, using de-escalation tactics to appeal to his sense of self-preservation.
Jennifer listened without judgment, asked questions, and showed a feigned understanding of his despair. She cleverly suggested that if he turned himself in, he would get a deal, that he could plead temporary insanity. Her words were a lifeline thrown into the storm of his psychosis, and against all odds, they worked.
Eddie, visibly shaken and hesitant, eventually agreed to her plan. He called his own mother, who then contacted the police. He told Jennifer to get dressed and wait with him on the front porch for the authorities to arrive.
Sitting next to the man who had just murdered her mother and brutally assaulted her, Jennifer waited in a state of profound shock, unsure if he would change his mind before the police arrived. When officers finally pulled up, they separated the pair, and the full, gruesome picture of the night’s events began to emerge.
At the police station, Jennifer was interviewed by Burlington County Prosecutor James Ronca, who was struck by her severe trauma. She was still in her field hockey uniform, her face a mask of forlorn shock. Meanwhile, Detective Brian Malo, the same investigator who had questioned Reddish four years earlier in connection with Dee Rosenthal’s disappearance, was brought in to interrogate the suspect.
Reddish’s confession regarding Rebecca’s murder and Jennifer’s assault was chilling, but he initially refused to admit to the sexual assault, even laughing when asked about it. It was then that Detective Malo, who had never forgotten the cold case, decided to press Reddish about Dee Rosenthal. In a stunning turn of events, after four years of silence, Eddie confessed to that murder as well, revealing that he had climbed onto her balcony, killed her in a struggle, and disposed of her body in a remote area, taking $80 from her purse.
Despite the confessions, the case was far from over. Reddish immediately recanted both statements after meeting with his attorney, and under New Jersey law, a confession alone is not enough to convict a person; it must be corroborated by independent evidence. For the 1991 murder of Dee Rosenthal, the prosecution’s key piece of corroboration was the $80 ATM receipt found in her datebook, which matched the exact amount Reddish admitted to stealing.
For the murder of Rebecca Wertz, the evidence was overwhelming, and the first trial resulted in a swift guilty verdict in less than 40 minutes. Reddish was sentenced to life in prison. However, the second trial for Dee’s murder was more complex.
Reddish’s defense attorney attempted to paint Dee as a woman who had simply abandoned her life, using tips and false sightings from the Unsolved Mysteries appearance to sow doubt. The strategy was risky, but the jury ultimately convicted him, a victory that brought Blaine Rosenthal to tears.
The legal saga, however, was not yet finished. In 2004, a review of the court proceedings found that the judge had made an error in his address to the jury, leading to a retrial order. With New Jersey on the verge of abolishing the death penalty, Prosecutor Albright made a strategic decision to avoid another trial.
She offered Reddish a deal: plead guilty to Dee’s murder and receive a sentence that would keep him in prison for the rest of his life. He accepted, and in the summer of 2005, ten years after his initial arrest, the case was finally closed. For Jennifer, the years following the attack were a testament to her incredible resilience.
She moved in with her adult sister Shannon, attended Catholic school, joined the cheerleading team, and worked hard to build a normal life, eventually becoming a mother herself. She has since channeled her experience into a mission of survival, proving that even in the face of unimaginable darkness, the human spirit can find a way to endure and even thrive, while the memory of her mother and the fight for justice remain forever intertwined.
