The night New Jersey stripper Denise Ramsey disappeared in 2011, she had been arguing with two men over money. She got into a car with them and wasn’t seen alive again.
Weeks later, in January 2012, an East Orange city worker found the 33-year-old woman’s remains under a mattress near a train underpass. She had been stabbed to death.
Two dancers working with Ramsey the night she vanished and the go-go club’s DJ told cops that year that they’d heard one of the men with Ramsey boasting of beating a murder rap in Atlanta, according to court records. In August, police showed them photos of men who had been accused in Atlanta killings, and one of the dancers and the DJ picked Corey Fallen’s picture.
Investigators thought they’d solved the case. Newark Detective Joseph Hadley and New Jersey State Police Sgt. Thomas McEnroe traveled to Atlanta, questioned Fallen and sampled his DNA. Fallen was arrested in October on charges of conspiracy to commit murder.
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Fallen’s main problem is his contention that police had no basis for arresting him. But they did. Witnesses had fingered Fallen’s picture. And on that basis, police got a warrant.
“The fact that they did not do further investigation of his claim to be innocent is morally outrageous, but not sufficient,” Walen said in an email. “The law should require investigators like McEnroe to present those who they arrest with an opportunity to contest their arrest” with hard evidence, he said.
Response from NJ police officers
