The camera was a Kodak Instamatic brown plastic body worn at the corners, the kind that took cartridge film and cost $12 at any drugstore in America in 1981. It had been sitting inside a shoe box on the top shelf of a hall closet in a house in Cranford, New Jersey for 40 years, undisturbed through three different owners, tucked behind a stack of old curtain rings and a broken picture frame in a closet that nobody had fully emptied since the family that put it there was no longer the family living in the house. The woman who found
it was not looking for it. She was clearing the closet in December of 2021 to make space for holiday decorations. She lifted the shoe box down, opened it because she always opened things and found the camera, a partial cartridge of kodacular film, 11 exposures already taken, one remaining, and a folded piece of paper with a name written on it in blue ballpoint ink.
The name meant nothing to her. She kept the camera. Something about it, the weight of it, the name on the paper made her feel as she would describe it later, like setting it aside was not the right thing to do. She called a camera shop in Westfield. They told her the film could be developed, but that the results, after 40 years in a closet, would be unpredictable.
She had it developed anyway. The photographs changed a family’s life, and they ended a man’s. But to understand what was on that film and why it mattered to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office and the New Jersey State Police and a 63year-old woman in Flemington who had been waiting her entire adult life for a single piece of evidence to surface.
You have to go back to Cranford, New Jersey in the autumn of 1981. You have to understand who Susan Pratt was and what she was doing with a camera on the last afternoon anyone saw her alive. Cranford sits in Union County, a commuter town 13 miles west of Manhattan, the kind of New Jersey suburb that existed in 1981 in a particular and now vanished mode.
Split level ranches and Dutch colonials on quarter acre lots. One car garages converted to dens, backyards that ran together without fences because the neighbors had known each other long enough that fences felt like a statement. The Rawi River ran through the center of town, and in the fall it flooded sometimes, and when it flooded, the basement of the houses along its banks filled with brown water, and the whole town turned out to help each other mop up because that was the kind of town Cranford was in 1981.
You knew your neighbors. You kept an eye out. Susan Pratt was 28 years old that fall. She had grown up in Westfield, the next town over, attended Westfield High, and studied graphic design at Ruters before coming back to the area and taking a job at a small advertising agency in Summit. She was talented.
Her supervisor there would tell investigators years later that Susan had an eye for composition that was genuinely rare, that she could look at a photograph or a layout and immediately see what was wrong with it and how to fix it. She had been at the agency for 3 years and was by every account on her way to something better.
She had moved to Cranford 18 months earlier, renting the upper floor of a two family house on Springfield Avenue. Her landlord, a retired machinist named Vic Garza, who lived downstairs, described her as quiet, punctual, considerate, the kind of tenant you forgot you had, and meant that as a compliment. She paid on the first of the month, kept the shared stairs swept, and occasionally left tomatoes from her garden plot on his doorstep in the summer without knocking.
She had a boyfriend named Mark, who worked in insurance in Newark, and a close college friend named Deborah Sims, who lived in New Brunswick and drove up most months for dinner. She had that fall been developing a side project. She was excited about a photographic series of New Jerseys industrial infrastructure.
The refineries and elevated rail lines and chainlink fences and loading docks that most people drove past without seeing. She had been taking the Kodak out on weekends to shoot reference images, planning to eventually move to a proper 35 memor once she’d worked out what she was after. The inmatic was practice.
It was also, as it turned out, a witness. On the afternoon of Saturday, October 17th, 1981, Susan drove to a commercial district on the south side of Cranford, an area of old warehouses and light industrial buildings along South Avenue to shoot a set of images she’d been planning. She had told Deborah about it on the phone Friday night.
She said she’d found a building with interesting fenestration. She described the light in that corridor on fall afternoons. She said she was going after lunch, should be back by 4:00, and was planning to order from the Chinese place and watch whatever was on cable. Normal Saturday, total ordinary Saturday. She was not back by 4:00.
She was not reachable by 6. Deborah called twice that evening and got no answer. Mark called Sunday morning and got no answer. He drove to Cranford from Newark and found her apartment door unlocked, her car parked on the street, her keys on the kitchen counter, and her jacket on the hook by the door.
He called the police at 11:43 a.m. The Cranford Police Department opened a missing person’s inquiry that afternoon. By Tuesday, after Susan’s car, apartment, and workplace had all been searched, and her bank account had shown no activity, it was escalated to the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. The Kodak Inematic was not in her apartment.
The film inside it, with 11 exposures already taken on the afternoon of October 17th, 1981, was not in her apartment either. It had gone somewhere with Susan or after her, and it was not found. Susan Pratt’s body was recovered on November 9th, 1981 from a drainage channel behind the warehouse district on South Avenue, less than a quarter mile from where she had planned to photograph that afternoon.
The Union County Medical Examiner confirmed homicide. No weapon was recovered. No fingerprints of value were lifted from the scene. The case file documented two partial shoe impressions in the mud near the channel. Size 11 or 12 adult male. Those impressions were photographed and preserved.
The camera was not at the scene. The film was not at the scene. The investigation was assigned to Union County Prosecutors Detective Frank Mani, 44 years old. A 20-year law enforcement veteran who had worked homicides before, but not many. Union County in 1981 was not a high homicide jurisdiction. And the murder of a 28-year-old graphic designer in a warehouse district on a Saturday afternoon was the kind of case that drew significant resources and significant pressure.
Manasi was a thorough man who worked the way careful people work, one thing at a time completely. He interviewed Mark, the boyfriend, within the first 48 hours. Mark was devastated and cooperated without reservation. His whereabouts on the afternoon of October 17th were documented and corroborated. He was eliminated on day three.
Maniachi’s attention turned in the second week to the South Avenue warehouse district. There were four properties in active use in that corridor in October of 1981. One was a sheet metal fabrication shop. One was a cold storage facility. One was a small moving company with a dispatcher and three drivers. And one was a residential property at the far end of the block, a converted carriage house occupied by a single man named Thomas Devo, 33 years old, who described himself to investigators as a freelance tradesman, and who had, it
emerged, been seen in that corridor on multiple occasions by the owner of the sheet metal shop, who mentioned it because Maniachi had asked who was around on Saturday afternoons. Maniachi interviewed Devo on October 29th, 1981, 12 days after Susan disappeared. Devo was articulate and unruffled. He said he had been home all afternoon on the 17th.
He said he had not seen anyone in the corridor that day. He said he had heard about the missing woman and it was terrible, just terrible. He made eye contact throughout. He offered to show Mania around the carriage house if it would help, which Mania noted in the case file as an unusual thing for a suspect to offer and which he could not decide was innocent or calculated.
There was nothing in the carriage house. Many looked. He found nothing. He noted in his file that Devo had no alibi that could be verified, no witness, no transaction, no phone record, but that no alibi was not the same as guilt, and he had no physical evidence connecting Devo to Susan or to the scene. He listed him as a person of interest and moved on.
Two other men in Susan’s peripheral life were investigated and eliminated over the following six weeks. The moving company drivers were all accounted for by company logs. The cold storage facility had been closed on weekends. The investigation returned repeatedly to the same center point. Thomas Devo alone in a converted carriage house at the end of a block where a woman had been killed with no alibi and no way in or out of the frame.
Frank Manassi retired in 1995. The case had not been closed. He told his wife on the evening of his retirement that it was the one he was leaving behind and that he hoped someone kept working it. Someone did. Intermittently, the carriage house changed tenants. The warehouse district changed. South Avenue got a brewery and a yoga studio by 2015.
The case file sat in Union County, transferred twice, updated with new contact information for witnesses who had moved. Thomas Devo moved to Pennsylvania in 1987. He lived in Bucks County. He had no further criminal record. He worked in construction management. He was by the time his name resurfaced in 2022, 73 years old and living in a house in Doylestown.
By 1991, 10 years had passed since Susan Pratt was killed. Deborah Sims had married and moved to Flemington in Hunterdan County, and she had become, in the way that the people closest to victims often become, the keeper of Susan’s memory in ways that no official file could replicate. She had a folder of Susan’s photographs, prints from before October of 1981, images of the same industrial landscapes she had been developing her eye for, held now in an archival sleeve in Deborah’s spare bedroom.
Every year on October 17th, Deborah drove to Cranford. She did not go to the South Avenue warehouse district. She parked on Springfield Avenue where Susan’s apartment had been and she sat in the car for a while. That was all. She did that every year for 30 years. Susan’s parents, Jean and Helen Pratt, had lived in Westfield until Jean’s death in 1998.
Helen had moved to be near her sister in Freehold, and she had called the Union County Prosecutor’s Office once a year until she simply couldn’t anymore. She died in 2014 without an answer. The case was reviewed in 2009 as part of a New Jersey cold case initiative and assigned new identifying numbers in the state database.
Biological trace material from the original 1981 scene had been preserved and submitted for DINA profiling in 2010. A partial male profile was extracted. No database match returned at that time. The profile was retained. In December of 2021, a woman in Cranford found a shoe box on the top shelf of a closet. Every case on this channel represents weeks of digging through records, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that were lost.
If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, take a second to like this video, subscribe, and tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from. Your support is what makes this possible. Now, back to that camera and what was left on that film. The Westfield Camera Shop developed the Kodacular cartridge over the course of a week in early January of 2022 using a specialist in film preservation who worked with old stock regularly.
The woman who had found the camera came to collect the prints. She spread them on the counter. There were 11 photographs. Eight of them were images of the South Avenue warehouse district. Exteriors, fenestration, light falling across corrugated metal, the kind of careful compositional work that confirmed to anyone who looked that the person behind the camera had an eye.
They were beautiful photographs. They were also precise location records of where Susan Pratt had been standing on the afternoon of October 17th, 1981. The ninth photograph showed a building exterior with in the right edge of the frame partially visible a figure male standing in a doorway. The 10th photograph was slightly blurred. It had been taken quickly.
The frame not fully steadied. It showed the same figure closer now facing the camera. His face was visible. The 11th photograph was black. It had been taken in low light or close contact. The lens pressed against something, an accidental exposure. It was the last frame on the roll. The woman who found the camera understood, looking at photographs 9 and 10, that she was holding something that did not belong in her closet.
She called the Cranford Police Department that afternoon. The camera, the prince, and the developed negatives were in the hands of the Union County Prosecutor’s Office cold case unit by the following morning. Cold case investigator Lisa Renard, assigned to the unit since 2018, received the evidence package on January 14th, 2022.
She was 41 years old. a former Union County detective who had transferred to cold case work because she believed, as she had said in an interview the previous year, that the older a case got, the more it needed someone who was willing to treat it as if it were new. She pulled the Pratt file. She looked at the photographs.
She looked at the figure in frames 9 and 10. She submitted the photographs to the New Jersey State Police Digital Evidence Unit for enhancement. The process, using software to stabilize and clarify partially blurred analog images digitized from original negatives, took 3 weeks. What emerged from that process was a face.
Not perfect, not courtroom quality on its own, but a face. A man in his early 30s. a specific nose, a specific jaw, a specific way of standing in a doorway. Renard pulled the original case file and found Mania’s interview notes from October 29th, 1981. She found the photograph of Thomas Devo that had been taken for the persons of interest file at the time.
She placed the enhanced still from Susan’s photograph beside it. she called the New Jersey State Police. The DINA comparison drawn against the biological trace profile preserved since 1981 and compared with a reference sample obtained from Devo through a lawful order of the Bucks County Court of Common Please returned a full match in February of 2022.
The profile from the South Avenue scene matched Thomas Allan Devo. 41 years after Frank Manassi had stood in the man’s carriage house and found nothing he could use. The something that could be used had come in from a hall closet on Springfield Avenue in a $12 Kodak camera. Thomas Allen Dero was arrested at his home in Doylesstown, Pennsylvania on March 8th, 2022. He was 73 years old.
He was extradited to New Jersey and arraigned in Union County Superior Court on a charge of murder in the first degree. He entered a plea of not guilty. The trial began in October of 2022, 41 years to the month from Susan Pratt’s death. It lasted 11 days. The prosecution presented the Dena evidence, the enhanced photographic still, the original shoe impression records from 1981 and testimony from three witnesses, including the owner of the South Avenue sheet metal shop, who was 80 years old and who had traveled
from his retirement home in Florida to testify that he had seen Devo in that corridor on multiple occasions in the fall of 1981, including he believed The Saturday in question, the defense challenged the photographic enhancement methodology. The jury considered that challenge for 9 hours of deliberation. On October 27th, 2022, they returned a verdict of guilty.
Thomas Allen Devo was sentenced to life in prison on December 12th, 2022. He was led from the courtroom without speaking. He had not spoken at any point during the trial. He had sat at the defense table for 11 days and looked at the wall behind the judge’s bench. And now he was 73 years old and going to prison for the rest of his life because a woman in Cranford had decided not to throw away a shoe box.
Susan Pratt had taken his picture. She had taken his picture because she was a graphic designer with an eye for composition who was building a photographic series and who had noticed a man in a doorway and found the image interesting. Interesting enough to shoot twice, to move closer, to get the frame right.
She had been until the end doing exactly what she had gone there to do, looking carefully at things other people didn’t see and making a record of them. He had not known the camera existed. He had assumed correctly for 41 years that no record of that afternoon remained. He had moved to Pennsylvania. He had built a life. He had calculated that time was enough.
He had miscalculated by one shoe box. Deborah Sims was 63 years old when the verdict was announced. She drove to Cranford on October 27th, 2022 and parked on Springfield Avenue in the same place she had parked every October for 30 years. She sat in the car. Then she got out of the car, which she had never done before, and she stood on the sidewalk in the October air, and she looked at the building where Susan had lived.
And after a while, she walked around the block and she did not feel that she had to go back to her car. She walked back to it. Eventually, she drove home. She told a reporter from the Star Ledger that Susan had been the most visually attentive person she had ever known. That you could walk past something a hundred times and Susan would see it the first time.
That she had been going to do something real with that camera. that it turned out she had. Susan Pratt was 28 years old. She left tomatoes on her landlord’s doorstep in the summer and didn’t knock. She paid the rent on the first of the month. She had an eye for composition that her supervisor described as genuinely rare.
And she was spending her Saturdays in warehouse corridors building towards something. And she had found the right light in the right building. and she was going to order Chinese food and watch whatever was on cable and she had plans for the fall class at Ruters and she was 28 years old and she pointed a $12 camera at a man in a doorway and made a record of what she saw.
He spent 41 years believing she hadn’t. There are things that stay. notes in a shoe box, a receipt behind a social security card, a recipe still in the family, and a roll of Kota collar film in a cartridge camera in a shoe box on a shelf in a closet that someone finally decided to empty. Susan Pratt made a record.
The record survived her. That is not justice. Justice would have been 41 fewer years for her family. 41 more years for her. But it is something. It is her eye still working four decades after she was gone. A few things worth sitting with. Susan’s camera was in the house when the original investigation ran. It had to have been since it was found there 40 years later.
Does knowing that the photographs existed somewhere undiscovered through the entire original investigation change how you think about what was missed and why? And what about the woman who found it in 2021? She could have set it aside, thrown it away, assumed it was nothing. At what point does an ordinary person’s instinct to keep something become the thing that breaks a 40-year-old case? And finally, Devo sat through 11 days of trial and said nothing.
What does that kind of silence held for over four decades and then through a public trial tell us about the psychology of someone who commits a violent crime and simply waits? Leave your answers below. Justice found Susan Pratt after 41 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
