Strip-Club Denizen John Denofa Kills
(“Last Dance,” Forensic Files)
On April 1, 200o, an all-terrain vehicle rider spotted the body of a woman under a bridge in Burlington, New Jersey. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater but had no identification.
Fortunately, a former boyfriend recognized a description that the police released. She was Rachel Siani, 21, a psychology student at Bucks County Community College.
“Body Identified As That of Student,” read one of the first Philadelphia Inquirer headlines about the case.
Tantalizing tale. Although investigators suspected suicide early on, the autopsy proved that Rachel hadn’t killed herself. Someone threw her off the bridge.
In the meantime, another one of Rachel’s associates also called police. William Love worked as a manager at Diva’s International Gentlemen’s Club, where Rachel danced under the name Roxanne, and she hadn’t shown up for work.
Now, media outlets had all they needed for a storyline to hold readers’ interest for years — a commercially attractive murdered woman belonging to a workforce sector that never seems to lose its mystique.
Labeled forever. For headline-writing purposes, newspapers changed Rachael’s ID to “Student-Dancer” and then “Slain Stripper.”
It made the tragedy even worse for her family.
As her cousin Nancy Finan said during her appearance on Forensic Files, “If she worked at an ice cream stand, the headlines wouldn’t say ‘Ice Cream Girl Killed.'”
Big spender. She does have a point. And if they’re going to make “exotic dancer” a woman’s personal brand, maybe headlines should describe a man who patronizes an establishment like Diva’s as a “stripper-paying barfly.”
In the Rachel Siani case, the killer turned out to be just that, a gentlemen’s club frequenter named John “Jack” Denofa.
Where most patrons doled out their money $1 or $2 at a time, Denofa handed out $20’s, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer story.
Dad on the premises. And there was a strange twist. Denofa’s wife not only knew about his visits to Diva’s but also approved of them. She sometimes dropped him off at Diva’s so he wouldn’t drink and drive.
For this week, I looked into where Jack Denofa is today and why Lisa Denofa tolerated her husband’s behavior. I was also curious to find out how a woman like Rachel Siani, who was brought up in a home with a nice father, ended up doing the kind of work she did.
So let’s get going on the recap of the Forensic Files episode “Last Dance” along with additional information drawn from internet research.
Psych major. Rachel Elizabeth Siani was born on April 18, 1978, and lived in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. When Rachel was a child, her parents divorced and her mother died a few years later.
At the time of Rachel’s death, she was living at home with dad Richard Siani, stepmother Janet Titlow Siani, with whom she reportedly had a good relationship, two brothers, Anthony and William, and two stepbrothers, Thomas and Charles.
Rachel attended community college full time and had completed 57 of 60 credits needed for an associate’s degree. To fund her education, she worked at Diva’s three to five times a week, earning as much as $400 a night. School cost around $1,000 a semester plus books, according to an AP account.
Really, no Camaro? In addition to studying psychology, she took acting classes. Like a lot of shy people who ply the performing arts, she lost her inhibitions when on stage.
Fellow acting students recalled that she came alive when she took part in skits.
So the exotic dancing might have served as an extension of that self-expression.
And maybe she really needed the money. She drove an ancient beaten-up-looking white Lincoln sedan (a gentlemen’s club performer without a red Trans Am?) and lived in a household of seven.
Early suspect. After a third party informed her father and stepmother she worked at Diva’s, they expressed disapproval but accepted that Rachel was an adult who could make her own decisions.
So how did she end up dead under a bridge? Police had found her blood on the bridge, suggesting someone had wounded her before she went over the side, although she probably died from the impact of the fall.
Investigators immediately zeroed in on a cook who Forensic Files calls Jason Woods and the Oxygen series It Takes a Killer identifies as Spike Davis. The club management had fired him because he wouldn’t leave Rachel alone.
But, whatever his name was, forensic evidence soon cleared him.
Successful entrepreneur. Suspicions turned toward someone else connected with Diva’s, a regular customer named John Denofa, age 35.
Denofa owned Apex Sign Supplies, a wholesale business on Railroad Drive in Warminster, Pennsylvania. It apparently generated enough revenue to underwrite waxing and extensions for exotic dancers and sustain a comfortable upper-middle class existence for Denofa and his wife.
He and Lisa Denofa lived in a four-bedroom three-bathroom house on Deep Creek Way in Buckingham, Pennsylvania.
Nice work if you can get it. The Denofas appeared to be respectable citizens. He served as chairman of his high school alumni association and was generally well liked, although he did fly off the handle when he didn’t get what he wanted, according to It Takes a Killer and the Philadelphia Daily News.
Because he had a DUI on his record from 1999, Jack often stayed over at the Econo Lodge next to the club. As mentioned, his wife knew all about this trips to Diva’s and didn’t object. After at least one of his nighttime outings, Lisa met her husband and one of his exotic-dancing friends for breakfast the next day. (The sight of them must have furrowed the brows of other diners — how did this trio come to be?)
Rachel was Jack’s favorite dancer at Diva’s. He found her charm, thick flowing hair, and blue eyes irresistible and sometimes paid her hundreds of dollars just to sit and talk with him.
Last-stop saloon. By all accounts, the two had no physical relationship outside of the club.
On March 31, 2000, the last night of Rachel’s life, she finished her shift at the club, changed into jeans and a white sweater with a butterfly pendant, and headed to a bar named Sportsters. (It doesn’t exist anymore, but I’m guessing it was that special no-other-options dive.)
Jack Denofa went to Sportsters, too, but in a different car.
Rowdy guy. Everyone ended up back at Diva’s parking lot. Rachel and fellow Diva’s employee Rebecca Yavorsky sat talking and smoking marijuana in Yavorsky’s silver Mustang. She snapped a picture of Rachel, and it would later help police positively ID the body.
Denofa got a little drunk and disorderly that night, banging on the door of the club, but employees told a concerned police officer that he was a regular and it was fine.
Rachel offered to walk the intoxicated Denofa to his room at the Econo Lodge.
Turnpike-cam. No one ever saw her alive again. Richard Scott, the ATV rider, discovered her body three days later.
Investigators found some blood in the shower of John’s $49.95-a-night room, No. 223, but it was too scant to test.
Video surveillance footage from Interchange 29 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, however, turned up a gold mine. It showed Jack’s Dodge Ram pickup truck with what looked like a body in the back.
All washed up. The image was blurry enough to raise reasonable doubts, but fortunately, a motorist named Melodie Hall, who was situated high up in the driver’s seat of a tractor trailer, got a clear view of the back of the pickup and saw the body dressed in white socks and dark colored pants, court papers say.
Hall saw the driver’s hair was slicked back as though he’d recently taken a shower, according to the It Takes a Killer episode “The Murder of Rachel Siani.” She didn’t report the incident, because she figured the sprawled-out person was just drunk. It was 3:13 a.m., after all.
Jack Denofa’s truck returned 25 minutes later with the back empty, no body, video footage showed.
Off key. Police searched the truck, which Denofa had cleaned thoroughly, but they discovered some blood in the back, enough to do a DNA test. It came from Rachel Siani.
Confronted with the forensic evidence, Jack Denofa said it wasn’t him driving the truck. Diva’s staff had taken his keys from him a few times — maybe an unknown evildoer copied them in order to frame him.
Investigators weren’t buying it.
Talk show. It seemed more likely that on the night of the murder, the one-sidedness of his relationship with Rachel suddenly dawned on him.
Although concerned about his getting to his hotel safely, Rachel wasn’t quite the stripper with the heart of gold of Hollywood movies.
She had reportedly told her friends at the club that Jack was a sucker for paying her $100 or more just for sitting with him. Sometimes, he gave her so much money for chatting that she didn’t have to bother dancing for dollar bills.
Pool of blood. The medical examiner noted burst blood vessels in Rachel’s eyes and on the rest of her face. He concluded that someone choked Rachel until she passed out that night in his room at the Econo Lodge.
A hotel guest remembered hearing a thud the night of the murder and police found Rachel’s blood in the parking lot below Denofa’s room.
Investigators believe Rachel rejected an advance and he choked her until she lost consciousness. Believing she had died, he then tried to put her on a ledge outside his room so he could drive his truck underneath and drop her into the back.
But he lost hold of her and she fell to the ground, leaving the blood stain on the parking lot.
Still breathing. Jack then threw her in the back of the truck and headed east to the bridge connecting the Pennsylvania and New Jersey turnpikes. He threw her body off the bridge — from a height of either 112 feet or 200 feet (accounts vary) — so it would look like a suicide.
She landed on the grass and died of massive injuries from the impact, which created indentations in the ground.
Dr. Faruk Presswalla, the New Jersey State medical examiner, would later testify that the internal bleeding she suffered indicated she was still alive when Jack Denofa threw her from the bridge.
Cops have their man. Econo Lodge night-auditor Diane Crouch told investigators that she saw Denofa walking fast to the parking lot that night and that he later checked out “smelling of soap and without a word,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Police arrested Denofa and placed him in the Bucks County Jail.
Meanwhile, Rachel’s family had to wait to bury her because investigators needed her body for evidence. It’s not clear whether everyone knew where Rachel worked, but her father definitely did.
“It’s not something I would have chosen for her,” Richard Siani told the Associated Press, “but it was something she was doing temporarily to pay her way through school.”
No judgments. The Sianis also had to bear the aforementioned media storm. The Philadelphia Daily News devoted four reporters and three pages to her story, “Death of a Dancer,” on April 17, 2000.
Meanwhile, no one seemed to use words like “lecher” or “sleazy character” to describe Jack Denofa for spending money vying for the attention of younger women while he had a wife at home. News stories referred to him as a “businessman.”
But the law considered him a dangerous individual.
Declining to testify. A judge originally set Jack’s bail at $1 million but later reduced it $500,000 and required him to turn over his passport. More than 20 of his friends showed up for the bail hearing and some of them chipped in toward the cause, according to an AP account.
At the month-long trial, Jack declined to take the stand, a wise move as recounting his days as a stripper patron too tipsy to drive himself home probably wouldn’t have helped the case.
Nonetheless, the defense produced 11 witnesses who testified about his “reputation for truth and honesty’ and “issues of habit and custom,” according to court papers.
Breadwinner. His mother-in-law, JoAnn Zener, even took the stand in his defense.
She testified that Jack was a good guy and that, although she didn’t like his boozy trips to the lap-dance emporium, “that was his time of relaxation with people he knew who accepted his drinking and accepted him,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Zener noted that her son-in-law made a nice living and took good care of Lisa Denofa.
Throwing off suspicion. To their credit, Denofa and defense lawyer Albert Cepparulo didn’t try the classic “she attacked me first and died by accident while I was defending myself” ploy (see Jonathan Nyce and Richard Nyhuis).
But they did go the trash-the-victim route.
“She had a number of lovers, and a number of men wanted to be the only man,” Cepparulo said. He also contended that Rachel used drugs heavily and knew motorcycle gang members who might have killed her.
Richard Siani said that it seemed as though his daughter were on trial rather than her killer.
Speedy verdict. Fortunately, members of the jury didn’t feel that way.
After deliberating for two hours, they found him guilty on Nov. 29, 2002.
Before leading him away, officers allowed him to hug his “wailing” wife and his mother. “The constricted position hindered his usual swagger,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Lisa Denofa was helped to the elevator by John’s mother and sister.
No bail. “This part of it is over,” said Richard Siani, “but Rachel will not be with us at Thanksgiving or at Christmas.”
Judge Thomas Smith deemed Denofa a flight risk and revoked his bail, so he stayed in jail between the hearing and the sentencing in February 2003 — when he made his first public statement since his arrest three years earlier.
“I am not a murderer. I have been wrongly convicted,” Denofa said. “I grieve for Rachel and her loved ones…I pray every day her killer will be found.”
Interstate intrigue. The judge gave him a sentence of life with a chance at parole after 30 years.
Jack Denofa “raised his cuffed hands to his lips and blew a kiss to his wife, Lisa,” as officers led him away, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
In 2005, Jack won a new trial based on a claim that the judge didn’t make it clear to the jury that they could only reach a guilty verdict if they believed Rachel died in New Jersey rather than Pennsylvania.
Defense drains dad. His lawyers argued that three different autopsies had each yielded a different cause of death.
The decision meant he could apply for bail, which a judge set at $1 million. His father, also named Jack, who had underwritten the cost of the defense for the first trial, said that this time his son wouldn’t make bail and would have to use a public defender.
“All my money is gone,” the senior Denofa said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I spent it on attorneys.”
Living to the max. The New Jersey Supreme Court reinstated Jack Denofa’s “where did she die conviction” in 2006.
In 2017, a court denied a writ of habeas corpus petition that Denofa filed.
Today, John Denofa resides in the New Jersey State Prison, a maximum security facility built in 1836 and formerly known as Trenton State Prison.
Wait, there’s more. He is still maneuvering to get out earlier than in 2032 — when, at the age of 68, he’ll have a shot at parole.
Incidentally, the venerable Diva’s International Gentlemen’s Club found its way into the spotlight again, when HBO used it as the setting for the reality show G-String Divas.
One of the divas, Shannon Reinert, might be familar to Forensic Files viewers because she figured into the 2005 episode “Summer Obsession.”
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
