Joan D'Alessandro remembered as family's fight for child abuse victims marks 50 years

HILLSDALE ― Jim Tobin was a little more than a year into serving as a patrolman with the borough Police Department on April 19, 1973, when he was called to Rosemarie D'Alessandro's home on a report of a missing girl.

D'Alessandro's daughter, Joan, had been gone a couple hours, Tobin recalled, as he spoke to a crowd Wednesday evening outside the Hillsdale train station on the 50th anniversary of what he would soon come to find out was a ghastly killing that would rock the sleepy bedroom community and change criminal justice in the state and the nation for decades to come.

"We start off solemnly. That is all part of it," Rosemarie said in her opening remarks. "At the end it will go to hope."

Joan, a 7-year-old Brownie Girl Scout, was last seen leaving her home to sell cookies around the neighborhood. Shortly after knocking on the door of Joseph McGowan, a high school chemistry teacher who lived across the street, she was sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled to death. At just 4-foot-3, the aspiring ballerina was no match for her towering attacker, 19 years her senior.

McGowan, who would later admit to the killing, wrapped her body, loaded it into his car and drove to Stony Point at the edge of Harriman State Park in Rockland County, New York, where Joan's body was found three days later, on Easter Sunday.

Frederick Zugib, then the medical examiner for Rockland County, called the case one of the most brutal crimes he had investigated.

But at the time Tobin took the call, he assumed it was the type of missing persons case common to Hillsdale: A child loses their parent in a crowd or they stay out playing too late and don't call home.

He pulled up to D'Alessandro's home, and before he could leave his cruiser, Rosemarie stepped out of her house and entered his vehicle, tears welling in her eyes, he said.

"After that, I thought, maybe this is a little darker than that initial feeling," Tobin recalled Wednesday at the candlelight vigil to commemorate Joan's slaying and her mother's decades-long fight to ensure that childhood victims of abuse and their families have the recourse and resources neither she nor Joan had.

Among the family and friends who gathered in the butterfly garden outside the Hillsdale train station, where the landscaping was adorned with green and orange lights ― a nod to Joan's favorite colors ― were Joan's younger brothers, Michael and John, who were both born after their sister's death.

Before McGowan's second bid for parole in 1993 brought up difficult feelings for the D'Alessandros, "it was like I had a sister who was an angel in heaven," John recalled of his blissful ignorance.

That event, and his mother's vociferous fight to keep McGowan behind bars, shattered John's naïveté. "It was scary," he said of realizing the gravity of his family's history amid an emotional battle with the State Parole Board.

Rosemarie's staunch resistance to McGowan's potential release moved the still-grieving mother to ensure other families would not have to suffer the same trauma of fearing that their child's attacker would again be among the general population.

In 1997, she successfully lobbied for the passage of what came to be known as Joan's Law, which repealed parole eligibility for any detainees convicted of sexually assaulting or killing a child under age 14. The next year, federal lawmakers passed a similar rule.

McGowan remained grandfathered into his sentence and was never subject to the new rule. Yet he never benefited from the carve-out and died in 2021 while serving a life sentence at South Woods State Prison, four years before he would have been up for parole yet again.

"It's like a different phase," John said of the 50th-anniversary event, now that McGowan is gone and the focus can return to Joan's life, however brief. "It's less urgent," he added, and about "appreciation."

"She was a leader," said Olivia Galgano, who taught Joan's ballet class and five decades later can still vividly recall the waifish girl. "Often, I would say we have to line up and she would run to be first."

Not in a pushy or self-important way, Galgano reflected, but wanting to be at the forefront of it all.

Mere months after McGowan's death, the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office cut the ribbon on "Rosemarie's Room," a new extension to the office's Child Advocacy Center in Paramus, where law enforcement, medical and mental health professionals can tackle allegations of child abuse.

Jason Love, then the chief detective of the office, described the expansion as a "safe place for our children to whisper their secrets."

It was allegedly the whisper of a secret that was McGowan's undoing.

As Tobin continued to recount the investigation into Joan's death Wednesday at the Hillsdale train station, he said that as investigators grilled McGowan for the second time, probing his involvement in the savage killing, their suspect continued to deny any part in what occurred.

As their scrutiny grew closer to the truth, he did not request an attorney, but a priest, Tobin said.

Offering him the same privilege as they would someone in a confession booth, the detectives stepped out while McGowan spoke with the cleric. On his way out of the interrogation room, Tobin said, the priest turned to the officers and told them, "Fellas, keep questioning him."

Rosemarie details her fight to keep Joan's memory alive in a soon-to-be-released book, "The Message of Light Amid Letters of Darkness." Proceeds from the book's sale will benefit the Joan Angela D’Alessandro Foundation, which advocates for child victims of abuse.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Joan D'Alessandro remembered in Hillsdale 50 years after her murder