Disposable Lives

We ignored four hookers in life. Why are we so fascinated by their deaths?

by Brian Hickey

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Published: Dec 13, 2006

When a corpse is dumped in water, it floats face down. During the first 12 hours, the muscles lock in place, starting with the head and ending with the toes. During the next day or so, that rigor mortis reverses itself; from toes to head, the muscles relax. The skin toughens and pimples. This is called goose-skin, or anserina cutis. Then, it becomes swollen and wrinkled, a phenomenon named maceration, or washer-woman's skin. As bacteria start eating away at body tissue, the corpse, now a greenish-red hue, starts emitting a putrid odor.

By the third day, gas pockets form internally, causing the stomach to swell. That can split the skin open and form cracks through which greenish-bronze and reddish-brown fluids seep. The water, even if shallow, forces the victim's hands and feet to balloon. Soon, portions of the outer layer of skin will separate from the underlying tissues and slide off.

By day 10 post-mortem, the fingernails and more skin start peeling off, body hair starts falling out and silt will have found its way into the airways, lungs and stomach. The body has turned greenish-black.

If it's left there for more than a month, the layer of fat beneath the skin will take on a soaplike texture and ooze from the body.

If the person died from strangulation, the face, taking on a dusky hue, will appear swollen. The neck may be bruised, abrasions may be evident and the blood vessels in the eyes will have burst.

The longer the body decomposes, the more difficult it is for police to identify the victim. Because the longer the body remains there, the more signs of humanity have disappeared.

This is gruesome, yes. But it is the reality of such a death.

And they are the sights and the smells that confronted a pair of women who, while walking behind a row of flop-house motels on the highway leading into Atlantic City late last month, found the body of Kim Raffo. Sometime between 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 19 and 3 p.m. on Nov. 20, the life was strangled out of the 35-year-old PTA-mom-turned-addict/prostitute. Finding Raffo's corpse was disturbing, but it could have been worse for the women.

About 50 yards away was Molly Jean Dilts, a 20-year-old who ran here from western Pennsylvania in October. The coroner estimated that her body had been left there about a month earlier.

Another 30 yards away lay the remains of Barbara V. Breidor, a 42-year-old from nearby Ventnor who'd been there for at least two weeks. As with Dilts, the level of decomposition made it impossible to determine what killed her.

And had they walked yet another 30 yards and looked down in the watery ditch, they'd have discovered the lifeless body of Tracy Ann Roberts, a 23-year-old whose healthy looks contradicted the street life she'd chosen. Roberts had been there up to a week, which wasn't long enough to veil what killed her. Someone choked off her ability to breathe.

As the ensuing law-enforcement and satellite-truck onslaught would attest, this was more than a multiple murder. This series of slayings would highlight America's obsession with serial killers while showing what happens when a neighborhood is left to decompose like bodies pulled from the muck.

But adding a sense of urgency was a sense that nobody knows what a person who took the time to remove the women's shoes and socks, carry the bodies down into the sewer easement and position their heads to face the bright lights of a rejuvenated Atlantic City is capable of doing next.

Though tight-lipped investigators won't say it publicly, this was a statement.

The statement of a textbook "harlot killer" who — driven by sadism, a need for power and a hatred of women — dehumanized four mothers, took trophies to remind him of what he'd done and discarded the bodies like leftover table scraps.

It was the statement of a serial killer who, still on the loose, has the castoffs who run the same drug-and-prostitution-laced circuit of Atlantic City's dead zone wondering whether more bodies will soon turn up. Whether one of those bodies will be their own. And, if so, whether they'd be missed.

THE DEAD: (From top to bottom): Raffo, Dilts, Breidor and Roberts. (Raffo photograph courtesy of the Press of the Press of Atlantic City.)

The second of four women found in a drainage ditch in Egg Harbor Township on Monday was identified. The woman is 23-year-old Tracy Ann Roberts. Roberts was a 5'8" tall, white female, about 120 pounds with a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back. Roberts had been designated Victim 4. ... Only one other victim has been identified. The first body found was that of Kim Raffo, 35. —Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey S. Blitz, Nov. 24.

About five miles from the crime scene, "Papa" Joe Bocchino owns four rooming houses and a dinette on the beach block of Tennessee Avenue in Atlantic City. He's a Brooklyn native who dominates all conversations. His employees know not to interrupt when he gets on a roll. It doesn't go over well.

Today, nine days after the bodies of four women, three of whom he knew, were pulled from the ditch, he's talking about life on his street and on adjacent Ocean Avenue, a depressed, bombed-out strip of row homes within eyeshot of Resorts Atlantic City. He refers to it as "Crack Avenue." It's not an exaggeration; at all hours of the day, you can walk along Ocean and cop drugs or sex.

Between Tennessee and Ocean, not far from a spray-painted sign urging locals to "Repent to Jesus," lies a trash-strewn alley. Right behind the remnants of a row home that was gutted in a 1998 fire, it's where the women take their johns to turn enough tricks to get enough money for their next fix. This is the kind of place where society's perceived bottom feeders get their nourishment.

But to Bocchino and others who knew the victims, they're not bottom feeders who can be written off; they're people with families and problems and challenges that he'd like to see them overcome, if it's not too late. And that, he says, has been lost since the bodies were found.

Papa Joe opens his restaurant before sunrise, goes over to the soup kitchen at 6:30 a.m. to prep for the daily homeless meal, comes back to work for a couple hours and then heads back to the soup kitchen to feed those without enough money to feed themselves. He remembers his regulars' orders. Raffo liked a sausage-and-egg bagel; Dilts, who had only been around for a couple weeks, always grabbed an orange soda and said, "Thank you Papa Joe!" If they don't have enough money to pay, he'll give them a hard time before cutting them a break; they can pay later, as the women often had to.

Papa Joe says he'd harangue the girls to "shock them," the sort of tough love needed to keep them aware that their souls weren't entirely lost.

"There must be a sign on the Expressway that tells these girls to come to Tennessee Avenue," says the apron-sporting 63-year-old who wears a cross and a large diamond-shaped pendant on chains around his neck. "I call them every name in the book. I used to call them $4 hookers. Give them $5, and they have to give you change."

Don't get Papa Joe wrong; much of what he says is bluster.

"People got problems and they come down here looking for jobs or whatever, and then realize that it isn't here. Ninety percent of the people who come in here are outcasts," he says. "But I don't care. These are my people, and I take care of them. I may run a restaurant in the ghetto, but that doesn't mean I have to run a ghetto restaurant."

Papa Joe isn't exaggerating when he declares, "This is my fucking block." He may have no stake in the African hair braiding shop, massage parlor, Asian restaurants, motels, pub, parking lots and Casino Control Commission, but there's a waiting list to get one of his rooms. That's probably because he says he feels compelled, for $140 a week, to provide heat, a TV and a microwave when all he's required to give them is a bed.

For weeks, some of his renters, and area prostitutes who worked around the corner, knew the women were missing, and when word came out that bodies were discovered behind the motels, they knew who the victims were before anybody else. Since the murders, Papa Joe's block hasn't been the same. Cop cars seem to be on 24/7 patrol and a parade of reporters, cameras and curious onlookers come by to check the diner out.

As early as 4 a.m., when Papa Joe opens up, he gets ambushed. Though the locals are sick of the attention — particularly cameramen who still take pictures of the restaurant after they're asked not to — everybody gets a kick out of the fact that, just yesterday, a beat-up van pulled up and none other than Geraldo Rivera hopped out.

"He asked me how it can all be fixed," Papa Joe says, referring to a world that drives onetime clean-cut women to indiscriminately dole out blowjobs in a seedy alley. "How can it be fixed? Who the fuck am I? Dr. Phil?"

Over the course of a couple hours, as reporters from New York City and Pittsburgh traipse through, and representatives from Court TV and 48 Hours call to schedule interviews, he'll tell the same story at least four times. When the laughter subsides, Papa Joe is asked why he bothers doing all this when he could easily turn his back on the downtrodden.

"They're like children to me," says Bocchino, who has three kids, 13 grandkids and "about 100 more that I've adopted. I just don't have the heart to say no."

It's the only kindness some of them see anymore.

Breidor, who was designated Victim 3, is a 5'7" white female, weighing between 140 and 150 pounds who was dressed in Capri blue pants and a long-sleeved brown zippered jacket when her body was found. ... Breidor was identified through dental records. ... Breidor, Raffo and Roberts have records for prostitution arrests. —Blitz, Nov. 27.

 

Nine months pregnant, a local who won't give her name stands outside Papa Joe's. Turning her head to spit on the sidewalk every couple minutes, she says she's tired of being asked if she knew the victims. Of course she knew them. Everybody knew 'em around here. Despite that familiarity, grief is a rare commodity on Tennessee and Crack avenues.

"Four crackhead whores die and it's front-page news? Can you tell me what's the big deal?" she asks nobody in particular. "People be dying [in town] every motherfucking night and nobody hears about it."

Contrary to popular perception, people don't be dying in Atlantic City every motherfucking night. In fact, the average annual homicide tally sits in the single digits. Still, she's right about one thing: The case has been a big deal since Nov. 21, when the Press of Atlantic City ran its "4 dead in Egg Harbor Township marsh" story.

At that point, little information was available as local homicide investigators succeeded in keeping details from being leaked. Still, news trucks filled the parking lots of nearby motels and helicopters hovered over the scene as investigators — on foot, with dogs and in canoes —scoured the marshes for evidence.

Each subsequent day, as names were reunited with their bodies, brought more attention. The Press would track down relatives and acquaintances whose stories would encourage us to see them as more than just a bunch of dead hookers, as people instead of Victim 1, 2, 3 or 4.

It took gruesome deaths for these women to finally be humanized, and the stories added to the tragedy.

Raffo was fighting drug addiction so she could have a chance to see her 12-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, who'd been placed in foster care. Her estranged husband Hugh Auslander would come to town from Florida, provide the papers with his ex-wife's picture and life story and place a cross with a white rose nailed to it near the crime scene.

Roberts, who roomed with Raffo, was known as the young, pretty one who drew a higher-caliber clientele to Crack Avenue. She was attractive enough to get a gig at a strip joint on par with those on Columbus Boulevard.

"They come and work here but when they can't make enough money, they end up out on the street prostituting to make enough for their drugs," a stripper at the Playground gentlemen's club said. "It happens all the time, but nobody deserves that. Nobody deserves to get butchered."

Of the four, Breidor is the wildcard. She didn't frequent Ocean Avenue, but some of the hookers there said they knew her from a rooming house in neighboring Ventnor.

This leads to questions as to how the killer met his victims, since Breidor wasn't picked up where the others worked. Nobody seems to know how the women uncharacteristicly ended up going offshore. If investigators could figure out the answer to that important question, the case would be solved and the attention would shift toward the trial of a known serial killer.

Raised in a well-off family from Huntington Valley, Breidor used to go to Margate in the summers and, at some point, decided to stay. Despite having a young daughter, drugs led her astray, too.

Finally, there's Dilts, the first killed and last identified. She had only arrived in Atlantic City in October. Locals said she seemed depressed. That might have had something to do with the fact that the 20-year-old fled her hometown in western Pennsylvania, where she faced drunken-driving and drug-related charges. She left her 18-month-old son with a boyfriend.

Papa Joe says Dilts was addicted but adds, "I don't think she was a prostitute, but who knows what she did when she ran out? Nobody's going to give you crack on credit."

As these details emerged, the story spread beyond Atlantic City and Philadelphia. After all, serial killers tend to grab the attention of the New York City tabloids. One wrote the standard Tale of Two Atlantic Cities piece — so much money in the casinos, so little in the neighborhoods — and another, true to serial-killer-fascination form, dubbed the killer the "Black Horse Strangler." (The bodies were found near motels on the Black Horse Pike.)

While publicity has been blamed for interfering with high-profile cases before, when asked last week whether the attention has had any effect on the investigation, county prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz said it's hard to tell.

"Some [of the information out there] is accurate," he said, "and some of it is inaccurate." He wouldn't say which was which.

For better, worse or having no impact, these stories have become part of the story's narrative. Blitz, however, offers little more than what he's legally obligated to. For example, during a phone interview last week, he was asked:

Do you worry that there may be more bodies out there? "All that we can comment on is that we're investigating these four."

Do you know how the bodies got there? "No comment."

Could this case ultimately boost the A.C. homicide rate? "At this point, it's Egg Harbor Township," so, for statistics' sake, they're not Atlantic City homicides. But, "that could change. The investigation is ongoing."

In other words, he didn't bite on questions asked to determine whether the women were killed at the motel, or if they were murdered elsewhere and dumped there.

It goes without saying that there's no official comment on whether the killer has contacted the authorities to taunt them and boast of his abilities, as often happens in such cases.

The last remaining woman found in a drainage ditch in Egg Harbor Township last week was identified as 20-year-old Molly Jean Dilts. The victim was identified through fingerprints after information was received from Pennsylvania State Police that Dilts had been reported missing and she fit the description of one of the victims who had not yet been identified. Dilts last spoke with family members in Blairsville, PA on October 7. Dilts had been designated Victim 2. ... Her cause of death is listed as undetermined pending police investigation. —Blitz, Nov. 28.

If Blitz doesn't seem too concerned about the heavy coverage, inaccuracies in media accounts of the case are fueling the ire of those hanging out at Papa Joe's. They say one article incorrectly identified a victim as a local woman who'd suffered from AIDS. They were right on one count: There was a local woman with the same name suffering from AIDS. But they were wrong on another: She was alive. Her father read the story and came into the restaurant in tears; he was relieved to learn she wasn't dead, but knows his daughter's private medical information is now available for public consumption.

Like everything in Atlantic City, this too apparently comes down to money. "Word got out that someone paid $100 for an interview, so everybody's telling all kinds of stories," Papa Joe explains, noting that rumors of police having a cell-phone picture of a suspect, and that the killer drove a white van, are inaccurate. "For the first week, all these reporters were camped outside the restaurant. I didn't want to talk to any of you and I didn't."

Why the change? "Too many lies were going into the papers."

Yes, finding someone to quote on Crack Avenue has been as easy as scoring a rock.

"I think I met the guy," said one man walking near the methadone clinic a stone's throw from Ocean Avenue. "I work at the gas station on the [Atlantic City] Expressway and the other day, this guy came in driving a cab, he had this weird vibe. I know when someone's shady."

Antsy and paranoid, the cabbie asked the attendant if there were cameras recording his face or his license plate at the gas station, which sits about 200 yards from where the bodies were discovered.

Then, a prostitute named "Cinnamon" with alert eyes, braided hair, a slight lisp and unusually clean clothes working the street around 10 a.m., said she had information that would break the case. For $20, she'd provide a cell-phone number and picture of the guy who she said took the victims from Atlantic City out to the motels behind which their bodies were found. When told buying information was unethical, she dropped her price to $10, offered that she was once roommates with one of the victims and said that the killer himself would be coming to pick her up in 25 minutes.

Asked why she'd get in a car with someone who could be a serial killer, Cinnamon explained, "I'm not scared because I got him under my finger. But you're running out of time. He's getting ready to get up out of here because of all the media."

Looking for some more credible ideas, I turned to Atlantic City police officers I knew from my four years of covering the department for the Press. One explained that part of the problem is that last year, the former police chief gutted the vice unit's ability to keep on top of street-prostitution activity. Ocean Avenue, in many ways, was left to decompose.

Papa Joe agrees. He says there aren't nearly enough police officers in Atlantic City to keep an eye on every pocket of town. "You can't depend on the police," he said, noting that he's been robbed before. "That's why I got my baseball bat and my nine iron here."

In other words, gone were the proactive days when, among other initiatives, undercover female officers would pose as prostitutes and sweep up dozens of johns. These initiatives went beyond traditional crime fighting; they were a makeshift outreach program in which police could warn the women about the dangers of the life path they'd chosen.

"These hookers, you have to work them on a daily basis. You have to catch them right away or else they're in trouble," said the officer. "They're at such risk in the area they're in. Vulnerable. When they go missing, nobody knows, nobody reports it. If you can get to them early, you have a chance [to help them turn their lives around]. But they're the lowest; that area has finally hit rock bottom. Within a few years, you'll see the bulldozers coming through."

The officer said he's worried about the investigation, and not only because the department lost 60 high-ranking officers in one mass-retirement swoop late last month. "You're dealing with people who won't be good witnesses to begin with," he says, "and there's not that much forensic evidence from what I understand, because they were in the water."

Another officer with homicide-investigation experience had worked up a profile. "You're looking for someone familiar with that area, maybe a handyman at one of the motels down there. Late 20s, early 30s, and he snapped over something recently," the officer hypothesized off-the-record. "If you look into his past, you'll see smaller assaults and other cases, but then he exploded and this happened. They need to start looking in other places, too. I'd bet there are more bodies out there."

Odds of an arrest? "This guy's long gone by now."

While he's more distant from the Atlantic City front, Harold Schechter, author of several true-crime books including The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (Pocket Books), also has some thoughts.

Having watched the case develop from New York City, Schechter couldn't say whether the killer fled or stayed nearby to bask in all the attention his crimes have wrought. But when it comes to serial killers, aside from falling into the same category as the infamous Jack the Ripper, this guy's nothing special. At this point, at least.

"He just seems like your standard, serial sex murderer," Schechter explains. "It's a compulsion, and the publicity adds to the thrill of it. Like Jimmy Breslin said about the Son of Sam, he was a nobody until he became a somebody by killing people. Having had a lifetime of humiliation, this gives them a sense of power."

Of the missing shoes and socks, he notes, "It's fetishistic. It provides them with an artifact they can masturbate over, evoke the crime again, it's exciting to him."

As for pointing the bodies toward Atlantic City, he suggested, "there's a ritualistic element to it, but I can't tell exactly what it means. He's operating in his own little world and it means something to him in there."

Let's turn the Hunter (the Killer) into the Hunted. Drop Dime on the Killer of the 4 Atlantic City Women. —Flyer posted throughout the city by members of the Guardian Angels, who spent a weekend here hoping to help break the case.

If the police have any suspects in mind, nobody here knows it. All that people on and around Crack Avenue know is this:

At 2:30 a.m. one Sunday, Raffo was at Papa Joe's grabbing a bite to eat before she took off with an unknown man. By 3 p.m. the next day, her body was discovered under a billboard of a smiling Geater. Should investigators figure out who Raffo was with and where she was during that span, they'll likely know who is responsible for killing four women.

Was she taken to the Golden Key and killed there? One man who's lived there for a while claimed that police showed him photographs of two of the bodies to help identify them. (He recognized them as having been there before and said that as of the end of November, investigators had searched two rooms there. While the prostitutes tended to work in A.C., some did come out to the Pike to turn tricks on occasion.) Or, did someone who knew the women from the Tennessee Avenue corridor kill them in Atlantic City and take the bodies offshore for disposal?

If Papa Joe has an inkling, he's not saying.

"Thank God the police know everything I know and nobody else," he said, while outside the restaurant, leaning against a parking meter while having a smoke. "That's the way I want it."

All he, and his people, can do now is wait to see whether investigators are able to track down whoever killed four mothers who, regardless of what choices they made in life, tragically left behind five children.

But even if there is an arrest, it can't change the fact that, much like a body that's been left in the water for weeks, Tennessee and Crack avenues have decomposed to a hopeless place where humanity takes a backseat to survival. Where conditions are so desperate that women are still heading off into the darkness with total strangers so rocks can still be smoked — even if it costs them their lives.

It also won't change America's morbid serial-killer fascination, which is rooted in a voyeuristic sense of relief that expendable hookers, and not our wives and daughters, are paying the steep price.

Even though the victims were mothers and daughters themselves, we'll watch, but won't try to understand what can be done to help them. Their deaths will do little to break a tragic cycle that keeps society's most vulnerable people forever in danger of winding up on Geraldo because they were found dead in a ditch.

"Maybe these new girls will learn," hoped an Ocean Avenue regular. But, "ain't nothing gonna be different around here because of this."

(hickey@citypaper.net)