After 3 years, prostitutes' killings still a mystery

ATLANTIC CITY - Denise Hill can't shake her memory of River Man.

The acknowledged prostitute, who lives and works in this seaside gambling resort, was entertaining a client - a shoe fetishist - in November 2006 when the man blurted out a confession.

He had killed people, he told Hill as the two partied on crack. He had killed women.

Hill's john called himself "River Man," an apparent reference to a similarly named Seattle-area killer who strangled dozens of women - mostly prostitutes - in the 1980s and '90s and is now serving a life sentence.

The next day, during Thanksgiving week, the bodies of four "working girls" were found barefoot in a shallow ravine behind the Golden Key Motel, on the Black Horse Pike in the West Atlantic City section of Egg Harbor Township - a strip notorious for prostitution and drugs.

As the details of the crime scene emerged, all Hill could think of was River Man.

Three years after the Nov. 20, 2006, discovery, the killings of Kim Raffo, Molly Jean Dilts, Barbara Breidor, and Tracy Ann Roberts remain unsolved.

Atlantic County Prosecutor Theodore F.L. Housel said last year that investigators had spent 175,000 hours attempting to solve the crimes. This year, he has said little except to confirm that the case is active and that he recently assigned additional investigators, an update he provided in a written statement.

The lack of information concerns many, including Hill, who feels that authorities never seriously considered her tip about River Man.

The victims "seem to be forgotten," said Bill Southrey, president of the Atlantic City Rescue Mission, where two of the women sought help. "Collectively, I think society doesn't really give a hoot."

After the deaths, Southrey recalled last week, "people were fearful, for sure."

At first, it appeared there had been only one killing. Two women were walking a trash-strewn dirt path when they spotted Raffo, 35. But when investigators traversed the swampy area, adjacent to the Atlantic City Expressway, they found Dilts, 20, Breidor, 42, and Roberts, 23.

Raffo and Roberts had been strangled, authorities said. The other bodies were too decomposed for a cause of death to be determined.

The victims were dressed, except for their shoes. Each was positioned with her head pointing toward the Atlantic City skyline, two miles east. All but one had a high concentration of drugs in their systems, autopsies showed.

Though it appears the slayings were carried out by a serial killer, the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office said last year that it had not ruled out the possibility of multiple suspects.

The deaths saddened homeless advocates, who said the women had been struggling to turn their lives around.

Raffo, a New York native and former PTA mom with two children, had become a hooker to feed her drug habit, relatives said. Breidor, who attended Pennsylvania State University with aspirations of a law career, had a 9-year-old daughter. Both visited the rescue mission, said Debbi Giacomoni, its director of women's ministries.

Raffo was "really seeking help and change," recalled Giacomoni, who said that the two stood out because they referred to their families and others who loved them. "It was just so tragic that something like that would happen at that moment."

Sister Jean Webster runs the soup kitchen at Victory Presbyterian Deliverance Church, where the women ate.

"They were nice girls, very respectful, regardless of what they did," Webster said.

Raffo had said, "I'm going back to New York to get my life together," Webster remembered. "What gets me is they never found the person that did it."

Former prostitute Gloria Adkins, 49, lives at the mission and remembers that Thanksgiving week.

"In my addiction days, it could have been me. It could have been any of us," she said.

She has been attacked twice, Adkins said. One time, she had been given a "bag of dope and a bag of coke" as payment. After consuming the drugs, she said, she lost consciousness and was sexually assaulted. After both incidents, Adkins said, police were "unsympathetic," asking what she had expected.

There are high risks for women who work the streets, and solving their killings is difficult. Additionally, authorities can be reluctant to acknowledge the work of a serial killer.

"It took me years to convince the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that if you have two, you have a series," said Vernon J. Geberth, a retired New York City homicide detective. His consulting firm, Practical Homicide Investigation, provides forensic training for law enforcement.

In such cases, it is productive to publicize information that could generate new leads, Geberth said.

"It doesn't make sense, with a case like this, to continue to keep the public uninformed," Geberth said.

"Three years is a long time," and the reason a person stayed silent can change, he said. "Relationships change, some people break up, some people go to jail, some people meet people or hear things."

Hugh Auslander, Raffo's estranged husband, told the Associated Press last week that he had not heard from authorities in a year.

"I don't think they have anything at all," Auslander said. "This has caused nothing but misery for me, so I'm trying to just move on with my life at this point."

Housel, the prosecutor, declined repeated requests to speak to The Inquirer for this article. On Tuesday, his office issued a three-paragraph news release that said "investigative efforts to solve the murders" continued with assistance from federal, state, and local agencies and national databases.

Earlier this year, the FBI released information about a database that focuses on homicide victims found along highways and a link to truckers. The agency launched an initiative in 2004 to look at the victims, primarily women with high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving drugs, alcohol, and prostitution.

There are 500 victims and 200 suspects from across the United States in the database, which is available only to law enforcement.

"The mobile nature of the offenders, the high-risk lifestyle of the victims, the significant distances and involvement of multiple jurisdictions, the lack of witnesses and forensic evidence combine to make these cases almost impossible to solve using conventional investigative techniques," FBI Special Agent Ann Todd said last month in an e-mail.

Asked whether the four local victims were in the database, the FBI referred a reporter to Atlantic County authorities, who would not say.

The lack of information released publicly by the Prosecutor's Office has raised criticism of an investigation that has seen odd twists.

There was a confession from an inmate who authorities determined was lying.

There was the mysterious River Man.

And there was Terry Oleson, 37, a handyman from Salem County. Oleson came under scrutiny after his arrest on unrelated charges but never was implicated in the killings, said James Leonard, his attorney. Oleson would like investigators to clear his name.

"I think they have a duty to let the public know what's going on," said Leonard of Atlantic City, adding that his client had submitted DNA samples. "When they do catch this guy, this guy's name will not be Terry Oleson."

Early on, Hill mistakenly thought Oleson was River Man. But when River Man returned to Atlantic City two more times, Hill contacted investigators, Leonard, and a producer for television's America's Most Wanted, which had aired three segments about the killings.

Leonard sent an investigator, who snapped the man's photo surreptitiously in June 2008. America's Most Wanted also got footage, said a series producer, Peter Gillespie.

The three segments that aired nationally on the Fox network generated dozens of tips each time, Gillespie said. Plans to air an update were scuttled when the Prosecutor's Office refused to put a representative on camera.

Hill has a theory.

"They don't care about what happened to those girls," she said last week, standing near a filthy mattress discarded at the scene where the bodies were found. "We're human, you know. And we've got family, too. We've got mothers, fathers, grandmothers and aunts, uncles. . . . We're just as good as anyone else."