NYTimes front pager on 4 dead women in NJ

[sam]

If these four women all worked for the same employer I bet that connection would be prominently mentioned like the obvious prostitution connection is buried in the article. -sam

One of Four Women’s Bodies Identified in N.J.

http:// http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/nyreg ... ref=slogin

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J., Nov. 21 — None of them were wearing shoes or socks. Each was discovered face down in several inches of water, head tilted slightly to the east. At least one had been strangled.

Aside from those chilling details, the authorities here said on Tuesday that they did not know how the bodies of four unidentified women ended up in a drainage ditch behind a row of squalid motels in the shadow of Atlantic City’s glittering lights.

A day after the bodies were found on terrain about the length of a football field behind a seedy stretch of Route 40 known as the Black Horse Pike, investigators said they were working on their two most pressing tasks: identifying the women — all four white and two believed to be in their 20s — and finding a killer.

Here in Egg Harbor Township — a working-class section of Atlantic County just a mile distant but a world removed from the opulence of Atlantic City — a measure of fear and uncertainty took hold as the authorities worked a quadruple homicide with several odd facts.

The Atlantic County prosecutor, Jeffrey S. Blitz, said last night that three autopsies had been performed so far, and that two of the deaths had been classified as homicides.

Mr. Blitz said that one woman, identified by fingerprints and photographs as Kim Raffo, 35, about 5 feet 6 inches tall and 140 pounds, was wearing Capri-style pants and a Hard Rock Cafe tank top and was known to have been living in an Atlantic City rooming house.

Mr. Blitz said she died of ligature strangulation and had been dead for “a matter of days.”

A news release from the prosecutor’s office, quoting the Atlantic County medical examiner, Dr. Hydow Park, said that results of the second autopsy gave the cause of death as “asphyxia by unspecified means.”

That victim, thought to be in her 20s, was about 5 feet 8 inches tall and about 120 pounds, had a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back, and was wearing blue jeans, a red hooded sweatshirt and a black bra. Mr. Blitz said she had been in the water for up to a week.

The third woman, wearing Capri-style blue jeans and a long-sleeved brown zippered jacket, was about 5 feet 7 inches tall and 140 to 150 pounds.

She is thought to have been in her 30s and to have been in the water for at least two weeks.

The fourth woman, about 5 feet tall and 160 pounds, was wearing a denim miniskirt, a bra and a mesh blouse. She is to be autopsied Wednesday morning.

Ms. Raffo’s father, Robert, reached at his home in New York, said his daughter was “a loving kid” who married young, had two children, and was “very close to her younger sister.”

A brother-in-law, from his home in Miramar, Fla., said that after Ms. Raffo and her husband separated about six years ago, she went to Atlantic City with a boyfriend and got involved with drugs and prostitution. Later, she worked for her ex-husband’s construction business on Long Island.

Her current boyfriend, Charles Coles, said Ms. Raffo had returned to Atlantic City in September and worked as a prostitute.

“It hurt her and broke her down,” he said. “She was trying to get her life together to get her kids back.”

Mr. Blitz declined to say whether investigators thought the women had been killed elsewhere and dumped in the marshy area between the pike and the Atlantic City Expressway. Nor would he say if the deaths seemed the work of a serial killer.

“We will opine about that after the post-mortem examinations are completed,” he said.

Mr. Blitz acknowledged that the bodies were in different stages of decomposition, which could indicate that the women were not placed in the ditch at the same time.

The first and second bodies discovered were 148 feet apart; the third body was 90 feet from the second, and the fourth was 83 feet from the third, the news release said.

Mr. Blitz said, “Some of the decomposition is in the face because of the way they were in the water.”

Mr. Blitz did note one unusual detail about the way the women were found.

“They were laying in the drainage ditch with head facing east, down,” he said. “Whether that’s a coincidence or not, it is what it is.”

The first body was discovered by two women walking behind the Golden Key Motel on Monday about 3 p.m. Egg Harbor officers who came to the scene discovered the other bodies.

The area where the women were found is strewn with trash. On Tuesday, the litter behind the Golden Key near the spot where the first body was found included an empty vodka bottle, a pair of black Jockey undershorts, a used condom wrapper and a battered copy of the James Patterson novel “Beach Road.”

“This is the worst place to live,” said Yasmin Olan, 28, who stays at the motel with her son while her husband works at the Atlantic City Hilton. “There is a lot of prostitution that comes in and out of here, plus all the drugs.”

Ms. Olan then pointed to bloodstains outside her bathroom window, which she said had been there for three days, and a hole that had been cut in her window screen about a week earlier when someone tried to steal a TV dinner on the windowsill.

Larry Huggup, 23, who has lived at the Golden Key for three months, said that on Monday afternoon he heard four or five loud pops, but did not investigate because he thought it was a car backfiring.

Jiniece Hamlett, 25, a cocktail waitress who lives with Mr. Huggup, said she was afraid the killings were related to a recent incident in which she was approached by a man driving a gray Plymouth van.

Ms. Hamlett, who leaves for work around 3 a.m., said she noticed the man in the van driving up and down the Black Horse Pike for weeks.

She said he often stopped to leer at women, including her, and had left only after Mr. Huggup came to her side.

Mr. Blitz said that investigators were keeping a range of options open as they worked on identifying the women.

[sunnysmiles]

This article really upset me, but I haven't been so well the last few days anyways.

I can't believe they were left with the trash, just disposed of. That's what women's bodies are in prostitution; cum disposal units and when you are done - you just use and throw.

Yeah, I've got nothing else to say really.

[oneangrygirl]

there was a follow-up story over the weekend, i'll see if i can track it down w/o having to retype it in .

[oneangrygirl]

Broken Lives and Victims in Shadow of Taj Mahal

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and NATE SCHWEBER
Published: November 25, 2006
Sometimes, when troublemakers enter Papa Joe’s diner on Tennessee Avenue, Joe Boccino glares at them until they leave. Other times, he pulls out his black Easton baseball bat and raps it hard — once, twice, three times — on the counter.

“You’re in the middle of crack city,” Mr. Boccino said yesterday at his restaurant, surveying this blighted corner of Atlantic City, where the authorities think at least some of the four women found dead in a drainage ditch on Monday were known and spent much of their time.

Not far from the Boardwalk, it is the kind of neighborhood where trouble puts its feet up. Drugs and prostitution are the main pursuits of those who visit here, and of those who stay.

Up the street, on Pacific Avenue, prostitutes lean against pawn shop windows lined with engagement rings, scouting for customers.

When they want to eat, some come to Papa Joe’s. When they want to sleep or shower or shoot drugs, most walk around the corner to Ocean Avenue, a blocklong stretch between Pacific Avenue and the Boardwalk where crumbling homes and dilapidated boarding houses languish in the shadow of the nearby Trump Taj Mahal.

“These people have nowhere to stay. They just crash where they can,” Mr. Boccino said. “But they’re pretty good people. They’re like family.”

By yesterday, though, fear and a sense of resignation had settled in.

Kim Raffo, 35, from the Canarsie area of Brooklyn, was part of that family and was the first of the four murder victims identified.

Yesterday the authorities identified a second victim as Tracy Ann Roberts, 23. They said her last known address was on Tennessee Avenue and that she had been asphyxiated. Both she and Ms. Raffo had had prostitution arrests, the authorities said.

The Atlantic County prosecutor, Jeffrey S. Blitz, said a task force of almost two dozen investigators from the F.B.I., the state police and local agencies had been brought in to compare photographs, DNA samples and markings on some of the bodies.

Earlier, some of the regulars along Ocean Avenue said they feared the body of a woman with a butterfly tattoo, found wrapped in a red hooded sweatshirt, was that of Ms. Roberts, whom they described as a young, blond and boisterous Philadelphia native.

“I used to let her stay in my apartment, and I remember her sleeping 18 hours because she was so tired from ripping and running,” said Charles Coles, 40, who said he works in construction. He said detectives had shown him photographs that he recognized as being Ms. Roberts.

Mr. Coles said he last saw Ms. Roberts on Oct. 27 outside the Sands casino, where she told him that she had recently been hospitalized after a man assaulted her and hurt her throat.

His sister, Shakira Coles, said Ms. Roberts had family in Georgia and had spent time there herself. Ms. Coles said she had a “country accent” despite being from Philadelphia.

Jannette Brown, 47, said that the first and last times she ever saw Ms. Roberts she was asking for crack cocaine. Ms. Roberts had been a dancer at a strip club on Pacific Avenue called The Playground, she said, until her addiction began affecting her looks and she turned to prostitution.

Ms. Brown, who was a prostitute herself until last year, said Ms. Roberts had left a child in Philadelphia but wanted to quell her addiction, leave prostitution and go back to being a mother.

“ ‘I can’t do it; how did you do it?’ ” Ms. Brown said she had asked her.

Mr. Coles and other neighborhood residents also said they believed another victim to be a woman they knew, a timid Boston native with a daughter she never saw and a vicious crack habit she could never quite break.

She slept on friends’ couches, they said, and every day slathered makeup over her acne so strangers would pay her for sex. In recent days, they said, the police had been asking about her.

“Fifteen dollars was a good date for her, isn’t that sad?” said Ms. Brown, 47, who knew both her and Ms. Raffo.

Ms. Brown said that she had once taken the Boston woman with her to perform oral sex on a customer in a parked van for $50 each. “Afterward she said, ‘Oh my god, that was the easiest money I’ve ever made in my life,’ ” Ms. Brown said.

For many of the prostitutes who live on or near Ocean Avenue, addiction leashes their bodies twice over — to the drugs, and to the place where they can be most quickly found.

It is rare for them to accompany customers to the motels on the Black Horse Pike, where the bodies were found, Ms. Brown said, because it is too far from their dealers.

Instead, they do their work in a nearby alley where old syringes and glass pipes crack underfoot, or in a vacant lot off Ocean Avenue, where a hand-painted sign urges, “Repent to Jesus.”

“Every penny they got they bought either heroin or cocaine,” Ms. Brown said. “They would not even buy a roof for a night because that would take away from their drug money.”

Most people on Ocean Avenue are just passing through. The lucky ones work in the casinos. The rest whip back and forth between odd jobs like waitressing and less savory ones like prostitution.

Dee Roman, 31, who lives above Papa Joe’s, said she saw vials and bags of crack on the street “all the time.” She added, “You can’t get away from that stuff.”

Ms. Brown said she feared that another of the victims was the daughter of a friend who had used crack since she was 17 and later began using heroin.

The woman worked a strip of Pacific Avenue known as the Track, as did the Boston woman, Ms. Brown said.

She said she had last seen her friend’s daughter this month wearing a denim miniskirt, a bra and a mesh blouse, an outfit that matches a police description of one of the victims.

“I remember telling her, ‘It’s not summertime,’ ” so take off the miniskirt, Ms. Brown said.

The police would not comment yesterday on the unidentified victims.

They have been showing people a computer-generated composite picture of one woman, and Mr. Boccino said they had been asking about the Boston woman, whom he nicknamed “Christmas Tree” because of her height.

She would come in for breakfast around 2 a.m., he said, ordering a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel with an orange soda before working the streets, ignoring his pleas for her to get clean.

“She just got her sandwich and said, ‘I’ll see you later, Papa Joe,’ ” he said.

and this:

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J., Nov. 22 — Along the grimy strip of motels where four women were found dead in a drainage ditch on Monday, a room goes for about $30 a night. Getting a prostitute to share a bed can cost $300 for an hour or two.

That is, if she is willing to take the risk at all.

Several prostitutes who work the luminous streets around Atlantic City’s casinos say that the notorious row of motels here on the Black Horse Pike, a few minutes’ drive to the west, is so dangerous that they will venture there only in pairs — or simply won’t go with customers at all.

“It’s not worth going up there for no amount of money,” said Dana, who is in her 20s and spoke on the condition that only her first name be used, while soliciting passing drivers about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday on Pacific Avenue. “It’s funny. I think it’s safer here because there are more cops, and more girls. It would be hard to dump a body around here without someone seeing you.”

Decades ago, these modest motels drew vacationing families who would go crabbing in the nearby inlets or swim and sunbathe along the shore. By the 1990s, county welfare officials who had housed poor families there moved them elsewhere after town leaders raised objections about substandard and inappropriate living conditions.

Now a marshy, garbage-strewn patch of land behind the Golden Key Motel, one of more than a dozen that line the seedy five-lane stretch of Route 40 known as the Black Horse Pike, is the scene of a quadruple homicide investigation.

The only victim identified so far by the authorities, Kim Raffo, 35, had worked in Atlantic City as a prostitute for several years, her brother-in-law and a boyfriend said. Like Ms. Raffo, the three others were found face down in a few inches of water.

Public officials and business leaders in Egg Harbor Township said in interviews on Wednesday that the four deaths were a tragedy for this South Jersey community, and that they hoped the crimes would finally spur the long-sought redevelopment of the troublesome area. But obtaining the millions of dollars of private and public money to buy the 23 acres of motels and land from the various owners has been difficult.

“It has indeed been the tale of two cities,” said Gary Israel, president of the West Atlantic City Home and Business Association.

“On one side of Black Horse Pike, there are beautiful homes in tranquil settings,” Mr. Israel said. “On the other side are dilapidated, obsolete motels that long ago provided no more value to the community, and harbor people who are in the shadows of society and bring with them elements of crime.

“I can only make an analogy to a serious disease like cancer,” he added. “We are long past the growth. The cancer is spreading throughout.”

The Atlantic County prosecutor, Jeffrey S. Blitz, said in a statement on Wednesday that the fourth autopsy showed that the woman had been in the water between two weeks and a month. The woman, whose age and cause of death have not been determined, had a red and black tattoo of a bulldog at the small of her back, a tattoo of a Playboy bunny in a heart on her right shoulder, and a faded tattoo that reads “Yolly” near her navel, Mr. Blitz said.

By Wednesday evening, the prosecutor’s office still had identified only Ms. Raffo, but said she and one other woman had been confirmed as homicide victims.

Ms. Raffo died of ligature strangulation and is believed to have lain in the ditch for a “couple of days,” according to Mr. Blitz’s statement. A woman thought to have been in her 20s died of asphyxia. No cause of death has been found for the woman with the Yolly tatto or another woman thought to have been in her 30s.

The contrast between the north side of the Black Horse Pike, where the troublesome motels are located, and the south side of the same road, is quite stark.

The south side is lined with well-known chain hotels like Hampton Inn and Ramada Inn, and more than 130 luxury town houses are under development near the relatively placid residential neighborhoods beyond.

But the northern stretch is blighted by the motels, where desk workers in small front offices talk to patrons through thick protective glass.
“It’s not like prostitutes are walking around out here, flashing their stuff and soliciting people,” said Phil Mody, 24, a manager at the Star Motel, a drab green building that sits between the Golden Key and the parking lot of the Fortune Inn. “It’s just that the rooms are cheaper than in Atlantic City. It spills over to here.”

Related
A Life Gone Off Course, and Then Violently Cut Short (November 23, 2006)

At the Quality Hotel Bayside Resort, directly across the Black Horse Pike from the Golden Key Motel, workers said that some prostitutes lived and worked for weeks at a time in rooms at the Golden Key provided to them by their pimps, bringing customers from Atlantic City. They said that the prostitutes sometimes ate breakfast at the Quality Hotel restaurant, but that there were strict rules there about not renting them rooms.

Staff members said that they had seen men hitting young women in the parking lot across the street, and that in one case, they watched a naked man chase a woman across the Black Horse Pike after she apparently stole his pants and wallet.

Mr. Mody said he often turned away patrons who seemed intoxicated, and regularly refused customers who had caused damage in the past. “The crack addicts, they steal the light bulbs,” he said.

James J. McCullough, the mayor of Egg Harbor Township, which has about 42,000 inhabitants, said the motel strip had been an “embarrassment, a hot seat” for prostitution, drugs and domestic violence. He also said that motel guests sometimes stumbled out onto the Black Horse Pike and were hit by cars.

The mayor said the Atlantic City Casino Reinvestment Development Authority had pledged to provide the township with $3 million in seed money to help it buy the motels and some adjacent property. But he said it would cost at least $20 million to buy all the parcels and revive the area. “I truly believe that the casino industry needs to do more to support this project,” Mr. McCullough said, adding that the development authority had provided grants of $75,000 and $40,000 about a decade ago to do a feasibility study and appraise the properties. “But nothing happened after that,” he added. “We wrote and called the C.R.D.A. and nothing happened until about a year ago.”

Thomas D. Carver, the development authority’s executive director, said that since he pledged the $3 million in late 2005, the next step was up to the township. “They asked for seed money and we gave them seed money,” Mr. Carver said.

Mr. Israel, of the home and business association, said that planned expansion of the casino industry — which could bring 24,000 new jobs to the area within the next seven years — had compelled some developers to take a fresh look at the motel properties on the Black Horse Pike.

Mr. Mody said that his family bought the Star Motel in the summer of 2005 for $900,000 knowing that the reinvestment authority had its eye on it as well. He said the family would consider selling the property for a good price. “If they want it, they’ll have to pay for it,” he said.