I had to remind myself that I was in town to film an episode of “Dark Minds,” a real-life dramatic true crime series I had created myself and worked on for years with John Kelly. Yet, as I began talking about my feelings with Kelly—also a forensic psychotherapist—I had to wonder not only what answers I’d find for myself to satisfy my own demons, but whether both purposes were intertwined. I mean, this is what I do. Crime is my life.
“You’re in the game now, Mathew,” Kelly warned me. “Take it easy. Always remember what Friedrich Nietzsche warned: ‘When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.’ Be prepared for that.”
John Kelly was worried about me; I kind of liked that. It was comforting.
Chapter 3
WHAT DID WE KNOW ABOUT THESE WOMEN and their deaths? For me, all murder investigations have to begin with the victims. I was once told to look at every murder victim as the bull’s-eye on a target and within the ripple effect of rings around the eye, you would find the answers to the mystery. It all begins by analyzing and searching the framework of the victim’s life. It doesn’t take Columbo to figure out that if you trace the final steps of a murder victim’s life, wherever it leads, you are going to run into her killer sooner or later. By the same token, however, you have to be prepared for any answer, whether or not it fits into your preconceived notions—and we all have them—of the crime.
With a series of murders that all seem to be connected, profilers and investigators look for patterns. The ages of the victims here did not take on any sort of familiar shape.
Kim Raffo, the last known victim of the Eastbound Strangler, was a 35-year-old wife and mother of two from Florida. (Atlantic City is one of those cities where no one who ends up dead or in trouble is actually from there.). According to reports (and an interview I conducted with Kim’s husband to confirm), Kim was born in Brooklyn and moved to Florida during the 1990s, where she remained until the bug of drug addiction bit her. She had volunteered with the Girl Scouts and the local PTA. Kim’s passion was cooking. She was enrolled in a cooking class at a technical school in Florida, where she met a drug user who, allegedly, introduced her to cocaine and heroin. As her love affair with drugs began, so did an extramarital tryst with her cooking partner. I say allegedly because, I suspect that Kim Raffo was dabbling in drug use before meeting this guy. Something tells me there is more to that end of her story than has been told.
When Kim fell victim to the drug life (addiction, I have always said, is the most prolific serial killer on the planet), her husband, Hugh Auslander, a carpenter, took the kids and left. Kim and her boyfriend (the drug-using cook) took off north and settled in Atlantic City, where Kim worked as a waitress before, Hugh told me, turning to prostitution to feed her habit.
Found along the bank of that drainage ditch near the Atlantic City Expressway, just in back of the Golden Key Motel, Kim Raffo was dressed in a Hard Rock Cafe tank top and pants (probably jeans). Unlike the other dead women, Kim’s tiny body was found before decomposition had set in, possibly within twenty-four hours of her death. She had been strangled with a rope or cord.
The parallels between Kim Raffo and Diana, my sister-in-law, are nearly indistinguishable—right down to how Kim was killed and the life she fell into leading up to her death. My sister-in-law, who was murdered in Hartford, was found dead inside an apartment building. She was five months’ pregnant. Her killer had placed a pillowcase over her head and strangled her with a telephone cord. Diana was a drug addict, same as my brother Mark. At the time she died, Diana was doing what she needed to do to feed both their habits.
“Kim was just this wonderful person who got hooked up with drugs and never turned back,” Raffo’s husband, Hugh Auslander, told me. “I tried repeatedly to save her, pick her up and take her out of there, but she always went back to Atlantic City.”
Change Atlantic City to Hartford and Kim’s name to Diana, and the same could be said.
Hugh admitted he had taken Kim into Atlantic City several times (a statement that baffled me). They had once moved to Long Island together when (he said) Kim got sober for a period. But he added, Kim ultimately went back to her boyfriend in Atlantic City, to sell her body for drugs. There’s a missing link here somewhere, because although Hugh had taken the kids away from Kim in Florida, the children ended up in foster care, and Hugh never got them back. Hugh told me that he and Kim, when they lived in Long Island, were no more than “friends helping each other out.” Kim and Hugh had parted in Long Island during the late summer after Kim took off, before saying she had some “unfinished business in Atlantic City.” They agreed to meet up again.
Instead, Kim wound up dead.
I asked Hugh why he would allow Kim to go back to the city, knowing what she was going to do.
“When she was ready to get help,” Hugh said, “I always told her I would be there for her and pick her back up.”Hugh admitted to me
Listening to Hugh describe the final months and days of Kim’s life, I couldn’t help but think how life—and the people around her—had let Kim down. When she crossed that line into heavy daily drug use, she couldn’t find her way back on her own. She needed someone to step up and take control. In some ways, I felt Kim knew she would end up dead one day, one way or another, just as Diana must have.
It takes only one stumble, a slip and fall, to throw off the course of your life. When you’re dealing with drugs like crack cocaine and heroin, you have to take into account how relentless these poisons are. Drugs first encompass and then strangle your soul. They do not want you to get back on your feet. They tell you when to eat, when to sleep, how to think, what to wear, who to fuck, who to rob, when to shower, shit and eat—all things those who aren’t addicted to drugs take for granted in our daily lives.
As I’ve said, Kim and Diana could have been the same person—which is one reason I cringe when I hear people talk about prostitutes and street girls as “easy targets” for serial killers. As if they don’t matter, as if being on the street was their choice. Many people look down on drug users who sell their bodies to feed their habits, and I understand why it’s easy to be so cynical. It’s the same as, say, ignorantly mocking overweight people—some are convinced overweight people could help themselves if they chose to do so. So it’s no surprise to me when society truly doesn’t give a shit when that street girl turns up dead in a ditch. I get the dichotomy of the human mind and spirit, and the struggle some have to love those who need it most.
Many more would have you believe that police feel the same, which could be seen as the reason many of these crimes go unsolved for so long. But that line of thought is patently unfair. Cops want to solve these cases as much—and maybe more—than anybody else. Victims of murder are victims. I am reminded of something John Kelly once told me: “Have you ever met a 10-year-old girl playing with Barbies that dreamt of growing up to be a drug-addicted prostitute?”
Cops—the good ones!—think this same way.
In the eyes of most people in law enforcement, there is no distinction between a mother in suburbia who’s been swiped from the parking lot of a supermarket and a hooker from the streets of Atlantic City who’s found dead in a ditch. Sure, there are exceptions. There are bigoted, corrupt, dirty-ass cops who don’t treat street women with respect and violate their human rights whenever they can. But those types of cops are rare, as you’ll find when you get out in the field and ask around.
So I’m not talking about the exception, I am focused on the rule. The problems arise when cops begin to investigate and realize quickly, same as I did, that investigating these types of deaths/murders becomes a rather intricate maze of walking through the sticky underbelly of a city steeped in crime and corruption and drugs and gambling. And all that goes on around the crime of prostitution and drug use. People are scared to come forward. They don’t want to be arrested for the crimes they’re committing. This type of obstacle can stall an investigation.
TRACY ANN ROBERTS, JUST TWENTY-THREE, grew up in New Ca
stle, Delaware, a quick surf south of Atlantic City. Tracy’s body was found in the drainage ditch not far from Kim Raffo’s, facing the same way and posed (a word I use cautiously) in the same peculiar positioning, according to several reports. Tracy had lived in Philadelphia for a time before heading to Atlantic City to work the strip club circuit. Her story was a familiar one: Tracy got herself involved in drugs and turned to the Atlantic City streets to work for money to feed her habit. Friends and fellow working girls called Tracy “the young, pretty one.” She lived in the same run-down area of seedy rooming (crack) houses as Kim Raffo, near the Resorts Casino close to South Tennessee Avenue and Pacific. It’s an area known to locals as “The Track.” Kim and Tracy were friends.
Authorities found Tracy wearing a red hooded sweatshirt and a black bra, according to one report. A source told me she had been clothed from the waist down, except for her shoes and socks. Tracy was said to have been dead for as little as a couple of days or as long as a week, but we just don’t know for sure. Kim Raffo’s body was found by those two girls walking along the service road parallel to the drainage ditch—and that led to the discovery of Tracy’s body, as well as the other victims. It has always been assumed that Tracy and the others were there all along, but their killer (or killers) could have kept the bodies elsewhere and dumped them when he wanted to (or at the same time he dumped Kim).
In looking for patterns and new evidence in a serial murder case, and information that will point you in the direction of a viable suspect (as opposed to some person of interest that everyone is hot on), you cannot assume anything, especially the obvious. Serial killers want you to think in that frame of mind. They want you to believe the lies they tell with a crime scene. But crime scenes left behind by serials—a majority of them, anyway—are almost always staged to some extent. That is, unless the location represents, out of necessity, a dump-and-run (or kill-and-run) scenario.
This particular location outside Atlantic City was no dump-and-run site. It is tucked away in back of a strip of seedy motels and, if you’re not from the area and don’t know it’s there, you’d be hard-pressed to simply come upon it and choose it as a recurring dump site. Locals know of this place. Area working men and women know about it, too. Cops are familiar with it.
This killer knew the area very well, no doubt about it. The dump site, in relation to the Atlantic City area and the lifestyles of the victims, says something about who this animal is. And why he chose these types of victims, and why he chose a dumpsite near water.
“In the shadow of evil, a feeding frenzy takes place among those who stumble upon the art of murder,” one infamous serial killer told me recently (we’ve been corresponding through the mail and talking via phone—this is not the same killer known as 13, I should point out, whose voice and insight you hear on “Dark Minds”).
Further, he added, “Our experience dictates how we kill. We learn from our experience.”
Based on our developing profile, the guy we’re hunting in Atlantic City is not some sort of married, working man (hiding in plain sight, much in the same manner as, say, BTK or Ted Bundy). This is obvious in his choice of dump site. At first blush, you might want to place him in the same pool as the Green River, Gary Ridgeway—but first impressions and comparisons to high profile serials are always a slippery slope.
Consider for a moment what my man on the inside said: Once something works for a serial, he sticks with it. Until, that is, a turn of events (such as those girls stumbling on Kim Raffo’s body) changes things. At that point, as an investigator, I’d have to ask myself: Did the Atlantic City killer leave Kim’s body out so it could be found? Kim’s body was left closest to one of the service road entrances into the drainage ditch. It was almost a certainty to this killer—unless he’s a total moron—that by leaving Kim where he had, she would eventually be found. Moreover, a back door into a room at the Golden Key led directly out to where Kim was found.
But what if he was back there, searching around for the perfect spot to place his latest victim, staging his scene the way he wanted, and someone came up on him and he had to dump Kim’s body and get out of there quickly?
Barbara Breidor, at forty-two, was the oldest of the four dead women. She had been raised in Pennsylvania, but came to Atlantic City to rent a house in the hamlet of Ventnor, about three miles southwest of Atlantic City, reportedly so she could run her family’s Boardwalk jewelry store. With business not once what it used to be along the crumbling Boardwalk, with a beach on one side with sand almost too dirty to walk on, Barbara moonlighted as a cocktail waitress. That is, before “a longtime drug problem worsened and pushed her into prostitution,” a news report claimed.
Barbara had been dead by some accounts for as long as two weeks when she was found. Forensic testing concluded that she had a “lethal level of heroin” in her system at the time of her death, and yet authorities claimed they were unable to determine how, in fact, she died. Wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeve zipper shirt, Barbara was reportedly missing her socks and shoes.
THE EASTBOUND STRANGLER’S PRESUMED FINAL VICTIM (or his first victim, if you look backwards at the timeframe in which the women died) was Molly Jean Dilts. Molly, at 20, was a chubby-cheeked, perpetually smiling young girl with dark hair and a cheery manner. Everyone along The Track adored the young girl. She had left her home, and a child, in Pennsylvania after being busted on charges of drinking while underage and harassment. She had also suffered a series of additional hardships, including the loss of her mother, who died while waiting for a heart transplant, and the suicide of her brother. The stress of life was too much and Molly found herself on the streets of Atlantic City, at first as a fast-food cook. Molly had never been arrested for prostitution in Atlantic City, though there were reports that several girls reported seeing Molly working the streets. Molly’s body showed no traces of drugs, but she had been drinking heavily before her death. Dressed in a denim miniskirt, a bra and blouse, Molly had died about a month before she was found.
I mucked around that drainage ditch and along the service road, getting wet, with hundreds of ticks stuck to my jeans like prickers—not to mention snuggled clingingly to my arm hair—snooping around. I was looking for some sort of reason other than the obvious as to why these girls could have been placed there (specifically), and why, if Molly had indeed been there a month, no one had seen her (or any of the others) in all that time. Billboards hug the bank of the drainage ditch. Any worker changing a light bulb or putting up a new billboard poster, could have looked down and spotted the bodies. And there are train tracks along the bank on one side of the water. How many thousands of people, I wondered, had traveled by here on those trains, staring out the window and perhaps thought they’d seen a body, but wrote it off as mind games? Why hadn’t a train conductor reported seeing anything?
One possible answer: the bodies hadn’t been there as long as the ladies had been dead.
Perhaps the women were killed elsewhere, and kept for a period of time before being dumped. Perhaps Molly and Barbara died of causes other than murder while in someone’s company. Law enforcement has never publicly said that a serial killer was working in Atlantic City. Nor has anyone officially said that these four women were the victims of one killer. Or even said that they all were murdered.
Still, we look for patterns, and there are several present here. So far, three prostitutes and one fast-food cook addicted to alcohol and seen working the streets. All were found in the same general area, facing the same way. All were barefoot. All worked in the same general street area of the city (The Track). All likely knew each other.
What stands out to me the most? The fact that they were all found barefoot. And that their heads faced the east toward the expressway and Atlantic City.
I spoke to Dr. Ed Merski, a psychologist and expert in the taboo-ish field of fetishes. Merski, a friend and colleague of Kelly, explained that the man I am hunting could have a foot fetish. Foot fetishes, prostitutes, and violence can prod
uce a man with a sadomasochistic tendency that can turn ugly and deadly within the blink of an eye. Add drugs to that (and I believe, as John Kelly has told me, most serial killers are drug addicts and alcoholics), and we have the makings of a dangerous psychopath who preys on women he can easily convince to get into his vehicle for party purposes.
If so, the no-shoes, no-socks evidence is not, I am certain, a coincidence. But as far as all the girls’ heads facing east and that being some sort of ritualistic message, I am more inclined to believe, based on what law enforcement has told me, that this is nothing more than a result of the tide and the water current flowing out with the ebb and flow of the water table, pushing all their heads in the same direction.
Chapter 4
THE ONE COMMON THREAD THAT EMERGED as I hit the streets along The Track and began talking to several working girls was that this city, perhaps like no other, has a mysterious pull. It lives and breathes and sucks you in, consuming your every sense. A lot of the girls I spoke to agreed. Atlantic City, they told me, was a well, and once you fell in, it turned darker and deeper as you moved along your way toward hitting the bottom.
“Like a magnet,” said one woman, whose face was pockmarked with sores, and whose arms were so speckled with bruises and scars from cutting herself, that it was hard to find a clear patch of skin untouched by the street life. “This city gets hold of you and doesn’t let go.”
Looking at this woman, sizing up her life, I was brought to tears. Like many of the women along The Track in Atlantic City, she has children, some of whom she hasn’t seen in years. There is a pain there, recognizable in her eyes, that runs so deep that no drug can numb its throbbing ache. I am convinced it is why she cuts herself. And cutters, I know from research I’ve done for a book, are screaming for help. This girl standing in front of me, a veteran of this tortured life along the road to hell, wanted to get out. But she just couldn’t pull herself from beyond the hole long enough to stretch a hand. Her story tore us apart. Personally, I wanted to pick her up and take her away, drop her off at rehab, and give her a fighting chance. Curtis Sliwa, however, I am not, and I know my place and limitations. John Kelly, an addiction specialist, told me I could offer her a free stint in rehab—but she refused, saying, among other things, “Now is not the right time.”
MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Page 7
