We talked about the murders. She knew two of the girls. There were tears in her eyes as she recalled last seeing them.
“You don’t fear this guy yourself?” I asked. “I mean, there’s a serial killer out there, who hasn’t been caught... he won’t stop... he cannot stop. That doesn’t scare you as you work the streets?”
More tears. She looked away, collected herself, and then looked me straight in the eye. “Fear? I don’t have fear any more. I don’t know what it is.”
When you lose your sense of fear, I thought, you’re finished.
This woman referred me to a former street girl. I spent the better part of the next three days, along with my producer, trying to track her down after being told that she had answers—and had been in a motel room with Kim Raffo the night before Kim was found dead.
“You need to speak with [Jane Doe],” my scarred source on the street told me. “She has a story to tell.”
I ended up interviewing a host of others along The Track, including a hooker who told me she had been choked by a john who was acting weird—and liked to play with her feet.
“How’d you get away?”
“I maced him.”
“And yet you still get into cars?” I asked.
Her explanation was sobering, if not startling. “Yes. But I look inside the vehicle first,” she explained. “If the guy is wearing a tie and suit, wedding ring, and there is a baby seat in the back, I know two things.”
“What’s that?”
“He’ll be quick,” she said with a smile, “and he won’t hurt me.”
“What if the serial killer I am hunting is using the baby seat as a ruse?”
She didn’t have an answer.
Chapter 5
I MET FORMER ATLANTIC CITY POLICE OFFICER Jim Hutchins at the drainage ditch to discuss the case. Hutchins, a tough looking, shaved-headed, straight-talking “Joysey” man’s man, was frank and honest to the core.
There had been a rumor that a Muslim could have been the Eastbound Strangler, hence the ritualistic significance of the heads facing east (toward Mecca, presumably). A person of interest had even been hauled in and interviewed. When you size up this theory with the evidence, not to mention that certain Muslim customs demand for the dead to be buried without shoes or socks, it begins to look (and feel) pretty good. A local reporter had broken this thread of the story, and once word hit the streets, it took on its own life.
I must say, I bought into this—a little bit—when I first heard about it. This sort of theory fit the Hollywood version of this case that I had in my head. But in all reality, it was not practical, much less reasonable under the circumstances of the evidence we knew of.
“Those are theories,” Hutchins told me as we stood down by the drainage ditch on one of those days when the rain just keeps coming. The weather got so bad that we moved to my rented Suburban to finish our conversation. “I think the obvious answer could be that the tide made all of their heads face that particular way. ...It flows out into the Back Bay eventually,” Hutch added, pointing in that direction, “follows in between the tracks and Route 40, so there is movement. ...You make a case that the... water moves... the faces to go east.” Hutchins looked over at the water. Then back at me while answering his own question: “I would say, yes.”
In studying this idea, standing by the water with Hutchins, I agreed. If this was a ritualistic set of murders, set up by some rogue, psychotic Muslim looking to send a message that Mecca is being violated by the filth of the street girl and her sordid sex-for-sale lifestyle of drug use, he would have made much more out of the way in which the girls’ bodies had been staged (if, in fact, the bodies had been placed in this way). He would have, in other words, staged the scene more obviously to give it that Hollywood mark.
Hutchins and I also talked about the maintenance-man theory. At one time, cops were hot on a man I’ll call John Doe. His reputation had been destroyed so badly that one newspaper referred to this person of interest as the “fifth victim.” Slit-eyed, with an eighties haircut that was almost a mullet, thin lips, and a solidly built frame, John Doe seemed like the perfect suspect. He worked maintenance at the Golden Key, which is directly in front of where the girls had been found. The back of the Golden Key faces the drainage ditch, its yellow walls easily visible through the brush—and there are several doors into Golden Key rooms leading out to the dirt road just before the drainage ditch. John Doe also spent some time living at the Golden Key, a one-level, skanky motel where you can get a room for fifteen dollars a night. This place and several others nearby dotted along Black Horse Pike catered to the girls and their johns. It was said that Kim Raffo had partied at the Golden Key the night before her body was found (we’ll talk more about this later on in the piece, as I verify this fact with a girl who had been with Kim that night!).
It turned out that John Doe did repairs around the Golden Key. John Doe also knew several of the girls and had “helped them out,” I was told. In one interview, John Doe said he remembered the day he thought his life was over, when an Atlantic City homicide detective cornered him and said, “We know you did it.” He had first come under suspicion on the day Kim’s body was found after he pointed out to law enforcement that he had located a shoe on the roof of the Golden Key and thought it could be important to the case. It was thought that perhaps John Doe was hanging around the murder scene because he was the killer. Some believe serials like to do that: watch their work as cops explore and look for clues. They believe that it’s part of the high for serials, much like the stalking and killing. I think this is an overblown profiling analysis generated by the Hollywood version of the serial. In reality, after serials kill, they get as far away from the scene as possible.
“I often left the state for a few days,” one infamous serial killer of eight women told me.
Not long after making that comment to police about the shoe (and a call into police from his angry girlfriend), John’s truck was impounded and a house he had lived in and fixed up was descended upon by law enforcement. It was torn apart in the search for evidence.
John Kelly was hot on this guy as person of interest, and still is, in some ways. This is the guy Kelly had warned me about sitting down with, face to face.
Anyway, authorities found nothing linking John Doe with the dead bodies uncovered in the drainage ditch in back of the Golden Key. But a DVD with photos of a nude underage girl—his girlfriend’s 15-year-old daughter—was found. It was said to have belonged to John Doe.
John insisted that his girlfriend was so pissed off at him that she had set the entire thing up, taking the photos, calling the cops, and planting the evidence to make it look like he was some sort of sex-crazed maniac who photographed kids and killed prostitutes. Porn that the media had deemed “kinky sex tapes” and “sex toys” were eventually found in John Doe’s truck. His excuse for all this was something to the effect of: Can’t a guy have a sex life and fantasize?
If John Doe actually took the photos of his girlfriend’s child—and I’m not convinced he did—it would indicate the psychological mindset of a man who favors younger girls. Girls who could be could be called clean and untarnished. This is not the same person who would kill prostitutes. Moreover, why hadn’t cops found any porn related to foot fetishes inside his truck? I would suspect that he would not be capable of changing his fondness for bare feet within his pornographic fantasies; it all works together. He would, I think, use the porn as an accelerant to ignite his foot-fetish fantasy! Dr. Merski keyed on this when we interviewed him.
On paper, however, it all seemed to fit. So John Doe was arrested for possessing the DVD of his stepdaughter. But the main reason for getting him into the interrogation suite was to ask him about four dead prostitutes found behind a building where he had once worked.
After months of investigating John Doe, he was released. John Doe remains free from charges today.
Did he do it?
I asked Hutchins.
“I don�
��t think so,” Hutch told me off-camera. “Doesn’t fit.”
And it didn’t when you looked closely and took it out of the box. I spoke to several people who knew John Doe personally and he was no more a murderer than he was a sex addict with violent tendencies, according to them. The cops, I was told, needed to fit a square peg into a round hole and found the right lathe to turn it into the proper shape.
Not quite sure I believe that, either, but sometimes you have to question how law enforcement goes about things, especially if you’re trying to reignite a cold case. There is also the pressure of a high-profile investigation to take into account—the media coverage of a case like this is a tremendous strain on investigators and gets in the way of their case. Pressure is put on the prosecutor’s office to come up with answers.
“I know, personally speaking,” my serial killer (not 13) on the inside told me, “law enforcement, for good reason, places misinformation in the media.”
I don’t ever want to be accused of questioning police tactics or ethics, because they have their own reasons for doing things. I simply like to look at an investigation from a different perspective. The cops know more about John Doe than I do. I am basing my thoughts, opinions and observations on what I know and the people I have interviewed about him.
“[John Doe] helped people,” one former friend of his told me, “he didn’t kill people.”
“His girlfriend set him up,” said another.
John Doe eventually volunteered to take a polygraph and DNA test.
“In my mind,” John’s attorney told reporters after news broke that he wanted to take those tests to clear his name, “he was either completely not guilty, or the dumbest serial killer on the planet.”
At one point, John Doe was going to talk to me on camera, but then something came up. My producer and I had a difference of opinion regarding the motivation behind the cancellation, but I felt in talking to John’s lawyer that John was not blowing me off. Furthermore, I had no gut instinct that John Doe was my guy. If he was, he had done a damn good job of hiding evidence and thwarting a major offensive by the police, who went after him with magnifying glasses and aggressive forensic strategies but came away with nothing. I’m from the old school of thought that you can burn evidence and wash DNA away with bleach, you can hide the trophies you take from your victims, but you cannot get rid of everything. It’s impossible. They tore apart John Doe’s truck, and his home to the point where it was unlivable. With that kind of search, if you come up empty, there’s a reason for it.
Martin Siegel, a respected attorney who once represented John Doe, claimed his former client wasn’t “treated fairly by the system.”
I agree with this (the “system” being the local media), which is why I changed his name for this piece, though John Doe’s real name is all over the news.
As John Doe sat in jail, a man came forward and wanted to admit to the murders, but, that man later said, “The prosecutors blew me off.”
There are plenty of nutbags that like to take credit for murders, especially the high-profile ones. For that reason alone, each “nut” has to be looked into. You cannot just write them off. As of now, I still have no opinion about this guy who came forward. I do know—which I am getting to soon—that the name of a viable suspect(s) was given to police.
Bottom line is that if cops had anything on John Doe, or the guy who came forward—and I mean any discrepancy in an alibi, a sketchy timeline, a single piece of trace evidence, any halfwit eye-witness—either of them would be in jail awaiting trial for these crimes. But as of this writing, John Doe and the other guy are free men.
Chapter 6
WHAT INTERESTED ME MOST as my time in Atlantic City wound down (we have about week to film our interviews; but spend weeks and even months looking into and researching the cases we cover) was the fact that once the heat was on and Kim Raffo’s body led to the discovery of the other three bodies, “Boom,” John Kelly said. “The murders stopped.”
(Presumably, I should add to Kelly’s comment.)
John Kelly has an opinion about this, saying, “Serial killers live to kill and kill to live. He cannot stop. He’s addicted to killing.”
So, although the bodies stopped showing up along that drainage ditch—and I’m told they did a complete search up and down miles-long sections of the drainage ditch from helicopters, looking for additional bodies with heat-seeking equipment—it doesn’t necessarily mean the killer (or killers, as we are about to explore) actually stopped.
The theory we all agreed on was that our guy in Atlantic City was scared off. Even 13, our serial killer on the inside and consultant on “Dark Minds,” said the same thing. Once this particular dump site was discovered, the killer either moved his show somewhere else (13 believes that the new location is Oak Beach, Long Island), found a new dumping site in the Atlantic City region, or wound up in prison on another charge and was forced to stop.
This led some back to John Doe’s trail.
Then, as the end of our week came, I began to think that perhaps I was not going to find out anything more than anyone else. It was that source I was hoping to talk to—the person my cutter/prostitute friend had introduced us to—but she kept calling and blowing us off. I was frustrated. I knew she had something big.
But as we packed to leave, the call came. She was ready.
“The end of the Boardwalk,” the source told my producer over the phone. “Out of the way.”
She didn’t want to be seen talking to us. A camera crew shooting a crime series causes a ruckus and people become engrossed and interested in what you’re doing. We had caused somewhat of a stir while in town all week. Everyone knew why we were there and crowds were coming out to see us. There was even one night, as cameraman Peter Heap was capturing some images of the Boardwalk at dusk, when we came close to getting into a fight. Being violent is not a general practice of mine, and has not been since junior high and high school. But assholes are assholes.
Most of my team is Australian. My production company is based in Australia. We travel together and live like family for the time we are on the road shooting the series. Anybody who has ever worked in documentary television knows what I’m talking about. You eat every meal together, work together day and night, laugh, get pissed off, and travel in the same vehicle for weeks at a time. You become close. You watch one another’s back. I consider my crew—Peter, Jared Transfield, Colette Sandstedt, and Jeremy Adair—like family, and I love each of them dearly.
Anyway, as Peter was mounting a shot of the Boardwalk, some idiot came up and started asking stupid questions. I told him (nicely) to please find our producer, who could explain everything to him (even though she was running around doing a thousand other things).
Peter didn’t say a word. He has that kind of patience.
This clown persisted. He stunk of booze. He was belligerent and rude, acting tough. I noticed, as he maneuvered around us, making remarks to some of his buddies sitting off to the side, that he’d once had a broken nose; it was twisted and pinched, like a boxer’s.
We ignored him best we could. I asked again, “Please, dude, just leave us alone, let us do our work. Our producer will be back soon and you can speak with her. We have all the permits required to shoot here.”
He mumbled something.
Then, as Peter spoke up and asked him kindly to go away, the guy picked up on Peter’s accent and, like some of the ignorant, bigoted a-holes we meet up with along the way, he said something about an Englishman and how England was this and that.
“Wrong country,” Peter said. “I’m Australian.”
My blood was beginning to boil. It had been a long week. I was tired and frustrated. The city itself was weighing heavily on my emotions. I’d had enough. I needed to get out of Atlantic City. I felt dirty.
I looked at him.
“What are you going to do?” he said, noticing my angry gaze.
So I approached him. I told him to move away and let us alone.
“Did he just call me an asshole?” the drunk said, pointing at Peter. It was obvious he wanted a piece of Peter and was trying to start something.
Peter had not said a word.
“I need you to step back,” I said.
He looked at me strangely.
Then he repeated the asshole comment again—and this time, it flipped a switch in of me.
I snapped.
As he moved toward Peter, who was still shooting, I stuck my chest in between and asked him if he wanted his nose broken—again!—and that I’d be more than willing to oblige. “You’ve pushed me too far now...” I said, charging at him. “I’m finished with you.”
He backed away and left us alone.
A quarter-mile down the Boardwalk, we came upon two drunks sitting on a tourist trolley car, drinking, saying things to passersby, laughing. One of them got up—a big sonofagun I wasn’t about to tangle with—and turned around as we walked by, dropped his fly, and took a leak off the side of the Boardwalk. Mind you, this was about at about six in the afternoon, with hundreds of people out for the night strolling along. He had some words for us, but we ignored him and moved on.
Further down the Boardwalk, some dude snarled angrily when Peter pointed the camera in his direction. He threatened to make big trouble—in the form of ass-whippings—for all of us.
“He’s probably on a most-wanted list somewhere,” I said, and we high-tailed it out of there.
This was the vibe, the atmosphere of the city, we felt just about every day. It was like the scum I sensed building up like a coat of wax all over my body, no matter how many times I showered. Atlantic City, by the time we were ready to leave, had gotten under my skin like an allergic reaction to meds. I felt a substantial gloom pushing down on my back, forcing me into a place of desolation. Maybe it was the case. Perhaps talking to all those girls, seeing firsthand the terrible lives they led and the hell they were living in, was getting to me. Or perhaps it was memories of my past bubbling up? Was I trying to reconcile my feeling of Diana? I could recall once saying to her during a heated argument, “I wish you would just go away and never come back!”
MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Page 8
