No one knows what led Blairsville woman to Atlantic City

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- The addicts and prostitutes who sell their souls to crack and their bodies to get it in dark alleys behind glittering casino hotels knew Molly Jean Dilts.

They saw her walking on garbage-strewn streets, past rooming houses with sagging beds, shared bathrooms and hot plates to warm coffee and canned soup. They knew her chubby face and her smile, and her habit of scoring an afternoon hit of crack between Atlantic and Pacific avenues.

But they don't know who killed the 20-year-old Blairsville mother and three prostitutes who were found last month -- barefoot and face-down with their heads pointed eastward -- in a drainage ditch behind cheap motels along the Black Horse Pike west of the city in Egg Harbor Township.

And what they don't know, they fear.

Amy, a thin, homeless prostitute who would not give her last name, on Thursday said she's afraid for her life when she turns tricks because of what happened to Dilts, Kim Raffo, 35, Tracy Ann Roberts, 23, and Barbara V. Briedor, 42.

"I think it's a serial killer," she said, resting her head on a paper placemat while waiting for free breakfast at Victory First Presbyterian Deliverance Church. "I walked around all night last night. I'm afraid now on the streets, but I don't have anywhere to go."

Relatives say Dilts, who was a teenager when her mother died of heart problems, had trouble dealing with the loss and quit Blairsville High School in 11th grade. She became pregnant and had a son, Jeremiah, 16 months ago.

She worked for a few months last summer at the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Route 22 in Burrell Township, where co-workers said she was friendly and pleasant. She had some boyfriends, according to family members who said she sometimes "took off for a while."

Without a word to her family, she left home in October. Verner Dilts said he does not know how his daughter got to Atlantic City, whether she was with someone or where she stayed when she got there.

"I have no idea," he said.

Shelter and soup kitchen workers estimate that thousands of homeless men and women wander the city, which has a population of 40,000 residents and attracts about 30 million visitors a year.

Some -- mostly men -- sleep inside at places like the Atlantic City Rescue Mission, where development director Kathy Jensen said rules require anyone who wants a bed for the night to be inside by 9 p.m. "for their safety, protection and comfort." But the women who sell themselves to men on the streets say they can't meet the deadline and make money, too.

"When you got rules and street people, they're not going by the rules," said Joe Bocchino, owner of Papa Joe's diner on Tennessee Avenue between Pacific Avenue and the boardwalk.

On the streets, rumors suggest the slayings were the work of a serial killer or a crazy customer or that the victims were silenced after witnessing a horrible crime. Several prostitutes claim police showed them cell phone photos "of a person of interest," something authorities would not confirm.

Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz has not said the victims fell prey to a serial killer even though he concedes the cases are similar. The women apparently were killed at different times over several weeks.

Raffo, Roberts and Breidor were known prostitutes. Although police have not confirmed Molly Dilts was selling herself, people who knew her say she was going "on dates" with customers. Raffo and Roberts were strangled, but authorities have not released a cause of death for Breidor and Dilts, who is believed to have been dead the longest, about a month.

Bocchino said Dilts, who had been in his diner four or five times, was "the new kid on the block."

"She was nice, chubby ... pleasant. She didn't come across to me that she was a street girl. If you looked at her, you wouldn't think she was a crackhead. But I know where she got it from," Bocchino said. "I saw it."

Bocchino, who has lived in the city for 17 years, said he's seen dozens of girls come for jobs and end up on drugs.

"This is crack city," agreed Sister Jean Webster, 71, who feeds about 600 people a day at the Victory church soup kitchen on the corner of Pennsylvania and Pacific avenues.

"A lot of these girls come in here. I don't ask questions. If they're hungry, I feed them," she said. "We all have faults and I can't judge anyone. If you're on drugs, you're gonna do whatever you have to get it."

If it means selling their bodies for $20 to get a 20-minute high, that's what they do, addicts say.

Gregory Payne, 52, grew up in Pittsburgh's Oakland section, graduated from Schenley High School and worked for U.S. Steel in Homestead until the mill closed. About 12 years ago, he found a job waiting tables in Atlantic City for $150 to $200 a day.

He said he got into drugs -- heroin, crack, anything he could get his hands on -- and kept an apartment where he partied with dozens of prostitutes who would "turn tricks for a hit." Now homeless, he sleeps at the mission.

"They'd do it for days and not sleep," said Payne, who has been sober for about 80 days. "For some ungodly reason, it seems to me that women don't have a cut-off switch when it comes to crack."

Deli cook Michael Schindler, 52, sees it every day from his first-floor apartment on Ocean Avenue, where he watched a screaming street fight between two glassy-eyed women Thursday morning.

"This is the never-ending story. It's 24-hour action all the time," said Schindler, whose door bears the sign "If you don't live here, don't come here or police will be called."

He said Raffo, who once lived in an apartment above him, was nice and worked at a pancake house until she got into drugs, lost her job, was evicted and began turning tricks.

Linda Taylor, Dilts' sister-in-law, said she had a good relationship with Dilts. Although she knew Dilts used drugs and was facing criminal charges, Taylor insists she was a good mother who loved her baby.

"Yeah, she did crack. Molly wasn't really troubled. She just wanted to be the center of attention," Taylor said.

Records show Dilts faced a Dec. 7 trial in Indiana County on a drunken driving charge related to an incident in December 2005 in the McDonald's parking lot at Southpointe Plaza in White Township. State police said Jeffrey Smith, no age or address available, reported Dilts struck him intentionally and dented his car fender.

Dilts, who admitted to police that she tried to hit Smith but did not realize she had done it, also was charged with aggravated and simple assault. Those counts were later withdrawn.

On March 20, Dilts was arrested again after a disturbance at Scott's Motel in White Township. Police said she admitted smoking crack cocaine with three friends there and consented to a search that produced a suspected crack pipe rolled up in a sock and other drug paraphernalia.

When Dilts did not appear for her July 20 arraignment, Judge William Martin issued a warrant for her arrest that was never served, records show. On Sept. 28, District Attorney Robert Bell rejected a petition filed by Public Defender Donald McKee to place her in the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program for her first DUI offense.

Six days later, she was gone.

"I dropped her off at Family Planning in Indiana on Oct. 4," Taylor said, adding that she does not know whether Dilts was pregnant.

"I gave her $3 to catch the bus back home, but she never came back. I never saw her after that."

On Oct. 7, Taylor accepted the charges when Dilts placed a collect call to the home of her father.

"She asked to speak to her dad, and I said he was just walking in the door. She said, 'Never mind,' and hung up," Taylor said.

She never called again.

Taylor said the family assumed she went back to Philadelphia, where she lived for about six months earlier this year. They began to fear the worst and filed a missing persons report only because she never called home again and newspapers printed a description of an unidentified murder victim in Atlantic City that fit her.

On Nov. 27, they learned that her fingerprints matched those of the tattooed, badly decomposed woman found in the fetid water under the billboards behind the $15-a-night Golden Key motel.

"I never thought this would happen. You never know who is gonna be next," said Yasmin Olan, 28, who lives in the pink and green motel with her casino-worker husband, Marcial, and their 5-year-old son.

She makes her son wait by the door when they come home alone during her husband's night shifts. She looks under the flowered bedspread and searches the closet and the bathroom, where the window overlooks the drainage ditch.

"I don't go out at night anymore. When the sun goes down, I go in," she said.

"You're never safe anymore, even if you try the best that you can."