The killer could be in prison. He may be plying his macabre hobby elsewhere. He may even be dead, himself.
But 10 years after his collection of four women were found in a drainage ditch behind a skid-row motel outside Atlantic City, the serial killer known as the Eastbound Strangler has cooled his heels in the area that was his hunting ground for at least a few months in 2006.
Authorities told Forensic Magazine that the case remains open and active, as the decade anniversary passes. In the meantime, the unsolved case hangs over the town known as “America’s Playground.” Without an arrest, and amid the declining fortunes of the gambling town, the brutal legacy will linger, say experts.
“It’s never going to go away – it’s always going to be Atlantic City’s biggest whodunit,” said John Kelly, a criminal profiler and private investigator who has offered a reward for information leading to the Strangler.
The bodies of Barbara Breidor, Kimberly Raffo, Molly Dilts and Tracy Ann Roberts were found on Nov. 20, 2006. They were lined up in the ditch, facing east toward the casinos about three miles off in the distance.
Raffo, 35, was the first found, face-down 50 yards behind the Golden Key Motel in West Atlantic City. Three more bodies were found nearby in that same ditch: the remains of 23-year-old Roberts, Breidor, 42, and 19-year-old Dilts. All had allegedly worked as prostitutes in the area to fund worsening drug habits—and all were mothers who had family, some out of state.
The victims were all found fully clothed, but barefoot. Though two of the bodies were weeks old and so badly decomposed a cause of death could not be determined, Roberts was found to be asphyxiated and Raffo was strangled with either a cord or a rope.
The bodies were all partially submerged in the ditch – which may have eliminated crucial trace evidence, said Kelly, the investigator.
The Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, which handles the investigation, told Forensic Magazine that it was not releasing any further information or details. The agency also has no comment on the purported ties between the Eastbound Strangler case, and the series of bodies found around Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County, N.Y., attributed to a still-sought killer known as the Long Island Serial Killer. (Parallels between the two cases fueled rampant speculation after the discovery of the Gilgo Beach bodies in 2010, and were explored recently in the ongoing A&E TV series entitled “The Killing Season.” However, authorities have since downplayed the connections between the two burial locations.)
But acting Atlantic County Prosecutor Diane Ruberton, who has been head of the office since August, said investigators remain committed to solving the case.
“The murders in 2006 of Barbara V. Breidor, Molly Jean Dilts, Kim Raffo and Tracy Ann Roberts are a case that remains and will remain under active investigation by the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office until the case is solved, and the perpetrator identified, charged, and convicted in court,” said Ruberton, in a statement released to the magazine.
It was not for a lack of attention, or investigative leads.
Terry Oleson, a 41-year-old handyman from South Jersey, was living in the motel at the time of the murders. His then-girlfriend saw TV reports of the bodies being discovered and called police to implicate him. Investigators searching his home in Alloway, N.J., later found he had been surreptitiously video recording his girlfriend’s teenaged daughter undressing. Though he spent several months in jail on an invasion of privacy allegation, he was never charged in the Eastbound Strangler killings.
James Leonard, Oleson’s attorney, told Forensic Magazine last autumn he has not been contacted by law enforcement in several years. The DNA tests never led to any further interviews or allegations, he added. Oleson volunteered to give a DNA sample before he even had an attorney, Leonard said.
“Obviously if there had been a match, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now in 2015,” Leonard said. “Their silence speaks volumes.”
A public reward has never been offered for information leading to the killer or killers. Kelly, an investigator with his private company called System to Apprehend Lethal Killers, or STALK, Inc., offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the killer last November. That reward still stands.
Kelly’s profile contends that the Eastbound Strangler is intimately familiar with the Atlantic City area, and is familiar with criminology and serial killers. While being relatively non-social, the person would be intermittently charming – allowing him to get close to sex workers in order to kill. The Strangler indulges in alcohol, marijuana and occasionally cocaine – but his major addiction is to sadistic violence, according to Kelly’s profile.
“As the cocaine-addicted prostitute builds up a tolerance to the drug and needs to increase her dosage to achieve her high, so too does the serial killer build up a tolerance to the fantasy – and needs to escalate (or enhance) by starting the hunt for a victim to achieve his high,” the profile says.
Kelly told Forensic Magazine that the Strangler could have found a way to hold off his addiction – some killers like Gary Ridgway (the “Green River Killer”) and Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer,” were able to hold off or slow their killing urges for years at a time.
But the killer is still out there, Kelly said. The case could be solved, with just the right call, or the right memory.
“I believe somebody knows something. There are girls out there who have met him – some of them will get sober. You jog enough memories, anything can happen,” he said. “You never know how these things get solved.”
