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Where sex is for sale, no fear of killer
Atlantic City streetwalkers take slayings and cops' queries
in stride
Sunday, November 26, 2006
BY JONATHAN CASIANO AND TOM FEENEY
Star-Ledger Staff
As Friday night blended into Saturday morning along an
Atlantic City boulevard lined with strip clubs, pawn shops and
casino parking decks, the sex trade was unusually quiet.
Some blamed the police. They were everywhere on Pacific
Avenue. They were interviewing front desk managers in the motels
that have threadbare sheets and paper shower mats. They were
chasing the prostitutes around corners and into the shadows to
show them photographs and ask them questions.
Some blamed the cold. The temperature was in the 40s. The
prostitutes on the strip behind Atlantic City's beachfront
casinos were bundled in long pants and puffy coats.
Nobody blamed the killer.
The bodies of four women were found Monday in a marsh just
beyond the city limits, in Egg Harbor Township. Some
criminologists have said they believe the deaths are the work of
a serial killer preying on prostitutes. Authorities have not yet
endorsed that conclusion.
There was no hint along Pacific Avenue that fear of a killer
on the loose was keeping prostitutes off the street on the
Friday night of a long holiday weekend.
In fact, there was practically no hint of fear at all.
Not among the casino cocktail waitresses who walked calmly to
the jitney stops once their shifts were over. Not among the
gamblers and club-hoppers who use Pacific Avenue to move from
casino to casino. And not among the young women who ply the same
trade as the two murder victims who have been identified so far.
"They're not scaring me off. There's money out
here," said a prostitute who identified herself only as
"Honey" and said she was 22.
Honey was sitting cross-legged on a wall beside the Ascot
Motel at 2:30 a.m. yesterday. She was by herself, listening to
music, playing a game on her PlayStation Portable and greeting
men as they walked by alone or in small groups.
Police on the task force investigating the four murders had
stopped Honey earlier in the evening to show her photographs of
the dead women, but she was not able to identify them, she said.
When a reporter asked her whether she was afraid of the
killer on the loose, Honey was defiant.
"I'm damn near 6 feet," she said. "Let him try
me."
A prostitute who would not give her name and ap peared to be
about 20 years older than Honey said she was frightened when she
first heard about the murders.
The woman said she knew Kim Raffo, the first victim police
were able to identify. She and Raffo had met in jail over the
summer after a vice sweep. The two women remained friendly, she
said. Sometimes they would meet at a local track to walk laps
together, and sometimes they would do Tae Bo.
The woman was bothered enough by the murders to turn down a
pair of would-be johns Tuesday night. But by Friday night the
fear had passed, she said, and she was out patrolling Pacific
Avenue in high-heel boots, black leather pants and a
leopard-print coat.
"I've got to make money," the woman said.
"What else am I going to do?"
NO GETTING AWAY
Making money Friday night was not easy, she said. Friday night
is always more of a challenge than Saturday night, and late fall
is al ways more of a challenge than warmer times of the year.
But the biggest challenge Fri day was the police presence,
she said. More than three dozen investigators have been assigned
to a special task force to find the killer, and they were
clearly in evidence along Pacific Avenue Friday night and early
yesterday.
The woman was working the block between California and Bel
mont avenues around 2 a.m. Police were working in the same area.
She thought her fortunes might improve if she got away from
them, she said, so she walked several blocks south, to the
corner of Pacific and Chelsea avenues.
When she arrived and took her place on the corner, she
discovered she had not moved away from the police at all.
Beneath the garish pink-and-teal sign of the Flamingo Motel,
inside a brightly lit office, three detectives in plain clothes
were interviewing the front-desk manager.
On Tennessee Avenue, on the tumble-down block between Pacific
and the Boardwalk where Raffo, 35, and another victim,
23-year-old Tracy Ann Roberts, rented rooms, there were signs of
fear.
Raffo's last known address was a room on the fourth floor
above Maloney's Bar, a building with no siding and where most of
the windows are covered by bedsheets rather than curtains.
Shay Delanui, caretaker of the building, said the killings
had shaken up even the women in Ma loney's who don't work as
prostitutes.
"I tell all the waitresses I've got to walk them out to
their cars to make sure nothing happens to them," he said.
But most of the people on Pacific Avenue Friday night and
yesterday morning found reason to be lieve the killer posed no
threat to them.
The casino employees and patrons took some comfort in the
thought that the killer appeared to be targeting prostitutes.
"That's got nothing to do with us," said LaKeesha
Samuel, 26, who was walking along Pacific Ave nue with three
friends from Pleasantville just after midnight. They had been at
the Taj Majal and were heading south to another casino. They saw
no reason to take any special precautions, she said.
AVOIDING 'BUMS LIKE THAT'
The women who were working as prostitutes found comfort in the
differences between their work practices and the practices of
the women who were killed.
"I'm not worried. I have clientele," said on blonde
prostitute in a black fur coat. Detectives had just stopped her
in front of Trump Plaza to show her photos of the dead girls.
She said she doesn't do business with the kind of men who
would kill.
"I'm safe," she said. "I don't just go
anywhere with bums like that."
The bodies of Raffo, Roberts and the other two women were
discovered behind a row of seedy mo tels along Black Horse Pike.
Raffo had been strangled with a rope or cord; Roberts was
asphyxiated by an unspecified means, authorities said. The
causes of death had not been determined for the other two women.
Prostitutes refer to the area where the bodies were found as
simply "the Pike."
"That's a mistake they made, going out there," said
one woman who was soliciting business on Pacific Avenue, not far
from Tennessee.
She was wearing an olive bomber jacket and had her blue jeans
tucked inside her high-heeled boots. Whenever a man walked by
and made eye contact, she smiled and asked him if he wanted
company.
If a man were to say yes, said the woman, who knew both Raffo
and Roberts, she would insist on using a motel in the city
rather than one of the seedier places out on the Pike. It's
safer that way, she said.
She had been working Pacific Avenue for two hours and had not
yet found a man to keep company, she said. The killer may be
stalking prostitutes, but it was the men who seemed frightened
Friday night.
"Too much police, I guess," the woman said.
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