The Cold Case of The Eastbound Strangler

in 2006 in a water run off behind the golden key motel in Atlantic City, 4 woman found dead unusually stagged that gave the moniker name The Eastbound Killer. Who is he? Where is he?

Let’s pull back the shadows that have kept these cold cases in the dark for far too long. Piece by piece, we’ll work to rebuild the truth not just for the story, but for the victims and the families still waiting for answers. The puzzle isn’t complete yet, but together, we’re getting closer.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

It's November 20th of 2006 in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. Just an expensive stone throw outside the neon soaked high-stakes world of Atlantic City. Now, guys, I'm a native Jersey girl, and I can tell you, if you drive down the Black Horse Pike away from the casinos and the boardwalk, the glitz fades pretty quick. It turns into a stretch of asphalt lined with neon signs of different kinds of budget motels, 24-hour diners in marshlands. Welcome guys to Shadows Uncovered, and I'm your host, Sarah. Today I want to go over the case of the eastbound strangler, a serial killer that went on a five-week ride, if you want to call it, of murder of a specific kind of girl yet facing all in the same direction with a peculiar twist only the murderer could know of. Let's start with the day that this started. It was a particular Monday. Two people were walking through the overgrown grass behind the Golden Key Motel. It is a rundown building, a place where people on the margins of society find temporary shelter. The air is cold, biting and smells of salt marsh and stagnant runoff water. Now, as these two passers walk along a narrow water filled drainage ditch running parallel to the highway, they look down into the reeds. They expect to see trash, debris, the usual runoff from the pike. Instead they see a shoe. No, not a shoe, a bare foot, a human leg partially submerged in the brackish water. They of course call nine, and when the local police arrive, they step into the ditch expecting a tragic isolated case of a life loss in the elements of foul play. But as they begin to secure the area, a detective looks further down the ditch. Sixty feet away, a second body. They walk further, another sixty feet, a third body. And by the time the sun began to set over Egg Harbor Township, investigators are standing over a horror film brought to life. Four women dead, left in a straight linear line stretching across three hundred and twenty feet of dark water. But it wasn't just the sheer number of body guys that sent a chill through the Atlanta County Police Department. It was the staging. The women were all laid face down, their arms were stretched out wide, they were fully clothed, but every single one of them was completely barefoot. Their shoes and socks meticulously removed and nowhere to be found. And then came the realization that gave this killers his tire terrifying monkey. The ditch ran east to west, and every single victim that had been placed with her head pointing precisely to the east forced even in death to face the glittering skyline of Atlantic City. That this wasn't a dumping ground. It was a Maccabee gallery. And the phantom artist behind it would soon be known to the world as the eastbound Strangler. When a serial killer strikes, you know the media often turns to the murderer into a celebrity, a monster with a catchy nickname. But to truly understand a case like this, guys, we have to pull our eyes away from the shadow of the killer and look at the lives he stole. Who were the four women left in the ditch behind the Golden Key Motel? To find them, you have to go into the unbelly of Atlantic City in 2006. Specifically Pacific Avenue. It's a red light district where drugs, poverty, and desperation intersect. All four victims were known sex workers operating in this area. They were women fighting battles against severe substance addiction and women who slipped through the cracks of a system that was supposed to protect them. But I want to start with the women investigators believed was the first to be taken. Molly Jean Dilts. She was just twenty years old, young, vulnerable, and originally from Pennsylvania. Molly had come to Atlantic City looking for a fresh start, but instead found herself trapped in the unforgiving cycle of the streets. Because of the advanced stays of decomposition when she was found, medical examiners couldn't definitely prove how she died. But her placement in the ditch left no doubt she was victim number one. Then there's Barbara Bredo, 42 years old, a mother, a woman described by those who knew her as kind but deeply troubled by her dependency on crack cocaine. Barbara vanished into thin air sometime in October 2006, and because of the unstable, transient nature of life on Pacific Avenue, she wasn't officially reported missing for weeks. Like Molly, the water had taken its toll on her body, making a precise cause of death impossible to determine. But again, the signature of her placement spoke volumes. Now the third victim was a twenty-three year old Tracy Ann Roberts. Tracy was an exotic dancer who had moved up the coast from Delaware. She was a mother to a young daughter whom she loved fiercely. Tracy's autopsy gave investigators their first concrete piece of forensic evidence. She had been asphyxiated. Someone had choked the life out of her. And finally, we have Kim Raffo, a 35-year-old, a mother of two, originally from Brooklyn. Kim was a well-known along the strip. She was a woman who tried multiple times to get clean, to go to her family, but the gravitational pull of the avenue kept dragging her back. Kim was the last to die. And in fact, she had been seen alive just twenty four hours before the bodies were discovered. However, her autopsy was clear. Another manual strangulation. Now, guys, I want to just think about the timeline, okay? We have four women that disappeared over the course of roughly five weeks. Kim Raffo disappeared on Sunday. On Monday, all four are found. This means the killer was returning to the exact drainage ditch, time and time again, over a course of a month, to neatly arrange this horrific, what do you want to call it, collection? But what kind of mind can can disconceive a ritual like this? When the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit and local criminal profilers looked at the crime scenes behind the Golden Key Motel, they saw a terrifying mix of high organization and deep-seated rage. Okay, I want to break down the forensic profile of this eastbound strangler. But first, the location. Okay, the drainage ditch wasn't deeply hidden in the wilderness. It was right behind a motel, parallel to a major road. To carry a dead body, guys, four times from a vehicle into that ditch without being seen requires intimate knowledge of the area. The killer knew exactly where the area would be dark and when the motel staff wasn't looking. And where the blind spots were. This tells profilers he was likely a local or someone whose job brought him to this stretch of the black horse pike regularly. Now, second, you gotta look at the lack of evidence, guys. The killer didn't just dump these women, he anchored them face down in the water. Profilers believe this wasn't just for concealment. The moving brackish water of the drainage ditch acted as a natural forensic eraser. By keeping the body submerged, the killer ensured that any hair, fibers, skin, or DNA left on the victim's clothing or skin would be washed away by the tides and current. And it worked. The forensic teams found almost nothing. No semen, no struggle marks, no footprints in the mud that could specifically point to a shoe brand. Except for one thing. Underneath the fingernails of Kim Raffo, the last victim, tech teams found a trace sample of male DNA. A teeny tiny microscope shred of hulp. Kim had fought back. But when investigators ran that DNA profile through CODIS, the national database, the system came back entirely blank. The killer had no prior felony convictions on file. He was a ghost. But guys, can we just talk about this? Like there the staging, the missing shoes and the socks. Profiler like John Kelly formed the stock S T A L K Agency, have openly speculated that the killer had a severe foot fetish, keeping the shoes as trophies to relieve his crimes. But some experts believe it was a symbolic gesture of profound hostility. Atlantic City, with its multimillion dollar casino industry, represents wealth, glamour, and escape. Pacific Avenue, however, where these women worked, represented the exact opposite decay, poverty, and abandonment. But pointing their heads towards the city? What was the killer making a statement? Was he saying look at what your city creates or look at what it discards? Or was it purely religious, a perverted ritual of alignment? The police had a profile. They had microscopic DNA sample. Now they needed a face. And soon the tips began pouring in. In the weeks and months following the discovery, Egg Harbor Township became the massive center of a task force. Police questioned hundreds of people, drug dealers, Johns, motel guests, and local transients. And over the year, the few names rose to the top of the suspect list. The first was a man named Terry Olseen. Olseen was a 41-year-old handyman and repairman. And there, where did he work? Where did where do you think he worked, guys? He lived and stayed for free at the Golden Key Motel right at the time of the murders, doing maintenance work and working on the property. How convenient, right? And yet to make matters worse, okay, around the time the bodies were found, Olsen was going through a volatile domestic dispute with his girlfriend. In a fit of anger, she went to the police and told them point blank, my boyfriend is the eastbound strangler. But when detectives raided Olsen's room, they didn't find any evidence of murder. But they found something deeply disturbing. Hidden video cameras set up around the property, including illicit images of his girlfriend's teenage daughter. Olsen was arrested on violent charges, and the media swarmed. For months the public was convinced that the killer had been caught. But the frenzied tea ran Olsen's DNA against the sample that they found under Kim Raffa's fingernail, and it was a negative match. Terry Olsen was a predator, but he was not the eastbound strangler. He was completely cleared of the homicides. Then came the man who called himself, quote unquote, the river man. Eldridge Raymond Burchell was a local resident who openly bragged to a sex worker that he had killed people, explicitly invoking the mountainer of Gary Ridway, the infamous green river killer, guys. The terrified woman went straight to the authorities. Police hauled Burchell for an intense interrogation. He knew details about the street life. He had the dark fantasy profile. But here we go, once again, the physical evidence just wasn't there. No DNA connection, no timeline alignment. He was a man playing a terrifying character, but he wasn't the monster behind the motel. So as the years drag on, another name was whispering on true crime forums and police corridors. Charles Coles, a local drug dealer who was known associate of Kim Raffo. Mark Hennessy, an acquaintance who knew both Kim Raffo and Barbara Brader, they were both scrutinized and put under the microscope and ultimately released without charges. So now, obviously, the trail was going cold. The Golden Key Motel felt into despair, becoming an eyesore and eventually demolished, wiping the physical crime scene off the face of Earth. But then, guys, in the summer of 2023, a massive shockwave hit True Crime World. On Long Island, New York, police arrest Rex Huerman. Yes, Rex Huberman. You know I've talked to him about him in a previous episode. He was the architect living in the quiet suburban life. He was accused of being notorious Gilgo Beach serial murder. The similarities between both were staggering, but Huberman targets sex workers. He used strangulation as his method of execution, and he dumped his victims in remote marshy areas along the highway. And geographically, the distance between Long Island and Atlantic City is less than three-hour drive. Was it possible that the Gilgo Beach Killer had taken a road trip down the Garden State Parkway in the fall of 2006? The task force in New Jersey immediately opened the communication lines with New York. Criminologists across the country held their breath, waiting to see if two of the biggest cold cases on the Eastern Seaboard were about to be solved with a single arrest. But the hope was short-lived. By late July 2023, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison and the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office released definitive statements. They had run the data. They had looked into Humorman's timelines, his phone records, and his DNA. The verdict? Rex humorin was officially ruled out. The sex workers killed in Atlantic City were not his victims. The eastbound strangler was still out there, or perhaps, guys, hiding in plain sight. It has been nearly two decades since Molly, Barbara, Tracy, and Kim were taken from the streets of Atlantic City and left into the freezing mud behind the Golden Key motel. Twenty years of silence, twenty years of holidays, birthdays, and milestones that four families had to experience with an empty chair at the table. Because these vermen were sex workers, because you know guys, they battled addiction. But to treat their deaths as an occupational hassle. Hazard than a calculated, horrified injustice. But the Atlantic County prosecutors hasn't forgotten. They maintain to this day that this is an active open homicide investigation and that there is still a $25,000 reward on the table for anyone who can provide the missing piece of this puzzle. Genetic genealogy. Yes, I'm talking about the same technology that caught the golden say killer is constantly evolving. Investigators continue to re-examine that single strand of male DNA recovered from Ken Ralph's fingernails, hoping that a distant cousin or something, or nephew or sibling, upload their DNA to a public database and a light might match. Someone listening to this episode might know something. A family member who came home acting strange in October 20, 2006. A guys, a truck driver, or even a construction worker who had an obsession, you want to say, with the budget motel along the Black Horse Pike? A man who kept a collection of women's shoes hiding away in a garage or attic. Now, the Golden Key Motel is gone. The ditch has been overgrown by weeds and filled with dirt. But the spirits of those four women still face east, waiting for justice in the cold light of day. If you want to see the visual layouts and the deep investigative interviews of the timeline mapped out by forensic profilers, you can watch the dedicated investigative episode of Dark Minds titled The Eastbound Strangler. But if you have any information regarding the murders of Kim Raffo, Tracy Ann Roberts, Barbara Brito, or Molly Jean Dilts, please contact the Atlanta County Prosecutor's Office or Crimes Tips line. Help bring them home. Well, there you have it, guys. Still, Eastbound Strangler is still out there to this day. Not identified, not found. And within a five-week period, went on a strangling thrill ride for himself, killing these women, knowing the area and knowing where to put them in a public area is just so brazen, don't you think? And to just know that putting them face down is going to erase all forensic evidence. But what was the key? Why were they all facing east? I don't know. But again, guys, just stay safe out there. You don't know what's going on anywhere you are, even if you are careful. Keep your eyes open. Because you don't know who might be there. Catch me next week for another case of uncertainty, unclear, maybe a motive type of case. All right, guys. Bye.