The Eastbound Strangler (Atlantic City Four)

Case background and investigation

On November 20, 2006, a sex worker walking behind the Golden Key Motel on the Black Horse Pike in Egg Harbor Township, on the outskirts of Atlantic City, New Jersey, discovered the bodies of four women lying in a shallow, water-filled drainage ditch. Each woman had been placed face-down in a row, roughly sixty feet apart, with her head pointed east toward Atlantic City. All were clothed except that their shoes and socks had been removed. Investigators believed the women had been strangled or asphyxiated, and the killer soon acquired the nickname the 'Eastbound Strangler.'

The victims were quickly identified as Kim Raffo, 35, a former Brooklyn waitress and mother; Barbara Breidor, 42, who had once helped run a family jewelry business; Molly Jean Dilts, 20, of Black Lick, Pennsylvania; and Tracy Ann Roberts, 23, a former dancer from Delaware. All four were involved in sex work along the city's Pacific Avenue red-light district and struggled with drug addiction. Kim Raffo, believed to have been killed last, was strangled with a rope or cord; because of decomposition, the causes of death for two of the women could not be firmly established. Molly Dilts is generally thought to have been the first killed. Because their bodies had lain in the ditch for varying lengths of time, medical examiners could not pinpoint exactly when each woman died, and the staging of the scene — the neat row, the removed footwear, the eastward orientation — suggested a killer who deliberately posed his victims.

The murders drew intensive attention but few solid leads. A motel repairman, Terry Oleson, who had been staying at the Golden Key in exchange for work, was implicated by his girlfriend and heavily scrutinized, but he was never charged and no DNA linked him to the crimes. Others who were questioned, including a man who reportedly confessed to a prostitute, were cleared. A $25,000 reward was offered but has gone unclaimed. The killings appeared to stop as abruptly as they began, and the perpetrator left behind little usable forensic evidence.

The case has repeatedly been examined for possible links to other serial murders. In 2010, investigators explored a connection to the Gilgo Beach killings on Long Island but ruled it out. That theory was revisited in 2023 after the arrest of Rex Heuermann, the architect charged in several Gilgo Beach murders, because Heuermann had ties to the region; prosecutors again found no confirmed connection. Nearly two decades later, the Eastbound Strangler remains unidentified, and the murders of Kim Raffo, Barbara Breidor, Molly Dilts, and Tracy Ann Roberts are still unsolved — one of New Jersey's most haunting cold cases and a stark reminder of how vulnerable the four women were to a predator who has never faced justice.