Motel janitor grilled in Shore serial stranglings

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. – A former maintenance man at the Golden Key Motel, near where the decomposing bodies of four streetwalkers were found face-down in a muddy sewer ditch in November, underwent a daylong interogation as authorities searched his Salem County home.

The Atlantic County Prosecutors Office would neither identify the man nor confirm whether he was being held in the probe of the four murders. A source confirmed this morning that the daylong interview took place yesterday and that bags of evidence had been collected at the man's white, woodframe home in Alloway Township in a rural area of Salem County.

The search lasted six hours, investigators said.

The victims' bodies were discovered in the watery ditch on Nov. 20 – their light-haired heads pointing east toward the glittering gambling mecca of Atlantic City. Investigators tied all four to prostitution and drugs.

So decomposed were the victims, Kim Raffo, 35, Tracy Ann Roberts, 23, Barbara V. Breidor, 42, and Molly Jean Dilts, 20, that it took pathologists several weeks to identify them.

Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey S. Blitz has been unwilling to confirm whether investigators suspect the women were all slain by a single killer. The FBI is aiding in the investigation.

Other experts have said that because of the placement of the bodies and because the women were slain seperately, over a period of weeks or months, the crimes appear to be the work of a serial killer.

Police originally focused their investigations on a corner room, Room 101, at the Golden Key, and siezed several bags of evidence. The room has an isolated front entrance and a back door that leads to where the bodies were discovered.

Managers at the $27-a-night motel, located along a strip of seedy hostelries in the West Atlantic City section of the township, about two miles from Atlantic City, would not allow the media to view the room after the killings and said it was undergoing "renovations."