"In my opinion, the case is stone cold," he said.
A second suspect called Leonard and "confessed" to being the man some have dubbed the Black Horse Strangler. Leonard met the man at the Atlantic County jail, where he was held in another case, and recorded their conversation.
Pamela Covelli, an admitted prostitute, identified the man as a "suspicious" client with whom she and Raffo had "partied" three days before Raffo's body was found.
But during a hearing on Oleson's case, a judge said investigators had rejected the other man's admission of guilt.
Another self-described Atlantic City prostitute, Denise Hill, said she had contacted investigators about a year ago concerning a third man, a john from Florida who hinted that he was the killer.
Hill said the man had sent her greeting cards in which he called himself "Riverman," an apparent reference to the Seattle area's Green River Killer, who was found guilty of slaying 48 women.
"He's come back to Atlantic City a few times over the past two years," Hill said last week. "One time he grabbed my face and told me he cared for me and would never do anything to hurt me, but that those other four girls weren't so lucky."
When she contacted investigators, Hill said, they seemed "totally not interested."
"If this guy is going to be caught, it's going to come from help from the girls on the street," Hill said. "We all still remember those girls. Two of them were my friends."
Atlantic County Prosecutor Theodore Housel told the Associated Press in June that dozens of law enforcement agencies had worked more than 175,000 hours on the case.
Housel has come as close as any official to calling the crimes the work of a serial killer.
"They were four young ladies in close proximity to each other," he said. "The idea that there might be four people who had done the exact same thing is not logical."
Joseph Pollini, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired lieutenant on the New York City police cold-case squad, said the case could still be solved.
"It just depends on how tenacious the people involved are . . . and how many resources they want to put into it," said Pollini, who as an officer helped solve murders as old as 30 years.
Though logic may suggest that cases get more difficult to solve as they age, he said reluctant witnesses could become more willing to talk. Police need to keep up the pressure, he said.
"Maybe there's a prostitute out there that knows what happened and is just tight-lipped," he said.
There have been no similar murders in Atlantic County since the bodies were discovered. Vernon Geberth, a former New York City police detective who writes forensics texts, said long hiatuses had once led officials to assume killers were dead or in jail.
"Then along came the BTK killer, and it fooled everybody," Geberth said. The BTK killer, Dennis Rader, committed 10 murders in Kansas between 1974 and 1991, with up to eight years between them.
The Atlantic County murderer may have moved, Geberth said, but "the truth of the matter is I don't think anybody can give you a logical explanation" for why the killings stopped.
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