A murder victim - and a mystery

Who was Rian Thal? Varied portraits emerge.

By Jeff Gammage and Zoe Tillman

Inquirer Staff Writers

At times, it could seem as if Rian Thal were two different people.

She attended Hebrew school at Congregation Or Ami in Lafayette Hill, and later worked as an exotic dancer.

She once turned aggressive toward customs officials at Philadelphia International Airport, but lovingly nurtured her cats at home.

She mourned the loss of her father, but his shining memory wasn't enough to steer her away from drugs.

In death, Thal, 34, has proved most of all to be a mystery, a woman who friends insist was a hardworking professional party planner, but who Philadelphia police say was heavily involved in the city's drug trade.

"The Rian I know, I don't believe that," said LaMar Campbell, 32, an Atlanta real estate broker who became friends with Thal in the late 1990s, shortly before she started working at Bluezette, a former Old City restaurant.

But court records show that in 2000, Thal was arrested at the airport as she returned from overseas and was charged with attempting to smuggle methamphetamine into the country. The next month, while working as a bartender at a Delaware County strip club, Thal was charged with possession of cocaine after a police raid.

In the smuggling case, Thal was sentenced to six to 23 months of home confinement, to be supervised by an electronic monitoring device attached to her ankle, records show.

She complained to the court that the device would prevent her from working as a dancer at local clubs, according to a source familiar with the case. The court advised Thal to wear boots - the device would stay on her leg.

Last month, Thal's life came to a violent end. She and a friend, Timothy Gilmore, 40, of Ohio, were shot to death on June 27 by three gunmen who waited in the hall outside Thal's apartment. She lived in the Piazza at Schmidts, a new luxury development in Northern Liberties on the site of the old Schmidt's brewery.

Police found four kilograms of cocaine and more than $100,000 in cash in Thal's seventh-floor apartment.

A law enforcement official familiar with the drug underworld told The Inquirer that Thal worked as a "holder," one who gets paid by dealers for storing their drugs. But that's not all she was, investigators said yesterday. Police believe she was involved at a deeper level, selling and possibly trafficking in narcotics.

Police said yesterday they were still operating on the theory that the shooting started out as an armed robbery, then escalated to murder.

Five days after the killings, Philadelphia police arrested Katoya Jones, 25, who lives in the same building as Thal. Police say she let three armed men and a lookout into the building, subverting the security system.

Police are searching for a high-level drug dealer who they believe set up the shootings, persuading Jones to help the killers get inside.

Thal was president and sole officer of RiGirl Productions, the Philadelphia party-planning firm she founded in 2003. She was known for club events that attracted professional athletes, celebrities, and aspiring rap stars. In April, fliers advertised a dual birthday party for her and James "Kamal" Gray, of the Roots, the Grammy-winning band, at Plush nightclub.

People who met Thal invariably remembered her for her blond hair, her kilowatt smile, her bubbling-over personality. Friends say her raspy voice was instantly recognizable.

Thal had always been popular, at Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School and later at the places where she worked. She stood only 5-feet-4, and in photos she posted on MySpace and other social networking Web sites, she seemed diminutive.

Her event planning in Philadelphia put her in contact with people such as Mayor Nutter and actress Carmen Electra, but her roots were in the Pennsylvania suburbs.

She grew up in what school friends called "the townhouses," a community on Birch Drive off Ridge Pike in Lafayette Hill. It was one of those neighborhoods, friends said, where everyone "used to live" before moving to more affluent areas.

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