Molly Jean Dilts in a photo from the Atlantic County prosecutor's office. Click photo for larger image. Listen in   Listen to a podcast about Molly Jean Dilts' story.
	Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette photos Isha Coleman is part of the family Molly Dilts lived with in North Philadelphia. Theirs is the house at the left. Click photo for larger image.
	"Papa Joe" Bocchino, who runs a luncheonette on Tennessee Avenue in Atlantic City, knew Molly Dilts and some of the other women who were killed. Click photo for larger image.
	A roadside memorial stands beside the Black Horse Pike near the ditch where the women's bodies were found. "KIM" refers to Kim Raffo, one of the victims and a friend of Molly. Click photo for larger image.

Molly Jean Dilts was a chubby 20-year-old high school dropout who scrapped and finagled and drank her way through a life that began in a used-up coal town and ended face down in a ditch on the edge of Atlantic City.

Someone discarded her, along with three other women, in a brackish trough that runs between the cheap motels of the Black Horse Pike and the new expressway that speeds big spenders to the luxury casinos of the Jersey Shore.

"She was just someone who was lost," said her cousin and closest friend, Trisha Balderas, who watched her cousin's life dissolve amid family losses and a craving for drink, drugs and companionship.

"She made a lot of mistakes in life," Mrs. Balderas said. "I know she was crying for help in the last months in life, and we just brushed it off as some kind of phase she was going through."

What Molly Dilts was going through was a spiral of decline that began almost from the start. She grew up in the village of Black Lick, a small town on Route 119 between the Indiana County towns of Blairsville and Homer City. Those who knew her say she had trouble making friends and, when she made them, they often turned out to be the wrong kind.

Trouble came early: a juvenile charge for harassment in 1999, followed soon by two other charges, including underage drinking. The next year, she lost her mother, Nicole Taylor Dilts, who died awaiting a heart transplant. Then came the suicide of her brother, the birth of a son whose father remains unknown and a deepening rift with her family. .....

She was charged in 2005 with drunkenly trying to run over a man during an argument outside a fast-food restaurant. She was picked up three months later at an Indiana motel and booked on crack charges. She never showed up for court and spent the rest of her life dodging an arrest warrant.

Molly traveled impulsively and rarely in comfort. She spent time at a homeless shelter in Black Lick, a county-rented apartment in Blairsville and a rented room in a decrepit neighborhood in North Philadelphia, until, finally, she moved from room to room and doorway to doorway in Atlantic City, plying the streets alongside prostitutes and scoring nuggets of crack cocaine.

"She was strange. She didn't seem happy at all," said Mildred Burton, at whose Philadelphia home Molly rented a room and registered a telephone last year. Ms. Burton said she urged Molly to go home, reconcile with her family, and regain the son she had given up.

"I told her this is not a place for her to be out by herself, on the street," Ms. Burton said. Twice she spent $44 to send Molly home to Black Lick. Both times, the young woman returned and resumed prowling the drug-and-hooker stretches of the neighborhood.

While roaming those streets one day last summer, Molly managed an act of heroism that stood out among neighbors accustomed to violence and indifference. A gunman shot a man in the chest at a bus stop on Lehigh Avenue. Molly, defying threats, stayed by his side until help arrived.

Police would not hear of her again until November, when a pair of tattoos led them to the name of the last body found shoeless and decayed, head pointing east, to the lights of Atlantic City. Only then did the world hear of Molly Dilts, one of the girls in the ditch.

Black Lick
The Rev. Gerald Mershimer returned to Black Lick after seminary and set up his ministry, The Chapel of Hope, at a small white church on a hillside overlooking the eastern edge of town. In the late '90s, a young woman showed up for the youth group in search of some hope.

"When I met Molly, you could just get the sense that she had some emotional turmoil, that she was in transition and she was looking for something positive," Mr. Mershimer said.

Part of her problem was a lack of friends. At the high school in Blairsville, there were the better-off "preps," the rest of the gang and, often enough, a unique category reserved for those from Black Lick.

"As I recall, growing up, Black Lick was sort of like a metaphor for being 'less-than,' " Mr. Mershimer said.

Verner Dilts, Molly's father, at least had a steady income. He worked on the gas wells planted around Indiana County, one of the last well-paid blue-collar positions in a place whose coal mines, and the wealth they generated, were long spent.

To its young, Black Lick is viewed as a dead end.

"Basically, it's a drug town," said Jess Blough, 18, a clerk at the local convenience store. Miss Blough remembered Molly Dilts from high school, where they attended a support group for students with learning problems.

Joshua Duffy, 20, also remembered Molly, who, he said, was outspoken, her voice easily heard when she piped up in class. It did not make her popular.

"The ones that knew her treated her good," Mr. Duffy said. The "popular kids," though, were less kind.

"They were mean to her," Mr. Duffy said. "Just ignorant. Called her names."

Many people had few clear recollections of Molly from her high school years, primarily because she rarely attended.

"People did pick on her," Mrs. Balderas said. "She wasn't like, school-wise, education-wise, she wasn't the smartest. She had trouble with spelling and she had trouble with math. She wasn't a good reader. And kids picked on her for that."

They teased her about her weight, her cousin Mrs. Balderas said, and they teased her about her appearance, something Molly, in her turn, seemed to ignore almost defiantly.

Molly was punished occasionally for cursing at the kids who taunted her. Her mother, in declining health, struggled to get her to school. Nikki Dilts died in 2000. Four years later, Molly quit high school in her junior year. That Christmas, she complained of the flu and threw up for three days. Her cousin took her to the emergency room at the hospital.

"I was there when she found out she was pregnant," Mrs. Balderas said. Molly assumed the father was a student at the technical school in Blairsville, a man she had been dating. Mrs. Balderas urged her to speak with him.

"She said she talked to him and he was kind of cool at the beginning, then he didn't want anything to do with it," Mrs. Balderas said.

Jeremiah Dilts was born in June 2005. His birth certificate lists the father as unknown.

Molly signed over custody of the boy to her father.

A downward spiral
The life of Molly Dilts fragmented at a quickening pace after she left her son with her dad. Friends and family say she tested positive for drugs during pregnancy, and her relationship with her father became difficult. At one point, she began living at the Pathways homeless shelter in Black Lick.

Her brother Tommy Taylor's suicide widened the distance between Molly and her family.

Mr. Taylor was found the summer of 2005 in his car on Simeone Road near his Indiana County home, a bullet in his head and a handgun in his lap. A coroner's report said he and his wife, Linda, had been separated for five weeks. When last she saw him, he asked if she'd like to see him shoot himself.

After he did, Linda moved in with Tommy's stepfather, Verner Dilts.

Molly took a room in late summer or early autumn of that year at the former Pittman Hotel in Blairsville. The room was paid for by the Indiana County Community Action Program's homeless assistance project. She shared the room with a man named Jason Harris. They had met at the shelter, her sister-in-law, Mrs. Taylor, said. The couple worked that month at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on Route 22.

"A couple of times somebody would say they were up there arguing," hotel owner Dwight Creen said. "I had a feeling they had some problems because he was gone a couple days before she moved out. She basically took what she could carry and she moved."

Mr. Creen said he threw out an assortment of things Molly left behind after hanging the key to Room 39 on a hook beside the door.

"There was a lot of like, books and, I guess, note pads and stuff like that," he said. "For going back to school. Getting a GED or something. Trying to further her education."

In December of that year, Molly, then 19, was charged with multiple counts, including public intoxication, after a wild fight at a McDonald's outside Indiana. A police report for Dec. 8, 2005, says she hopped into a car and tried to run down Jeffrey Smith. Mr. Smith was uninjured. The front fender of the car was dented.

She was freed on bail Jan. 3, 2006. For a home phone, she posted a number that rings at the Alice Paul House, a women's shelter. Officials there would not say if she stayed at the shelter.

Molly traveled to Virginia after her release, Mrs. Taylor said.

"She went with a friend of hers. Some girl that she met," Mrs. Taylor said. She never got the name. "She called her dad to send her money because the girl she went with beat her up."

Molly was in trouble again. Police responded to a call at Room 4 of Scott's Motel, south of Indiana. Someone had tried to get into the room the night before, saying he was a state trooper.

Trooper Daniel Zenisek knocked on the door the morning of March 27. Molly opened it.

Trooper Zenisek's report says Molly told him she spent the night in Room 4 with Derrick Clemons and Heather Forsell, both of whom had drug-related records in the county. She added that her boyfriend, from Cleveland, was in the Indiana County Jail on drug-related charges.

A search turned up a hypodermic needle in the room, a crack pipe in Molly' sock and other drug items. She was booked and freed on bail.

When she didn't appear for trial, a judge issued a bench warrant for her arrest.

West Colona Street
The stretch of North Philadelphia bounded by Ridge and Lehigh avenues is reached by passing streets named after Pennsylvania counties: Westmoreland, Dauphin, Clearfield, Cambria and Indiana. Jobless men and women stand on street corners, and clerks in the small markets padlock their doors.

When Molly Dilts arrived in this bitter stretch of the city in early 2006, she stood out. The neighborhood is overwhelmingly black. Molly was white. People are wary of strangers, and Molly seemed to thrive on meeting everyone she could, making new friends and becoming known on West Colona, a short bit of road lined with worn row houses. She moved in with a man neighbors remember as James at 3040 W. Colona.

Her pattern of broken relationships quickly repeated. Molly moved out on James and moved in with her new friends, the Burton family, at 3012. They rented her a room at the top of the stairs, a tiny space with a curtain for a door. She had her own telephone installed.

The mysteries of this white girl living on a black street only deepened for Mildred Burton; her son, Rondell; Rondell's fiancee, Isha Coleman; and the others in the family.

Molly told fantastic tales. Her mother had died in Australia. She had gone to college, but left. At one point, she said she'd heard her son had died. She would leave the house and return with money she couldn't explain.

"When Molly said she needed some money, she would pick up the phone, make a phone call, then she would leave from here," Miss Coleman said. "Then, next thing you know, when she'd come back, she'd have money."

"She would have $500 in her pocket," Mrs. Burton said. "I'd say, 'Where'd you get that money from?' She said, 'Oh, a friend of mine.' That was it."

Her longest absence was a week, said Raymond Robertson, Mrs. Burton's fiance.

"And then she would pop back up," Mrs. Burton said. "She'd come back with money. I thought maybe she was out there tricking. That's what I thought."

By mid-June, Molly was a fixture in the neighborhood, occasionally phoning home, but seemingly happy in her new surroundings. She was waiting for a bus June 16 at Lehigh Avenue and 29th Street when she began talking with a man named Ardo Rosa.

Police reports say a neighborhood man named Darnell Brown and another, who was never identified, walked up and asked Molly for a cigarette. Mr. Rosa and Mr. Brown traded words and, police say, Mr. Brown pulled out a revolver and shot Mr. Rosa in the gut.

"We thought he was going to die," Philadelphia Detective Jim Waring said.

Molly told the Burtons that Mr. Brown turned to her after shooting Mr. Rosa and said, "You could be next."

Mr. Rosa returned to the neighborhood looking for Molly; he didn't seem to know her name. He asked about the white girl who had saved him.

"He was trying to find the girl to thank her," said Cynthia Winder, who lives on 29th. He credited Molly with applying pressure to his wound, holding back the blood, and said she stayed with him until an ambulance took him away.

Mr. Rosa could not be relocated. He never showed for Mr. Brown's hearing. His wife, Demaris, echoed the account police and Molly gave.

Mr. Rosa was not the only one who didn't show up for court. Molly, her friends said, was terrified. She had mentioned an arrest warrant with her name on it, but she was more afraid of the assailant.

"She said she didn't want to tell on the person because the guy's from around this neighborhood and would know where she was at," Mr. Burton said. "He knew her face and so she didn't want to go to court."

After one absence of a week, Molly returned to West Colona and showed off a stunning black dress, a gift, she said, from an admirer with whom she had stayed in Atlantic City.

"She said she stayed at the Borgata," Rondell Burton said. The Borgata is touted as Atlantic City's most luxurious hotel-casino. "That was her first time going to Atlantic City. She said she really enjoyed herself and that she got to gamble for the first time, got to really see the beach, and that she would like to go back sometime."

Molly mentioned something else, Mr. Burton said. She was returning to Black Lick.

"She mentioned that she was going back home because she had got a new apartment and she was trying to get her life together," he said.

Molly Dilts went home, which, in her world, meant someone else's house.

Waiting for Oktoberfest
Jeremy Clawson's home sits on the edge of a ravine on a winding road on the outskirts of Black Lick. Behind it, Black Lick Creek chatters over brown rocks. The porch has a cooler with an unopened beer atop it and a raft of empty cans overflowing a trash bag. A shutoff notice from the electric company is tucked into the door.

Molly moved in with him in late July or early August. They had known each other briefly in high school. Before he was discharged for drinking in 2005, he spent two years in the Army. He and Molly corresponded. On a visit in 2004 they had a brief affair. When she returned to Black Lick last summer, they moved in together. She told him Jeremiah was not his son, though he has no way of knowing.

"I was going to actually try to settle down with her," Mr. Clawson said. "Before she left, though, man, we weren't getting along too well. She just slept a lot. Like she didn't like it where she was at and stuff."

Molly told Mr. Clawson about her arrest warrant. Other than an occasional cruise in Yellow Creek State Park on Mr. Clawson's boat, Molly did little. She had no job. Mr. Clawson worked from 5:30 p.m. to dawn on a gas well job. Their cycles were reversed. They hoped, at least, to have a day out together at an Oktoberfest celebration in a town about an hour's drive away.

"She said she was going to turn herself in after Oktoberfest," Mr. Clawson said. She would settle the charges, regain her son and the trio could start a new life as a family.

By summer's end, though, Mr. Clawson saw little future with this unpopular girl who slept most of the time and badgered him to move to Philadelphia.

"She always wanted to go back to Philly, no matter what. She just kept asking me," Mr. Clawson said. "She wanted me to go at first, and I didn't want to go. She never told me what she wanted to do there. She said she had friends there. She liked the city or something."

Mrs. Taylor, the sister-in-law who now lived with her late husband's stepfather, picked her up Oct. 4 for a drive to Indiana, where Molly was visiting a family planning clinic.

That was the last time she was seen in Indiana County.

"We were supposed to go to Oktoberfest that weekend," Mr. Clawson said. "I don't see why she picked that weekend to leave."

Returning to West Colona
When Molly Dilts turned up at the top of West Colona on Oct. 7, neighbors turned out to greet her. She was dressed in new jeans, new shoes and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. She gave Isha Coleman her bus ticket for safekeeping.

Didn't Ms. Coleman notice something different about her? she asked her friend. New shoes. Ms. Coleman agreed they were cute. But Ms. Coleman noticed something else: Molly had cropped her hair short.

"She said, 'I cut my hair because I'm about to go into the military or the Air Force,' something like that," Ms. Coleman said.

Molly made the rounds with neighbors.

At some point during the day, she phoned home, the last call ever from her upstairs room. Mrs. Taylor answered the call in Black Lick. Molly asked if her father was there. Mrs. Taylor told her he was. Molly abruptly hung up.

If the Burton family was happy to see Molly, they weren't prepared to have her move back in. Mildred Burton said she wanted Molly to return to Indiana County, to her own family.

"I actually told her she had to leave, 'cause I wanted her to go home. Because if she was into drugs and stuff, I couldn't have that in my house," Mrs. Burton said.

Molly retrieved her bus ticket and left.

Driving through the neighborhood, Mrs. Burton caught her last glimpse of Molly.

"She had a plastic bag in her hand. She was just walking down Ridge Avenue. I don't know where she was going."

Atlantic City
That plastic shopping bag stayed in Molly's hand for days. She walked the streets of Atlantic City with the thing in her hand, said Denise Hill, who says she worked the same corners and shared the same drugs as Molly.

"She walked out there. She always had a plastic shopping bag. You wouldn't know she was a working girl. She looked like a tourist," Ms. Hill said.

Ms. Hill believes Molly had first come to Atlantic City almost two years ago. Local memories of her are clearer in the months leading up to her death.

Joe "Papa Joe" Bocchino runs a diner in the heart of the crack district. He rents out rooms above. Molly was a regular. She would come in for a breakfast sandwich, an orange soda, and then leave.

"Molly was just going from room to room. Wherever she could rest her head, that's where she was at. She had no place. She had no permanent address," he said.

Mr. Bocchino said Molly stood out because "she didn't look like a crack head." Molly became close to Kim Raffo, a former PTA mother who turned to crack and prostitution.

Molly stopped showing up at Papa Joe's in late October or early November. He can't be sure because the girls on the street often disappear. Some return home. Some land in jail for a few weeks and return. Some just vanish.

Mr. Bocchino said he last saw Kim Raffo at 2:30 a.m. on a November morning. She bought something to eat. He held the door open for her as she got into a car with out-of-state plates. The next day, two women were walking along a rubbish-strewn path behind the Golden Key Motel on the Black Horse Pike. They found a body, face down. When police arrived, they found three more: Kim Raffo, Tracy Ann Roberts, Barbara Breidor. The last was Molly Dilts. Two of the bodies were so far gone the Atlantic City district attorney can't state a cause of death. Police, still silent on the case, kept the bodies for nearly two months. Tests showed toxic levels of drugs in three of the bodies. In Molly's, they found alcohol.

Rescue the perishing
Back home, Mr. Mershimer, a Bible and study text spread on the footstool before him, cast about for some answer to Molly Dilts. He would do the funeral. The stories of prostitution, of the ditch, the ignominy of her death, pain him.

"She was just another precious human being," he said. "Life seemed to have dumped on her a lot."

Even in death, she couldn't get a break. She became known simply as one of the Atlantic City prostitutes. Her father shut himself away in his home and turned away questions. Mr. Mershimer doesn't blame him.

"Initially, there seemed to be this portrayal of Molly that just lumped her with some descriptions that would just make people roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, well,' " Mr. Mershimer said. "I don't know exactly what she was doing in Atlantic City. I do know the young lady I knew, to the extent I knew her, was a sincere, and sincerely hurt young lady by the circumstances of life and so much of what she'd seen and experienced."

In the living room of his tiny house overlooking the creek, Jeremy Clawson wondered, too, at the woman who had shared his life for a few months, then "walked out of my house and died."

"It bothered me for a while," Mr. Clawson said. "Finding out she went and got murdered, somewhere, you know? I mean, I was gonna' throw her out anyway, but I didn't want nothing to happen to her or nothing, you know?"

Trisha Balderas didn't want anything to happen to Molly, either. In recent years, as she saw her friend and cousin slip deeper into the trough of addiction and self-destruction, she asked Molly how it had happened.

"She said, 'It just makes me feel good. It's the only thing that makes me feel good.' That's what she kept telling me," Mrs. Balderas said.

Mrs. Balderas is expecting her first child this year. Sonograms suggest it is a girl. She plans to name her Elena Molly.