"She said that she owed me her life, because she was going to get killed down there," said Melodia, 33, who had not heard from Mahoney for weeks before getting the call. "She told me she had been raped, she had been beaten. Her body was covered with bruises. She was scared."
Melodia is not sure whether Mahoney knew that a man recently strangled two women in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood - women who, like Mahoney, were addicted to drugs and willing to go to desperate measures to get them. Mahoney may have seen the fliers posted in the historically crime-ridden neighborhood, warning of a man who is suspected in attacks on several women last month.
In any case, Mahoney told Melodia she'd had enough of the streets, and said she planned to enter rehab after she finished detox.
Instead, Mahoney left her program last weekend and headed back to Kensington, a section of the city associated with drug dealing and prostitution. Melodia doesn't know how or when Mahoney got to Philadelphia, but she believes it could not have been earlier than last Saturday.
Mahoney's body turned up Wednesday around 5 p.m., not far from the places where Kensington's other strangling victims were found last month.
Police said there are strong indications that Mahoney was killed by the man responsible for the deaths of Elaine Goldberg and Nicole Piacentini. Those deaths have been linked by DNA evidence, but testing has not yet been completed on evidence taken from Mahoney's body.
The similarities between the homicides have led police to acknowledge that the pattern may be the work of a serial killer. All three victims were white and between 21 and 35. They were found nude from the waist down, blocks from each other, in vacant lots near abandoned buildings. All showed signs of sexual assault.
