Pubdate: Sat, 12 May 2001 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Author: Dan Barry A FADING ACTRESS, A PILE OF DRUGS AND 3 SLAYINGS Her movie-career highlight had been as a featured dancer in "Dirty Dancing," but that 1987 film's success had not done much for Jennifer Stahl. The closest she came to fame was by renting a tired apartment five stories above the Carnegie Delicatessen in Midtown, where tourists come to eat pastrami and marvel at the framed photographs of celebrities that hang on the walls. So Ms. Stahl turned to singing and, the police say, to selling marijuana. She used her apartment to record music as well as to store scales, packaging material and pounds of the drug. Behind her pink front door there hung a cardboard sign that listed a half-dozen varieties, with prices from $300 to $600 an ounce. On Thursday evening, Ms. Stahl was simply relaxing with people who appear to have had nothing to do with her drug-dealing: a hair stylist, there to trim her hair; an old friend interested in recording some music; and two friends from the Virgin Islands, in town for a weekend wedding in New Jersey. Then her apartment's buzzer sounded; moments later she opened the door to find two young men wearing bandannas on their heads. "Sean," she said, according to what one witness told the police. "What are you doing here today?" Five minutes later, two of her guests were dead from gunshots to the head, and Ms. Stahl was dying. A fourth guest was seriously wounded, and the slightly injured hair stylist was dialing 911, desperate to share every detail he could about the executions occurring above the heads of dining, gawking tourists. Investigators said that the killings reflect how the marijuana trade - long viewed as among the cheapest and most benign kinds of drug trafficking - has become more violent as prices have increased. Ms. Stahl appears to have been only a midlevel retailer, they said, but each of the six pounds of marijuana in her apartment had a street value of $10,000. The police said they believe that the two suspects knew of Ms. Stahl's cash business, and set out to rob her. They spent yesterday hunting for the two men, aided by some fairly sharp images from a surveillance camera on the second-floor landing of the apartment building, at 854 Seventh Avenue. A videotape from that camera has been forwarded to the F.B.I. laboratory in Quantico, Va., for enhancement. Although many details about the killings and the victims remain unclear, Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik said, "We believe there was an association between the killers and at least one of the victims." That would be the 39-year-old former actress whose vitality can only be found now on videotape and DVD: Jennifer Stahl. She was blond, blue-eyed, thin and very photogenic, from an affluent family in Titusville, N.J., a picturesque hamlet along the Delaware River, about 15 minutes north of Trenton. Her father, Robert, ran a company that distributed packaged foods; her mother, Joyce, was very involved with the Princeton Ballet School (they have since divorced). Heather Lea Gerdes, who met Ms. Stahl in a dance class, remembered her as rebellious, and always chafing against the wishes of her family. She sold marijuana "for as long as I've known her," Ms. Gerdes said. "She felt she had to do everything illegal. She wanted to have fun all the time, but she secretly also wanted to be a star." In 1986, Ms. Gerdes said, the two former classmates bumped into each other on Eighth Avenue, and Ms. Stahl told her about a call for dancers in a movie called "Dirty Dancing." Soon they had both landed jobs as "dirty dancers" who provided the background for the close-up and steamy dancing between the stars, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. Linda Gottlieb, a producer for the movie, vaguely remembered Ms. Stahl as "the girl with the blond ponytail that flew back." "They were all kids who got a really big break for doing this movie," Ms. Gottlieb recalled. "We shot them in Blacksburg, Va., and in North Carolina. These kids were brought down because they could dance and they were cheap." Besides her minor appearance in "Dirty Dancing," Ms. Stahl had forgettable roles in forgettable movies: Cat in "Necropolis" (1986); Mindy in "Firehouse" (1987); and Woman with Professor Bob in "I'm Your Man" (1992). Ms. Stahl eventually withdrew from the Actors Equity union. According to a former boyfriend, she married, divorced, squabbled with family members and turned her attention toward a singing career. She converted a room in her apartment above the Carnegie Delicatessen into a soundproof recording studio, and, he said, recorded a compact disc that was sold in Japan. But there was also her other career, selling marijuana. When her acting career hit a dead end, "she was supporting herself with that," said the former boyfriend, who asked not to be named. A senior police official said that although Ms. Stahl was never arrested in New York City, her name appears in a law enforcement database that tracks areas known for heavy drug trafficking. The reference, while vague, indicates that she had been placed on a watch list of possible drug dealers traveling to and from Puerto Rico and Barbados. In addition, the senior official said, Ms. Stahl's drug operation was discreet, and not always open for business. "It's very controlled," he said. "You have to call. You have to know her." On Thursday evening, Ms. Stahl appears to have been taking a break from both singing and drug-dealing. She was sipping wine, having her hair cut, basking in the company of friends. There was Anthony Veader, 37, a hair stylist who has worked on the sets of movies: "Men in Black" in 1997, for example, and "8MM" in 1999. For the last two years, he has also worked on the set of "Guiding Light," the CBS soap opera. A colleague who asked not to be identified said that Mr. Veader, who lives on West 48th Street, had several private clients, and was constantly on call. "It could be midnight, and a client could call and say, `I need a haircut,' and Anthony would get out of bed and go do that haircut," the colleague said. There were Rosemond Dane and Charles Helliwell III, both 36, who had just arrived that day from St. John, in the United States Virgin Islands, for a wedding in New Jersey. Bob Sells, Ms. Dane's former husband, said that she is from Morristown, N.J., and has lived on the island for 15 years. He said she has two sons and owns three stores selling jewelry, Indonesian imports and beach gear on the island, and had been seeing Mr. Helliwell for several months. Mr. Helliwell, the son of a retired professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was originally from Harwich, Mass., where he started a music production company. He was an avid sailor who moved to the Virgin Islands in 1998 to work toward a captain's license, according to Gilbert Curtis of Cambridge, Mass., a family friend. And there was Stephen King, 32, of 20 West 64th Street. Raised in Grosse Pointe, Mich., he was an accomplished trombonist and body builder who had funneled his considerable talents into recording his original rock music, which is why he had brought his guitar to Ms. Stahl's apartment. "He was really excited about that," his father, Philip King, said last night. "He was working very, very hard on that." On Seventh Avenue, cabs whizzed past; people rushed to the theater. Above it all, in a sixth-floor apartment, Ms. Stahl drank wine with a couple of her guests. About 7:27, two visitors began climbing the stairs to her apartment, in no apparent rush and taking no precautions to shield their faces from the surveillance camera. Ms. Stahl opened the door to the men, calling one of them Sean. One man ushered her into the recording room, while his companion ordered Mr. Veader and Mr. King to lie down on the floor and began binding Mr. King's hands and feet with duct tape. According to a senior investigator, Ms. Stahl was heard saying: "Take the money, take the money. Take the drugs. Don't hurt anybody." Then Mr. Veader, whose hands were being hastily bound, heard a single shot. "Why did you have to shoot her?" asked the man who was busy with the duct tape. Ms. Dane and Mr. Helliwell came out of a third room and were ordered to the ground, where his hands and feet were also bound. Then, the senior investigator said, Mr. Veader heard "a quick boom-boom-boom- boom," including the shot that hit him in the head. Mr. Helliwell and Mr. King died instantly, and Ms. Stahl died within a few short hours from a gunshot to the head. The investigator said that Mr. Veader and Ms. Dane probably survived because the gunman fired in great haste. "They laid down on the floor; most are shot in the back of the head," he said. "It's a rush job." The two men hastily left the apartment, though they did not run down the stairwell, video from the surveillance camera shows. One of the suspects was carrying a backpack; it is not clear whether he had brought it with him, or whether he took it from the apartment. They left the building, turned west on West 55th Street, and disappeared down the stairwell leading to the N and R subway line. All told, the video indicates, they were in the apartment building for less than six minutes. The police who responded to the 911 call placed by the wounded Mr. Veader found a scene in stark contrast to the bustling exuberance on the street below: the dead; the dying; the wounded; six pounds of marijuana; some psychedelic mushrooms; and about $1,800 in cash in a suitcase. Ms. Dane was in serious but stable condition at Bellevue Hospital Center last night. "The bullet grazed her head," said Mr. Sells, her former husband. "I hear she's not doing too well emotionally." Mr. Veader is also recuperating, at the Manhattan campus of St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. "He's scared, and a little freaked out," said a colleague, who added, "He was glad he was alive." Meanwhile, Mr. King's father, who teaches organizational management at San Jose State University in California, said he is haunted by the way his son died. "So they had a little period of terror there before they were shot in the head," Philip King said. "He was a wonderful human being, and to get this kind of tragedy is really hard to take." Yesterday morning, the police removed the yellow tape that surrounded the Carnegie Deli, and soon tourists came trickling in to eat. Brett Horowitz, 14, who had just arrived with his family from Pittsburgh, looked distractedly at his menu, but could not help himself. "What happened?" he asked the waitress. "There was a shooting upstairs," she said, pointing her pen to the ceiling. And then she jotted down the food orders. - --- MAP posted-by: Andrew