There aren’t as many strip joints as there used to be during the jiggle business’ halcyon days in the 1980s.
Famed Toronto flesh emporiums like Jilly’s, For Your Eyes Only and the Landing Strip have all had their final lap dance.
Time simply caught up with them.
But in the confines of the survivors, lonely men still encircle the stage.
Raymond Goodwin, 34, and Claudell “Doc” Christmas, 35, were two such men. The two Atlantans were also connected to the adult entertainment industry in the Georgia metropolis.
Christmas was a dancer and Goodwin was a photographer who took photos of the strippers to help them bump up their portfolios and market themselves.
After not hearing from her brother, Cariletta “Smokey” Jones and a friend went to his apartment on Aug. 15, 2002, where they made a horrific discovery. The pair had been shot to death.
Jones had earlier received a call from “G,” one of Christmas’ friends.
“’G’ was like, ‘Hey, I was on the phone with Doc and I heard gunshots,’ and something like he couldn’t breathe or something like that,” Jones added. “He said I did hear some female voices in the back saying, ‘Get the money, get the money.’
“Finding my brother dead, that changed my life forever. Everything was rushing through my head. Who, what, when, why. I just broke down crying. We couldn’t wrap our minds around it.”
Detectives believe the victims were patsies.
“These men were just easy to lure in,” said Sgt. Nicole Redlinger, of the Cumming Police. “They’re at these clubs, they’re spending money, they’re trying to have a good time and they meet these pretty ladies.”
Homicide investigators found no signs of forced entry and there were no signs of a struggle. Goodwin had been shot in the head and stomach while Christmas had been shot once in the head.
Cops recovered seven bullets. The gun used was a .32-calibre, a smaller weapon more often than not carried by women.
Jones believed her brother may have been targeted because of the pricey photo equipment in his home. Both men also carried fat wallets filled with cash and that was long gone.
“During this timeframe, the adult entertainment industry was booming,” Redlinger said.
“People would want to rob the men knowing they had a lot of cash going into these clubs. They started to have a lot more robberies within our city. And they were being committed by females.”
Two days later, another crony of the dead duo was found shot and killed in his apartment in Atlanta.
He was Lemetrius “Meechy” Twitty, 29.
Forensic investigators found the same .32-calibre shell casings recovered from Goodwin’s apartment. Cash was missing and so was his gold Nissan Maxima.
“The fact that the same calibre, which was an unusual calibre, was used, it would not be far from saying the same individual committed all three murders,” former detective Todd Merrifield said.
Jones said: “We actually just were so scared, you know what I mean — we got a serial killer out here?”
Goodwin’s gal pal told cops that on the night of the double murder, the victims were hanging with two peelers: Peaches and Snow. No one knew who they were but the girlfriend claimed she partied with the pair on a yacht.
Then, about 10 days after the double murder, officers were called to a fast-food joint called Mrs. Winner’s Chicken & Biscuits. The chain had recently been hit with a slew of armed robberies.
Hiding in the restaurant bathroom were two women. Falicia “Peaches” Blakely, 18, and Armeshia “Snow” Ervin, 20. Their vehicle matched the very dead Twitty’s car, a Nissan Maxima.
Atlanta cops searched the bathroom and in the toilet tank, they found the .32 — the same gun used in the trio of murders.
Peaches spilled the beans. She copped to everything.
“This is one cold-blooded female,” Merrifield said. “That just does what she needs to do and does what she wants to do. I don’t know if I’d ever seen anything like that.”
Blakely didn’t “sugarcoat things”.
The stripper claimed she and her sidekick Ervin met Goodwin through his photo business. They thought he had money and their intention was robbery, not murder, Blakely said.
The murderous strippers then hit a slew of nightclubs and spent the dead men’s cash. They met Twitty at a club.
Minutes inside his apartment, Blakely shot him dead and left the $650 he had in his wallet.
She told cops that it was all the fault of her pimp, Mike Berry, whom she met as a pregnant stripper several years earlier. It was he who made her rob and kill.
Berry told cops he had nothing to do with the murder-robbery scheme and he was never charged.
Blakely also had another consideration: The death penalty was on the table for her insidious crimes.
So she pleaded out, as did cohort Armeisha Ervin.