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Planning a trip through Atlantic City International Airport? Prepare to see something still uncommon in airports: podlike security portals separating deplaning passengers from baggage claim.

The futuristic-looking “pods,” as they’ve been nicknamed by staff, draw more than a few strange looks from passengers. At times, the see-through, bubblelike portals even inspire a few four-letter words from confused travelers in a hurry to get to baggage claim.

What many don’t realize is that the airport in Egg Harbor Township was the first in the country to test this equipment and is now one of the few to use it. This comes from a cooperative research and development agreement among the South Jersey Transportation Authority, or SJTA, which operates the airport; the federal Transportation Security Administration, or TSA; and the federal Transportation Security Lab, which is based nearby at the William J. Hughes Technical Center.

The agreement was a first for those entities five years ago and allows for equipment to be tested in real-life settings. No money is involved, but the agreement is beneficial to all parties, officials say, as it allows for more realistic testing of the latest and greatest concepts. Meanwhile, Atlantic City International often gets to be the first to use the new technology and can negotiate to keep equipment it tests with proper approvals.

“It’s truly ‘Star Wars’ kind of technology that’s being tested here sometimes,” SJTA spokesman Kevin Rehmann said. “Unfortunately, there’s a certain segment of the population that wants to kill us, and the technology that’s tested here is what helps keep us safe.”

The arrangement expires in August, and officials are considering extending it. If it is extended, it could likely include the involvement of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is working on an agreement to take over airport operations in July. It’s still unclear how that relationship might affect any new agreement, but Port Authority officials have said that one of the things that makes the airport attractive is its proximity to the tech center.

A new agreement would have to be approved by the TSA. Federal Security Director Tom Coury then approves which equipment can be tested at the airport.

“We’re in a unique position here. The role of the laboratory is to test all security equipment that may have some opportunity to be of service in our airports. In Atlantic City, it gives us the opportunity to test the latest and the most developed security,” Coury said.

To date, the testing has brought officials from several other airports to Atlantic City to see equipment in action. The security portals have sparked interest from airports in Syracuse and Rochester, New York, and Dallas-Fort Worth, Rehmann said.

The pods separate secure areas from unsecure ones and ensure that no one who exits can return to the secure area. In other airports, security guards control that task. But that staff costs money, and human error can still occur. A security breach at Newark Liberty International Airport last year caused hours of delays and a terminal lockdown when a passenger got through a checkpoint without full screening.

Atlantic City’s setup allows for an estimated savings of $300,000 a year because guards are no longer necessary. Passengers approach the pods, which have slowly revolving doors. The machine then scans everything and everyone inside. Seconds later, a door facing baggage claim opens. Everyone and everything in the portal must exit. Otherwise, the portal will not reopen.

As acting SJTA Executive Director Sam Donelson demonstrated recently, the portals are able to pick up materials as small as a coin. On a walk through the airport with a reporter, he left a quarter in the portal to test its effectiveness. As designed, the portal would not reopen to the secured area until the quarter was removed.

While airport staff who are aware of the technology and what it represents think it’s neat, passengers can be left confused. That will likely continue until the portals become more commonplace. Despite videos at the portals showing people how to use them, even after lines build up, people often enter the portals one at a time rather than taking several people as designed.

“You can watch a dozen people cram into an elevator anywhere, and that’s normal. But people see the pods, and, for whatever reason, everyone thinks it’s one at a time,” Rehmann said.

Still, the portals remain one of the more successful projects tested at the airport. There has been equipment that has not worked out quite as well. An earlier attempt to separate secure areas from unsecured ones came in the form of sliding glass doors. The doors were supposed to detect anyone who passed through and then tried to travel back. In theory, the doors would have shut and created a barrier until security arrived.

But that didn’t happen. As SJTA officials soon found, they could roll objects such as small balls back through the doors without any problem. As the doors were tested, security personnel remained to prevent any actual security breaches.

“Those doors failed everything, every test there was. That happens sometimes,” Rehmann said.

There have been other examples. About four years ago, the SJTA tested equipment in the Atlantic City-Brigantine tunnel that was supposed to alert officials by either email or text message if smoke was detected from an accident. It turned out, however, that the product didn’t work on all cell phone carriers.

At the moment, no other equipment is being tested at the airport. What could be next, however, is some sort of biometric testing that would allow for iris screenings or fingerprint screenings as a means of identification. That type of equipment could ensure that only airport employees enter certain areas. Key cards are currently used at Atlantic City International, but this technology would be even stronger, Rehmann said.

Coury said the applications for that kind of equipment hadn’t been narrowed down yet.

“The airport is interested in using some type of biometric application. We don’t know exactly what that application would be, but there is interest,” Coury said.

Contact Jennifer Bogdan:

609-272-7239

JBogdan@pressofac.com

Follow @ACPressJennifer on Twitter

Inside a one-bedroom apartment in the senior community of Leisure Towne in Southampton, Burlington County, Roy and Jo Anne Bray constantly search for space and patience.

The small apartment is all the couple can afford with the rent at $830 each month on top of the mortgage for their Little Egg Harbor Township home that was flooded and damaged during Hurricane Sandy.

The Brays have kept themselves busy the past six months, shopping, completing paperwork and planning for their life after the storm, anxious to return home.

“We take it one day at a time. We try to go out a lot. We work part-time jobs. I just don’t like to spend a lot of time here where I am staying. I’m just not comfortable here. I want my own house back,” said Jo Anne Bray, 62.

Hurricane Sandy caused widespread damage in Little Egg Harbor, damaging more than 4,000 homes, the majority in the Mystic Islands section. Mystic Islands is a collection of lagoon-front streets lined with small homes. The area has 4,922 homes, 2,865 of which are on the waterfront.

There is no exact number for how many Little Egg Harbor residents were displaced by the storm, but officials estimate hundreds still are unable to return. If you drive through Mystic Islands at night, there are no lights in many of the homes, no cars parked in front.

Those stuck living in temporary housing are unable to move past the storm that forced them to flee in the first place.

The Brays do a lot of traveling back to the southern tip of Ocean County from their temporary home in Burlington County.

“We worked at the house today to salvage some of the plants that are there, so they are not lost when the house is torn down. All our neighbors in the area are also displaced and waiting for money and to tear down their homes. No one is at home,” she said.

Roy, 71, said they sustained about $100,000 worth of damage to their home on Lake Superior Drive. The home will be torn down because it was built on a cement slab and cannot be lifted, he said.

Like many others, the Brays are waiting for money from their insurance company to start rebuilding.

“It’s been a convoluted process of moving paperwork around, driving and going to different offices. You’ve seen it in the paper that insurance companies are bragging that 90 percent of claims are settled, but they are not giving people anything,” Jo Anne said.

The Brays received only half of what their flood insurance policy is worth and did not qualify for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Jo Anne said the insurance companies are giving out the least amount and hoping people will just go away.

FEMA paid the couple’s rent for four months, but that has been cut off. The Brays were unable to pay their new rent in addition to their mortgage and requested that their bank hold the mortgage, Jo Anne said.

Expensive disaster

For Diane Bruhnsen and her family, FEMA will pay the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Medford, Burlington County, until June 30. Bruhnsen said she hopes, by that time, they will return to a home at their property on South Ensign Drive in Mystic Islands.

The journey after the storm and their trek west to Burlington County has proved to be a disaster — an expensive, exhausting disaster, Bruhnsen said.

“My 17-year-old son sleeps on the Goodwill sofa in the living room of the apartment, me and my husband live in a bedroom and my 84-year-old father lives in the other bedroom. There were six of us living in the house in Mystic, and now there are four of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Bruhnsen said.

The Bruhnsens used all of the money they had in the bank to order a modular home to replace their flood-gutted house. She smiled, though, as she talked about the piling that are going in soon for the new home.

They had to borrow thousands from their daughter to build a new home, she said. Not one phase of the process has gone smoothly, with the exception of rental assistance from FEMA, she said.

Bruhnsen said she and her husband have done nothing to prepare for the new home, where they must start over after losing everything inside their other home. They’ve bought three mattress sets and haven’t spent a dime on anything else except their mortgage and insurance.

Humiliating moves

In January, during a FEMA meeting at Pinelands Regional High School, 70-year-old Santos Garcia and his 61-year-old wife, Maria, said they were scared of losing everything they had worked for and their home on West Dory Drive.

Maria Garcia clutched folders with FEMA forms and land records, smiling nervously and reciting the questions she said she desperately wanted answered. Santos stood next to her and spoke of their hotel room in Galloway Township.

“It isn’t home. It isn’t our home. We just want to go home, and we don’t know when that will be. We don’t really know anything,” he said at the time.

When FEMA rental assistance ran out in March, the couple packed what belongings they brought with them when they were evacuated to the Comfort Inn on the White Horse Pike and returned to Little Egg Harbor, where they stayed with their niece.

“It was terrible moving around like that. It was humiliating, frightening. You get used to a situation and all the fret starts dying down, and then you have to leave again, and it’s not your choice,” Maria Garcia said.

Their stay with their niece was short-lived after Maria underwent eye surgery last month. The couple then traveled north to Newark, where they have been staying with their son while she recuperates.

Maria’s voice became lower when she spoke about the misfortunes of her neighbors and friends in Mystic Islands. These are not simply the misfortunes of a flooded home or car, a damaged boat or dock, but rather the toll that Sandy took on their bodies after the dust and debris settled and the emergency crews pulled out.

“I just found out that one of my good friends who lived down there near us and was flooded out and was very stressed out just had a sudden heart attack and passed away. This is what is happening after all of this. This is what is happening to the seniors now who lived in that area. This has been hard to handle,” Maria said.

The Garcias will not return to their home on West Dory Drive, but they will return to Little Egg Harbor by July, she said. During the past several months, the couple learned they would not be able to afford to raise their home to meet new FEMA requirements. Instead, they bought a home a few miles away in the Sunrise Bay senior community on Radio Road.

No calm after storm

Stanley Mosczynski, 62, like many of those from Mystic Islands, has not slept in his lagoon-front home on West Navisink Drive since the night of Oct. 28, 2012.

He remembers sitting on his deck looking at the sky and wondering just how bad the storm was going to be, if the forecast was correct and the evacuation orders were necessary.

He’d seen storms since relocating to the area in 1986, but he said he had a feeling this one was going to be different and it looked as if his neighbors did, too, when the neighborhood began to empty out that Sunday.

Mosczyski did evacuate after he double-tied his 25-foot boat to the dock behind his home and hoped it would be there when he returned.

Mosczynski, however, said he was not prepared for what he saw when he returned home after the storm. Like many of his neighbors, his house was flooded with about 4 feet of water, and at that moment when he saw the pieces of his life strewn about inside, he said he knew he wouldn’t be home for a long time.

“My house is stripped down now. No floors, no walls. It’s a shell. They’re going to knock it down next week. I settled on putting a modular up in its place. It’s a ranch. It’s nice. But it’s going to be lifted in the air on piling about 10 feet,” he said.

When he was first displaced, he stayed in Medford with his 70-year-old brother, Ron Moll. Now he is staying with his girlfriend.

“I’ve got my stuff everywhere now. I’ve got clothes out in Burlington County, and then I have some stuff up at my girlfriend’s in Toms River. I’m just spread across two counties with everything from moving around,” Mosczynski said.

On a recent sunny Sunday, Mosczynski prepared his boat to go back in the water for the summer. His home will be knocked down. He said he is confident he will once again tie his boat to the dock before the end of the summer.

“You can sit in the corner and cry, feeling sorry for yourself, or you can pick yourself up and move forward,” he said.

Contact Donna Weaver:

609-226-9198

DWeaver@pressofac.com

Follow @DonnaKWeaver on Twitter

Dr. Hubert “Doc” Paluch has treated tigers, harbor seals, elephants, whales and lions.

As an exotic animal veterinarian for nearly 40 years and now zoo director/director of animal health at the Cape May County Zoo, Paluch has a unique profession.

How many people can say they’ve monitored the heartbeat of a cougar under anesthesia, or tagged the tail of an alligator, or examined a shark?

Paluch, 64, of Upper Township, traces his roots not to an exotic wildlife locale but to a small town outside Green Bay, Wis., where his family had a small dairy farm.

“I was born and raised on a farm, and I was always interested in animals. … So when I got into high school, I decided I might try going into medicine, and then I decided veterinary medicine is what I liked.”

That career path led Paluch to study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an undergraduate and to the University of Missouri-Columbia for veterinary medicine, where he did an internship with the St. Louis Zoo in 1972 and 1973.

“That’s when I decided zoo medicine, aquatics and marine mammals was what I wanted to do,” he said. “At that time, it wasn’t as advanced as it is now. Tranquilizers and medicine we used in exotics wasn’t as well known as it is now. It was challenging to work with different medicines and different animals, so I just fell in love with it that way.”

Paluch’s career led him to a veterinary practice in California and patient lists that included whales, dolphins and seals.

“Then we had some smaller zoo facilities we took care of, some studio work for documentaries, and televisions shows and series that had animals in them,” he said.

Shows included “Those Amazing Animals,” a weekly documentary series in 1980 and 1981 whose hosts included Burgess Meredith and Priscilla Presley.

He also worked at Safari Park in California and Great Adventure. He started at the Cape May County Zoo in the late 1980s.

Paluch is a soft-spoken man with a calm demeanor. Asked whether he liked some of the zoo’s approximately 250 species of animals more than others, he answered diplomatically: “No. I like them all. Some of them like me more than others, but that’s part of the profession, too.”

Some animals maintain their wild status and do not want to associate with people. Others — such as Rocky, the zoo’s 12-year-old tiger that was hand-raised as a cub — are more personable.

As Paluch and a visitor walked past Rocky’s cage on a recent weekday morning, the tiger calmly walked close to the cage, chuffing in a tiger’s equivalent to a house cat purring.

“If he didn’t like us, he’d be stalking us,” Paluch said.

Paluch cannot recall how many species he has treated and examined over the years, although his abbreviated list is “anything from whales to rodents to elephants.”

“It’s a pretty good spectrum. I haven’t worked with all of them yet, but I’m trying,” he said.

“The final goal of everything is to make animals recover. Sometimes you’re faced with the fact they’re not going to. But it’s always rewarding to be able to turn an animal around, either by medicine or diet or management. There are a lot of factors that go into an animal’s health besides medicine. It’s understanding an animal’s behavior,” he said.

The Cape May County Zoo is an accredited member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Bill MacQueen, executive director of the Cape May County Zoological Society, a nonprofit that works with the zoo to raise funds and build exhibits, said Paluch has made sure the zoo lives up to those standards.

“He knows the animals and the staff there as well as anybody can,” said MacQueen, of Cape May Court House. “He knows those animals personally, and he takes care of them on a personal level, and he’s done that over the years.”

Contact Brian Ianieri:

609-272-7253

BIanieri@pressofac.com

HAMMONTON — After decades of temporary fixes by volunteers determined to keep the historic 1929 Seth Thomas clock near Town Hall running, a nonprofit group has pledged to renovate it.

MainStreet Hammonton, which has worked for 20 years to rehabilitate the downtown and bring in new businesses, has agreed to raise the funds needed for the project, said a spokesman, Jim Donio.

“A full restoration will cost in the tens of thousands of dollars,” Donio estimated. “We have pledges of support from the Hammonton Historical Society and the Historic Preservation Commission. No local tax dollars will be used.”

Donio said representatives of the Verdin Bells and Clocks, of Cincinnati, Ohio, told him Hammonton’s is one of the few historic clocks left in South Jersey. The closest is in front of Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, Donio said.

Councilman Dan Bachalis, who is heading a clock committee, said the company chosen for the job will be told to keep as many of the original parts as possible.

“It’s a sensitive issue in town,” Bachalis said. “It’s a 1920s-era clock. We’re talking about restoring parts already in there, not necessarily replacing them unless they are completely unworkable.

“People don’t want just a replica,” he said. “It won’t be the same unless we keep as much of the original as possible.”

He said the clock stopped recently because a wooden piece had rotted and fallen into the works. That had to be replaced, and was. The clock is now working again, Bachalis said, adding that the renovation includes removing several layers of paint that obscure detail in the metalwork.

Donio, who is also president of the Eagle Theatre in Hammonton, said the group is hoping more community groups and local businesses will help raise funds. The goal is to finish the project before Hammonton’s 150th celebration in 2016.

The cast iron clock, which sits on the triangle where Central Avenue, Vine Street and Third Street meet, is about 16 feet tall, Donio estimated. It was originally located at the corner of Bellevue and Central avenues, at what was then the People’s Bank (now Wells Fargo).

When the bank no longer wanted the clock, the town almost lost it in the early 1960s. Fred and Ethel Noyes wanted to buy it for their Historic Towne of Smithville, Donio said. But there was an outcry from the public, and the bank gave it to the city instead. It was moved to its current location in front of Town Hall in 1965.

Some clocks, such as the one installed last year in Longport in honor of the Longport Volunteer Fire Department's 100th year of service, look historic but are reproductions.

A previous Seth Thomas clock was first installed in Hammonton 1922, but was hit by a car and destroyed sometime in the ’20s, Donio said. Then the exact model was reinstalled in 1929, he said. The famous clock at Grand Central Terminal in New York City was also made by the Seth Thomas Clock Co., which was incorporated in 1855.

The company remained independent until 1930, and since then has been purchased by various companies. Currently its inventory of goods, intellectual property and trademarks is owned by Alliance Time.

Volunteers have long maintained and repaired the clock, especially Hammonton resident Bob Hitman and optometrist Leonard Streitfeld, who has been working on it for nearly 40 years.

Contact Michelle Brunetti Post:

609-272-7219

MPost@pressofac.com

Margaritaville’s debut on the Atlantic City Boardwalk marks a potential reversal for Resorts Casino Hotel just two years after it launched a Roaring ‘20s makeover and lost a third of its operating profits last year.

The Jimmy Buffett-branded complex, which opens Friday, was designed to lure nongambling visitors to Atlantic City’s oldest casino. Its 160-machine slot parlor is just a small piece of a larger $35-million project that includes a year-round beach bar, coffee shop, gift store and restaurant.

“It’s not just about the slots,” said Tamara Baldanza, Margaritaville Hospitality Group’s director of new business. “It’s about the whole experience.”

A section inside Resorts quietly opened last week, while the beach bar is slated to debut Friday. Even casual Parrotheads will recognize the tropical themes: palms, pineapples and sand. Restaurant patrons can dine under perpetually sunny skies. LED accent lighting casts a neon blue haze across the slot floor. The slot machines are familiar ones, with names like Gold Fish and Double Dragon, but their metal surfaces gleam in the light. And, of course, the sound of acoustic guitar and steel drums waft through Resorts.

Mark Giannantonio, who took over as Resorts’ president and CEO in January, said the Margaritaville expansion and other projects, including new players’ lounges and hotel renovations, will turn the casino’s fortunes around.

“We’ve had a lot of construction here in the last nine months that’s clearly impacted our numbers,” he said. “But now that it’s over, or close to over, I see it in the team. They’re ready to go.”

Resorts was Atlantic City’s first legal casino, having opened in 1978, but it lost ground in recent years to newer properties.

Despite a Prohibition-era rebranding in 2011, Resorts has struggled along with the rest of the city’s casinos. Last year, its gross operating profits plummeted 35 percent to $7.9 million, while the remaining Atlantic City casinos combined fell 28 percent.

Rebranding initiatives like Resorts’ Margaritaville are a common strategy for casinos — and businesses in general — to renew interest in their product, said Michael Pollock, managing director of Spectrum Gaming Group, a Linwood-based consulting firm.

“What this will do, as opposed to previous rebrandings, is endeavor to capture a demographic more closely identified with the Margaritaville notion and brand,” he said.

Cocktail waitresses in Resorts’ low-cut flapper uniforms strolled through Margaritaville’s slot parlor last week, highlighting the differences between the casino’s two adopted styles.

But Pollock said those distinct themes don’t necessarily conflict. Instead, he said, Margaritaville may draw a more laid-back contingent to a property already linked to the debauched fun of the 1920s.

“It’s a brand expansion,” he said. “In Las Vegas, for example, with certain properties you have multiple brands tied to different demographic segments — it’s not unusual.”

Vegas’ Mandalay Bay, for instance, features different hotels geared to visitors of different income levels. Similarly, most Atlantic City casinos feature restaurants offering high- and low-end cuisine or different promotions for day and nighttime customers.

Giannantonio said Jimmy Buffett’s brand was ideal for Resorts due to its lasting popularity. The hope is that it will attract more visitors from the valuable 30-55 age demographic, he said.

“The concentration of Parrotheads and Margaritaville followers are right here in the Northeast — New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania,” he said. “And the closest one is in Connecticut at (Resorts’ parent company) Mohegan Sun.”

Resorts’ new direction is also indicative of a larger trend of casino properties leveraging Atlantic City’s beach and Boardwalk through beach bars such as Margaritaville’s LandShark Bar & Grill and Revel’s HQ Beach Club. Trump Plaza, meanwhile, reversed a decision made last summer to close its beach bar.

“What you’re seeing collectively is that properties are looking at the assets that make their property, and Atlantic City as a whole, distinct from other markets,” Pollock said. “The first thing that jumps out is obvious: the beach.”

Baldanza said the Margaritaville project was designed to attract a diverse group of people, “just like a Jimmy Buffett concert — from seven to 97.”

“A family can come, their kids can go out to the beach to play at the LandShark and eat a hamburger with their parents,” she said. “And parents can go in and gamble.”

Historically, Atlantic City’s beach bars have been seasonal operations, but Baldanza said LandShark will be open year-round. In winter, floor-to-ceiling insulated glass walls will enclose a portion of the beach adjacent to the restaurant.

“It’s an outdoor experience without the outdoor experience,” she said. “You can overlook the ocean in winter and be in your flip-flops all year round.”

Margaritaville Atlantic City represents a larger push by Jimmy Buffett’s company to expand into gambling enterprises. The company began with the opening of a bar in Key West, Fla., in 1985 and gradually expanded as a chain of restaurants across Canada, the Caribbean and the United States.

In 2011, Margaritaville opened a casino floor and hotel tower at the Flamingo, the famed Las Vegas resort created by mobster Bugsy Siegel. This June, it will debut a $197-million resort casino near Shreveport, La.

“We’re all about fun and, in certain markets, gambling is fun,” Baldanza said, noting that Margaritaville had operated a restaurant in Las Vegas for nine years before expanding into gambling.

Baldanza said there are no plans for Margaritaville to take over Resorts. The partners are still in the process of blending their distinct brands, she said.

In conjunction with Margaritaville’s launch, Giannantonio said Resorts has tweaked its own image.

New blue-and-gold carpeting leads visitors from the parking garage to the Boardwalk. Many of the rooms have been updated with flat-screen televisions and video on demand service.

Bellmen, cocktail servers and doormen still wear their retro costumes, but the piped-in jazz has been replaced with more contemporary tunes. And bartenders with an acrobatic flare will serve drinks at the new It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere bar.

Giannantonio said all the effort is aimed at reinvigorating Atlantic City’s first casino.

“We believe our best days are ahead,” he said.

As for the flappers strolling through Margaritaville?

Baldanza said they’re a function of the new project’s roll-out process. The slot parlor had an unpublicized soft opening last week while management worked out the details of operations in advance of a grand opening scheduled Friday.

“Once we open the Margaritaville-branded casino, you’ll see cocktail servers dressed a little more casual,” Baldanza said.

“We’ll get there where it’s a natural convergence,” she added, with a laugh. “I don’t know if it’ll be flowered flapper outfits or what.”

Contact Wallace McKelvey:

609-272-7256

WMcKelvey@pressofac.com

Follow Wallace McKelvey on Twitter @wjmckelvey

When Loretta Doyle Burroughs moved, she took her husband with her — packed in containers, according to criminal charges filed Friday.

Burroughs, 61, was arrested at her new home on West Florida Avenue in the Villas section of Lower Township after investigators found the remains of the husband she reported missing six years ago inside a closet in the Ventnor home she was leaving.

“I knew it from Day 1,” Bob Valiante said as he stood across the street from the Mays Landing home where she allegedly stabbed her husband to death in August 2007.

He never believed the story Burroughs gave about her husband leaving her. She said he got into a yellow Hummer with Florida tags and another woman inside.

But no one listened to Valiante when he kept telling police his friend didn't just take off, leaving behind all of his most prized possessions — including a new truck, boat and tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools.

The disappearance apparently remained a missing person case until a family member came to the newly created Cold Case Unit of the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office this past February, according to information given in court Friday.

While it wasn’t revealed what new evidence was provided, more interviews were done and more information was gathered, Assistant Prosecutor Seth Levy told the judge during Loretta Burroughs initial appearance. Then, an interview with the defendant provided more.

The information led Friday to two teams — including investigators from the State Police, Atlantic and Cape May County prosecutor’s offices and the Hamilton Township, Ventnor and Lower Township police departments — serving search warrants at the Ventnor and Villas homes.

Inside a closet at the Ventnor home on the 300 block of Hampshire Drive, remains were found and positively identified as belonging to Daniel Burroughs. An autopsy is pending.

Loretta Burroughs reportedly lived in at least one other home between moving from Mays Landing and then to Ventnor.

On Friday evening, investigators were inside the home and on the expansive property where the couple lived on Leipzig Avenue in Mays Landing.

“They kicked me out and said it’s a crime scene,” said Ron Roberts, who lives across the street. “That's when I said, ‘It was a crime scene six years ago.’”

Right after Daniel Burroughs’ disappearance, everything was sold, Roberts said. “It was a fire sale.”

Valiante said that when Loretta Burroughs asked him if he wanted anything, he said he wouldn't buy his friend’s things and have to explain it when Danny got back.

“He’s not coming back,” he said she replied.

That, Valiante said, is when he knew Danny’s wife had killed him.

“I didn't know how she did it, but I knew she did it,” he said.

Crying, sighing loudly and still in her street clothes, Loretta Burroughs had her first court appearance Friday afternoon on the charges of murder and a weapons offense.

She answered, “No, sir,” both when Superior Court Judge Kyran Connor asked if she needed an attorney and if she was going to hire one. He said he would make sure she got a form to apply for a public defender, just in case.

Court records show she had a public defender when she pleaded guilty to a fourth-degree charge of theft by unlawful taking in 1996.

The year before, she was charged with bank fraud and was ordered to repay $10,000 in restitution, according to court records. But her probation was ended in 2003, without the balance paid.

During her 15-month sentence served in West Virginia, her husband would visit her and sneak her the foods she wanted taped to his leg, Valiante said.

Dan and Loretta were supposed to move to Florida in 2007, his friends said. But Loretta didn't want to go.

Then, one day in August 2007, she said her husband had left her.

Valiante said he knew that wasn’t true. His friend would never have left all of his belongings. And, he didn’t have a girlfriend.

“Men tell each other those things,” Valiante's wife, Joyce, said Friday.

On Aug. 6, 2007, Roberts said he saw Dan Burroughs for the last time. He was on his riding mower, his arm in a sling from recent shoulder surgery.

A week later, Loretta would report him missing.

“She had seven days to do what she had to do,” Valiante said.

Both Valiante and Roberts said they smelled death at the house. There were moth balls on the ground and Loretta said a woodchuck died.

Roberts was helping her clean up when he saw a black tarp on a dirt mound.

“I'll take care of that,” Loretta told him.

She also had a back injury around that time.

“I was putting everything together,” Valiante said.

He said the police wouldn't listen.

“You told them,” friend George Ausby said Friday as he watched investigators’ cars come and go across the street. “He kept going down to the police station, telling them.”

At 8 a.m. Friday, Valiante and his son, Robert Jr., were heading to breakfast when Burroughs’ brother called, sobbing and incoherent.

Finally, he was able to tell them: “They found my brother.”

He then said he was in separate containers in Loretta’s closet, and she had been arrested.

Valiante said he was glad to finally have vindication in the death of the man who had been his best friend since the two met in 1973, when they lived a block apart in Egg Harbor Township.

“I called him Uncle Danny,” said Robert Valiante Jr., 40. “We used to go boating and fishing. He did everything.”

None of the men believed Loretta Burroughs’ tears in court.

“I’ve seen both sides,” Robert Valiante Jr. said.

“I think she's a sociopath,” his father said. “She’d bake you cookies then slice your throat while you were eating them.”

Loretta Burroughs’ bail is set at $2 million cash, which also accounts for a financial case in which about a half-million dollars is “unaccounted for,” Levy said.

Valiante said he believes that case is really why the warrants were served Friday morning and that the investigators “accidentally” found the body.

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