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.