Cross-dressing Serial Thief Hits ClayCo Gas Station.

  The last two weeks have not been good for the BP station in the 51-hundred block of state Highway 85 in Clayton County.

   According to store personnel, over a recent ten day period nine customers had their wallets, handbags, and other possessions stolen from their cars at pump six.  At one point, they say, there were eight robberies in eight straight days.

   "Someone just ripped everything from me," sighed Nidra Dillon.  "My ID is gone; my social security cards; my children's social security cards.  It's just a big mess."

   Dillon says she had no clue she was being robbed... and she was there.  So were her kids.

   "I paid at the pump.  I never left my vehicle," she recalled.  "This guy was just that quick that he just reached his hand in there, and nobody ever even saw it. He was just that clever.  My children were in the car.  There's no telling what could have happened."

   The store's surveillance cameras were rolling, but the manager says the computer took a hit during a recent thunderstorm, and the video has been hard to retrieve.

    "He was passing the car, and he saw the window and the bag lying around, and he just jumped on the opportunity; and he got away with it," said store manager Talha Bin Mumtaz.  "I guess he had another urge the next day to do it again, and he's been doing it since then. And everyday there's a victim of that."

   Mumtaz says he thinks he recognized the suspect  as a local man who dresses in drag.

   And that would corroborate what Dillon's husband said he saw when he came back to the store looking for her wallet.

   "He said he wasn't sure if it was a male or female," she said.  "Now we know it was a male posing as a female who walked up to the car and crawled over to this lady's vehicle and was sticking his hand into the vehicle.  And (my husband) said that he started flashing his lights at him, and he took off running."

   Clayton County police say they have stepped up patrols and assigned a detective to the case but note that the majority of the victims did not file a police report.  The manager believes that's likely because the store is right off the interstate and that many of the victims were out-of-town travelers who simply wrote off the loss.