DUNEDIN — Mary T. Dittus was the kind of woman who talked to strangers like they were friends, and pretty soon they were friends.
She was the kind of woman who could get a retired New York City police detective to share his poetry.
She was the kind of energetic 60-year-old who loved riding bicycles on the Pinellas Trail, but mostly loved the people she got to know along the way.
She also was the kind of woman who would take in a down-and-out friend — and that may be why Dittus is gone, the victim of a brutal murder.
Dittus put up her friend Anthony Dadabo in a mobile home in the same complex where she lived. This month, he is scheduled to go on trial in her slaying. Joseph Difiore, charged in the same crime, is scheduled to go on trial Tuesday.
So this week, many of the friends she saw nearly every morning at their regular coffee spot beside the Pinellas Trail will instead go to the Pinellas Criminal Courts Complex for a murder trial.
Dittus, originally from New York, had allowed her friend Dadabo to stay in a mobile home she owned at Grand Bay Mobile Home Estates. She had met Dadabo years earlier during a real estate transaction in New York.
On Aug. 19, 2006, Dadabo picked up Dittus from the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Tampa, and he believed she had won a lot of money. Authorities say he called Difiore and told him where to find a key to Dittus' mobile home, also in Grand Bay, so he could go inside and wait for her. During an attempt to rob her, she was struck with a hammer and stabbed several times, Pinellas sheriff's officials said at the time.
"This group suffered a very, very emotional setback because of the loss of Mary," said Nancy Stack, 75, one of her friends who gathered to discuss her last week at the Happy Trails cafe. "We're not the same."
At Happy Trails, formerly called Time Out, a small cluster of regulars, including many retirees, gathers several mornings a week for caffeine and conversation. It's not unlike the informal groups that spring up at doughnut shops and breakfast spots all over the Tampa Bay area.
But this group is a bit different. Because it's so close to the trail, many of the customers are bicyclists who take pride in their fitness — Dittus loved bike rides with friends. This especially close-knit group gets together for dinners twice a year, bringing spouses along. Dittus was a big reason, they say. Her friends, meeting on Thursday, threw out several examples to explain how she helped turn their group into a community.
One time about eight of her friends showed up to help move her into her mobile home, said Luther Evans, 81, the poetry-writing former New York detective. Later, she gave everyone a $50 restaurant gift card — spending more in total than she might have for professional movers.
"She wouldn't take it back," Evans said.
She claimed each day was her birthday — and seemed just as happy as if that were true.
Dittus always invited people to her home, including one of the cafe regulars, retired auto mechanic Don Schroyer, 60. Schroyer hesitated. He's a married guy, and Dittus was fit and good-looking; he didn't want anyone getting the wrong idea.
But as soon as he took up her invitation and sat with her on the porch, he felt she was "like a sister I never had."
In 2006, when news spread that she had been killed, members of the group were horrified.
"I couldn't talk," Schroyer said. "I came over here and sat down and started crying."
The funeral was in New York, but her cafe friends had a memorial service also, at the cafe on Scotland Street. People shared their memories of Dittus. They planted a tree beside the trail, and unveiled a plaque. It bears a poem that Dittus wrote after 9/11. An excerpt:
I wish each day for happiness
with laughter and a smile;
With people kind and loving
if only for a while.
Evans, the retired New York detective, has memorized it. He has a reason. This week he may be called to testify in Difiore's trial. In case he is asked to say what kind of person Dittus was, he wants to describe her in her own words.
Curtis Krueger can be reached at (727) 893-8232 or ckrueger@sptimes.com.
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