American Notes Aids

A Dallas woman calling herself "C.J." sent a shock wave through the city last August when her letter appeared in Ebony magazine and described a meticulous campaign to infect men with the AIDS virus as revenge for having contracted the disease herself.

* Then last September, a woman who also identified herself as C.J. called Dallas radio deejay Willis Johnson and, with calculated fury, elaborated on the campaign. Johnson asked the caller if she viewed herself as a "serial killer" who "stalks" men. "They approach me. I don't approach them," she said in the gentle cadence of a Southerner.

Last week the mystery woman was found to be two people: one is a 15-year-old girl who lost a relative to AIDS and says she wrote the letter to focus attention on the disease; the other is a 29-year-old medical-school employee who says she called the radio station as a joke.

While the two maintain they were not working together, they jointly succeeded in giving Dallas a chilling and beneficial lesson about the risk of casual sex as a heterosexual conduit for the disease.