He said that his first murder was in March 1989 while driving around Manhattan’s East Village looking for prostitutes. At about 10pm, he selected a young woman he remembered only as ‘Susie’. She was a hardcore drug addict, demanding several stops to purchase crack before they drove back to Long Island. After listless sex, Susie again asked Rifkin to take her out in search of drugs. Instead, he picked up a souvenir howitzer shell and beat her furiously. ‘I just lost control,’ he said later. ‘I stopped when I got tired.’ Susie was still alive and she fought back when he tried to move her, biting one of Rifkin’s fingers deeply before he strangled her to death. After placing her body in a plastic rubbish bag, Rifkin cleaned up the blood and signs of combat in his living room, then lay down and slept for several hours as if nothing had happened. Upon waking, he dragged Susie down to the basement of his house, draped her body across the washer and dryer, and then used that makeshift operating table to dismember her corpse with a knife. In his mind, the grim task was ‘reduced to biology class’. To foil identification, Rifkin severed Susie’s fingertips and pulled her teeth with pliers, then jammed her severed head into an old paint can. The other parts went into rubbish bags and then into his mother’s car.
Rifkin drove the body parts across the state line to New Jersey, dropping the head and legs in the woods near Hopewell. Doubling back from there, he returned to Manhattan, throwing the arms and torso into the East River. Rifkin believed that his victim would never be found, but he had been careless. On 5 March 1989, a member of the Hopewell Valley Golf Club sliced his ball into the woods along the seventh green and found the can containing Susie’s head. Rifkin suffered ‘a major anxiety attack’ after learning that Susie was HIV positive, following the case as police prepared artists’ renderings of the victim in life and checked them against a list of 700 missing women. Susie has never been identified. Her case remained unsolved until Rifkin confessed.
He waited more than a year to claim his second victim, prostitute Julie Blackbird. Rifkin drove her home to East Meadow when his mother was again out of town, and they spent the night together. At about nine the next morning, Rifkin recalled ‘completely bugging out’, beating Blackbird with a heavy table leg before he strangled her. When she was dead, he considered raping her body in conscious emulation of serial killer Ted Bundy, but the prospect repulsed him.
Determined not to bungle the disposal this time, Rifkin went out to purchase cement and a large mortar pan. He dismembered the corpse as before, placing the head, arms and legs in buckets weighted with concrete; the torso filled a milk crate by itself. Driving into Manhattan, he disposed of Blackbird’s head and torso in the East River and then dropped her weighted arms and legs into a Brooklyn barge canal. The remains were never found. Knowledge of Blackbird’s fate came only from Rifkin’s confession and from her diary found in his bedroom.
Barbara Jacobs was the next to die, a 31-year-old drug addict and prostitute. Rifkin picked her up on 13 July 1991 and took her home to East Meadow for sex. When she fell asleep, he clubbed her with the same table leg he had used on Julie Blackbird, and then manually strangled her. Rifkin wrapped Jacobs in plastic, folded her into a cardboard box, and placed her in the back of his mother’s Toyota pick-up. He drove to the Hudson River, dropping her into the water near a cement plant. She was found hours later by firefighters on a training exercise. This time, though, Rifkin was unfazed by the discovery of the body.
Mary Ellen DeLuca, a 22-year-old Long Island resident, was the next victim. She was last seen alive at 11pm on 1 September 1991. Rifkin found her on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and drove her around New York until sunrise, buying drugs for her at various stops. Rifkin asked DeLuca if she wanted to die and she allegedly said yes. As he strangled her, Rifkin recalled, ‘She did nothing, just accepted it.’ He remembered her murder as ‘one of the weird ones’.
It also left Rifkin with a new problem. He was scared to drag the body out in broad daylight. He drew inspiration from Hitchcock’s Frenzy and went out to purchase a trunk, squeezing DeLuca inside it. From the motel, he drove upstate to Orange County and left DeLuca’s body in a lay-by. She was found on 1 October, naked except for a brassiere, without ID. Decomposition made it impossible to determine a cause of death and she was buried nameless.
Rifkin’s selection process was erratic – the prostitutes he patronised on a near-nightly basis were usually spared, with others chosen apparently on a whim. One early September night he picked up 30-year-old Yun Lee, a Korean native he had been with before; she was his second prostitute in an hour. That may explain his failure to perform as Lee went to work. He struck her on impulse, strangling her while she ‘mouthed something about making a big mistake’. It was Rifkin’s first murder of someone he had known beforehand and he experienced fleeting remorse. ‘Actually,’ he later said, ‘I thought I liked her.’ Rifkin placed Lee into the same trunk he’d used for Mary DeLuca and dropped her in the East River. She was found on 23 September, eight days before DeLuca. Lee’s ex-husband identified the body, sparing her from an unmarked grave.
Rifkin could not recall the name of ‘number six’, murdered a few days prior to Christmas 1991. He picked her up in Manhattan and strangled her in his car during oral sex, describing the event as ‘very quick’. Afterwards, he drove back to Long Island with the body slumped beside him, concealing her under a tarpaulin at his rented workplace. Next, he drove to a recycling plant, where he had once worked part-time, and helped himself to a 200-litre oil drum. There was ample room for the body in the barrel, safely hidden for their ride to the South Bronx, where Rifkin rolled her into the East River. As he was about to leave he was confronted by police officers who accused him of illegal dumping, but Rifkin persuaded them he was collecting junk instead. They let him go with just a warning.
The method of disposing of his victims using an oil drum worked so well for Rifkin that he purchased several more for use as makeshift coffins. He used the next one on Lorraine Orvieto, a 28-year-old prostitute and crack addict. Rifkin found Orvieto on 26 December 1991 in Long Island. He parked near a schoolyard fence and strangled her while she performed oral sex, discovering her HIV-positive status when he found a bottle of AZT in her handbag. He kept the pills, along with Orvieto’s jewellery and ID, as souvenirs of the kill. Rifkin stuffed her lifeless body into an oil drum, drove to Brooklyn and dropped it into Coney Island Creek. A fisherman found her on 11 July 1992.
One week after he killed Lorraine Orvieto, on 2 January 1992, Rifkin killed again. At 39, Mary Ann Holloman was his oldest victim, again a prostitute and crack addict. After picking her up, Rifkin drove her to the same car park where he had taken Yun Lee and strangled her while she was giving him oral sex. Later, he recalled the act as ‘very automatic. Not much with that one.’ He followed the same disposal procedure as with Orvieto, disposing of her body in an oil drum in Coney Island Creek. Her floating remains were found one week later, two days before Orvieto’s body was found. Unlike Orvieto, Holloman was identified from dental records and returned to her family for burial. Two floating bodies in as many days suggested a serial killer at large, but New York police had their hands full with 2,000 murders a year in those days and junkie prostitutes were never high-priority.
Rifkin’s ninth victim surfaced before numbers seven and eight. He was vague on the details in later confessions, unable to recall the woman’s name, if he had ever known it. He remembered her tattoos, the fact that he had picked her up in Manhattan and the way she fought for life when he began to strangle her. He dropped her into Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek, where she was spotted floating with the current; a foot was seen protruding from the rusty barrel on 13 May 1992. The cocaine in her system suggested to detectives that she might have been a drug ‘mule’, killed accidentally by the rupture of drug-filled condoms in her stomach. Police learnt of their mistake a year later, when Rifkin confessed to her slaying, but ‘number nine’ remains anonymous, the last Jane Doe.
His next victim was Iris Sanchez, a 25-year-o
ld crack addict. He picked Sanchez up in broad daylight, driving her to a Manhattan housing project. After strangling Sanchez during sex, he drove her body across Brooklyn Bridge, seeking a drop-off point. The site he chose was an illegal dump, within sight of JFK International Airport. Rifkin wedged the body underneath a rotting mattress, first relieving Sanchez of her watch and other jewellery. She would not be found until June 1993, when Rifkin drew detectives a map.
On 25 May 1992, Rifkin picked up Anna Lopez, aged 33. He took her to a backstreet for sex before strangling her. Rifkin drove through the night to Brewster, in Putnam County, and dumped her body in a lay-by. A motorist stopping to relieve himself found Lopez the following day. She was missing one earring, later found in Rifkin’s bedroom.
Violet O’Neill was his next victim; the first he had taken home to East Meadow in nearly a year. He picked her up in the city, strangled her after sex at his mother’s house and dismembered her body in the bath. Rifkin consigned her remains to the waters surrounding Manhattan. Her body surfaced in the Hudson River, wrapped in black plastic; her arms and legs were later found in a discarded suitcase.
Mary Catherine Williams, another prostitute and drug addict, was Rifkin’s next victim. Prior to murdering her, Rifkin had dated her several times. On 2 October 1992, he picked her up and bought her drugs. He then tried to strangle her when she dozed off in his mother’s car. She woke up fighting for her life, kicking the gearstick hard enough to snap it off before Rifkin smothered her. Rifkin drove the body to a Westchester suburb, where she was found on 21 December 1992. He kept her credit cards and a wicker handbag filled with costume jewellery, so much, in fact, that the amount would briefly cause detectives to inflate the number of victims. Williams was buried as others had been before, in a nameless pauper’s grave, until Rifkin confessed to her murder six months after her body was found.
Jenny Soto was the last victim of 1992. She was a 23-year-old drug addict whom Rifkin picked up at about 11pm on 16 November, near the Williamsburg Bridge in lower Manhattan. He strangled her in his car after sex but he admitted that she was the ‘the toughest one to kill’; she broke all ten fingernails as she clawed Rifkin’s face and neck. Wounded from the battle, Rifkin claimed her bra and knickers, earrings, ID cards and drug syringe as trophies for his cache. He rolled Soto into the Harlem River, near the spot where Yun Lee had been found 14 months earlier. Her body was discovered the following day, and she was identified from fingerprint records of her last arrest. Soto’s fight for life capped Rifkin’s own frenzied ‘acceleration period’ and also left him with embarrassing wounds to explain. He did not kill again for 15 weeks and, when he did, he intended to be more careful.
Rifkin’s first victim of 1993 was Leah Evens, 28; like all the others she was a prostitute and drug addict. Rifkin found her soliciting on 27 February 1993. He picked her up and they had sex in an abandoned car park. Evens started to undress, and then stopped, demanding greater privacy. Rifkin refused, strangling her when she started to cry. Afterwards, he drove her body to the far eastern end of Long Island and buried her in the woods. She was the only one of his victims buried in a shallow grave. Hikers found her on 9 May, after they discovered a withered hand protruding from the ground. A forensic anthropologist started to reconstruct the victim’s face, but Rifkin confessed before the model was finished. Police found Evens’ driving licence at his home.
Lauren Marquez was a 28-year-old addict and prostitute, and Rifkin’s next victim. Rifkin picked her up on 2 April 1993 and drove to a point near the Manhattan Bridge, clutching at her throat without the usual preliminaries. Briefly distracted by a man who passed the car walking a dog, he almost let Marquez escape. She fought him, resisting strangulation until he snapped her neck. Rifkin dumped her body in the Suffolk County Pine Barrens, where she lay undiscovered until his arrest. Besides a broken neck, Marquez had fractured ribs, though Rifkin claimed he could not remember hitting her. She was identified through DNA testing on 20 August 1993.
Rifkin’s last victim, Tiffany Bresciani, was from Metairie, Louisiana, and had been drawn to New York by dreams of acting or dancing. Instead, she wound up hooked on heroin, performing for strangers in strip clubs and bars. By the time Rifkin found her, in the pre-dawn hours of 24 June 1993, she was his second hooker of the night, and his fourth within two days. Rifkin picked her up on Allen Street and drove her to the car park of the New York Post, where he strangled her at 5.30am. From there, he drove back to East Meadow, stopping at stores along the way for rope and tarpaulin, while Bresciani’s body lay sprawled across the back seat of his mother’s car. By the time he got home, he had wrapped the body in a tarpaulin, which he concealed in the boot. Rifkin had just arrived home when his mother demanded her car keys and embarked on a 30-minute shopping trip, with the body still in the boot. Rifkin had no time to move the body, but his mother never knew. Relieved of his ‘little anxiety attack’, Rifkin moved Bresciani into the cluttered garage, leaving her body on a wheelbarrow. Then, as if in a fugue state, he spent the next three days working on his pick-up, ignoring the summer heat and pervasive reek of decomposing flesh. He was on his way to dump the corpse near Melville’s Republic Airport, some 15 miles north of his house, when he was stopped by the police, who found Bresciani’s body in his boot. The killing game was over, but the quest for justice had only just begun.
Following his arrest and before finally coming to trial, there were a number of legal arguments raised by his defence, which revolved around Rifkin’s confession and the suggestion that he had asked for legal advice and that this had been refused. However, these were negated. The full trial began on 20 April 1994. The jury was made up of seven men and five women. Rifkin pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. However, the jury did not accept this and on 9 May found him guilty. He was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder.
In 2002, New York’s Supreme Court rejected Rifkin’s appeal against his convictions for the murder of nine women. His lawyer argued that his statements to the police at the time of his arrest should be suppressed because he had not been informed of his rights. Joel Rifkin is now serving 203 years to life in the Clinton Correctional Facility, New York. He will be eligible for parole in 2197.
ARTHUR SHAWCROSS, AKA THE GENESEE RIVER KILLER
Arthur Shawcross (b. 1945) was unique as far as serial killers were concerned, having been arrested and imprisoned for a series of killings and then released back into society with the opportunity to kill again, which he grasped with both hands.
It was in May 1972 that Shawcross committed his first murder. His first victim was 10-year-old Jack Blake, in Watertown, New York. He had disappeared near the apartments where Shawcross lived. Jack’s mother had an instinct about Shawcross, then 27, who had taken Jack and his older brother fishing a few days before. When she confronted Shawcross, he offered several conflicting stories. That seemed suspicious, but with no body and no evidence, the police could do nothing. Searches for the boy turned up nothing. Shawcross said to his interrogators that the boy had pestered him, so he’d hit him and had accidentally killed him. This story would eventually change.
Four months later, eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill was visiting Watertown with her mother when she disappeared. Her body was found under a bridge that crossed the Black River. She’d been raped and murdered. Mud, leaves and other debris had been forced down her throat and inside her clothing. Shawcross, who often fished under the bridge, was a suspect. Detective Charles Kubinski of the Watertown Police Department knew him. With persistence and skill, he eventually got Shawcross to confess to the crime. He also gathered enough information about Jack Blake that the police were finally able to locate the boy’s body. Due to its advanced state of decomposition, it was unclear whether Jack had been sexually assaulted, but, like Karen Ann Hill, he’d been asphyxiated. Shawcross had admitted to having sex with the girl and forcing himself on her while she screamed.
Shawcross confessed to both murders but was later able to obtain a plea-bargain with the pr
osecutors. He would plead guilty to killing only Karen Ann Hill on a charge of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. In return, the charge of killing Jake Blake would be dropped. With little evidence to go on, prosecutors went along with this and the self-confessed double child-killer was given a 25-year sentence.
Shawcross served 15 years before being released on parole in March 1987. He had difficulty settling down as he was constantly hounded where he lived and worked as soon as neighbours and employers found out about his criminal record. Eventually, he settled in Rochester, New York, and moved in with a woman named Rosie Whalley with whom he had formed a stable relationship. But deep within, the monster was awakening and the urge to kill subsequently engulfed him. The results of his cruel and evil deeds would surface on 24 March 1988, in the Genesee River Gorge, Rochester, New York.
A group of fishermen discovered what they thought was a mannequin in the chilly waters, but soon discovered it to be the body of a woman, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt. Detectives could see from the serious bruises that this woman had been beaten, but they allowed the medical examiner, Dr Forbes, to complete a full examination and autopsy before making a final judgment. He noted that she had been strangled. Vaginal trauma, surrounded by teeth marks, was also evident, although this might as easily have occurred after death as before. She appeared to have been viciously kicked in the groin. Although she’d been in water, she had not drowned. There was no water in her lungs, so her killer had disposed of her body there after she had died. Dr Forbes determined that her wounds had been made by a blunt object, but could not identify just what had made the patterned indentation, about 2in wide, across her chest. It had left a mark but had not broken the skin.
It wasn’t long before she was identified as Dorothy ‘Dotsie’ Blackburn, 27, a local prostitute and mother of three. Her sister had filed a missing persons report on 18 March and it was she who identified the body. Prostitute murders were not unusual and this woman had been a cocaine addict with a debt. Prostitution was a high-risk occupation with a low risk of discovery for whoever decided to target such women for murder. The Rochester police examined the shooting and knifing murders of two other prostitutes in the area, but at the time were unable to link them.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 29
