On a warm and sunny summer day Matt and I drove out to East Meadow to visit the site of several of the Joel Rifkin homicides - the home at 1492 Garden Street where he had lived at the time of his arrest on June 28th, 1993. The area was as unassuming as any middle class Long Island community you could think of - winding suburban streets and closely spaced homes with attractively landscaped front lawns predominated. After finding the address we parked several houses away and proceeded on foot to capture a few images. Ducking under the spray of a lawn sprinkler we found ourselves walking past a lavender garage with white trim set several feet back from the sidewalk. This could only be the garage in which Rifkin had dismembered Tiffany Bresciani, his last victim. Indeed, when investigators entered the garage after his arrest they found a wheelbarrow with 3 ounces of human blood in it, a floor littered with rope and tarps, a pair of women's underwear, and a chainsaw with blood and bits of flesh adhering to the blade. The odors emanating from this structure (he kept her body stored there in the summer heat for 3 days while he worked on his truck out front) were assumed by neighbors to be from the chemicals he used in his landscaping business.
The Rifkin home (we are unsure of who the present inhabitants are) itself seems structurally the same as it was over a decade ago when the crimes associated with it came to light. The landscaping is more elaborate however, and seems designed to obscure the front of the house from passing viewers. It is deliberately, almost forcedly, cheery - colorful and floral. It reminds one of the disarming smile of the seasoned predator before he strikes.
So how did this happen? Who was Joel Rifkin and what led him to become who he became? It is a question all the more intriguing because of the setting which formed the backdrop against which these events took place.
Joel Rifkin was born on January 20, 1959 to a young unwed couple who were unprepared to raise a child. He was subsequently adopted by Bernard and Jeanne Rifkin in Upstate New York. They adopted a daughter, Jan, in 1962 and moved to East Meadow in Nassau County in 1965. Joel was educated at Prospect Avenue Elementary School and East Meadow High School. His education was saturated with cruelty and taunts from his classmates from the beginning. Joel was simply unable to fit in. He was nicknamed "the turtle" due to his slouching, defensive way of carrying himself. Unfortunately for him, he found academic success as elusive as social acceptance. Although his IQ tested in the 120's he was possibly dyslexic. His poor academic performance was a disappointment to his father who was a member of the school board and was so influential in the town that a room in the East Meadow Public Library was named after him.
As a teen-ager Joel's sexual fantasies ran towards bondage and rape, with some elaborate gladiatorial scenarios thrown in. In all of his fantasies, the victims were passive and simply accepted his actions without protest.
Rifkin graduated high school in1977, near the bottom of his class. Joel attended Nassau Community College and SUNY Brockport at various times in the late 70's and early 80's. He was unable to complete any academic program, however, and by 1984 had quit college completely. He held various menial jobs throughout the 1980's, and rented a few apartments on Long Island in an attempt to get out of his parents house. None of the jobs or apartments lasted for long and he always ended up living back home on Garden Street. At this time Joel was spending whatever small sums of money he earned on prostitutes. He was also regularly getting robbed by the women, once being duped twice by the same girl in the same way. Even on the streets, Joel was unable to fit in.
Joel's father was chronically ill with emphysema when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1986. He took an overdose of barbiturates in 1987 and passed on after several days in a coma. Joel delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
In 1988 Rifkin enrolled in a horticulture studies program at SUNY Farmingdale. He excelled there for the first time in his life, earning straight A's for two semesters. As a result he was selected for a prestigious internship at the Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. While working there he became infatuated with a fellow intern. When she did not return his interest, Joel finally reached the breaking point.
Joel killed for the first time in March, 1989. His mother had gone out of town and he had the house to himself when he went cruising for a prostitute in Manhattan's East Village. He picked up a woman he remembers only as "Susie" and drove her back to his home, stopping several times to buy crack at her insistence. After sex she requested that he take her out to buy more drugs, but he beat her viciously with a souvenir Howitzer shell instead. He later said "I just lost control. I stopped when I got tired." She was still alive after the beating and bit his finger deeply when he tried to move her, prompting him to strangle her to death. After the murder Joel placed her body in a plastic garbage bag, cleaned up the room, and slept for a few hours. Upon awakening he brought her body into the basement laundry room, draped her across the washer/dryer and dismembered her body with an X-acto knife. To hinder identification her cut off her finger tips and pulled out her teeth with a pair of pliers. He decapitated her and placed her head in a paint can. He placed the other body parts into plastic garbage bags and loaded up his mother's car. He drove to New Jersey and disposed of the head and legs in the woods near Hopewell. He tossed the rest of the body into the East River surrounding Manhattan on the way home. The paint can with Susie's head was found in a few days and Rifkin panicked, following the story closely as it was reported in the news. He was particularly concerned when he learned that his victim was HIV positive. Susie has never been identified and her murder was only attributed to Joel when he confessed to it in 1993.
Rifkin continued this general pattern of behavior with some variation throughout the rest of his murders. He would pick up a prostitute, something would snap and he would bludgeon and/or strangle her to death. He killed many in his car in parking lots and on side streets, either before, during or after sex. He dismembered some at home, some he simply dumped into nearby bodies of water or threw into the woods on the way home. He went through a period during which he was infatuated with 55 gallon oil drums, purchasing several to use as containers for his bodies. As he learned that his victims were not the top priority of the police department and often were not even reported missing for days or weeks after the murders he became less concerned with concealing their identities. He made the effort to bury only one of his victims, Leah Evans. They were about to consummate their interaction in an abandoned parking lot when she demanded a more private place. When Joel refused she began to cry. He then proceeded to strangle her and drove her body to eastern Suffolk County where he buried her in a shallow grave in the woods. Did her display of emotion touch something in him, sparking a seed of remorse? Did he feel that her emotional response to his actions validated him in some way and thus he honored her with this final attempt at restored dignity after her death? Joel has never said.
It should be noted that Rifkin by no means murdered all of the prostitutes he came in contact with. During the killing times he was patronizing large numbers of women, the vast majority of which never saw any side of him other than that of the average customer. In fact, some of the murders occurred on nights when he had already been with one or more women before the victim.
Joel's series of murders came to an end in June of 1993 with the murder of Tiffany Bresciani. He picked her up on Allen Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side and drove her to the NY Post's parking lot where he strangled her at 5:30 am. She was his second woman of the night, his fourth in the past 2 days, but the only one to meet the killer Joel. He drove home to East Meadow with her body in the back seat, stopping along the way to buy rope and tarps. By the time he got home she was neatly packaged in the trunk of the car, and not a moment too soon. His mother was waiting there and demanded the car keys to run an errand. Joel surrendered the car and she spent the next 30 minutes or so driving around the area with Tiffany's body in her trunk. When she returned the car, Joel transferred the body to the garage. He then left it there in a wheelbarrow for 3 days as he worked on his truck out front and attempted to ignore the odors of human flesh decomposing in the summer heat. This was the longest time Rifkin had held onto a body before disposal and some have speculated that he was in a psychological fugue state for those 3 days as the mental stresses of the murders finally exceeded critical mass. Tiffany was number 17.
Joel finally came to his senses and decided it was time to dispose of the body on June 28, 1993. He loaded the tarp wrapped corpse into the bed of his Mazda pickup truck and began driving towards Melville's Republic Airport where he intended to make the body drop. State troopers Sean Ruane and Deborah Spaargaren attempted to pull him over on the Southern State Parkway when they noticed he lacked a rear license plate. Rifkin refused to stop and led 6 police cruisers on a chase through Wantagh before missing a turn and crashing into a telephone pole in Mineola, ironically right outside the court building in which he would eventually be convicted. It was 3:36 am and Joel offered no resistance when he was removed from his truck. He was unkempt and had a thick layer of Noxzema smeared under his nose. When searched they found an X-acto knife in his pocket. Drawn by the overpowering stench emanating from the bed of the vehicle, police discovered Tiffany's body wrapped in a tarp. When asked about her Joel replied "She was a prostitute. I picked her up on Allen Street in Manhattan. I had sex with her, then things went bad and I strangled her. Do you think I need a lawyer?"
Joel is now serving 203 years to life in prison at the Clinton, NY correctional facility. He will not be eligible for parole until 2197. One of the judges in his multiple murder trials stated "It is not in my power to give Mr. Rifkin the sentence he deserves. In case there is such a thing as reincarnation, I want you to spend your second life in prison."
