Joel Rifkin

Victims

9 CONVICTIONS from FIVE SEPARATE PROCEEDINGS in three counties, one at jury trial and the rest by guilty plea, and the first was for SECOND-DEGREE MURDER rather than first. He confessed to SEVENTEEN killings; the other eight produced no charge, and among them are victims never identified and remains never found. The seventeen therefore rest on his own confession, not on any court finding

Years active

1989 - 1993

Location

New York City, New York, USA

Method

Strangulation

Status

Arrested on June 28, 1993 after a Long Island police pursuit, the body of Tiffany Bresciani in his pickup truck, and confessed to seventeen killings. THE NINE CONVICTIONS CAME FROM FIVE SEPARATE PROCEEDINGS IN THREE COUNTIES, not one trial. In Nassau County in May 1994 a jury convicted him of the SECOND-DEGREE MURDER of Tiffany Bresciani after rejecting an insanity defence, and he received twenty-five years to life. He then PLEADED GUILTY to the remaining counts: in Suffolk County to two murders, in Nassau to three more, and in Queens to two, with a further Suffolk count. The consecutive terms total two hundred and three years to life, with parole eligibility calculated at 2197. He has said he does not expect release. Held at Clinton Correctional Facility. NO CHARGE WAS BROUGHT over the remaining eight of the seventeen he confessed to, several of whose victims were never identified or never found.

Joel Rifkin was born in 1959, adopted as an infant, and grew up in East Meadow on Long Island. He was severely bullied at school, drifted through several colleges without finishing, and was living with his mother in her house in East Meadow, working occasionally as a landscape gardener, when the killings began.

Between 1989 and 1993 he killed at least nine and by his own account seventeen women in New York City and on Long Island. Almost all worked as prostitutes around Manhattan and Queens and were dependent on crack or heroin. He picked them up, strangled them at his mother's house or in his vehicle, and dismembered several of the bodies, disposing of them in rivers, in oil drums and in wooded ground across four counties. Several were never identified, and are recorded in the case papers by number.

The women named in the record are Barbara Jacobs, thirty-one; Mary Ellen DeLuca, twenty-two; Yun Lee, thirty-one; Lorraine Orvieto, twenty-eight; Mary Ann Holloman, thirty-nine; Iris Sanchez, twenty-five; and Anna Lopez. Three others are recorded only as a first name or a number, and two of those were never found. Another, Julie Blackbird, was named but her remains were never found.

That anonymity is the case. Women disappearing from that world in New York at the height of the crack epidemic were not reported missing, and no connection was made between remains found in Brooklyn, in the Hudson and on Long Island for four years.

He was caught on June 28, 1993, when state troopers noticed a pickup truck without a rear number plate on the Southern State Parkway, pursued it for twenty minutes and stopped it after a crash. The body of Tiffany Bresciani was in the back.

He was convicted of nine murders and sentenced in 1994 to 203 years to life. He is at Clinton Correctional Facility.