CHAPTER TWO of four chapters

“Sexual Psychopathy”

By: Don Jacobs, Chair

Forensic Psychology & Forensic Science

Weatherford College, Weatherford, Texas USA

djacobs@wc.edu

This Chapter addresses:

Psychopathy & Sexuality

Violent Criminal Psychopathy

Profundity of Sexual Psychopathy

Joel Rifkin: Sexual Perversion



"It is worth noting that the historical link between psychopathy and violence is not peculiar to Western psychiatry. Indeed, psychopathy is a disorder that apparently occurs in every culture, and the potential for violence usually is considered symptomatic of the disorder”.

Violence & Psychopathy
Adrian Raine (Ed.)

________________________________________________

Rewording the above quote to maximize our theme of adaptive psychopathy…

“It is worth noting that the historical link between
psychopathy and adaptability is not particular to
Western psychology. Indeed, psychopathy
as a natural adaptive dynamic occurs in every culture;
without it, the potential of thriving and surviving
would be considered symptomatic of a brain not
fit to survive.”
Don Jacobs (2009)
Architect of the Brainmark Paradigm


Psychopathy & Sexuality

The relationship between extreme psychopathy and sexual offending has been empirically established, but is little understood (Meloy, J. Reid, 2002). The construct of spectrum psychopathy—a psychological theory of deception in personality masquerading as normalcy, expression of which, is due to a variety of related influences with biology the strongest; the construct has a long history of clinical concern, and of late, more precise forensic and research protocol since the 1990s (Millon, Simonsen, Birket-Smith, & Davis, 1998).

This resurgence of information is due primarily to the pioneering research of Robert Hare, Ph.D., author of Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (1993, reissued 1999), a professor at the University of British Columbia, and associates, who followed in the academic wake of Hervey Cleckley’s landmark book, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (1941, reissued 1988 5th Ed).

(Interestingly, Cleckley, an M.D. and psychiatrist, co-write with Corbett Thigpin Three Faces of Eve, a pop culture look at multiple personality disorder (now, dissociative identity disorder. The book became a hit movie upon its release in 1957. Actress Joanne Woodward as “Eve White,” “Eve Black,” and “Jane” earned the Academy Award® as Best Actress for her performance in the film.)

A psychiatric disorder, once characterized as moral insanity (from Latin manie sans delire, or the French folie raisonnante), psychopathy is theorized to be composed of {among other characteristics} aggressive narcissism (Meloy, 1992) and chronic antisocial behavior (Hare, et al., 1990).

Violent sexual psychopaths are indeed a breed apart; they are qualitatively different from any human personality formation on earth; mindless behavior of wolves and sharks rival violent psychopathic behavior.

Perhaps a common dictionary definition best characterizes what unsuspecting persons, perhaps chosen victims, will encounter when they are confronted by the cowardly monster hiding behind the “mask of sanity”:

“Psychopathic personality is an emotionally and behaviorally disordered state characterized by clear perception of reality except for an individual’s social and moral obligations, and often by the pursuit of immediate personal gratification in criminal acts, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.”

Criminal Personality & NCAVC
Continuing our discussion from chapter one of psychology’s new products, in the same decade that Samenow was doing his pioneering research into criminal personality, John Douglas (1977) became a member of the FBI’s new Behavioral Science Unit. Teaching applied criminal psychology at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia his audience was comprised of FBI agents and police officers from across the nation. Subsequently, Douglas created and managed the FBI’s Criminal Profiling Program and later became unit chief of the Investigative Support Unit of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

Traveling transcontinental instructing police officers and detectives in the latest FBI criminal apprehension techniques (called “crime schools”), Douglas and fellow agent Robert Ressler, began interviewing incarcerated violent sex offenders to determine personality characteristics. Gathering this data had never been attempted before. This study produced inductive evidence—a database of habits, patterns, parental influences, social and incarceration histories, mental health factors, and addiction—that could be applied to larger populations in the future. While deductive logic (based upon educated guesses—the method of Holmes) is good, inductive evidence compares a small sample to a larger one to connect know offender characteristics, a step necessary toward empiricism required of hard science.

(Ironically, at the time, the FBI was not initially interested in methods of criminal profiling rather their focus was on apprehension of offenders.) The result of this singular endeavor produced Douglas and Ressler’s book, Sexual Homicide: Patterns & Motives (1988). Soon after, Crime Classification Manual (1992) appeared. Clinical forensic psychologists as expert witnesses in forensic amicus curiae and forensic neuropsychologists armed with brain scans were just around the corner as new products for the 21st century.

In 1995, following retirement from the FBI, Douglas gained international fame as the author of a series of books tracking serial killers with information considered to be some of the most insightful works written on the minds, motives, and operation of society’s most elusive predators.
Accuracy in Profiling

The FBI foursome of Teten, Mullany, Douglas, and Ressler were responsible for the accuracy that today is commonplace in criminal profiling. In 1973, they needed one blockbuster case to draw attention to criminal profiling as a viable investigative tool. (A similar case would be played out on a worldwide stage six years later when John Douglas and fellow FBI agent Roy Hazlewood would proffer an accurate profile of the serial killer of young black youths in Georgia (Atlanta Child Murders,1979-1981). Atlanta resident Wayne B. William was identified as the serial murderer from an extremely accurate profile. He is now on death row.)

Prior to that seminal event, in 1973, a young girl was abducted as she slept in a tent in the Rocky Mountains. The FBI-inspired profile declared the abductor to be a young white male, likely a Peeping Tom, who sexually mutilated victims to harvest body parts as souvenirs. The accuracy of the profile led to the arrest of David Meirhofer, a local 23-year-old single male who was a suspect in a similar case. Even though Meirhofer killed only two victims, he became recognized as the first psychopathic serial killer to be captured due to an accurate profile.

Showing the evolution of this new investigative tool, criminal profiles were once called psychological profiles and later psycho-behavioral profiles in the movie Silence of the Lambs. Today, by FBI standards, a killer must kill three or more victims with cooling off periods in between to be correctly called a “serial killer”.

Intermittently, in 1974, homicide detective Robert Keppel used profiling methods to aid in the capture of serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, (the identification of which had stressed out profiler John Douglas with a viral infection almost costing him his life.)

Specifically, the profiling team of Douglas and Ressler became well-known among the early founders of criminal profiling. In the early 1980s, Ressler and Douglas interviewed thirty-six (36) incarcerated serial killers as part of their coast-to-coast “crime schools” mentioned above. They succeeded in discovering parallels between criminal mens rea (sexually-driven motives) and horrendous, often “toxic” parental-child upbringing as well as other familial and social factors. Douglas and Ressler were the first to interview, study, and apply what they deducted from convicted serial, sexual predators creating the “organized” and “disorganized” typologies still in use today.

Ressler, Douglas, and Hazlewood, and others were instrumental in Vi-CAP startup (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) consisting of a centralized computer database of information on unsolved homicides. Knowing the nomadic lifestyle of serial killers who often kill a “string of strangers” with no apparent motive, similarities in personality began to arise as well as victimology and MO—modus operandi). The goal of Vi-CAP is to watch for pronounced similarities even though they occur across different jurisdictions and across the nation.

Ressler retired from the FBI in 1990 and is the author of best-selling books on sexually psychopathic serial killers. He remains active on lecture circuits providing insight into criminal minds to students, new FBI agents, and police officers.

The perfect segue from criminal psychology into forensic psychology came from this rich tradition of reliance upon both inductive and deductive logic connecting mens rea with the crime (actus reus) merging at horrific crime scenes. All of which is sure to enter criminal court. Recall that where psychology and law interact, forensic psychology is always there. When victimology, MO, and signature—the cri de coeur or emotional connection from offender to victims—are infused into the investigation, the chase is on in what becomes a strategic chess game of wits between the good guys and the bad guys.

Violent Criminal Psychopathy

“What is missing in psychopathy are the very qualities that
allow a human being to live in social harmony.”
—Robert Hare

Toward the close of the 1990s, it became the consensus of researchers that the roots of violent psychopathy were due to a severe, underlying psychopathic personality disorder. It was considered pervasive enough to be conceptualized as the most severe example of spectrum psychopathy—the continuum (gradation) that produced garden-variety (mild to moderate versions) to the severe variety—the violent and sexually psychopathic serial killers.

Yet, ironically, the DSM-IV-TR (2000) does not address criteria in the differential diagnosis of Psychopathic Personality Disorder directly; in fact, the word ‘psychopathy’ is mentioned once under Antisocial Personality Disorder and not listed at all in the glossary. Instead, diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder is listed and often confused with the construct of spectrum psychopathy and of course violent sexual psychopathy.

As previously mentioned, from experience with the psychopathy construct, we know that Psychopathic Personality Disorder is not the same quantitatively as Antisocial Personality Disorder, not by a long shot.

Based upon a study that appeared in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Vol. 66/3: The “Polymorphously perverse psychopath: Understanding a strong empirical relationship (2002) by J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., the following behavioral characteristics are known to lie behind spectrum psychopathy, pronounced and robust in severe varieties of violent sexually psychopathic serial criminals.
1. It is well known by researchers and clinical forensic psychologists that psychopaths do not emotionally bond to mates as normally observed in committed relationships. Instead, sexual victimization is the overriding intention while mate and parental responsibilities are ignored or marginalized.
In his early attachment research, John Bowlby labeled such individuals “affectionless” (1944). The modus operandi of psychopaths in these matters is documented and predictable—they abandon numerous children of self-absorbed sexual liaisons so that moms are left alone in single-parent, broken homes. One of the first clues that relational bonding will never be consummated with a psychopath is the red flag of constant bickering and verbal (possibly physical) triads with jealousy a constant theme. Also, sexual behavior gradually becomes more sexually perverse often by demands for anal intercourse.

2. Although not initially shown or suggested in demeanor, psychopaths eventually display a callous disregard for the rights and feelings of others (Hare, 1991). If social bonding suggests the ability to empathize, both are lost on the psychopath. An extreme (and violent) example of callousness is pathological sadism where pleasure is derived from a victim’s suffering and degradation, yet another red flag.
Psychopaths attempt to control, not affectionately relate, to others; therefore, it is predictable that psychopathy and sexual sadism would be positively correlated. Criminal sexual sadists prefer anal intercourse (Dietz, et al., 1990), a sex act that dominates and controls another from behind to further dehumanizes victims; this is directly opposite the preferred sexuality of normal adults, where face-to-face intimacy stimulates emotional exchange (Janus & Janus, 1994).

3. Interdisciplinary research over the past 50 years confirms that psychopaths as a group are sensation-seekers. (Quay, 1965, Eysenck, 1967; Farley & Farley, 1967; Hare & Cox, 1978; Zuckerman, 1978). They often engage in dangerous activities in preadolescence and adolescence. This characteristic is likely due to peripheral autonomic under-stimulation or hyporeactivity (Hare & Cox, 1978). This biological predisposition predicts early onset, violent criminality in adults (Raine, Venables, & Williams, 1990). It provides incentive for forbidden and risky sexual adventure so appealing to the brain of violent sexual psychopaths, with serial rape and pedophilia as examples.

4. Grandiosity, evident in the inflated sense of self-worth in psychopathy, and the fuse to entitlement is the banner (and red flag) of pathological narcissism. Entitlement is the deep-seated feeling that psychopaths have the right to take whatever they desire from victims, including their lives. A grandiose sense of self-worth is showy, ostentatious, pretentious, and ultimately a deceptive ruse designed to attract attention to one’s self, or to demonstrate how much smarter the psychopath is in comparison to everyone else in the room. There is no give-and-take, only “take”, in the orbit of psychopathy; therefore, psychopaths continually manipulate others as accomplished compulsive liars.

Predictably, there is a wide chasm between the psychopath’s real life failures yet reported (imagined or exaggerated) as successes. Grandiosity, entitlement, and compulsive lying project the desire for control—observed eventually in sexual abuse of girlfriends to the abduction and violent sexual sadism characterized in sexually psychopathic serial crime (Dietz, Hazlewood, & Warren, 1990).

5. Sexual predation is inherent in the construct of spectrum psychopathy. In violent sexual psychopathy, researches expect to identify the following characteristics in serial offenders:
• low levels of anxiety and autonomic hyporeactivity,
• chronic emotional detachment (and lack of empathy),
• sensation-seeking,
• a fearless demeanor,
• hiding a manipulative, controlling nature
• focus on deception and compulsive lying,
• criminal versatility,
• lacking guilt or remorse, and
• a shallow affect (often manifested as blunt affect or inappropriate affect).

Novelist Patricia Cornwell states in her book Jack the Ripper: Case Closed:
“These people are extraordinarily cunning and lead double lives. Those closest to them usually have no idea that behind the charming mask there is a monster who does not reveal himself until—as “Jack the Ripper” did—right before he attacked his unsuspecting victims. Psychopaths are incapable of love. When they show what appears to be regret, sadness, or sorrow, these expressions are manipulative and originate from their own needs and not out of any genuine consideration for another creature. Psychopaths are often attractive, charismatic, and above average in intelligence. While they are given to impulse, they are organized in the planning and execution of their crimes. While they continue to harm others right up until they are captured, upon incarceration there is no cure.”

Profundity of Sexual Psychopathy

The art and science of criminal profiling is most useful to criminal investigators when the crime scene reflects a perpetrator with a profound degree of sexual psychopathy. The justification for the efficacy of profiling a select group of crimes will be addressed throughout the material; for the time being, the guiding principles of profiling predators who commit sexually driven crimes display the following psychosexual deviance: Perpetrators (UNSUBs) display a sexually depraved mind mixing sexuality, violence, death, and possibly necrophilia, a severely flawed character absent altruism and restraint (or conscience), and/or the disability of preventing their emotionally-charged imagination from becoming “acting out” behavior and a distinct emotional apathy toward victims.

According to Holmes & Holmes, and verified by FBI statistics, criminal profiling is the most accurate and offers the best chance of targeting the probable offender relative to the following crimes.

1. Sadistic Crimes (often involving torture)
According to Dr. Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist at Michigan State Penitentiary, the “Three Ds” of sexual sadism is the manifestation of psychosexual dysfunction observed in the protocol of “dread, dependency, and degradation” by the perpetrator upon victim. Breaking the victim’s will to resist by sadistic torture as well as breathing life back into the victim with the express purpose of prolonging the rape/torture/degradation as long as possible is a benchmark. When death comes to rapidly or by accidentally delivering a major trauma, the sexual sadist feels cheated and may brutalize the body further with overkill and/or necrophilia.

2. Evisceration
“Jack the Ripper” type crime scenes best exemplifies evisceration defined as disembowelment or removing the entrails or organs of another in slaughterhouse fashion with the total destruction of mind, body, and soul of the victim.

3. Postmortem “slashing, cutting”
Stopping short of evisceration, postmortem “slashing and cutting” alternatively referred to as overkill denote sexual crimes within the context of repressed anger, rage, and hostility observed in mutilation-type crimes such as the first serial psychopath “Jack in the Ripper”. Sexual impotence and/or genital deformity of the UNSUB may be suspected.

4. Pyromania
A malicious fire-starter according to the DSM is a person who experiences “tension or affective arousal before setting the fire and has “fascination with, interest in, curiosity about, or attraction to fire” and receives “pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting fires, or when witnessing or participating in their aftermath”. The DSM stops short of using the words “becomes sexually excited” as a fire-starter but this aspect cannot be ignored by evidence from extreme severe psychopaths (serial killer) who were fire-starters before launching “careers” in serial crime.

5. Lust/mutilation murders
Sexual crimes involving mutilation of the genitals, breasts, or evisceration of internal sexual organs as trophies (or non-sexual organs) comprise the clinical forensic picture of the lust/mutilation murderer driven by rage, impulsive, and lack of conscience or remorse typical of the extreme severe psychopath (serial killer or sexual psychopath).

6. Rape
Through the years, researchers and criminal investigators have variously analyzed rape as a crime of power, control, and degradation but in serial crime such as serial rape and serial murder, rape takes on a strong sexual connotation. When the UNSUB’s signature (or emotional connection to the crime) is uncovered it shows strong elements of sexual dysfunction and deviant cognitive mapping often marked by an obsession or addition to violent pornography.

7. Satanic/ritualistic crimes
Crimes involving satanic worship or “devil worship” crimes are often ritualistic in process showing marked sexual dysfunction (as in the sacrifice of virgins and blood-drinking) and obsession with a nihilistic and sadistic view of life.

8. Pedophilia
The obsession and compulsion to commit sexual acts with children or under-aged teenagers (the DSM’s term is “prepubescent child, generally age 13 years or younger) has long been observed as severe disorder in the DSM and is among the most reviled criminals (even by the prison population) convicted of the crime and set to lockup. The DSM defines a pedophile as a person who “must be age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older then the child”). So-called “pedophilic pornography” contains themes awash with excuses (rationalizations) involving the plethora of sexually arousing activities of pedophiles that purport that sex has “educational value to the child or the child was sexually provocative indicating his/her desire for sexual pleasuring”. The deviant cognitive mapping of pedophiles is confirmed by deviant websites, photographs, and literature recovered at the residence of pedophiles.

Due to the heinous nature of serial crimes indicated above and the societal unrest engendered by serial rapes and murders—rapacious crimes—human predators must be captured and incarcerated for life. There is no treatment.

Sexual Perversion in Joel David Rifkin

By: Ashleigh Portales Edited by: Don Jacobs

Time Span of Crimes

March 1989 to June 28, 1993

Offenses Prior to Serial Murder
Soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman (August 1987)

Quoting Rifkin
“I will not go away as a monster, but as a tragedy.”

Preferred Prey
Rifkin killed drug-addicted prostitutes who were in their twenties and thirties, not because they were prostitutes, but more likely because they were the only kind of women he could attract and ultimately control.
Society’s Outcast

Rifkin was born January 20, 1959 into the Baby Boomer generation in much the same way he would spend most of his life: unloved and unwanted. His mother, who bore him as the illegitimate child of a college romance, gave him up for adoption. By Valentine’s Day, the infant had gone to Bernard and Jeanne Rifkin, a childless couple living in upstate New York who christened him Joel David Rifkin. The Rifkins adopted a daughter three years later, and the seemingly happy family moved to East Meadow, Long Island.

Rifkin began the first grade in 1965, the birth date of GEN Xers. From the very beginning, Joel found school a nightmare. He was an immediate outsider and a favorite target for bullies who called him “The Turtle.” The name came from his slow walk and slouch, which accentuated his neck and head so that it resembled a turtle’s head thrust from beneath its shell. He suffered constant physical assaults and had his head pounded into concrete on more than one occasion. At other times, bullies forcefully stripped him of his clothing in the hallway and left him partially nude. At still other times, they stole his books and lunch.

Joel’s failure to socialize with peers carried over into the classroom where he flunked his courses due to undiagnosed learning disorder (dyslexia), despite a tested IQ of 120. To add insult to injury, Joel’s father was a member of the East Meadow School Board and saw his son as little more than a major disappointment. He often ranted at the boy, “Why can’t you do anything to please me?” Though Joel’s mother shared her love of gardening and photography with him, she was the model of incompetent parenting (emotional apathy) and completely oblivious to the hell her son suffered in school. Later she stated that she just “thought of him as a loner.”

By the time Joel reached high school, things only had gotten worse. One of Rifkin’s many tormentors recalled him as “an abuse unit . . . who was subtly obnoxious . . . his presence annoyed you.” In a desperate attempt to fit in, Joel joined the track team where his only reward was the moniker “lard ass.” Teammates routinely hid his clothes and shoved his head into the toilet. Determined to win over a few friends, Rifkin invited them to his home to drink and watch TV, but as one classmate later stated, “No one wanted to associate with him . . we used him, to be blunt about it . . . he was easy to make fun of.” Abandoning the track team, Joel turned his talent for photography into a position on the yearbook staff where his camera subsequently got stolen. Still he slaved to produce the yearbook, but, despite his efforts, the staff excluded him from the year-end wrap party.

Rifkin failed even more with romance. Rifkin’s track teammates destroyed one date by holding Joel prisoner in the gym and pelting him with eggs. He had to call his father. On another occasion, Rifkin and his date arrived at a local pizza parlor, but school bullies chased them out and pursued them until the couple reached safety inside a public library.

Rifkin’s parents gave him a car in his senior year. While it did nothing to boost his popularity, it did allow young Joel to cruise the streets at night, picking up prostitutes in the nearby town of Hempstead and later in Manhattan. According to Robert Madinich, author of From the Mouth of the Monster,

“Joel’s fantasies included ‘some bondage’ and ‘some rape’ plus ‘a gladiator type thing with two girls that would fight to the death.’ He raped and stabbed women in some daydreams, but his fantasy victims were silent, ‘just passive about it.’”

He fixated on strangling prostitutes after a 1972 viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, loosely based on London’s “Jack the Ripper” homicides of 1888.

Rifkin graduated at the bottom of his class in 1977 and looked forward to the prospect of life after high school, which he assured himself could only get better. Unfortunately, he was wrong. He proved an academic failure again at Nassau Community College on Long Island, where he completed only one course his first year due to constantly skipping class. Rifkin then transferred to the state university at Brockport, where similar behavior as well as rejection by his first real girlfriend resulted in his dropping out. From there, Joel drifted back home to his parents and subsequently failed at a second attempt at Nassau Community College. He again attended only sporadically and earned only twelve total credits before dropping out
of school for good in 1984.
Rifkin’s life continued its downward spiral from there as he bounced from job to job. According to Court TV’s Crime Library,
“poor hygiene, chronic absenteeism, and general ineptitude” blocked the road to advancement. His employer at a local music store described Joel as “a total piece of work—this guy couldn’t even count to ten.”’

Rifkin aspired to be a famous writer, but his bleak verse did not suit publishers. While he actively pursued his interests in photography and horticulture, neither produced a paycheck, and Rifkin soon found himself back at home with his parents. In Joel’s own words,
“I couldn’t put two nickels together,” and most of what he did earn went to prostitutes. “The whole focus of my life was on the streets.”

Even on the streets among the lowest of the low, he proved unfit. On at least a dozen occasions, hookers or pimps robbed him; he fell for the same trick twice from the same girl who made off with his money before having sex with him.

Successive failures spelled depression for Rifkin. The depression deepened, as did his commitment to sexual deviance, when his father committed suicide in 1987 to escape the pain of prostate cancer. In August that same year, Rifkin got arrested in Hempstead after soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman. He escaped with only a fine that, though substantial, suggested to his damaged brain that he could act against society with minimal repercussions.

For a brief period in his life in 1988, Rifkin experienced success in his horticultural pursuits. After graduating with straight A’s from the State College of Technology in Farmingdale, New York, he received an internship at the renowned Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, New York. His inadequacy with women once again proved his downfall though. Infatuated with a co-worker who did not reciprocate his feelings, Rifkin created an elaborate fantasy affair. Her blatant rejection of his numerous advances finally pushed him over the edge. Payback time had come.

The Outcast Fights Back

Rifkin took matters into his own hands for the first time in March 1989 at the age of thirty. The first murder coincided with the second anniversary of his father’s death and Rifkin later noted that most of his killings connected in some way to a number of personal anniversaries.

During this particular time, his mother was traveling out of the state, and Joel was home alone. While cruising Manhattan for prostitutes, he picked up a woman he remembered only as “Susie.” She asked Rifkin to take her out to buy drugs after having sex because she was a hard-core crack addict. However, Rifkin began beating her instead, later recalling, “I just lost control. I stopped when I got tired.” But Rifkin had “gotten tired” before his victim died. When he attempted to move Susie, she retaliated by severely biting into one of his fingers. Angered, Rifkin began strangling her. This would become the killer’s modus operandi. In Rifkin’s words, he would “just grab and hold on, basically till my hands got tired.” When the girl finally died, Rifkin put her body in a trash bag and cleaned up the mess he had made of his mother’s living room before falling asleep. When he awoke, he took the body in the bag down to the basement where the washer and dryer became an autopsy slab. He dismembered the girl with an X-acto knife, an event that Rifkin recalled was “reduced to biology class.”

Fearing the body still could be identified he then removed the girl’s fingertips and pulled out her teeth with pliers. He placed her severed head in an old paint can and the other parts in various garbage bags before loading them into the back of his mother’s truck. Driving across the state line to New Jersey, Rifkin deposited the head and legs in the woods before returning to Manhattan, where he threw the arms and torso into the East River. He believed that his actions would erase the possibility of detection, and maybe even the crime altogether, but a golfer playing a course that backed up to the New Jersey woods proved him wrong by stumbling upon the paint can containing Susie’s head.

Rifkin closely followed media coverage of the discovery and suffered an anxiety attack when he learned the girl had tested HIV positive. He felt pleased though when police efforts produced no positive identity. “Susie’s” identity and her murder remained unsolved until Rifkin’s 1993 confession.

More than a year passed before Rifkin’s mother left town again, leaving him free to kill again. He chose prostitute Julie Blackbird because of what he called her “pseudo-Madonna look,” and took her back to his mother’s house where they spent the night. Upon awakening the next morning, he beat Blackbird with a table leg and then strangled her. This time, however, he determined that the body remained buried, so he took a trip to the store and returned with cement and a large mortar pan before once again dismembering his victim.

He modified his MO by weighting several buckets with the concrete and placing Blackbird’s head, arms, legs, and torso in separate ones. He then loaded the buckets into his car and drove to Manhattan where he threw those with the head and torso into the East River and dumped the arms and legs into a Brooklyn barge canal. Rifkin’s attempt at concealing his crime worked; no one ever found Blackbird’s body. In fact, authorities only discovered her murder upon Rifkin’s confession and through details written in a diary found in his room.

In April 1991, Rifkin went into the landscaping business for himself and rented a space at a nearby nursery to store his equipment. Though the business proved a failure, the storage area proved the perfect place to keep bodies before permanently disposing of them. However, he would not store his next victim there. He wrapped thirty-one year old Barbara Jacobs in plastic, folded her into a cardboard box, and dumped her into the Hudson River. Rifkin did not dismember her body because he was “put off” by the thought. Though someone found her body, she went unidentified until Rifkin’s confession two years after her death.

A few months after Jacobs, Rifkin picked up twenty-two year old Mary Ellen DeLuca and drove her to a seedy motel. Rifkin says that she rushed through their sexual encounter, complaining all the while. He contends that he asked her if she wanted to die and complied with her affirmative response by strangling her. He alleges she “did nothing, just accepted it.” Her murder was “one of the weird ones.” Because of the public location of her murder, Rifkin feared simply dragging her body across the parking lot to the car. Reenacting a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, he bought a cheap steamer trunk, transported his latest victim to a rest stop in Orange County, and dumped her body there. When discovered on October 1st, the body’s advanced state of decomposition foiled attempts at identification. Authorities buried DeLuca in an unmarked grave, like Jacobs before her, until they learned her identify from Rifkin’s confession. Rifkin used the same trunk for his next victim, thirty-one year-old Yun Lee. He strangled her after she made fun of his inability to attain an erection after he picked her up. Her ex-husband’s identification saved her from an anonymous burial.

“Number six” remained unidentified, as Rifkin could not recall her name. After strangling her during oral sex, he stuffed her body in a fifty-five gallon oil drum and rolled the drum into the East River. Pleased with the success it gave him, Rifkin purchased three more oil drums to serve as the coffins of victims seven through nine. Number seven was twenty-eight year old manic depressive Lorraine Orvieto. Rifkin killed her in December, 1991 and dumped her into Coney Island Creek, where no one discovered her until July, 1992.

One week after the Orvieto murder, on January 2, 1992, thirty-one year old Mary Ann Holloman met her fate at Rifkin’s hands. He dumped her inside her designated oil drum in Coney Island Creek, where someone discovered her two days before Orvieto. However, Holloman’s dental records identified her, and authorities returned her to her family for burial.

The last of Rifkin’s oil drums went to a prostitute he remembered only for her tattoos. Rifkin dismembered her body before disposing of her in Brooklyn’s Newton Creek. Her discovery would not take place until May, 1992, and she would remain unidentified.

Rifkin picked up victim number ten, twenty-five year old Iris Sanchez, on Mother’s Day of 1992. After strangling her during sex, he hid her body under a rotting mattress close to a runway at JFK airport. Police discovered her remains in June, 1993 using a map Rifkin had drawn during his confession.

Soon after Sanchez’s murder, on Memorial Day weekend, Rifkin killed thirty-three year old Anna Lopez and dumped her body along I-84 where a motorist discovered her the next day.

Rifkin had not brought one of his girls home in almost a year. After strangling twenty-one year old Violet O’Neil, he mutilated her corpse in his mother’s bathtub, wrapped the various pieces in plastic, and deposited them in several Manhattan waterways. Her arms and legs appeared in an abandoned suitcase. Thirty-one year old Mary Catherine Williams was a former homecoming queen, college cheerleader, and ex-wife of a pro football player. After failing as an actress in New York, she had turned to drugs and prostitution, which led her to Joel Rifkin on October 2, 1992. He dumped her body in Yorktown where its discovery occurred two months later. Authorities buried her as a Jane Doe. Rifkin’s confession also identified her.

“The toughest one to kill,” twenty-three year old Jenny Soto, broke all ten fingernails in her fight to live, a fight she lost to Rifkin on November 16, 1992. The following day her body appeared in the Harlem River, which authorities identified by her fingerprints taken on a recent arrest.

The first victim of 1993 was twenty-eight year old Leah Evans. Rifkin strangled her after she started to cry when he refused to give her privacy while undressing. He drove to a wooded area in Long Island and buried her in a shallow grave where hikers found her unearthed hand on May 9th.

Rifkin claimed two more victims before capture, one in April and one in June. He strangled twenty-eight year old Lauren Marquez before sex, yet her body, discovered after Rifkin’s arrest, showed signs of battery. Rifkin could not remember beating her.

Tiffany Bresciani was Rifkin’s last. He picked her up in the early morning hours of June 24th, his fourth hooker in half as many days. After strangling her, he stowed her body in the backseat of his mother’s truck and drove home, stopping to purchase rope and tarp. He wrapped her in it and moved her to the truck bed. Immediately upon his arrival home, his mother took her keys from her son and went shopping, never knowing there was a dead prostitute in the back. After his mother retired for the evening, Rifkin relocated Bresciani to a wheelbarrow in the garage where she remained for three days. He then loaded her back into the truck and drove fifteen miles to Melville Public Airport, where he intended to dump the body. This time, however, luck was not on the side of Joel Rifkin.

The Outcast Cast Away

At 3:15 A.M. on June 28, 1993, two New York State Troopers noticed a Mazda pickup truck with no rear license plate driving along Long Island’s Southern State Parkway. The troopers activated their lights in an attempt to make a routine traffic stop. When the driver did not pull over, they ordered him to halt over the loudspeaker. Instead, the truck sped away down the next off-ramp, and the chase was on. The troopers called for backup, and soon five patrol cars joined the ninety mile-per-hour pursuit, which ended when the Mazda’s driver missed a turn and crashed into a telephone poll at 3:36 A.M. The driver did not resist when police removed him from the vehicle. They found an X-acto knife in his pocket upon frisking him. The man’s driver’s license identified him as thirty-four year old Joel David Rifkin of East Meadow, Long Island. The thick layer of Noxzema smeared across the man’s upper lip puzzled officers, as well as the reason he fled to avoid the minor citation for having no rear license plate. They got their answers when, searching for the source of a rather pungent odor, they pulled back a tarp covering the truck bed and discovered the decomposing body of a naked woman. Confronted with the discovery, Rifkin 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?”

Back at headquarters, Rifkin embarked upon an eight-hour confession, identifying Bresciani as “number seventeen.” Though police never recorded any part of the confession, they took a written transcript as well as various sketches of body locations and victim lists Rifkin made.

Throughout the entire proceeding, Rifkin acted emotionally detached and smiled when describing the most grisly of details, displaying characteristic blunt and inappropriate affects. He responded to questions about how he felt during the murders by indicating he felt no hesitation or remorse. “I’m not sure I felt anything, it’s just something that happened.” He stated that, in the moment of murder, he was “behaving mechanically, autopilot.” When he omitted Williams’ name from one of his lists, it confused police, who falsely elevated the death toll to eighteen. Rifkin found this humorous, saying that “the clumsy cops had counted Williams twice.”

Police obtained a search warrant for Rifkin’s home and served it around 8:00 P.M. that evening. Jeanne Rifkin had no idea what was going on until she saw news reports of her son’s arrest on TV. The search of her residence, specifically Joel’s room, yielded at least two hundred and twenty-eight “trophies” he had taken from his victims, including clothing, jewelry, IDs, and makeup. Investigators also confiscated literature on the Green River Killer and Arthur Shawcross.

Rifkin went on trial for the murder of Tiffany Bresciani on April 20, 1994. He pled not guilty by reason of insanity and, judging by the way he slept and snored through the prosecution’s arguments, he expected to get off. However, prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, who had testified against Arthur Shawcross, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Hinckley, found that Rifkin was “sick but not insane. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it.” The jury agreed and convicted Rifkin of murder and reckless endangerment (for the car chase), sentencing him to twenty-five years to life.

In subsequent trials for the murders of Evans, Marquez, Sanchez, Orvieto, Halloman, and “Jane Doe,” Rifkin received one hundred and eighty-three years. The New York Supreme Court rejected Rifkin’s appeal in 2002, and he currently is serving two hundred and three years to life in the Clinton Correctional Facility, isolated high in the Adirondack Mountains. He will become eligible for parole in 2197.
Aftermath

Rifkin has spent most of prison life in solitary confinement, labeled “involuntary protective custody,” where he is confined to his cell twenty-three hours of every day. Here he has amused himself with civil suits filed by the victims’ families. When the Orvieto family sued him for wrongful death, he responded with a handwritten note labeling his victim an AIDS carrier who “may be responsible for the eventual deaths of numerous individuals” and suggesting her surviving relatives shared responsibility for “what might have been.”

Rifkin sells his paintings from prison to compensate his victims’ families. While most are scenes of flowers or wildlife, one work, entitled Guardian’s Failure, depicts an angel weeping over a bare foot clad with a coroner’s toe tag.

Perhaps the greatest irony occurred in August, 1999 when Rifkin revealed to the public his plans for “Oholah House,” a shelter for prostitutes seeking rehab, counseling, medical care, and job training. Rifkin claimed the project was so named because “Oholah” was both the Hebrew word for “sanctuary” and the name of an Old Testament prostitute who suffered a gruesome end. (The spelling of the latter name actually is “Aholah.”) In Rifkin’s own words, this gesture was “a way of paying back a debt, I guess.” This attempt at deception did not fool prosecutor Fred Klein. He had the plan promptly dismissed on the grounds that Rifkin had included in the plans a “Motivation Room” where residents of the house would be “scared straight” by viewing photographs of prostitutes murdered while tricking. His reasoning for such callous treatment: “These girls think, ‘I can’t be touched.’ Well, seventeen girls thought that, and now they’re dead.”