Chapter 12

AS police released names of Joel Rifkin’s victims, bands of journalists raced to interview family members. One of the first they found was María Alonso. By late afternoon, shortly after Rifkin was arraigned, a line snaked outside her Brooklyn apartment. Everyone wanted to know how María Alonso felt. What did she think about Joel Rifkin? What would she do to him if she could?

“I always thought that I was going to be so happy once I knew what happened to my daughter,” she told reporters. “I’d get my life back. But it’s worse than the beginning—to know that that man killed my daughter. I see his face and I can’t get to him.”

Reporters asked her how she’d feel if Joel Rifkin pleaded insane. María Alonso’s voice grew bitter.

“He’s not insane,” she said. “If he remembers where he threw my daughter’s body thirteen months before and the details of all these girls, where he threw them, nobody in the world can convince me that that guy is insane. He’s just plain evil. That’s how he got his kicks. That’s how he felt powerful: killing innocent, defenseless women. Because otherwise he’s nothing, he’s a nobody. He’s not good at anything. He’s a sadist personality.”

She told reporters how she had tried to tell police about her daughter’s disappearance. She told them about the officer who said Annie had probably met someone and gone to the Bahamas.

“If they would have listened to me, maybe a few lives could have been saved,” she said. “But they didn’t care. They don’t care for drug addicts. They really don’t. How many girls did that monster kill after he killed my daughter?”

And then María spoke for the other mothers who would learn the fate of their children. Her words were quoted on the front pages of the newspapers and broadcast on the evening news.

“He did not kill seventeen prostitutes—he killed seventeen daughters,” she said evenly. “Some of them were mothers. They have sisters and brothers. And they left a lot of people behind suffering and missing them. There is a story behind every one of them.”

María paused to wipe away her tears. “When I see one of these girls in the street, I do not look at them with disgust. I look at them with pity. They’re still people. My daughter had to sell her body to support her drug habit. I’m not naive. When you have a drug addiction, whatever money you make working is not enough. If you are into crack, you do what you do. I never saw my daughter doing drugs or selling her body, but I knew she did it. But my daughter was not born a prostitute. Only drugs made her a prostitute.”

Over the next few days police fended off criticism. Why had no one linked the murders of more than a dozen young prostitutes over the past two years? Were women who sold their bodies unsympathetic victims? Did their deaths somehow mean less? In their defense, police said that no one had reported these women missing. “Prostitutes are out on the street at all hours,” said New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. “There aren’t going to be any witnesses.… This is a big city. We have a lot of missing person’s reports. And also, if you’re reporting someone missing you may not necessarily identify them as a prostitute.”

Various experts on serial killers spoke out as well. They explained that prostitutes were easy prey because most had no connections—no family or friends who’d even notice if they were gone. “There are a lot of people in this world who don’t have a connection to their families,” said Colonel Wayne Bennett, head of the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

But that wasn’t the case with Joel Rifkin’s victims. They had families. They had people who cared. In fact, many relatives of the missing women attempted to file reports with police. In New York, however, a missing person’s report is taken only if the person is under eighteen or over sixty-five, or has a medical problem or history of mental illness.

Besides, as Assistant District Attorney Fred Klein pointed out, no one would ever know how these women encountered Joel Rifkin. No one could say what really happened. “Not all of the victims have a record of prostitution or any proof that they were prostitutes,” he said. “He says they’re prostitutes. Unfortunately, the victims can’t tell us their side.”

*   *   *

One wonders what Leah Evens would say. She was twenty-eight years old and a mother of two when she was murdered by Joel Rifkin. It was a Saturday night. Her children, Julian, five, and Eve, three, were home, sleeping. They lived with Leah’s mother in a Park Slope, Brooklyn, town house.

The mystery of what had happened to Leah Evens ended when police found her driver’s license and employee identification card in Rifkin’s bedroom. For months before, no one knew where she was. Her corpse lay in Potter’s Field, a dumping ground for unclaimed bodies.

*   *   *

Leah grew up in an ambitious family. Her mother, Susan, worked in the public relations office of Cooper Union; her father, Lester, was a Manhattan Civil Court judge.

She was close to her parents, particularly her dad. In 1985, when her father became embroiled in a very public—and humiliating—scandal, Leah suffered along with him.

She was away at school, attending Sarah Lawrence College. She read about her father’s disgrace every morning in the newspapers. It started out innocently. Her father, then sixty-one, was sitting at his bench one morning in Arraignment Part II at 100 Centre Street and watched as cops led a group of prostitutes into the room. Among them was Beth Reilly, a pretty eighteen-year-old. Reilly had been arrested a week earlier and fined a hundred dollars. She paid half, and promised to return with the rest.

She never did. Police rearrested Beth Reilly. She sat waiting in Lester Evens’s courtroom for a friend to post bail. She leaned back on the bench and yawned. Loudly.

Lester Evens grinned. He motioned to Beth Reilly, inviting her to join him on the bench. Giggling, she did.

Beth Reilly spent the morning sitting with the judge. Then he told her she was released.

“Go home,” Evens said, smiling. “Call it time served.”

Judge Lester Evens was branded a fool and a dirty old man. His colleagues nicknamed him Judge Hooker. He was eventually censured for “undignified behavior” by state officials. His wife eventually left him and moved to Park Slope.

Two years later, Judge Evens was defeated in a primary.

It was a difficult time for Leah Evens. Her father’s public humiliation was crushing. But she remained close to him—she didn’t care what anyone else said. Besides, by the time her father had lost his reelection, she had enough troubles of her own.

By then, Leah Evens had left Sarah Lawrence and was having problems finding a job. She eventually began working as a waitress and cook in a restaurant on Seventh Ave in Manhattan. For a time, she had a boyfriend. They had two children together—Julian and Eve.

Then Leah’s boyfriend left her.

Despondent, Leah Evens turned to drugs. She began to work the streets of Twelfth Street and Second Avenue to pay for her daily fix. On at least one occasion, she was arrested for prostitution.

Yet once or twice a week Leah Evens still visited her dad at his opulent Manhattan apartment. Back home at her mother’s town house in Brooklyn, Leah often sat on the stoop outside watching her children play.

Somehow, Leah Evens managed to hide the worst of her disease from the people she loved the most.

On February 27, 1993, she could no longer protect them. Or herself.

Joel Rifkin says that on that night he offered Leah Evens forty dollars for sex in his pickup. He says the judge’s daughter agreed. When it was over, he strangled her.

Joel Rifkin then drove east, Leah’s body still in the pickup with him. He passed the exit for East Meadow and kept going. He went about fifty miles farther and then turned down County Road 51. It was before dawn. The road was deserted.

A few miles later he turned on a gravel road, Old Riverhead—Moriches Road. Rifkin didn’t know it, but he’d entered the 192-acre Hidden Hill Farm in Speonk, in the hamlet of Northampton. The owner rented lots to several Korean farmers who grew mostly wild vegetables and herbs. Several dogs roamed the area, keeping trespassers away.

But Rifkin stayed at the edge of the farm, away from the dogs and the trailers where the farmers lived. He stopped the pickup just a hundred yards from the road. Then he dragged the body of Julian and Eve’s mother through the woods another hundred yards. He dug a shallow grave and dumped the body inside. He covered it with dirt.

For the next two and a half months the body of Leah Evens lay unnoticed.

*   *   *

It was May 9—Mother’s Day. Early in the morning, five Koreans from Queens were out hunting for wild vegetables. They’d gotten permission from one of the farmers on the land.

They traipsed through the woods, searching for edible ferns. Then one of the group members spied a cluster of them. He reached down. He gasped. Amid the bushes was a hand sticking straight up.

The group drove into the town of Speonk and called the police. When cops arrived, they cordoned off the area and examined the body.

It was badly decomposed—almost a skeleton. Bits of red or orange nail polish still clung to the nails. The next day police put out her description. She was white, at least twenty years old, with dark brown hair at least shoulder length. She weighed ninety-five pounds and was tiny—four foot nine. She wore a long-sleeved white pullover shirt with a Gap label, and a blue button-front sweater.

The Southampton Town Police Department, which handles the area, tried to interest the local media in the story about the body. At first reporters declined. At the time, the hot story in Long Island’s East End was a man who was torturing and killing animals in Sag Harbor.

But later, the Hampton Chronicle News ran a front-page article: POLICE SEEK TO IDENTIFY BODY DISCOVERED IN NORTHAMPTON, the headline read.

The article quoted the Suffolk County medical examiner, Stuart Dawson, who said that autopsy results were inconclusive and that they revealed no obvious cause of death. That, Dawson added, didn’t rule out foul play.

Over the next few weeks, Suffolk County homicide police worked on a computer-enhanced composite of what the dead woman might have looked like. They had just completed it when Rifkin was caught and told detectives about Leah Evens.

During his interrogation with Capers and Louder, Rifkin described Evens, detailing where they met and how he’d disposed of the body. But the East Meadow man had trouble remembering her name. Capers and Louder waited. Rifkin thought some more. Then he shook his head.

“I can’t remember,” he said. But then Rifkin recalled something else. “I kept some stuff from her,” he told them.

Indeed he had. With the driver’s license and employee ID card found in Rifkin’s bedroom, detectives connected Leah Evens’s name with the body found in Speonk. They were then able to contact Lester and Susan Evens.

And so Leah Evens’s parents got the news they had prayed they would never hear. Over the next few weeks they managed to evade the media; neither spoke publicly about their daughter. But privately, Susan and Lester Evens grieved for their Leah. Somehow they found the strength to do the unthinkable—to explain to their little grandchildren why their mother never came home last winter, and never would again.

*   *   *

Not only did Joel Rifkin forget Mary Catherine Williams’s name, he couldn’t remember that he had murdered her. She was the one victim that Joel Rifkin never mentioned. Police believe he may have simply lost count. He told them seventeen; police think the actual number was eighteen. Joel Rifkin may have forgotten that he strangled Mary Catherine Williams.

Her family never will. Catherine, as they called her, was petite and dark haired. She was a talented gymnast and dancer and dreamed of becoming an actress. She had a series of bit parts in movies produced by a North Carolina film company.

Catherine earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had been a homecoming queen and varsity cheerleader. When she graduated, she married Jay Cave, a football star from Charlotte.

The marriage ended in 1987. A few years later, Catherine moved to New York to pursue her acting dream. But acting jobs were tough to find in the city. Catherine took a job at an advertising agency and began to wonder if she would ever make it as an actress.

Back home in Charlotte she’d used cocaine a few times. In New York, she began to use it more. Then one day she realized she couldn’t stop. When she ran out of money for drugs, she became a prostitute.

For a time, it seemed there was hope. About eight months before she died, Catherine met a thirty-six-year-old Japanese businessman and fell in love. At the time, she was living in a crack house in the East Village.

Her boyfriend encouraged her to get into a program. Catherine said she would. She went home to Charlotte for Christmas. Her parents knew about her drug problem and begged her to stay. They would help, they insisted.

But Catherine was adamant. She returned to New York, insisting she could handle it.

She couldn’t. Her cocaine use continued. Then, in October 1992, Catherine and her boyfriend had a fight over her drug use. He dropped her off at the crack house. He never saw her again.

A few nights later Catherine met Joel Rifkin. He had just taken a new job. He had signed up with Dunhill Temporary Systems, a local agency that assigned its clients to various jobs with large companies. Rifkin was placed at Olympus America in Woodbury. Every day he joined an assembly line of ten to fifteen workers at a large table. He cleaned and repaired cameras. Sometimes he worked alone, packing and loading cameras.

At night he drove into Manhattan. At some point he noticed the pretty dark-haired girl on the street, the former cheerleader from North Carolina.

Two months later, just before Christmas, Mary Catherine’s naked, badly decomposed body was found in a wooded area of Yorktown, in Westchester. A medical examiner found cocaine in her system. As with Leah Evens, as with Anna Lopez, as with so many others, no one knew who she was. Her body lay unclaimed in Potter’s Field until the following summer.

That’s when her credit cards were found in Joel Rifkin’s home. Police called Catherine’s parents in Charlotte. Her father, Egbert, a dentist, sent his daughter’s records to New York. Police made a positive identification.

Police called the Williamses with the tragic news on the same day that their younger daughter, Susan, got engaged.

“When something good happens, something horrible happens too,” Doris Williams said, breaking into sobs.

*   *   *

About a month after he strangled Mary Catherine Williams, Joel Rifkin encountered his next victim. Her name was Jenny Soto.