Chapter 13

THE last time Jessy Olmedo saw her sister Jenny it was 11:00 P.M. on November 16, 1992.

They had spent the evening hanging out in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with Jenny’s boyfriend, Popcorn. As usual, Jenny and Popcorn wound up in an argument. It was over something silly—it typically was. Jenny, twenty-three, had a quick temper. She grabbed a Goya bean can and threw it at Popcorn. Then she stormed out of the apartment.

Jessy followed her sister. She’d seen Jenny and Popcorn fight lots of times. But she knew that the couple adored each other. “Pop changed my life,” Jenny always said. “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The sisters talked on the stoop. Their conversation turned to Jessy’s pregnancy. She was due in four months. Jessy was just fifteen, nervous and a little scared. But Jenny was excited. She assured Jessy that everything was going to work out great. Jenny said she’d go back to school, get her GED, and land a good job. She’d rent an apartment, and Jessy and the baby would live with her. Jenny kept telling Jessy not to worry: she would always take care of her little sister.

On the sidewalk outside of Pop’s apartment, Jenny’s beeper went off. She looked down.

“It’s Albert,” she said. Albert was her ex-boyfriend. Recently, he’d been paroled from prison and was unhappy that Jenny was dating Popcorn. Albert had been calling a lot lately, begging for another chance.

It was getting late. Jessy was supposed to have been home by ten. The sisters walked to the subway and took the M train to Delancey Street in lower Manhattan. They crossed the platform. In a few minutes the F train approached. It was just a few stops to Park Slope, Brooklyn. The doors opened.

Suddenly Jenny stepped back.

“You go on ahead,” she told Jessy. “I’m going to meet my friend.”

“But Jenny—” Jessy began to say.

“Hurry up or you’ll miss the train,” Jenny said quickly, giving her sister a hug. “Don’t worry. I’ll be home by twelve-thirty.”

Jessy stepped inside the car and the subway doors shut. At night, when she lies in bed, the house silent, Jessy can still picture Jenny standing on the platform as the train pulled out, waving goodbye.

*   *   *

Jenny Soto grew up in Brooklyn. Her mother, Margarita, had three children with her first husband. Then she met Jenny’s father. Jenny never knew him. He was stabbed to death in a subway station on DeKalb Avenue a few months before she was born. Police never found his killer.

A few years later Margarita Gonzalez married Felix Olmedo. He worked in a shipyard in New Jersey. The couple had three children—Jessy, Charlie, and Eric. Felix was a good stepfather to Jenny; he raised her as one of his own children.

When Jenny was twelve, the family moved to a three-story brownstone on Thirteenth Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Several of Margarita Gonzalez’s siblings lived nearby. The families were close; they gathered for big Sunday dinners and celebrated birthdays and holidays together. Jenny spent a lot of time with her cousins.

But she was closest to her younger sister and brothers. Jenny was eight when Jessy was born. She played dolls with the little girl and fixed her hair in fancy braids. Jenny liked to pretend to be a teacher; Jessy was her student. She told her stories and taught her to dance.

When Charlie came along, Jenny doted on him too. As he grew older, she play-wrestled with him and took him to movies. Sometimes they watched soap operas together—All My Children was Jenny’s favorite.

As for Eric, Jenny practically raised him. She showered him with hugs and kisses and wanted to give him anything he asked for. Two years before she died, Jenny brought home four yellow parakeets. When she saw how much Eric liked them, she gave them to him. Little Eric and his cousin Matthew named the birds Sito, Yiya, Christmas, and Yellow.

Jenny often took her three younger siblings along when she went shopping or to hang out with friends. As Jessy, Charlie, and Eric grew up, she warned them about smoking and drugs.

“Don’t drink beer because after that, you’ll go on to smoke pot, and keep continuing,” she’d say. “Just don’t try anything.”

Sadly, she didn’t follow her own advice. When Jenny was thirteen, she met Albert, a twenty-year-old from the neighborhood. Jenny’s family believes that Albert was a bad influence. He used drugs. Before long, Jenny did too.

Jenny and Albert dated for seven years. At the end of eleventh grade, Jenny dropped out of John Jay High School. She went dancing in clubs almost every night, sometimes getting home after dawn.

Drugs took over. Desperate for money, Jenny turned to the streets. She was arrested several times—once for prostitution. Her fingerprints were placed on file at state police headquarters in Albany.

Despite her wild ways, Jenny remained close to her family. She still talked regularly about her goals. She wanted to be a dancer or a model. Almost every week, she bought film and asked friends to take her picture. She turned to her little sister, Jessy, for updates on fashion.

Sometimes Jessy teased her. “You’re getting old,” she’d say. “You don’t know the style.”

Jenny always took Jessy’s advice. She wore lots of gold jewelry and enormous gold earrings. She even bought $250 gold caps for her teeth.

“It’s the style,” Jessy would tell her. And Jenny would follow it.

Jenny loved to fix hair and makeup. She practiced on her sisters, cousins, and friends. Sometimes, before a party or for a special occasion, she styled her mother’s hair. Margarita Gonzalez was proud of Jenny’s talent. She encouraged her to become a professional hairstylist.

“Why don’t you take that up?” Margarita Gonzalez would say. “You do it better than people who have a diploma.”

Jenny always promised to think about it. “Ma, maybe I’ll take that, but I don’t know,” she’d say. “There are so many things I want to do.”

*   *   *

After Albert was arrested and sent to prison, Jenny met Popcorn. It was January 1992. Jenny had gone with Jessy to visit Jessy’s boyfriend. Popcorn was his best friend. At the time, Jenny was twenty-two; Popcorn was nineteen.

The young man noticed Jenny at once.

“Who’s that girl?” Popcorn asked Jessy in a whisper. “I like her.”

Jessy introduced her sister. The couple began to talk. Popcorn told Jenny that his real name was Noel—Pop was his rap name. He told her about his group. Someday he hoped to make it big.

Before long, Jenny and Popcorn were in love. She began to stay with him in the basement apartment he shared with his grandparents in Bushwick. Always, though, Jenny called home three or four times a day.

Bushwick wasn’t too far from Park Slope, so Jenny went back and forth between Popcorn’s place and her parents’ home. She quickly discovered a fast route to Popcorn’s—she took the F train into Manhattan and then the M train back to Brooklyn.

Her family noticed a change in Jenny. She began to talk about going back to school and getting her GED. Popcorn wanted her to, she said. Jenny talked a lot about the rap group. Popcorn said she could be the group’s producer.

In fact, the summer before she died, Jenny made the rounds, going to various clubs and trying to convince owners to audition the group. She even managed to get her little brother, Eric, involved. He introduced the act, and danced.

Jenny never missed rehearsals. They were held at the Playground, a Manhattan club. Sometimes she offered suggestions. Mostly, though, she just cheered them on. She was so proud of little Eric and Popcorn. At the end of each rehearsal she always applauded loudly.

At last it seemed as if Jenny Soto’s life had turned around. She had new ambitions and a boyfriend she loved, one who didn’t do drugs and who wanted her, too, to stay clean.

When Albert was paroled from jail and returned to Brooklyn, Jenny refused to see him. “No way will I go back to him,” she told Jessy. “I love Pop.”

Jessy was glad. She liked Popcorn. He was good for her sister. By then, Jessy was pregnant. As always, Jenny was there for her. It made Jessy feel safe, and reassured. Jenny was going to take care of everything.

Over the years, Jenny had often wondered aloud if she would ever be a parent. When she was dating Albert, she had become pregnant several times. Each time she’d had a miscarriage.

“I don’t think I can ever have kids,” Jenny told Jessy. “You have the baby. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll live together and I’ll take care of the baby while you finish school.”

It was her dream—to help raise her sister’s child, to get an apartment of her own, to produce her boyfriend’s rap group. Someday she would marry Popcorn. They’d already planned the wedding.

Joel Rifkin would destroy the dream.

Oddly, the summer before she was killed, Jenny Soto talked a lot about dying. She bought an ID card, and carried it in her wallet. She said that way if something happened to her, she could be identified.

One day she gave her gold chains to her mother.

“If I die,” she said, “put them on me. I want my gold jewelry. And don’t go putting me in a dress.”

Margarita Gonzalez dismissed such morbid talk.

“What are you saying, Jenny?” she asked. “Don’t talk that way.”

The weekend before she was murdered, Jenny Soto went to her cousin Patricia’s birthday party. Normally upbeat and chatty, Jenny seemed distant, detached. Her relatives suspected something was wrong but Jenny brushed off their concerns with a laugh. She was fine, she told them. Everything was fine.

No one was surprised that Jenny didn’t express her real feelings. All her life she’d listened to their problems and doled out advice. But when it came to sharing her troubles, Jenny Soto was always silent. There was a part of Jenny Soto, her relatives knew, that no one could touch.

*   *   *

By that point, Jenny’s family believed her drug problem was in the past. Over the summer Jenny attended a few Narcotics Anonymous meetings with a friend. But she didn’t stay with the program. And her battle to stay clean raged within her.

Her preoccupation with death just before she was killed haunts her family. They wonder what she knew.

Perhaps Jenny Soto sensed her drug problem might eventually bring her to a point where no one could save her. Perhaps she knew that by putting her life in danger, someday she’d find her luck running out.

It did.

On the night of November 16, 1992, drugs set the deadly chain of events in motion. When Jenny Soto left the subway station, police believe she went looking for cocaine. She found it. A medical examiner reported that traces of the drug were found in her body.

But at one point that night, Jenny stopped at a pay phone and called her mother. It was 11:45 P.M.

“Did Jessy get home all right?” Jenny asked.

Jessy was fine, but Margarita Gonzalez was angry. Jessy had come home way past her curfew.

Jenny tried to make peace.

“Don’t be mad at Jessy,” she said. “She was with me.”

Margarita Gonzalez sighed. “And when are you coming home?” she asked.

“In an hour.”

*   *   *

What happened next?

It is likely that Jenny Soto needed drug money. She may then have spotted the pickup truck, as it slowly cruised the streets of lower Manhattan.