Chapter 18

RADIO talk show hosts couldn’t get enough of the Joel Rifkin story. Shock jock host Howard Stern of radio station WXRK talked about little else for the week following Rifkin’s arrest.

He interviewed Rifkin’s neighbors, childhood friends, and former employers. He poked fun at Jeanne Rifkin, describing the elderly widow as walking around in a daze and continuing to putter around in her garden.

One caller who lived down the block from the Rifkins said that Joel Rifkin seemed odd and always looked and smelled dirty. The caller said that he frequently saw Rifkin working on his trucks late at night, and that many in the neighborhood thought it strange.

“It was just so bizarre,” the caller said. “One day, the car would be working for a couple of days, then he puts it up on those stilt type of things and takes out parts and transfers it to the other car and drives that one around. Half the week one car would be working, the other half the other car.… Two frames, one car.”

“That’s a dead giveaway,” Stern said firmly. “There’s no normal guy doing that.”

The caller continued. He said that the day before Rifkin’s arrest, he saw him working on his Mazda.

“My wife said, ‘What do you think of him,’” the caller recounted. “I said, ‘Oh, keep away from him. I don’t want you to talk to him. I don’t want you to look at him. He’s nuts. You never know about this guy.’”

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Stern shot back. “I saw that garden on TV. That’s the work of a mental patient. He has all kinds of trails and everything … It looks like a nightmare garden … like a Chinese warlord garden.”

*   *   *

Over the next few days the phone lines were jammed with callers trying to get into the spotlight. Employees from Record World phoned in. So did former classmates at East Meadow High School.

Over at Spirit Insurance in East Meadow, the staff was excited. They, too, wanted to go on the air and talk to Stern. After all, they had as much right as anyone: Joel Rifkin was a customer. He insured his Mazda with Spirit.

The morning after Rifkin’s arrest, shortly after 7:00 A.M., Spirit customer service representative Dawn Kessler had opened the office and gone directly to the files.

She’d heard Rifkin’s name on the news.

That name is so familiar, she thought. I bet he has insurance with us.

Alone in the office, Kessler hunted through the files. She found his at once.

I knew it, she thought.

Thumbing through his papers, she tried to remember her dealings with Joel Rifkin. He’d first signed up at Spirit on December 3, 1992, wanting in insure a 1976 Mercury sedan. Spirit had quoted Rifkin a price—$750 annually—but a few weeks later it was raised to $893. Rifkin hadn’t told them about an accident he’d had a few years earlier.

Three weeks later Rifkin showed up again. He wanted to switch his policy, putting the same license plates on his gray Mazda pickup.

Dawn had helped him. She remembered how he’d stared at her and the other girls in the office. Once Dawn’s future brother-in-law, Mike Lomelo, who also worked at Spirit, had caught her eye and motioned to Rifkin. “That guy’s a psycho,” Mike had whispered. Dawn had nodded, rolling her eyes.

On April 5 Rifkin had had an accident with a Bellmore man. He told Dawn that his pickup truck had fallen out of gear and smashed into a car. The damage to the pickup was minimal, but the other car’s right rear door and quarter panel were bent. Rifkin got an estimate from a body shop: $1,338.

For more than a week, Dawn had spoken to Rifkin almost daily, calling him at his job at Olympus. She’d helped him fill out the proper forms. When he came in to the office, Dawn had tried not to notice how he looked at her.

She glanced at the file again. Rifkin’s insurance had been canceled on May 20, more than a month before. He’d failed to make his last two payments.

Alone at Spirit, Dawn Kessler suddenly felt strange. She thought about the way Joel Rifkin had eyed her. Could I have been one of those girls? she wondered. Dawn put the file away. In a short time, a few of the other employees arrived. She didn’t mention Joel Rifkin.

A few hours later, Dawn was at her desk, sending bills, when the front door burst open. It was Spirit owner John Rose. Everyone in the office looked up.

“Quick, give me the murderer’s file!” he yelled. He had been listening to Howard Stern on the drive into work. Stern had been complaining about the lack of callers who actually knew Joel Rifkin.

Dawn began to laugh. “I know, I know,” she said, holding up the file. “Can you believe this?”

John grabbed it. He searched through the pages until he found what he was looking for: a copy of Rifkin’s driver’s license. He ran to the copy machine and made an enlarged copy. He quickly scribbled a note: “To Howard Stern from Spirit Agency Insurance in East Meadow. Serial killer was insured here. We have all the psychos.”

John Rose faxed the note to The Howard Stern Show. He yelled at one of his employees, Garrett Duffy, to get the show on the line.

“Did you know about this, Dawn?” John asked.

“Yeah, I pulled the file,” she said. “I remember helping him. Maybe just a month ago.”

“It’s Spirit Insurance,” Duffy said, into the phone. “The murderer had insurance here.” Within minutes, Howard Stern’s producer, Gary Dell’abate, was on the line.

“We’re putting you on the air,” he said. “Put on someone who had dealings with the killer.”

John Rose immediately turned to Dawn. “You do it,” he practically commanded. “You’re the last one who had contact with him.”

Dawn agreed. She called her fiancé, Ray Lomelo, and her brother. “I’m going to be on the radio,” she said, rushed. “Quick, turn it on.”

She hung up. Suddenly she began to get nervous. She knew the way Stern taunted his guests. “I don’t know,” Dawn began saying, her confidence wilting. “What am I going to say? What’s Howard going to do to me? What if he starts being obnoxious to me?”

Her coworkers tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry, you’ll be great,” they said.

Dell’abate called back.

“Five minutes,” he said.

“Five minutes,” John Rose sang out.

The owner of Spirit Insurance Agency began to dance around the room. “We’re going to be on The Howard Stern Show, we’re going on Howard,” he chanted.

He turned to face his employees. Everyone was laughing.

“You know, every day I think, Who are these morons who call Howard Stern?” John said. “And here we are—we’re one of those morons!”

*   *   *

The radio interview lasted just a few minutes. Dawn Kessler told Stern what she remembered—Joel Rifkin had acted strangely, and always leered at her and the other girls in the office.

HOWARD: Did he try to bite you?

DAWN: No, but was staring at all the girls in the office.

HOWARD: I see. I see.

DAWN: We have a lot of pretty girls who work here.

HOWARD: Are you pretty?

DAWN: Oh yeah.

HOWARD: Oh really?

DAWN: Oh yeah.

Dawn went on to describe the accident Joel Rifkin had had in April. She said he told her that his pickup had somehow fallen out of gear and hit another car.

DAWN: He kept saying how crazy the other guy was.

HOWARD: And was he looking at you?

DAWN: Oh, yeah.

HOWARD: He was taking you in.

DAWN: He was just eyeballing everybody.

HOWARD: To the audience at home, you’re a very attractive woman?

DAWN: Oh yeah.

HOWARD: What do you look like, facially? Farrah Fawcett Majors?

DAWN: I would say more like Goldie Hawn.

HOWARD: Oh really. You got a body like her?

DAWN: Yeah.

HOWARD: Was this Rifkin character trying to come on to you?

DAWN: He was … I would say he stared at me the whole time.

HOWARD: You were really turned off to him?

DAWN: Completely.

HOWARD: He made your skin crawl.… Were you wearing a miniskirt the day he came in?

DAWN: I think I was wearing a minidress the day he came in.

HOWARD: He was staring at your legs?

DAWN: Head to toe.

HOWARD: Soaking you in … He didn’t say anything weird to you, like, “I have to bury you”?

DAWN: No, he just said he wanted to insure the car because he wanted to drive his friends around.

HOWARD: Well, he sure did. One more thing. Did he try to stuff you in a garbage bag?

DAWN: No. He didn’t have a chance.

When it was over, everyone at Spirit hugged Dawn at once.

“You were great,” they kept shouting. “Great!”

“I didn’t sound good,” Dawn said immediately. “My voice sounded so deep—boyish like.”

“You sounded great,” they kept telling her. “You’re a star.”

The phones didn’t stop ringing all day. Customers and friends called to say they’d heard the show. The Federal Express delivery man was impressed. “Who’s Dawn? Who’s Dawn?” he kept asking.

Even the mailman stopped by. It was his day off. He’d been washing his car in the driveway, listening to the radio. He’d been laughing all morning.

“That was the funniest thing I ever heard,” he told John Rose.

The next morning, Dawn Kessler opened Spirit as usual. But this time the young woman felt a bit uncomfortable. She was glad Joel Rifkin wasn’t out on bail.

I wonder if he heard me on the radio, she thought. Here I am, in his office by myself.

Dawn brushed off the disturbing images. He’s not getting out of jail, she thought. Not ever.