Chapter 2

TROOPERS handcuffed Joel Rifkin and led him to a patrol car, ordering him to sit in the back. He showed no emotion as they arrested him and read him his rights.

Meanwhile, Spaargaren and Ruane remained with the pickup. They unlocked the tailgate, dropped it, and peered inside, shining flashlights from top to bottom. The blue tarpaulin filled the bed of the truck. Using the tips of their flashlights, the troopers cautiously lifted a corner of the tarp. The smell grew even more potent. They lifted the edge of the tarp a little higher. Their suspicions were promptly confirmed.

Inside the tarp was the decomposing body of a woman. From the looks of the body and its stench, the cops guessed she’d been dead a few days. They shone a flashlight onto her face. For a moment, no one spoke.

The troopers didn’t know they were looking at the body of Tiffany Bresciani, that she had been just twenty-two years old, a pretty, petite aspiring writer from Metairie, Louisiana. They didn’t know that for the past few days Tiffany’s mother, Cheryl, had been worried about her only child. Since Tiffany moved to New York City several years earlier, she’d always called home frequently.

But there had been no phone call since Thursday, June 24. Late that night, three days before police would spot the Mazda pickup on the parkway, Cheryl Bresciani’s only child had made a terrible mistake: she’d climbed into a car with Joel Rifkin.

By 3:30 A.M. more than a dozen state troopers and Nassau County cops were swarming along the corner of Old Country Road and Washington Avenue. They cordoned off the area and examined the interior of the pickup, strewn with trash. Their findings were disturbing. A pair of women’s shoes. Gray stretch tights with one pink sock attached. A pair of rubber gloves. A wooden handled steak knife. On the dashboard in the cab, a Grateful Dead sticker. On the back bumper, another sticker: STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES BUT WHIPS AND CHAINS EXCITE ME.

The troopers studied Joel Rifkin’s driver’s license: “Rifkin, Joel D. 1492 Garden Street, East Meadow, New York 11554. Eyes: gray. Height: 5 ft. 10. Born 01/20/59. Wears corrective lenses.”

But the cops respectfully stepped aside to allow Ruane and Spaargaren to question the suspect. Joel Rifkin was, after all, caught because of the tenacity of the young cops.

The troopers asked the obvious question. Who was the woman in the truck?

Joel Rifkin answered without hesitating, his voice composed.

“She was a prostitute,” he said. “I had sex with her, and then I killed her.”

The troopers were stunned. A minor traffic infraction had somehow spiraled into a murder case. And the suspect didn’t seem the least perturbed. Outside the patrol car, Spaargaren and Ruane consulted briefly. It was definitely time to radio headquarters with the latest developments.

News traveled fast. Troopers on overnight duty in East Farmingdale immediately telephoned several senior investigators at home. Details were still sketchy, they explained. But there was a suspect, an East Meadow man who’d confessed to killing a woman. Perhaps there was even more to this grisly story. The detectives didn’t need urging. They hurried to headquarters at once.

Once the detectives were on their way, the troopers consulted a list to find out which assistant district attorney from the Major Offenses Bureau was on call for the week. Six ADAs worked for Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon. Each took turns manning the bureau a week at a time.

Assistant District Attorney Fred Klein’s shift was due to end at 9:00 A.M. Monday morning. But five hours before it did, Joel Rifkin was apprehended with a body in his truck. Klein got the case.

Since joining the DA’s office in 1978, Fred Klein had been one of the more valued ADAs on Long Island. He was aggressive and tenacious. And he’d had a good deal of experience dealing with the media.

In recent months Klein had wrapped the most infamous case of his career—the prosecution of Amy Fisher, the Long Island teenager who had shot her alleged lover’s wife in the head. The assistant district attorney loathed the publicity the story had engendered. Ducking interviews, he’d tried to focus on the case. After six months, Klein had negotiated a plea bargain with Fisher’s attorney. When the Long Island teen was finally sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison and sent to an upstate New York prison in December 1992, Fred Klein was relieved.

But it wasn’t over. Two months later, DA Dillon had assigned Klein to an equally high profile case—the prosecution of Joey Buttafuoco, Amy’s alleged lover, on statutory rape charges.

So when the telephone rang a few hours before his shift was scheduled to end, Fred Klein could only wonder what was in store for him next.

Klein listened as troopers explained the situation. A man. A body. A confession. Klein dressed quickly and drove straight to Mineola.

*   *   *

It was shortly before 4:00 A.M. The patrol car carrying Joel Rifkin, its lights flashing, sped down the Southern State Parkway. It was important to bring the accused in for interrogation as soon as possible. The patrol car raced past the spot where Spaargaren and Ruane had first signaled the pickup to pull over, less than an hour before.

In the car, Joel Rifkin responded to troopers’ questions effortlessly. He told them he was a landscaper, but that he hadn’t worked in some time. Now and then he did office temp work for various companies on Long Island. He was thirty-four years old, an East Meadow resident. He lived at home with his mother, Jeanne, and sister, Jan. His father, Bernard, had died six years ago.

Without much coaxing, Joel Rifkin began to volunteer details on the murder. He told the troopers that on Thursday evening he’d borrowed his mother’s 1986 blue Toyota four-door sedan and driven to Manhattan. For a while, he’d cruised Allen Street on the Lower East Side, one of his favorite haunts, as well as Twelfth Street and Second Avenue in the East Village. Both areas are known to be frequented by prostitutes.

Rifkin spotted Tiffany Bresciani on Canal Street. She’d been working the street off and on for several years. She wore a simple black skirt and a green blouse. She had a couple of tattoos—one of a purple rose encircling her left wrist and an ankh symbol—the Egyptian symbol for life—on a floral background on her left hip.

Like almost every prostitute on the streets of New York City, Tiffany Bresciani was a drug addict. For several years heroin had been her drug of choice. But lately, Bresciani had been fighting her disease. She’d joined a methadone program in the city. Every day, she got her daily fix of the orange liquid.

But in a short time she was back walking the streets, selling her body to get high. It was an existence she loathed, a world away from life as Cheryl Bresciani’s little girl in Metairie. But like so many others, Tiffany Bresciani felt powerless. The lure of drugs was formidable.

So when Joel Rifkin rolled down his window late Thursday night and motioned, Tiffany Bresciani willingly responded. She walked over to the Toyota and leaned in. It only took a minute to negotiate a price: forty or fifty dollars was standard. It would be enough for the evening’s high. And so Tiffany Bresciani, whose grandmother called her “little lamb,” got in the passenger seat of Joel Rifkin’s car and pulled the door shut.

Rifkin drove just a few hundred yards, parking the Toyota in an isolated spot near the Manhattan Bridge. It wasn’t unusual for prostitutes and their clients to conduct business around the bridge. Between drug sales and prostitution, the area is often jammed with cars. Now and then, New York City cops sweep the site, arresting dozens of hookers and loading them into a van.

But no one was around the night Joel Rifkin took Tiffany Bresciani under the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. No one heard her muffled gasps. No one was there to save her. Rifkin told police that as he began having sex with Tiffany Bresciani he placed his hands around her neck. As her eyes widened with terror, he squeezed with all his force. In just a minute, Tiffany Bresciani was dead.

Joel Rifkin looked at her for a long time. She had been an attractive girl. Such lovely reddish brown hair.

Back in Metairie, Tiffany’s mother and grandmother waited for a telephone call. Earlier, they’d mailed a care package to Tiffany filled with summer dresses, pictures, and a white teddy bear.

Tiffany’s boyfriend, Rick Wilder, was also waiting. The two had lived together off and on for several years. Tiffany’s drug problem caused a strain on the relationship. But Rick, a rock musician and aspiring actor, loved Tiffany. And she loved him.

With Tiffany Bresciani’s body beside him, Joel Rifkin started the engine of his mother’s Toyota. He cruised past the prostitutes and drug addicts on Canal Street. Tiffany’s friends on the strip were still working. They wouldn’t begin to miss her for several days.

Joel Rifkin left Manhattan and drove to Levittown, not far from his East Meadow home. He bought the blue tarp and yards of heavy cord. In a secluded parking lot he painstakingly wrapped Tiffany’s body and dragged it from the car seat to the trunk.

Joel Rifkin drove home and slept for a long time. It had been a busy night.

*   *   *

The day after he killed Tiffany Bresciani, Joel Rifkin moved her body to a wheelbarrow in the detached garage next to his mother’s home. Sooner or later, Jeanne Rifkin would need the Toyota. Leaving a body in the back wasn’t a good idea.

Rifkin wasn’t sure what to do about the bloodstains on the upholstery and in the trunk. He shrugged it off. He had never been questioned before.

Leaving the body in the garage was a problem, however. In the heat of the summer, it would decompose rapidly. Neighbors might complain about the smell and start asking questions. Rifkin knew he had to act quickly. So early Monday morning he set out for Republic Airport, about ten miles from East Meadow. The fields and bushes surrounding the runways would be a good place to dump a body. Ideal, in fact.

Joel Rifkin confessed his plan not long after he was collared by police. The troopers couldn’t help but catch the irony; Republic Airport, on Route 110 in East Farmingdale, is adjacent to state trooper headquarters. In his final act of bravado, Joel Rifkin had intended to discard the body of Tiffany Bresciani only a few hundred yards from an area rife with cops.

*   *   *

Shortly after Joel Rifkin arrived at headquarters, he met with Senior Investigator Tom Capers and Investigator Steve Louder. The three men faced off in a small room. Capers and Louder were skilled interviewers. Capers had been a detective for fifteen years; Louder, ten. Both men understood the intricacies of obtaining information. They knew they had to ensure that Joel Rifkin felt comfortable. They had to gain his trust.

It is customary for only one or two detectives to interrogate a suspect; it makes it more likely the suspect will speak freely. Besides, if there are too many interviewers, a savvy defense attorney could claim the suspect had been badgered into a confession. In the case of Joel Rifkin, state troopers were taking no chances.

Despite the facts—that a young woman was found dead in Joel Rifkin’s truck—Capers and Louder approached the East Meadow man gently, in an almost fraternal manner. They knew the drill; the more at ease a suspect felt, the more likely he’d offer details about his crime.

For the next few hours the investigators learned all they could about Joel Rifkin and the murder of Tiffany Bresciani. The landscaper told them he had been going to prostitutes two or three times a week since he earned his New York State driver’s license at age eighteen. Rifkin frequently used the word “patronizing” when talking about his late-night forays into lower Manhattan, looking for a woman. He said he’d “patronized” Tiffany Bresciani. He described the “date”—how he’d approached the young woman on Canal Street, and how they’d agreed on a price for sex. With his hands, Joel Rifkin demonstrated what he had done to Cheryl Bresciani’s only child.

He told the detectives where he’d bought the tarp and cord. He explained that he had used his mother’s car, and that he was forced to move the body to the garage and then to the pickup before he attempted to dispose of it.

By dawn, the investigators knew enough to determine that the local media would likely take great interest in this story. It had all the elements: A quiet landscaper from a middle-class neighborhood. A dead prostitute in the back of a pickup. A high speed chase. Two young hero cops.

Troopers prepared a one-page press release. The investigators reviewed it and gave it their okay. It read:

New York State troopers are investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of a white female discovered in a pickup truck following a vehicle and traffic stop at 4 a.m. this morning, June 28, 1993, in Nassau County, N.Y.

Two troopers on patrol of the Southern State Parkway in Nassau County attempted to stop a male operator for a traffic violation early this morning. The driver would not stop and troopers pursued the pickup onto Wantagh Avenue North and then onto Old Country Road West. The pickup eventually collided with a light pole at Old Country Road and Washington Avenue in Mineola. At the scene, troopers discovered the body of a white female in the back of the pickup. The driver has been arrested and state police investigators will be available to address questions concerning this case at approximately 1 p.m. this afternoon, June 28, 1993, at State Police Troop L Headquarters, East Farmingdale, N.Y.

By 9:00 A.M., the public information officer, Trooper Tom Collins, placed the press release on the fax machine in the communications division of headquarters, just off the lobby. He pressed the start button, instantly sending it to more than forty media agencies throughout the state. As the release slowly made its way through the machine, Collins braced himself for the flurry of phone calls he knew to expect. He’d been a public information liaison for more than eight years. He knew this was the type of story that would elicit a strong turnout at the news conference.

The fax marked the first time the media had heard of Joel Rifkin, but it didn’t take long for them to react. By noon, an hour before the scheduled news conference, a large crowd of reporters and photographers gathered outside headquarters. But they would have to wait; the news conference would be delayed. Inside the small conference room, Capers and Louder weren’t giving up. Their captain, Walter Heesch, urged them to press Rifkin harder. “This guy’s too calm,” he told the investigators. “Here’s this body, it smells so awful, and he’s riding around with it. And he’s not excited; he’s not upset. It’s not like this is his first murder, where there were drugs and sex and he got excited and killed her. There have to be others. Start asking him if there are others.”

They did.

“Is there anything more you want to tell us?” he asked casually.

Joel Rifkin said yes.

In the same matter-of-fact tone, Joel Rifkin began to tell the troopers how he’d strangled Jenny Soto. And Anna Lopez. He described how he’d killed Lorraine Orvieto and Maryann Hollomon. He spoke of the Hispanic woman, how he’d choked her to death and hidden her body under a mattress in an abandoned field near JFK Airport. The Korean one he’d murdered two years ago, stuffing her remains in a steamer trunk and throwing it into the Harlem river. Four of the women he strangled he’d jammed into fifty-five-gallon drums. He’d bought the drums in December of 1991. Within a few months, he told the investigators, he’d used them all.

Three women he’d dismembered, slinging their torsos and body parts into Manhattan rivers and canals. But mutilating bodies, he explained, got too bloody. And so he’d stopped.

A lot of corpses he’d just tossed into the woods—some in New York City, the East End of Long Island, even as far as upstate New York. Many times, Rifkin explained, he’d driven around a while, looking for the best locale.

Capers and Louder remained composed, trying not to show their amazement. At first, they weren’t sure if they even believed Joel Rifkin.

But the East Meadow landscaper was convincing. He told the investigators he began killing young women four years ago. His memory of some murders, Rifkin confessed, was murky. Others he recalled quite vividly. Overall, he felt pretty sure about the number: seventeen. Seventeen women—all young, and petite. All prostitutes, he said. He’d given them money; they’d given him sex.

Then he’d strangled them.

In a calm, almost disinterested manner, Joel Rifkin spoke of each of his macabre deeds, giving dates, descriptions, and locations. He tried to be helpful. He drew maps of areas where he’d stored bodies. He spelled names of some of his victims. Sometimes he only remembered a prostitute’s street name, or what the woman had looked like. But he thought hard, trying to recall more.

Capers’s mind was spinning. He had to make a choice: Should he try to draw Rifkin out slowly, case by case, or attempt to get as much as he could on every killing?

He opted for the latter approach. “What about this one?” Capers kept repeating. “What happened to her?”

“I did her, too,” Rifkin responded. “I strangled her.”

Some of the killings, Rifkin bragged, had been easy. Others had not. Jenny Soto, he recalled, took a long time to die. He’d picked her up by the Williamsburg Bridge, off Houston Street in lower Manhattan. She was twenty-three years old.

“She fought the hardest,” Rifkin said.

For the next four hours, as the media waited impatiently in the lobby, eager to learn more about the murder of Tiffany Bresciani, the detectives hunkered down with Rifkin, asking nonstop questions. Briefly, the cops considered setting up a video camera or getting a written confession, but they decided against it. Capers didn’t want to risk doing anything that might trigger Joel Rifkin to stop talking.

So Joel Rifkin continued to talk. As the number of his victims escalated, Capers and Louder began to realize the enormity of what they faced. In a few hours they would break the news to the public. Within days, the story of Joel Rifkin and the women he had killed would spread from Long Island to headlines around the world. Law enforcement agencies all over New York State would face a voluminous task: to recover and identify almost two dozen bodies.

For the families of the victims, the news would be calamitous. It would devastate those who had already buried their loved ones—their daughters, sisters, in some cases, mothers—but hadn’t known the circumstances behind their deaths.

And for those families who were missing someone, those who still had hope, it would be the end of a dream. For months, sometimes years, they had fought to stay optimistic: as long as there was no body, there was still a chance. But daily they battled their gut feelings—the ones that told them that something terrible, something deadly, had occurred.

Now, at last, they would have an answer: only not the one they’d prayed for.

For Jeanne Rifkin, the seventy-one-year-old white-haired mother at 1492 Garden Street, it would be a shocking discovery. It would prompt her to reflect on every moment of her son’s upbringing—to ask the same question, over and over, the question that no one, except Joel Rifkin, could answer: Why did these women die?

Overnight, Jeanne Rifkin’s son, the unemployed landscaper from East Meadow, would earn a new moniker: the Long Island serial killer.