Chapter 20

IN many ways, Joel Rifkin neatly fits the profile of a serial killer. Robert Ressler, a criminologist who worked for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit for more than seventeen years, has been studying serial killers for decades. He was used as a model for a character in the film The Silence of the Lambs.

It was Ressler who coined the phrase serial killer: someone who kills four or more people, in different locations and circumstances, with a cooling-off period in between. During that period, premeditation and fantasy begin to build, leading to the next murder. The fantasy is often promoted by pornography, including magazines and videos.

Rifkin, Ressler says, is the typical serial killer. Most serial killers are white men between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-five. They are outcasts and introverted, unemployed, or else work at menial jobs. They live with a single parent, usually their mothers. As far back as early childhood, they never socialized well with peers.

“There’s a series of dynamics that fit in with these guys,” said Ressler. “It’s not all cookbook fashion but this guy certainly fits the mold.”

Serial killings, Ressler says, are based on fantasies that ordinarily begin in adolescence, about ten to fifteen years before the offender begins to act them out. Over the years, fantasies drive the individual to fetish-type behavior. That may include window peeking, grabbing underwear off clotheslines, making obscene phone calls, and a fascination with pornography. It is a gradual progression toward murder. “You just don’t go from a thought to an action,” Ressler says. “Eventually, the human factor becomes absent. They don’t appreciate the human nature of the victim. They become literally evil.”

In his book, Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler writes:

All the murderers we interviewed had compelling fantasies; they murdered to make happen in the real world what they had seen over and over again in their minds since childhood and adolescence. As adolescents, instead of developing normal peer-related interests and activities where they couldn’t completely control what went on, the murderers retreated into sexually violent fantasies, where they could, in effect, control their world. These adolescents overcompensated for the aggression in their early lives by repeating the abuse in fantasy—but this time, with themselves as the aggressors.… Sexual maladjustment is at the heart of all the fantasies and the fantasies emotionally drive the murders.

The first step for Rifkin may have been his early solicitation of prostitutes. He told police that he patronized prostitutes for about thirteen years before he began killing them.

“It was a preparation—a step in the direction,” Ressler asserts. “From the beginning, he was possibly thinking of tying up, killing these hookers but he wasn’t ready. It was all mental at that point. He was rehearsing.”

It is likely, also, that Joel Rifkin chose to kill prostitutes because he felt power over them. “Obviously if this was a functional person he wouldn’t be going to prostitutes to start with,” Ressler says. “These types of people usually fear relationships. Prostitutes reflect the fact that he can only deal with a woman on the basis of buying sex. A normal woman would probably frighten this guy to death.”

And yet, Ressler adds, there is an overwhelming hostility for the woman who provides the sexual release. “You get a blend of hatred and sexual desire,” he says. “The anger builds. Often there’s sexual malfunction. He may go through the motions but the completion may be lacking. It fuses with the sexual aggression. In a blend of rage they will blame the victim for not being woman enough to help them perform. It’s misdirected anger.”

In his book, Ressler describes two types of serial killers: organized and disorganized.

An organized killer stalks his victims and is methodical in how he goes about his crimes. He takes pains to avoid leaving clues to his identity. Usually an organized killer is outgoing, even charming. He may be married and hold a good job. Organized killers transport bodies from the places where the victims were killed and then hide them, sometimes quite well.

The organized killer takes personal items belonging to his victims as trophies or to prevent the police from identifying the victim. In his book, Ressler writes:

These trophies are taken for incorporation in the offender’s postcrime fantasies and as acknowledgment of his accomplishments. Just as the hunter looks at the head of the bear mounted on the wall and takes satisfaction in having killed it, so the organized murderer looks at a necklace hanging in his closet to keep alive the excitement of his crime.

A disorganized killer is different. He disregards his appearance; he is sloppy and unclean. He is single; his room is likely a mess. He is incapable of staying in school or holding down a decent job. Disorganized killers have had socialization problems since childhood.

The disorganized killer is also sloppy about his crime. He may pick up a steak knife in the victim’s home, plunge it into her chest, and leave it there. He does not care about fingerprints or evidence.

Writes Ressler in his book:

Part of the reason for unexpressed anger within the disorganized offender is that they are not normally handsome people. They don’t appear attractive, as measured by others, and they have a very poor self-image. Disorganized offenders tend to withdraw from society, almost completely, and become loners. If they live with anyone else, chances are it will be a parent, and probably a single parent at that. No one else will be able to stomach their strange ways, so the disorganized offender is alone, possibly a recluse. Such offenders actively reject the society that has rejected them.

Joel Rifkin appears to be mixed: he was methodical in his premeditation and in transporting and hiding bodies. He kept trophies and took pains to hide his identity. But at the same time, he plainly fits the definition of a disorganized killer—his slovenly ways and antisocial behavior. He was clearly a loner, a man whose self-image was low and anger toward society strong.

*   *   *

For the young women he killed, it doesn’t matter how Joel Rifkin is labeled. An added tragedy is that they, too, have been labeled. As prostitutes, their background has come under scrutiny. Their families are bitter; they feel that in some ways the victims have been blamed.

No doubt prostitution is an extremely perilous profession. But it is one that is born out of desperation; it draws an overwhelmingly high percentage of young female drug addicts. It is the trap of addiction that coerces the women to sell their bodies. As president of Covenant House, a New York City–based refuge for runaways, Sister Mary Rose McGeady has counseled hundreds of young prostitutes. These are desperate young women, McGeady says, who feel they have no other option.

“It’s certainly not a profession they like or trust,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable position than to be a street prostitute today. It’s not surprising that somebody could kill seventeen or eighteen prostitutes and nobody noticed. Our society in general doesn’t care very much about prostitutes. People have such a negative attitude toward them.”

Robert Ressler agrees. He has interviewed dozens of young prostitutes in his research on serial killers. “Bad part of town. Three in the morning. Sexual contact with a stranger you don’t know anything about—they’re natural victims for this type of personality,” he says. Many of the women, he adds, mistakenly believe they can protect themselves, that they can judge their customers. “It’s the old adage: ‘It won’t happen to me,’” he says. “They all said they’re a pretty good judge. Some of the most violent offenders are the nicest guys you ever want to talk to.”

*   *   *

Did Joel Rifkin seem like a nice guy too? Did he chat amiably with his victims before he killed them? Did he tell them of a fictitious world—that he was Jimmy, a married man with children, as he told Charlotte Webb?

Only Joel Rifkin knows for sure what happened in his truck beginning in 1989, and he may never reveal anything more than he already has. And so it is Jeanne Rifkin who is left to explore the mystery, and challenge her doubts. For whether fairly or not, it is she who must face society’s questions about the son she raised.

It is the victims’ families who must endure. For them, the pain is endless. It rises with every fresh development in the case, as bits of new information are disclosed. They must fight the urge to re-create the last moments: the terror of their loved ones as they slowly and painfully died at the hands of a monster.

As the unmarked graves of these young women were at last unearthed, the families learned the truth. And then, for Joel Rifkin, the match was over, his quest for celebrity ended. Once called a loner, a loser, Joel Rifkin may now believe he has finally succeeded at something.

The man they call the Long Island serial killer has left behind a most bitter legacy.