Chapter 5

AS more than a dozen detectives rifled through her home, Jeanne Rifkin sequestered herself in her bedroom on the first floor, just off the kitchen. She tried to block out the horror of the past twelve hours. She couldn’t sleep. She’d barely eaten all day. In the next room, her daughter was inconsolable.

The phone rang continuously. Jeanne told Jan not to answer it. The seventy-one-year-old woman got adept, fast, at turning down interviews. When Newsday phoned, shortly after police announced the arrest, Jeanne Rifkin cut off the caller midsentence.

“I’m sorry,” she said crisply. “I have no comment.”

As the days passed, Jeanne Rifkin found herself looking back on her life. Losing her husband six years earlier had been excruciating. It didn’t compare to the pain she felt now.

She attempted to piece together what had gone wrong. She had tried to be a good mother—that she knew. Her husband, Ben, had been devoted to Joel and to Jan as well.

Jeanne Rifkin remembered the early days. From the beginning of her marriage, she and her husband had wanted a child. For a long time, it seemed as if it wouldn’t happen.

Then there was Joel. They adopted him in the winter of 1959, three weeks after he was born to two unwed students. Back then, the Rifkins lived in a small ranch house in New City in upstate New York. Baby Joel was a blessing, the miracle that the couple had prayed for. When he came into their lives, Ben was forty; Jeanne thirty-seven.

When Joel was a toddler they were blessed again. In 1962 they adopted Jan.

The adoptions were never a secret; both children knew that Jeanne and Ben were not their biological parents. But the Rifkins always reminded their kids that they were special—and very much wanted.

In 1965, when Joel was six and Jan three, the Rifkins moved to Garden Street in East Meadow. They enrolled Joel in Prospect Avenue Elementary School down the block, adjacent to a large playground.

Ben Rifkin took a job as a structural engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Stony Brook. Jeanne took care of the house, and when the children were older, she worked part-time as a recreational therapist. For many years, Jeanne’s father lived with the family. There was always someone home when Joel and Jan returned from school.

Almost daily, Jeanne Rifkin worked in the garden. As he grew older, Joel began to take an interest in horticulture too. Joel mowed the lawn and helped his mother trim hedges and plant trees. As they worked together, Jeanne Rifkin taught her son about foliage.

Mother and son shared other interests as well. Both loved photography. Jeanne Rifkin was skilled at needlepoint, lapidary, and jewelry making. Joel enjoyed crafts too. He worked with driftwood, and in high school he did silk-screening on T-shirts for a neighbor who played in the orchestra. On the T-shirts he printed VIOLA POWER.

Jeanne Rifkin had another passion: education. She and her husband were committed to improving the school system for their children. When Joel was in the fifth grade, Ben Rifkin was elected to the East Meadow School Board for a three-year term. At a reorganization meeting midway through his tenure, Ben Rifkin was appointed vice-president by fellow board members.

When school board elections neared, Jeanne Rifkin spent hours on the telephone, calling neighbors and encouraging them to vote. Ben canvassed the neighborhood on foot, knocking on doors and handing out leaflets about the candidates.

Ben Rifkin also joined the board of trustees of the East Meadow Public Library. Between his responsibilities on the school board and the library, Ben Rifkin spent several nights a week at meetings. For many years, Joel worked at the library after school. He was a page, sorting and arranging books on the shelves.

Although he was bright (his IQ was tested at 128), Joel did poorly in school. In lower grades, Joel often got 30s and 50s on relatively easy tests and had difficulty learning to read. Years later, the family learned he had dyslexia. Back then, they knew only that school was difficult for Joel. Almost every evening Jeanne spent hours tutoring her son, reviewing homework and listening patiently as he painstakingly read aloud.

Because of his work on the school board, Ben Rifkin got to know most of his son’s teachers. It put added pressure on Joel. Although his marks improved somewhat in high school—he graduated with about an 80 average—Joel’s middling grades were a disappointment to the family. And Joel knew it.

Throughout his school years, Joel Rifkin also had a tough time fitting in with his peers. Other children made fun of him. In elementary school, they nicknamed him the Turtle, because of his stooped shoulders and slow gait. Later, in high school, his socialization problems would grow worse. After Rifkin’s arrest, one former childhood classmate seemed to sum up the sentiment; he recalled a time when he’d glimpsed Joel’s latest failing test grade and remarked to a friend, “The Turtle is such a loser.”

*   *   *

In other ways, Joel Rifkin had a seemingly normal upbringing. The Rifkin family spent time together. In the summers, they had barbecues in the yard, took day trips to the beach, and went on vacation in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, staying in roadside motels. Now and then, Ben and Joel went off fishing alone. Joel treasured those outings with his dad.

Joel and Jan fought like typical siblings. Some of their battles centered on use of the upstairs bathroom, which they shared. They had their own bedrooms, and their own pets. Joel kept a turtle and a snake in a cage. Jan had a Siamese cat named Hector who was declawed in order to keep him from ruining the furniture. Several times a day, Jan attached a leash to the cat’s collar and took Hector for a stroll in the neighborhood.

Although they were Jewish, the Rifkins did not attend synagogue. Unlike many of the Jewish children in the neighborhood, Joel and Jan did not join the youth group at Temple Emanuel or at the East Meadow Jewish Center, a few blocks from their home. When he reached adolescence, Joel did not have a bar mitzvah.

Ben and Jeanne Rifkin had a strong marriage. They often took walks together in the neighborhood, holding hands. Ben was proud of Jeanne’s talent in landscaping and other creative arts. Once the children were grown, and Jeanne’s father had passed away, the couple managed to get away alone together a few times. On several occasions, they traveled to Europe.

Ben Rifkin was an outgoing, affable man. He was well liked in the neighborhood, and in his community. When he died, members of the board of trustees at the library voted to name a wing of the branch in his memory.

He was remembered as a progressive man. In the early 1970s he joined a men’s group whose members met every week to discuss ways to improve their relationships with women, and to understand their changing role in society.

On the board of education, Ben Rifkin advocated students’ rights and encouraged young people to get involved in the political process.

“He was ahead of his time,” recalled Superintendent Frank Saracino, who served as principal of the East Meadow High School from 1976 to 1988. “If someone was trying to be harsh on a student, Ben would always be there to remind them to recognize the student as a human being, someone who should be treated with dignity. He was not the type to come down hard on someone because they were subservient to him.”

On the board, Ben Rifkin always managed to get his point across without pushing too hard. “He believed in the dignity of the person,” Saracino recalled. “He wasn’t given to being boisterous or heated.”

Shortly after his father’s term on the school board ended, Joel Rifkin graduated from Woodland Junior High School and moved on to East Meadow High School.

Once again, Joel Rifkin tried to fit in. Once again, he was rebuffed. His classmates thought he was strange; he wore wire-rimmed glasses and dressed oddly—his pants were too short, his white socks always showed. When he asked girls for dates, they turned him down. Many times he ate lunch alone.

Other students teased him. They called him a host of degrading names. His childhood moniker, Turtle, followed him throughout his schooling. In high school, however, more degrading nicknames emerged—nerd, doofus, oddball, creep, jerk. And worse.

After Rifkin’s arrest, former classmates admitted with some embarrassment that they’d given Joel Rifkin a hard time over the years. One man confessed he regularly yelled, “Hey, asshole, get out of my way,” whenever he encountered Rifkin in the halls. When they met, Joel would immediately retreat; he’d duck his head, mumble, and walk away.

The former classmate said he and a friend used to grab Joel and play catch with him, occasionally throwing him into the lockers. “I’d push him, he’d fall down,” the man recalled. “I’m not proud of this by any means, but, you know, you got the order of life—jocks, class A’s, freaks, burnouts. Joel was on the bottom. He was an abuse unit. He was subtly obnoxious, like, his presence annoyed you. I remember really ticking him off, and he never took a swing. I guess we were trying to get a rise out of him because he was so strange. I could see him get so enraged that he’d be shaking. He would just stand there. He almost seemed like he wanted it.”

Only once did Joel Rifkin fight back. It was in his junior year. He saw a classmate, also an outcast, taking a beating in the schoolyard. Joel jumped in and starting swinging. With a strength no one knew he had, Rifkin yanked the teenagers apart roughly and stood in the middle, shaking with anger. The look on his face frightened both boys.

In an attempt to fit in somewhere, Joel Rifkin participated in a variety of extracurricular activities. In freshman year, he joined the cross-country track team. He wasn’t the slowest runner on the team, yet his teammates dubbed him Lard-ass. At practice, Rifkin trained alone. When the others circled the track together, he headed outside the gates and ran around the school grounds.

Over the next three years, Rifkin’s teammates tormented him. They hid his running gear and planted phony letters in his lockers, supposedly from girls who wanted to date him. One Friday night in his junior year, four track members, drunk on beer, surrounded each exit of the East Meadow Library, where Rifkin was working after school. Every time he tried to get out, they pelted him with eggs.

Finally, Rifkin called his father. The boys ran off as Ben Rifkin’s car approached.

It was in the school’s basement lockers, however, that Joel Rifkin took the most abuse. Every afternoon after practice, members of the track team as well as those on the football and lacrosse teams harassed Rifkin. There was no escape. They sprayed him in the showers, stole his towel, and held his head under running water.

After Rifkin’s arrest, former classmates studied the yearbook picture of the cross-country team. Everyone in the photo wore the regulation blue East Meadow High School sweatshirt—except Joel Rifkin.

“I don’t remember why, but I would guess maybe he didn’t have his sweatshirt because probably one of us threw it in the shower,” said Mark Vangasteren, one of the other runners on the team. “It was the kind of thing we did to him all the time. We were cruel to him. In high school, there are the picked on and those who do the picking on, and I happened to be a picker-on. I feel bad about that now.”

Some of the aspersions were more subtle. Once, the cross-country team participated in a week-long preseason training camp near New London, Connecticut. The camp was attended by high school runners from throughout Long Island.

To get there, Joel hitched a ride with another teammate. But when it was time to go home, the teammate left without him. No one else offered Joel a ride home. He stood outside, silently, as everyone else loaded their bags into cars and drove off. When the last car disappeared from sight, Joel called his father. Ben Rifkin drove more than three hours to pick up his son.

Vangasteren remembered that day. “My parents came to pick me up and I could have offered him a ride,” he said. “But I didn’t. I herded my parents out right away, because I didn’t want him catching a ride with me. It was like that. It was nothing he did. It was just you didn’t want to be around him.”

Word of the incident spread in school over the next few days. Many students laughed at the image of Joel Rifkin left alone by the side of the road. But Alan Whitlock, who knew Joel from the photo club, recalled how he and several of his friends had felt badly for Rifkin. “We couldn’t believe the team had done that to him,” he said. “It was so mean.”

Yet despite the abuse, Rifkin tried to befriend his tormentors. He often invited his teammates to his house when his parents were away. Sometimes, they accepted the invitation. “We would go over and have the run of the place,” said Vangasteren. “Watch TV, drink beer, do whatever we wanted. We used him, to be blunt about it. He was easy to make fun of. He would usually laugh, even if we were being really cruel. He didn’t show any sign of feeling the pain. It’s not something I’m proud of, but that’s how it was.”

*   *   *

In the beginning of his senior year, Joel quit the track team. By then, he’d achieved his goal: he’d earned a varsity letter. Even that was a hollow victory. To earn a letter, a runner had to score at least one point in a varsity track meet. At the last meet of the year, Rifkin’s coach let everyone who hadn’t gotten a letter participate, just to earn the letter.

Rifkin joined the debating team, the yearbook staff, and the photo club. He also spent a lot of time with the AV crew, setting up microphones and projectors for slide shows.

But Joel didn’t fare much better in those cliques. One afternoon while he was working in the darkroom, fellow photo staffers stole his camera. When he emerged and asked for it, the boys, straight-faced, claimed ignorance.

Joel never mentioned it again. Eventually, he got a new camera.

Some insist that there were others at East Meadow High School who shouldered far more ridicule than Joel Rifkin. One overweight student, in fact, had a particularly difficult time.

“He was picked on far more than Joel Rifkin,” said Ben Mevorach, who attended East Meadow High School and is now news director for WGSM, a Long Island radio station. “We had others that had other quirks. Joel wasn’t the only one who got a hard time.”

If ever there was a place where Joel Rifkin did not get teased, it was probably at the school newspaper, the Jet Gazette. He took pictures and did some writing. The biggest perk to working on the newspaper, however, was having a place to hang out in between classes.

That was Joel’s favorite part, too. He headed to the office, on the first floor around the corner from the cafeteria, as often as he could. He didn’t mind when it was his turn to sell pretzels—fifty cents apiece—to help raise funds. For Joel Rifkin it was a rare opportunity to socialize.

During senior year, Joel’s parents gave him a dark blue two-door Toyota to drive the two miles to and from school. On several occasions, Rifkin offered Alan Whitlock a ride home. Sometimes the teenagers stopped at a record store and browsed. Now and then they dropped by the Rifkin house and hung out in Joel’s room, listening to rock music. Joel had a good-quality stereo system with a built-in tape deck. He liked to crank up the volume when playing his favorite tunes—the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” On the walls of his bedroom were photos he had taken—mostly black-and-white shots of scenery or crowds.

Looking back, Alan Whitlock insists that nothing about Joel’s life or his behavior seemed unusual. “He’d snap at his sister when she knocked on the door—‘Leave us alone’—and give one-word answers—‘Fine’—when his mother asked how his day had gone.” Whitlock said. “That’s the way all teenagers are.”

But Whitlock recalled that Joel Rifkin never talked about girls. Or his family. “He never said much about anything,” he said. “Never talked about any girls in school. Didn’t mention his family. Once I said something like, ‘Your mom is so nice. You don’t look like her, though.’ And he said, ‘My sister and I are adopted.’ And that was it. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

*   *   *

In many ways, Joel Rifkin’s family life remains shrouded in mystery. By all accounts, Ben and Jeanne Rifkin were nurturing and concerned parents. Ben Rifkin attended all of his son’s track meets, cheering from the bleachers. Jeanne Rifkin shared her love of nature with her oldest child.

But Joel Rifkin’s ambitious and tenacious parents may have proved daunting role models. Clearly, Joel Rifkin grew up with none of their energy and self-confidence.

Instead, he retreated. He learned to dismiss the abandonment and ridicule he suffered in school. He skillfully internalized his anger. But something ominous was developing in his mind.

Experts suggest that a serial killer harvests violent sexual fantasies for ten to fifteen years before he acts on them. It is likely, then, that the early stages of Joel Rifkin’s monstrous intents hatched during his troubled high school years.

Did he try to fight them? Did he know his desires were lurid, his reverie appalling? When did the seeds of his odious plan to kill prostitutes first develop?

There is no way to know.

“I keep looking back in disbelief,” says Superintendent Saracino. “The kind of kid he was—maybe forty, fifty kids a year fit the same profile. He just blended into the woodwork. You’d never notice him.”

Perhaps that was the problem. Maybe Joel Rifkin wanted to be noticed; to make his mark. One thing is clear. It was at age eighteen, a graduating senior at East Meadow High School, that Joel Rifkin began to patronize prostitutes. Was he seeking acceptance? Or revenge?

It was a deadly beginning.