Chapter 7
AS police hunted through Joel Rifkin’s bedroom the night of the arrest, they uncovered the Shawcross clippings and the book on the Green River killings. But strewn about the room were even more grisly findings.
Detectives discovered dozens of “trophies”—mementos taken from Rifkin’s victims. On the floor, in desk drawers, even posted to the wall were dozens of ID cards, driver’s licenses, library cards, credit cards, and photographs. Jenny Soto’s wallet was there, and Mary Ellen DeLuca’s driver’s license. They found one of Anna Lopez’s earrings.
There were piles of women’s clothing—panties, bras, sweaters, stockings. In a blue metal safe were dozens of earrings and necklaces, gold bracelets and rings. Scattered throughout the room were several makeup cases, pocketbooks, even a hair curler. Police gathered it all, placing the evidence in plastic bags.
In the garage, investigators immediately detected a putrid smell. It came from an orange wheelbarrow. Cops drew three ounces of blood from the inside. They found a pair of women’s panties on the floor, as well as a stockpile of rope and tarp. On a gas chain saw they made yet another grim discovery: bloodstains and bits of human flesh.
When questioned later, neighbors admitted that they had smelled foul odors emanating from the Rifkin garage for some time. They said they thought it was from pesticides Joel and his mother used in the garden.
In all, the detectives’ search took six hours. At one point, a trooper made a run to the local pizzeria, Tucci’s, in town. He brought back ten pies with assorted toppings. The investigators stopped their dismal task to eat.
When they were done with their search, police had removed 228 items. They took 115 from the upstairs bedroom, 91 from the garage, 21 from the basement, and 1 item from another small room upstairs.
When told about the trophies, Jeanne Rifkin confessed softly that she knew nothing about it—she never ventured into her son’s room. Investigators felt sorry for the diminutive widow, clearly in shock. But they could barely conceal their amazement. How much had she overlooked in her son’s deadly past?
In all, police found names of ten women in Joel Rifkin’s room. In some cases, the names helped cops link long-unidentified bodies to Rifkin. In other cases, the serial killer himself offered names of the women he had strangled.
The bodies of most of Rifkin’s victims had already been found. Some had been identified through fingerprints and dental records. Some lay in Potter’s Field, the dumping ground for unclaimed corpses. Rifkin’s confession helped police find two more bodies.
Back at state trooper headquarters, Captain Walter Heesch grew even more determined; every one of Joel Rifkin’s victims would be found and identified. In life, they’d been cheated. In death, they deserved the dignity of a name on their grave.
* * *
Within a few days of the arrest, Heesch announced that state police had linked eighteen murders to Joel Rifkin, one more than Rifkin had admitted to Capers and Louder. By the summer of 1993, police had identified eleven. They were still searching for four bodies; they were still trying to identify three they had.
All of the women were petite—under five foot three, and weighing around a hundred pounds. Joel Rifkin said they were all prostitutes; police believe they probably were.
Almost all the women were picked up on the streets of Manhattan, mostly from the Lower East Side. They almost all suffered from drug addictions.
Joel Rifkin smothered or strangled them, sometimes during sex or immediately afterwards. He took a memento from each—unfastening an earring, removing panties, pocketing credit cards. He stored the bodies for days in various locations. Then he disposed of them in diverse ways.
“He went, picked up a prostitute, had sex with her, killed her, and dumped her,” said Heesch.
Tragically, it was that simple.
* * *
The first two women to die at the hands of Joel Rifkin have never been found. He strangled them and cut their bodies into pieces. He told police it was easier to transport them that way. He murdered the first in 1989, the second in 1990. He told police he didn’t remember exactly where he’d disposed of the body parts. He thought he had dumped one into a canal in New York City and the other in waters off New Jersey.
Rifkin took a breather for a while. Then in the spring of 1991 he met Barbara Jacobs.
Jacobs lived on the Lower East Side. In 1979 she had been arrested for car theft. Since then, Jacobs had been in and out of jails in drug and prostitution cases. She was small—five-three and around a hundred pounds. Her decomposed nude body was found wrapped in a plastic garbage bag inside a cardboard box on July 14, 1991, in the Hudson River off Pier 95. It was eleven days before her thirty-second birthday.
For two years, her death was listed incorrectly. A medical examiner had ruled that Jacobs died of acute cocaine intoxication. She didn’t. Barbara Jacobs was strangled.
So was Yun Lee. The body of the thirty-one-year-old Korean prostitute was discovered on September 23, 1991, in a black steamer trunk in the East River near Randalls Island. Her ex-husband identified her corpse.
Eight days later, the body of Mary Ellen DeLuca, twenty-two, of Valley Stream, Long Island, was discovered. It had been discarded on grass clippings in a field used as an illegal dump in upstate Cornwall, New York, not far from West Point. She wore only a bra.
At the time, state police had no idea who the young woman was. They checked records but DeLuca had never been arrested, and so no fingerprints were on file. After a donation came from a Cornwall resident, Mary Ellen DeLuca was buried in a private cemetery under a marker that read “Jane Doe.” Meanwhile, her parents, Lois and Thomas DeLuca in Valley Stream, were praying every night that their daughter would walk through the door.
Mary Ellen, they knew, had been struggling with a drug problem. A few years earlier she’d dropped out of Central High School in Valley Stream. Despite her best efforts to stay away from drugs, Mary Ellen kept relapsing, winding up in Queens crack houses.
Her family tried desperately to help. Mary Ellen’s three sisters, Loriann, Justine, and Susan, watched her every move. Lois and Tom DeLuca forced their daughter into various drug programs—once they even grabbed her off the street, dragging her into their car and driving directly to a hospital in Staten Island. Mary Ellen was admitted, and remained in a rehabilitation program for nine days. When she was released, she swore that this time she really would stay clean. And for six months, she did.
On the evening of September 1, 1991, Mary Ellen went out with a group of girlfriends. It was Labor Day weekend. The DeLucas were cleaning up, following an evening barbecue. Mary Ellen was planning to cap the night with dancing at J. Sprat’s Dining Saloon in Island Park. It was a favorite night spot of hers.
But that night there wasn’t any dancing—just football games on the large-screen TVs. Mary Ellen and her friends headed to Huey’s, a nearby bar. A few of her girlfriends dropped Mary Ellen at home around 11:00 P.M. She waved goodbye.
But she never made it into the house. After her friend’s car disappeared from sight, Mary Ellen went in search of drugs. That night, the hunger was too much to fight.
Somewhere along the way, Mary Ellen DeLuca encountered Joel Rifkin. Her family still can’t believe she would sell her body, not to him, not to anyone. But perhaps the lure of drugs can be more powerful than any family-learned values. In any case, it doesn’t change the terrible truth: Lois and Tom DeLuca’s second youngest child died at the hands of Joel Rifkin.
* * *
When she didn’t show up that night, Mary Ellen’s parents reported her missing. They figured she had relapsed. It wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared.
But as days turned into weeks, the De-Lucas knew this time was different. Yet they never gave up hope. They installed caller ID on their telephone. They took Mary Ellen’s photograph to the drug dens she used to frequent in Queens. Sometimes, people would say they’d seen Mary Ellen, and the DeLucas’ hopes would soar.
Shortly after Joel Rifkin was arrested, police released a report on all of his suspected victims. The victim from Cornwall, New York, they said, was a Valley Stream woman.
Friends and family of the DeLucas began to call, trying to prepare Lois and Tom for heartbreaking news. But Mary Ellen’s parents refused to believe it.
“It can’t be my daughter,” Lois DeLuca kept repeating. “She couldn’t have been lying up there for two years.”
Not even when reporters showed up at the house did Lois DeLuca give up. Not even when she learned that the state police had released her daughter’s name.
“It isn’t my daughter,” she told the press. “It isn’t.”
Her husband telephoned the state police in upstate New York, near where the Cornwall body had been found. He was angry.
“Are you releasing my daughter’s name for any reason?” he asked.
And that’s when Tom DeLuca learned that Mary Ellen’s driver’s license had been found in Joel Rifkin’s bedroom. Investigators, the cop told him, were on their way to talk to the family.
“We’ll wait,” Tom DeLuca said quietly. He hung up the phone.
Turning to his wife and daughters, he told them about the license. His youngest child, Susan, broke down in his arms. “No, God, no, God, no,” she sobbed.
But Tom and Lois DeLuca did not cry. To cry meant they had given up. Mary Ellen’s parents were not ready to do that yet.
When troopers arrived about a half hour later, Lois and Tom wouldn’t listen to them at first. They told the police that someone was almost positive he had seen their daughter just a few months ago in Queens. Another man was pretty sure he’d borrowed a dollar from her. The driver’s license was no proof anyway. Mary Ellen had sold her license for drug money in the past.
And the time. It had been two years. How could her body lie unidentified for so long? How could this be possible?
The troopers gently assured the DeLucas that they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t sure. The Cornwall body was indeed Mary Ellen.
* * *
When the troopers and reporters finally left, Lois and Tom held each other for a long time. At last they knew the truth. There was work to do—to make funeral preparations for their child. But right now, the couple could only cry. “I want my baby,” Lois kept whispering. “I want her home.”
The funeral for Mary Ellen DeLuca took place a week later. It was a hot Saturday. Members of the Sons of Italy Lodge in Queens, where Tom DeLuca is a member, carried the casket. At the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Father John Dillon asked the more than four hundred mourners to pray also for Joel Rifkin’s other victims.
“I don’t think there are many words to fully capture the array of thoughts and feelings and emotions all clashing within our souls at the same time,” the pastor said.
The service ended at the Cemetery of Holy Rood in Westbury.
* * *
At almost exactly the same time, another young woman was laid to rest about thirty miles away. Lorraine Orvieto’s driver’s license also had been found in Joel Rifkin’s bedroom.
He’d strangled her a few months after Mary Ellen. In December 1991, about two years after he began to kill, Rifkin bought four fifty-five-gallon drums. He needed a new way to dispose of bodies. He was up to five by now—the two he’d mutilated plus Jacobs, Lee, and DeLuca.
A few days before Christmas, he went looking for his next victim.
She was Lorraine Orvieto, age twenty-eight.
Lorriane grew up in Stony Brook, the only daughter of Florence and Richard Orvieto. She was a good student, excelling in math and track. On weekends, she and her friends went dancing at the local teen center. She was tiny—just four feet eleven—but she loved to play basketball.
As a teenager, Lorraine began to suffer from depression. She went on medication, and for a while she improved. She was a cheerleader in high school and had such good grades she managed to graduate a year early, in 1980. She attended Suffolk Community College for a year, and then transfered to the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University, taking accounting classes at night. To pay for school, Lorraine ran a successful housekeeping service. With her earnings, she even bought a car. On weekends she went out with friends. They’d go dancing at Club 500 in Patchogue or Whispers in Smithtown.
But after she graduated from college, Lorraine’s depression grew worse. She was working for a Manhattan accounting firm and the pressure was intense. The hours around tax season were brutal. Lorraine could no longer cope.
She quit. She tried to restart her housekeeping business but business was slow. Then, she heard through the grapevine that her ex-boyfriend was getting married. In fact, all of her friends seemed to be getting married.
Lorraine Orvieto sank into a serious depression. Doctors diagnosed her as a manic-depressive. They prescribed antidepressant drugs.
It wasn’t enough. By then, Lorraine Orvieto had found an instant but deadly respite from her depression: she started taking crack. Eventually, she worked the streets of Brentwood and Bellport, Long Island, to support her habit. She lived off and on in a rooming house riddled with crack dealers.
In November of 1991 she was admitted to Kings Park Psychiatric Center, and a month later she was moved to an outpatient group home in Bay Shore, Long Island. But on December 20, 1991, Lorraine called her family and said she was going through a difficult time and wouldn’t be seeing them for a while. They never heard from her again.
After Lorraine disappeared, her mother, Florence, called police and even visited psychics, restless for any news on her daughter. She filed a missing person’s report and went to One Police Plaza in Manhattan to search through pictures of unidentified bodies. She wrote more than 150 letters to hospitals. She even tried to get the TV show Unsolved Mysteries to do a story on Lorraine’s disappearance. In a spiral notebook, she kept a log of all of her attempts to find her daughter.
Florence Orvieto saved her daughter’s Christmas presents—a sweater and an umbrella. They remained untouched, still wrapped in brightly colored paper. Deep down, she and her husband suspected their child was dead. Lorraine would have called. She always did.
In December 1992, almost a year to the day after Lorraine vanished, her family gathered at St. James Catholic Church to pray that they would learn of her whereabouts. When they gathered there again seven months later, it was for Lorraine’s funeral.
Lorraine’s name had been released about five days after Joel Rifkin’s capture. Her best friend, Susanne Averso, heard it announced on the eleven o’clock news. The two young women had met in accounting class in college. Lorraine had been a bridesmaid in Susanne’s wedding.
That night, Susanne cried for hours. She couldn’t stop thinking of what she’d heard: that Lorraine had been one of three victims found stuffed in steel drums, floating in New York waters the previous summer. The drum that held Lorraine’s body was discovered stuck in a pier in Coney Island Creek. For about a month, a fisherman had been using it to stand on. Then, on July 11, 1992, seven months after she was killed, the fisherman looked inside. The body had decomposed to the point that only a partial skeleton remained.
At Lorraine’s funeral in Setauket, Long Island, her twenty-four-year-old brother, Danny, carried a single pink flower. The Reverend Joseph Mundy talked about the church service the previous December, and the prayers.
“Those prayers have been answered—not the way we wanted them to be answered, but they’ve been answered,” Mundy said. “The struggle for Lorraine is over now.”