Chapter 8
IN April 1991, about two years after he killed his first victim, Joel Rifkin leased a small plot of land from Kev’s Landscaping Design and Tree Service of Hicksville. He told the owner, Kevin Seck, that he needed a place to store his trailer and gardening equipment. He didn’t tell him he needed somewhere to stash bodies, too.
Seck offered Rifkin a fenced-in pen, twenty feet by fifty feet, for four hundred dollars a month. Rifkin signed a contract. He gave Seck a fifty-dollar deposit.
A few days later, Seck was taken aback when he saw Rifkin’s equipment. His trailer was old and broken. He had outdated spreaders and a junky lawn mower.
Some landscaper, Seck thought.
Over the summer, Rifkin dropped by the pen several times a week. Now and then he stopped to talk with Seck. He always asked for pointers on operating a landscaping business.
“How do you do it?” Rifkin would ask. “I keep losing all my customers.”
Seck tried to be encouraging. “You got to work with it,” he’d say. “It takes time. And lots of work.”
Seck didn’t say what he was thinking—that Rifkin seemed lazy and unreliable, and that his equipment was a mess. To his brother, Tim, who also worked in the landscaping business, Kevin Seck scoffed at the idea of Joel Rifkin, a landscaper. “The guy’s a lawn mower,” he said. “He can’t even keep his clients just cutting their grass. He doesn’t have the necessary tools, his truck’s a wreck, he’s not licensed with a landscaping association. No certification. No insurance. He doesn’t even have a name on his truck. He doesn’t even have business cards.”
* * *
By midsummer Rifkin had dropped behind in his rent. Clearly, his mind was elsewhere. By then he’d killed his third victim—Barbara Jacobs.
Rifkin began paying in smaller installments. Some months he skipped completely. By fall, Seck had had enough.
“You got to pay your rent,” he told Rifkin sternly, “or I’m going to lock up your gate. You’ve got to pay.”
“I will,” Rifkin told him. “I should be getting another job this week.”
Seck had heard it before. “If you don’t pay by the end of the week, I’m really going to lock your gate,” he said.
Seck and his brother, Tim, tried to work out a deal: they offered to buy Rifkin’s red Ford dump truck. As it was, Rifkin had told them that he was having trouble meeting the payments.
“How much are you looking for?” asked Tim.
Rifkin never gave a direct answer. “I’ll let you know,” he said vaguely.
Kevin Seck began to call the Rifkin house several times a week. He tried Joel’s private line, but Rifkin never answered the phone. Seck left countless messages. When he called the main number, Seck usually reached Jeanne Rifkin.
“Your son hasn’t paid for a couple of months,” he’d say.
Jeanne Rifkin sounded sympathetic. “That’s not like him,” she’d say. “I’ll talk to him. I’m sure he’ll take care of it.”
By December 1991 Rifkin told Seck that he was closing his landscaping business. He promised to pay the seven hundred dollars he still owed.
“I don’t have any work,” Rifkin said. “I’ve got one possibility I’m working on. If this job comes through, I’ll take care of the rest.” Rifkin made one more payment of a hundred dollars and then disappeared. The next time Seck heard about him Joel Rifkin was on the front page of all four New York City newspapers.
Within days, Seck learned the grim details: that all along Rifkin had been storing bodies on Seck’s land. By the time Rifkin left Kev’s in December 1991, his gruesome tally had been at least six.
* * *
About the same time, Rifkin bought the fifty-five-gallon drums. Over the next few months he strangled four more young women. He loaded their remains into the drums and threw them into New York City rivers. In addition to Lorraine Orvieto, there was Maryann Hollomon. Her corpse was found stuffed in a drum floating in Coney Island Creek on July 9, just two days before Lorraine Orvieto’s. Holloman was thirty-nine, five foot four, and had lived in a single-room occupancy hotel in the East Village, home to drug addicts and prostitutes. Her credit cards were found in Rifkin’s home; she was positively identified by dental records.
The third and fourth victims are still not identified. One has not even been found. She was stuffed in a drum and thrown into the Harlem River. The second body was found in a drum in Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on May 13, 1992, about two months before Orvieto’s and Hollomon’s. At 11:30 A.M. that day, a sanitation worker spotted the drum floating in the creek, behind North Henry Street and Greenpoint Avenue. He saw a leg sticking out of it.
Half the body was decomposed, and toxicological tests indicated that traces of cocaine were in her system. Detectives in the Ninety-fourth Precinct thought the woman might have been a drug mule who had died of an overdose when condoms holding cocaine burst in her stomach. Later, they learned that Joel Rifkin had killed her sometime that winter.
* * *
In the spring of 1992, while the bodies of his four latest victims floated in the oil drums, the first two dismembered were still undiscovered, and the deaths of his first two victims, Barbara Jacobs and Yun Lee, remained a mystery, Joel Rifkin went back to agricultural school at SUNY Farmingdale. This time he was not permitted to apply for the matriculated program; he took uncredited classes instead.
He drifted in and out of classes, and spent hours working on his truck. By then, his driver’s license had been suspended—again—after he failed to answer a summons.
In the evenings, Rifkin often drove to a video store in Uniondale and rented porno movies about prostitutes. The owner didn’t think much about Joel Rifkin. One thing he did notice—Joel Rifkin never looked him in the eye.
In general, Rifkin’s routine didn’t vary much. Classes, working on the truck, stopping at the Apollo diner for lunch. He’d been a regular at the Apollo for several years. He always ordered the same meal—scrambled eggs, white toast, coffee. It came to $3.30. He left a fifteen-cent tip.
His waitress was almost always Judy Maltese. The short, energetic woman in a black-and-white uniform and white sneakers had been waiting tables for seventeen years. Her coworkers often joked that Judy Maltese had been waiting tables at the Apollo since before it even opened.
Maltese always sighed when she spotted Joel Rifkin. His fifteen-cent tips really bugged her. Each time, she was tempted to speak up.
One day, I’m going to just say, “Take your fifteen cents and keep it,” she’d think.
Sometimes, she practiced what she’d say: I’ll say, “Hey, take your fifteen cents, you need it more than me,” she thought. Or else, “Don’t leave anything if you’re going to leave 15 cents. It’s insulting.”
But she never did. She knew the Apollo’s owners, Bob and Louie, wouldn’t like it.
And so she continued to serve Joel Rifkin. He never lingered; just stared into his plate, ate quickly, and left. Judy Maltese wondered about him.
* * *
In April 1992 Rifkin killed again. This time his victim was Iris Sanchez. She was twenty-five years old, the youngest of five siblings. Iris Sanchez had a little girl, an eight-year-old named Jolene, who lived with Sanchez’s parents.
As a child, Sanchez had looked up to her big brothers and sisters, trying to emulate them. One of her sisters was a New York City housing cop. But later, as a teen, Iris Sanchez began to follow her friends. She got into drugs, and then prostitution. Despite several arrests and countless drug binges, Sanchez refused to move back with her family. They tried to get her into rehabilitation programs, but nothing stuck.
Iris always called home on holidays and on her daughter’s birthday. But she felt her child was better off without a drug-addicted mother. So she stayed away.
After he killed Iris Sanchez, Joel Rifkin dropped her fully clothed body in a deserted field next to John F. Kennedy International Airport. It was pretty easy, actually. He lifted an old mattress lying nearby and threw it on top of the corpse.
For more than a year, the body decomposed under the mattress. During his interrogation, Joel Rifkin described where he had left it. “I put it in the sand,” he told Capers and Louder. “Near Thurston Basin.”
That’s exactly were it was, about two hundred feet off Rockaway Boulevard, near the water. The morning after Rifkin’s arrest, state police notified the Queens district attorney, who in turn called the Port Authority police. That afternoon, cops searched the field by helicopter. When they spotted a mattress, they slowly brought the helicopter down. The spinning rotors blew away the mattress. Port Authority cops looked down and saw a skeleton.
There was still some hair on the head, and the body was still wearing a dark dress with large white polka dots. And one sock. Rifkin had told investigators the woman was wearing just one shoe.
* * *
When he left Iris Sanchez’s body under the mattress that spring night, Joel Rifkin’s cold-blooded count was at least six dead.
Then, on May 25, 1992, he met Anna Lopez.