By Nadia Fezzani
Rifkin’s words about his victims are quoted, not endorsed.
The interview below is reproduced as it was published. Joel Rifkin's descriptions of the women he killed are his own and are quoted, not endorsed. Their names are in the editor's note at the end.
Die-Hard Seinfeld fans! You might remember the name Joel Rifkin, as Elaine's one-episode boyfriend who shared his name with a notorious serial killer. He is, indeed, for real. Rifkin terrorized New York City for four years, as 17 prostitutes did not escape his wrath.
Many are intrigued as to what drives an individual to commit such horrible crimes. After all, no one was born a murderer. So how does one become a serial killer? Joel Rifkin enlightens us with his story.
Adopted at three weeks old, Joel Rifkin didn't have the luxury of having an ordinary childhood. With eggs thrown at him, beaten up non-stop, humiliated, laughed at because of his clothes, he was rejected and bullied from kindergarten through College. Dreaming of expressing his art through horticulture, showing life through photojournalism, or leading his way into political science, this New Yorker never imagined he would spend most of his life behind bars. During his teenage years, in addition to losing his cancer-stricken father to suicide, he became severely withdrawn and developed a social phobia. He later found refuge with prostitutes, a 17-year ‘hobby’ that became a strong addiction. He contracted herpes, gonorrhea and was wrongly tested positive for hepatitis B. Out of rage or vengeance, he then killed seventeen prostitutes in a four-year spree, between 1989 and 1993.
‘Joel the Ripper’ was sentenced to 203 years to life in 1994, for nine of the murders. He would be eligible for parole in 2197. Prior to being transferred to another establishment, he was locked up at the Attica Correctional Facility in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day for over four years.
Today, Rifkin wants to start a foundation that will help ‘eliminate’ prostitutes, by helping them to leave the streets and housing them after detoxification so they can move on with their lives.
While interviewing him, Joel seems like such a sweet person! He keeps smiling and remains calm and well-mannered. Even if watched over by two security guards, he answers questions with a friendly attitude.
I had one close friend up until Junior High. He then moved to Baltimore with his family. Another friend came into the picture then. We hung out together until I was convicted.
It was probably all cumulative.
Not at all! I don't remember throwing any punch in anger, not even as self-defense. I tend to cover up and let the snot get pounded out of me.
It's hard to remember because I shut out a lot of those feelings. I remember once, when my father found out I had a fight with a guy, he asked me who the boy was and brought me to his house. Now I was a rat! The kid was getting yelled at by his father. Then he denied everything and I denied it too. After that, I kept everything inside. I even had a knife pulled on me for my lunch money. I didn't say a word. As far as I was concerned, it never happened.
Several times. I was withdrawn most of my life.
Strained. He was an athlete at school. He was a civil engineer so he was very good with numbers, too. He would tell me: “No kid of mine can't do math! No kid of mine can't do sports!” I was lefthanded, he was right-handed. When we would go to pick up something simple to lift, I would be on one side and he would be on the other side. Then he would yell at me, “You're supposed to help a guy out, not try to mess him up”.
It was constant. In the end, when I knew he was dying, I gave him a hug and he didn't hug me back. I was his failure. My sister remembers getting a talk a couple of nights before he took the pills. He told her, “live a good life, be careful about the boys you date. I won't be there”. I got no talk.
Alright. We were always playing in the mud and planting stuff. She got me interested in gardening and design. She was also a photographer. Then she raised us kids. Afterwards, she went to work in recreational therapy for mental health.
Fine. Two of them broke up with me because I got really depressed. However, there was never any hostility with the girlfriends.
A prostitute is like a rented vagina. A thousand years from now, men will probably be renting androids and completely remove the human element of it. There is no affection. It's about getting the money, most often for her next fix. I wasn't much different with them; I wanted to get off. When I was with my regular girlfriends and I was in the mood and they weren't, a pro would relieve the stress.
I accompanied the prostitute to her girlfriend's place, where she shot up and then passed out. I hung out there for an hour. Then her girlfriend kicked us out. So we went to my mom's place. She had to shoot up again! She passed out once more. It was an extremely frustrating night! Then, as soon as we had gone through what she had agreed on, she asked, “Where can I get some drugs?” She was all over the place, “We gotta go, we gotta go!” I was already tensed. Unknowingly, she did everything she could to get me completely angry. Of all the seventeen murders, it was the most violent.
I beat her madly. I hit her head, twenty or thirty times, with a brass artillery shelf. I couldn't hit her hard enough or enough times.
I got to the point where I hated what they did to my whole lifestyle. To them, it's all about drugs. There's no real care for personal hygiene. They don't care about the felonies, where I could be arrested, I was once convicted for this matter. A lot of them had sexual diseases. I had already been on the meds for gonorrhea. I had also contracted herpes. For a guy who was mentally paralyzed about asking girls out, now I had this other problem. It just destroyed my dating role at that point. So I basically blamed it all on them. In the purse of a girl I had just killed, there was a bottle of AZT, which was for AIDS. She knew she had it. She didn't care who she was getting infected. She just wanted to get high.
For seventeen years, hiring prostitutes increasingly became both my social and sex life. I believe I developed a sexual addiction. There were long periods of time when almost every waking hour and even night dreams involved thinking of paid sex.
When you get a $200 pay check, you buy a tank of gas, and then you have to borrow money for the rest of the week, it sounds to me like a gambling or a drug addiction. If you lie about it and hide it, it fits all the definitions.
The first time, I was completely freaked out. I couldn't believe what I had done. The body had to disappear. If it disappears, it never happened. Towards the end, I thought, “Okay, let's find a place. It happened again. Oops.”
Sometimes. After getting sexually transmitted diseases, I was telling myself: “If you kill her, the next guy won't get sick and bring it home to his girlfriend, his wife or his kids. And who knows how many people she infected or will infect”. So it was a good thing she was gone.
I thought I would get sick from the streets or be killed on the street. I never thought about life without parole.
Yes, many times. The police found a piece of paper where I had written New Year's resolutions: “Stop seeing P” followed by “Stop K”. So, when the state psychiatrist asked me, “So, ‘P’ is ‘prostitute’ and ‘K’ is ‘killing’?” I said, “Yeah”. They added, “You knew what you were doing was wrong, therefore you're not legally crazy”. This country has a really weird definition of ‘legally crazy’.
I knew I was killing these people and I knew it was wrong. People who smoke or do drugs know it's harmful. But my crime was not a normal hobby. I was killing people! That's so far off the scale that there has to be an element of insanity to it. It's not like I walked into a bank and asked “give me the money”, got angry and shot the teller. When you just decide, “Okay, this person's going to die” for no other reason than what you've decided, you have to be nuts. I believe it's a mental illness they haven't classified yet.
Yes. It's just like a scalpel. It's easy to get into joints and bones from the socket. It's very mechanical. It was like an unpleasant job, but it had to be done. So I talked myself into it.
It didn't faze me. They really weren't mothers to their kids. They cared more about getting high than they cared about their kids. I learned later on that many of their children were being cared for by grandparents or the foster system. One prostitute had two kids in California and she couldn't tell me how old they were.
That is another aspect of how the brain lies to itself. When soldiers blow up a tank, they don't say: “Oh, I blew up a tank with six men who had families and kids back home.” They just blow up the tank. So, I had killed a ‘prostitute, a drug addict, a disease-spreading piece of vermin’.
Oh yes. One of the victims was killed on December 26th. During the Christmas season, I think of her and her two children. For them, this season is a bad memory. But then I lie to myself with what I learned about her; she was in and out of mental institutions, she had AIDS, she was a chronic drug user. So, would she have been there for the kids anyhow? Could she have overdosed on the 27th?
I put forth a proposal to establish the Oholah House, a home where post-detoxification, former prostitutes, could safely live while preparing to fully become a part of society. The proposal fell on deaf ears, but I still support the idea.
There were two of the girls I hung out with, I never slept with them. One wanted to quit the life, so I brought her to detoxification, but she got scared and wouldn't walk in. I then drove her upstate to her parents' house to see her baby who was one year old. She eventually quit that line of work and I heard she was then working in customer service for an insurance company. The other girl, they found her after I was caught. She was still a street worker ten years after I knew her. Since I realize I threw some of their lives away, as well as mine, helping them would be my way of giving back.
Editor's note: this interview was conducted in prison by Nadia Fezzani for Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as published, including the photograph credit that ran with it. Rifkin's answers are printed in full and unedited, which is the only honest way to run an interview of this kind, and it means the reader gets his account of the women he killed in his own words. This archive does not present that account as description of the dead.
What the record holds. Joel Rifkin was convicted of nine murders and sentenced in 1994 to 203 years to life, with parole eligibility in 2197. Seventeen deaths are attributed to him, between 1989 and 1993 in and around New York City. He is alive.
The women have names, and the reason to print them here is that the interview does not. Barbara Jacobs, 31. Mary Ellen DeLuca, 22. Yun Lee, 31. Lorraine Orvieto, 28. Mary Ann Holloman, 39. Iris Sanchez, 25. Anna Lopez. A woman known only as Susie, never identified. Julie Blackbird, whose remains have never been found. Two more whose remains were never found or never identified are recorded in the case file only as numbers.
On his own claims. The hepatitis B result, the AZT bottle, the reasoning about disease, and the assessment of the women as mothers are all things he says and nothing more; no source corroborates any of it, and the last of them is a man explaining why the people he killed did not count. His account of his own case is more reliable on the New Year's resolution note, which was in evidence, and on the psychiatric argument he lost. The Oholah House proposal was never established.
The Seinfeld reference in the opening is accurate. An episode in 1993 gave Elaine a boyfriend called Joel Rifkin, and the joke was built on the news.