Joel Rifkin confessed in June 1993 to killing 17 women over about four years. He was 34, an unemployed landscaper who lived in his family's house in East Meadow, on Long Island. Most of the women were sex workers he picked up in Manhattan, according to police and prosecutors. He strangled or suffocated them, by his own account, and left their remains across the New York region, from creeks in Brooklyn to woods on eastern Long Island and a golf course in New Jersey.
He was caught by chance. Before dawn on June 28, 1993, two New York state troopers tried to pull over his pickup because it had no rear license plate. He fled, crashed into a light pole, and the troopers found the body of Tiffany Bresciani, 22, in the back. His confession led police to more remains. A Nassau County jury rejected his insanity defense in May 1994 and convicted him of her murder. Guilty pleas in Suffolk, Brooklyn and Queens followed, and his sentences have been reported as totaling 203 years to life.
Rifkin was born on January 20, 1959, the date recorded by the New York State Police. He was adopted, and he grew up in East Meadow, a Nassau County suburb. In 1993 the Baltimore Sun described him as the adopted son of a respected local resident and said he had drifted between colleges and jobs. The documentary producer Peter Reiss, who first met him in prison in 1998, has said that Rifkin came from a loving home, attended good schools and was close to his sister.
The writer Robert Mladinich, an NYPD detective, met Rifkin in 1979, when both were journalism students. More than 20 years later he interviewed Rifkin in prison and wrote a 2002 book drawing on those conversations and on interviews with Rifkin's mother.
As an adult Rifkin worked as a gardener and landscaper, and by 1993 he was out of work. He lived at 1492 Garden Street in East Meadow; a 2026 News 12 Long Island report, citing Realtor.com, said he shared the house with his mother and sister from 1989 to 1993, the years of the killings. Neighbors told reporters after his arrest that he was sweet, quiet and awkward, a bachelor who had never left home and was never seen with a girlfriend. He helped neighbors with their groceries and greeted their grandchildren. His interests were truck repairs, amateur photography and flowers, and he owned two 1984 Mazda pickups that he was always working on. "I don't believe it," said Alan Whitlock, a high school friend. "I'm sorry, even if I heard it from him, I wouldn't believe it."
He later told police he had begun seeing prostitutes at 18, when he got his driver's license. On August 22, 1987, he was arrested in Hempstead during a police sweep after he offered money for sex to an undercover female officer, according to court papers described by the Baltimore Sun in 1993. That was his only known arrest before 1993.
The first woman Rifkin killed was not identified for about 24 years. Heidi Balch was 25. She worked as a sex worker in New York City, investigators said, and she used many names and Social Security numbers, among them the name Susan Spencer and about 15 others. Some of the numbers traced to Ohio and Florida. Her parents, who live in Maryland and Florida, did not report her missing at first.
In March 1989 a golfer found a woman's severed head at the edge of a stream at the Hopewell Valley Golf Club in Hopewell Township, north of Trenton, New Jersey. Legs that matched were found later that spring. A torso was recovered from the East River in New York the same year, but it was never entered in a law enforcement database. No one could put a name to any of the remains.
After his 1993 arrest Rifkin told investigators that his first victim was a woman he knew as Susie, and that he had left her head and legs in New Jersey. Hopewell police long suspected the golf course case was hers. In 2011 detectives from Hopewell, the New Jersey State Police and New York obtained a list of women arrested for prostitution on Manhattan's Lower East Side around 1989. Heidi Balch was not on it, but a woman called Susie was.
A missing person report filed in 2001 by an aunt seemed to fit, but it had been set aside because it said she had last been seen in 1995, six years after the head was found. When detectives met the aunt, they concluded that the sighting she had been told about was a mistake. The forensic anthropologist Donna Fontana compared a reconstruction of the golf course victim's face with Susie's arrest photograph and pointed to matching features, including a mole, a scar on the eyebrow and the hair. The aunt recognized her niece in the arrest photo, and DNA from Heidi Balch's parents confirmed the identification. The East River torso, sent to the FBI, also appeared to match.
New Jersey State Police announced the identification in March 2013. "It's fitting the story exactly how Mr. Rifkin described it," said Lieutenant Bill Springer of the Hopewell police. Detective Michael Sherman said the team had almost treated her as a family member after so many years of work. "She was young," said the Hopewell police chief, George Meyer, who hoped the identification would bring her family some closure. Chief Meyer told The Times of Trenton that New York authorities had no interest in prosecuting the case because Rifkin was already in prison, and NBC News reported that he would not be charged with her death in New Jersey.
Rifkin's own count was 17. The State Police say his task force located and identified the remains of 15 of the women he described, and that charges were filed or considered in 10 jurisdictions. A 2024 Newsweek account names the women linked to him besides Heidi Balch as Julie Blackbird, Barbara Jacobs, Mary Ellen DeLuca, Yun Lee, Lorraine Orvieto, Anna Lopez, Violet O'Neill, Jenny Soto, Mary Catherine Williams, Leah Evans, Iris Sanchez, Lauren Marquez and Tiffany Bresciani, together with two women never named. Mary Ann Holloman, whose death was one of his Brooklyn convictions, is named in the 1995 court coverage. Little was reported about most of these women beyond their names, ages and where they were found.
Yun Lee was 31. Her body was found in a steamer trunk in the water off Randalls Island on September 23, 1991, and in the first days after his arrest it was the earliest killing police had linked to him.
Lorraine Orvieto, 28, and Mary Ann Holloman, whom United Press International gave as 41, were killed in a span the Brooklyn prosecutor put between December 1991 and January 31, 1992, along with a woman who has never been identified. Their bodies were found in 1992 in Newtown Creek and Coney Island Creek, on the Brooklyn waterfront, and were decomposed when found. The three deaths remained unsolved until his arrest.
Anna Lopez was 33. Her body was found upstate on May 25, 1992. Her mother, Marie Alonso, attended a court appearance in 1993.
Jenny Soto was 23. Her body was found in the Bronx on November 17, 1992. Her mother, Margarita Gonzales, was in court with Marie Alonso in 1993.
Leah Evens was killed in 1993. A wire report on her case gave her age as 28; a United Press International report days after the arrest gave it as 22 and said she was from Brooklyn and had been found in Southampton, on Long Island's South Fork, the previous month. Lauren Marquez was 28. Both women's bodies were left in remote parts of Long Island in 1993.
Tiffany Bresciani was 22 and lived in Manhattan. She was the last woman he killed.
Two women remain unidentified. Investigators refer to them as Number Six and Number Nine. Rifkin admitted killing Number Six in the early 1990s, but her remains have never been recovered. Number Nine was found in 1992, soon after she died.
Families of some of the women have waited decades for answers. Rifkin later admitted that he had told himself the women had no families at all. "Drug addicted, disease-carrying vermin is the lie I told myself," he said in a 2011 interview with CBS New York. He said he had come to think of people as things.
In his statements to police, Rifkin said he cruised parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn where sex workers looked for clients, picked a woman, had sex with her and then killed her. Police said at least eight of the women were strangled or suffocated, and that he dismembered some of them. Many were picked up in lower Manhattan, according to law enforcement sources quoted in 1993.
He spread the remains far apart. In a 2011 prison interview with CBS New York he said he had disposed of bodies in groups of three, some dismembered, some in oil drums, some in water and some on land, and that he had read about past cases for ideas. "Water is harder to investigate than land because it washes everything," he said. A 2010 interview with the New York Daily News, as reported later, quoted him as saying he left bodies hundreds of miles apart. The result, as he intended, was that police in different jurisdictions were looking at unconnected cases. Within days of his arrest, departments in New York City, Nassau and Suffolk counties, upstate New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were comparing their unsolved killings of women with what he had told investigators.
He told the forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz that he had re-enacted, with real victims, a strangulation scene from Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 film Frenzy, Johns Hopkins Magazine reported in 1994.
Rifkin strangled Tiffany Bresciani in New York City after a sexual encounter, UPI reported at his trial. Accounts written later say she died three or four days before his arrest. He kept her body in his mother's garage and was driving it to a dumping place when the troopers saw his truck, according to a Long Island history account published in 2020.
At about 3:15 a.m. on June 28, 1993, Troopers Deborah Spaargaren and Sean Ruane of the New York State Police saw a tan 1984 Mazda B2000 pickup with a black cap on the Southern State Parkway. It had no rear license plate, and they tried to stop it.
The driver sped up instead. He left the parkway at Wantagh Avenue northbound at about 65 miles an hour. The troopers radioed State Police communications at Farmingdale for help, and Nassau County and Garden City police joined the pursuit. The chase ran along State Route 107, Glen Cove Road and Roslyn Road, across many side streets, with the pickup reaching about 90 miles an hour. As the driver turned left from Roslyn Road onto eastbound Old Country Road, he lost control and hit a light pole, cutting it through. The truck came to rest on the sidewalk about 70 to 75 feet west of Washington Avenue. The chase had lasted 20 to 25 minutes; at the trial it was described as covering 25 miles.
The driver was Joel David Rifkin, of 1492 Garden Street, East Meadow. The troopers noticed a strong odor from the back of the truck. During an inventory search before the truck was impounded, they found Tiffany Bresciani's body hidden in the rear. Rifkin was taken into custody and charged in Nassau County with murder in the second degree and reckless endangerment in the first degree.
Rifkin was questioned that day, first at the scene and then, some five hours after his arrest, by other officers at a police station. He admitted killing Tiffany Bresciani and 16 other women. The forensic psychologist Barbara Kirwin, who later examined him for the defense, said in a 1997 interview on NPR's Fresh Air that he had confessed while waiting for his lawyer, reportedly in return for a tuna fish sandwich.
His confession led investigators to two more bodies the next day: one in a shallow grave in woods on Long Island and one in a deserted field near Kennedy Airport, both where he said they would be. On June 29 he was arraigned in First District Court in Hempstead on a charge of second-degree murder. His lawyer, Robert Sale, entered a plea of not guilty and said he was considering an insanity defense.
Police searched the house on Garden Street. In his bedroom and the garage they found keys, library and credit cards, photo identification, jewelry and women's clothing, items they believed he had taken from the women he killed. They seized a wheelbarrow and a chainsaw. Identification from 10 women was recovered, and Trooper Thomas Collins said several of the women whose documents turned up in the house had since been found alive. A 2011 Patch report said police had found human remains and blood in the garage.
Within two weeks, Newsweek reported, police had linked him to 13 bodies, and he was facing a single murder charge. On July 3, 1993, state police identified two women who had been missing since 1991 as his victims, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Over the following months the State Police task force located and identified 15 of the women he had described. Two more were never found, as reported at his 1994 trial; Associated Press accounts in 2011 gave the number never found as four.
Rifkin's defense at trial was insanity, which Barbara Kirwin later said was his only realistic choice short of pleading guilty. She was brought in by the defense, and she said she had expected, from the press coverage, a sexual sadist who knew exactly what he was doing. Instead she met a man with a "hang-dog" look who seemed down on his luck. She concluded that he was severely disordered and psychotic, though bright and sensitive, and that he had had schizophrenia for most of his life without adequate treatment. He often said he did not know why he had killed.
Park Dietz, the forensic psychiatrist who had testified in the trials of John Hinckley and Jeffrey Dahmer, also testified as an expert at Rifkin's trial. Johns Hopkins Magazine, profiling him in 1994, described his general view that many killers of this kind are disordered but in control of themselves and legally responsible, and it used the Rifkin case to illustrate how people want to believe that only a madman could commit such acts.
Before trial, Rifkin's lawyers moved to suppress his statements to police. A suppression hearing was under way at the Nassau County courthouse in Mineola in December 1993. The County Court denied the motion, and the statements came in.
The trial was held in Mineola before Nassau County Court Judge Ira Wexner and lasted 13 days. The prosecutor was Fred Klein, a Nassau County assistant district attorney. Kirwin testified for the defense that Rifkin could not tell his sexual fantasies from reality. Klein told the jury Rifkin was a clever, sadistic killer who had covered his tracks. "You could say this was the work of a disturbed man or a sick man," he said in closing, "but not an insane man."
During deliberations a juror asked about testimony from two psychologists, and Judge Wexner told the jury not to consider it. The jurors, seven men and five women, also asked for clarification of the reckless endangerment charge, which arose from the chase.
On May 9, 1994, after two hours and ten minutes, the jury found Rifkin guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree reckless endangerment, and found him sane. He showed no reaction, as he had shown none through the trial. One juror, Joe Cavaco, a 51-year-old business manager, said a single vote had settled the question of sanity. "One thing that bothered me was he never looked at us once," he said, adding that he felt sorry for Rifkin, who he thought had problems. "The jury obviously were not fooled by Mr. Rifkin and his defense," Klein said.
Judgment was entered on June 8, 1994. Wire reports later gave his Nassau sentence as 27 years to life. At the time of the verdict he faced six more indictments.
Rifkin did not take another case to trial. On August 24, 1995, he pleaded guilty in Suffolk County to the murders of Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez, whose bodies had been dumped in remote parts of the county in 1993. The plea covered four counts of second-degree murder. On September 18, 1995, Suffolk County Court Judge John Jones sentenced him to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life, a total of 50 years to life.
On December 1, 1995, Rifkin, then 36, pleaded guilty in Brooklyn to three counts of second-degree murder: the killings of Lorraine Orvieto, Mary Ann Holloman and the woman who has never been identified. The Kings County district attorney, Charles Hynes, said he would recommend three consecutive terms of 25 years to life. "This defendant is a menace who must be kept behind bars for the rest of his life," Hynes said. UPI noted that he was already serving 77 years to life for three women, that he faced seven more possible trials, and that the case was the state's largest serial murder investigation since Arthur Shawcross was sentenced in 1991 for killing 11 women in the Rochester area. Justice Pesce of the Supreme Court, Kings County, entered judgment on December 13, 1995.
On January 25, 1996, Justice Hanophy of the Supreme Court, Queens County, entered judgment on Rifkin's plea of guilty to murder in the second degree, tampering with physical evidence and unlawful removal of a body. The appellate decision on that case does not name the victim.
News accounts since then have consistently given his total as nine murder convictions and his combined sentences as 203 years to life. The four county judgments cover seven of the women: one in Nassau, two in Suffolk, three in Brooklyn and one in Queens.
Rifkin appealed all four judgments, and the Appellate Division, Second Department, decided the appeals together on December 3, 2001. The panel was Justices David S. Ritter, presiding, Gabriel M. Krausman, Sondra Miller and Anita R. Florio. Arza Feldman of Roslyn represented Rifkin on all four appeals.
The Nassau appeal was the only one that raised a real question. In People v. Rifkin, the court held that the hearing court should have suppressed what Rifkin said at the scene of his arrest. Questions put to him after he had been handcuffed and placed in a patrol car, before he was read his Miranda rights, were interrogation rather than preliminary questions to clarify what was happening. Because there was no definite break between those questions and the rest of what he said at the scene, all his crime-scene statements should have been suppressed. The court still affirmed the conviction, finding the error did not require reversal "in light of the otherwise overwhelming evidence of the defendant's guilt."
The court rejected his challenge to the main confession. That statement was made at the station house, about five hours after his arrest, to different officers, after he had knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily waived his Miranda rights, and there had been a definite break in the questioning. Rifkin had not testified at the suppression hearing, and the court found no evidence that the confession was a product of the earlier statements.
In the Kings County and Queens County appeals (People v. Rifkin, 289 AD2d 263 and companion decision), Rifkin argued that the Nassau court's refusal to suppress his statements had pushed him into pleading guilty. The court found nothing in the record to support that claim and affirmed. In the Suffolk appeal, the court held that he had waived his right to appeal when he pleaded guilty. No later decision by the New York Court of Appeals in his criminal cases was reported.
After his convictions, prison officials decided that Rifkin could not be held in the general population. They found that the notoriety and serious nature of his convictions were disrupting the facility, and that keeping him apart was needed for security and for his own safety. He was placed in administrative segregation, which is more restrictive than the protective custody for which he was eligible.
Rifkin challenged the placement. A hearing officer found that protective custody would have meant contact with about 40 other prisoners, while segregation limited his exposure to others, and the decision was upheld on administrative appeal. He then went to court, and the State Supreme Court in Wyoming County ruled against him. The Appellate Division, Fourth Department, unanimously affirmed in Matter of Rifkin v. Goord, 273 AD2d 878. It found a rational basis for treating him differently, held that the conditions were neither intolerably isolating nor lacking in basic needs, and ruled that segregation was not the kind of atypical and significant hardship that creates a protected liberty interest. It noted that a three-member committee reviewed his status every 30 days, with the superintendent making the final decision.
He was later moved to the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, near the Canadian border. The Long Island Press reported in 2011 that the transfer followed a fistfight with Colin Ferguson, reportedly over which of them had more victims. The Press described Ferguson as the Long Island Rail Road spree killer.
Rifkin has given a number of interviews. In 2002 he told ABC News that the killings "just happened" and that he still did not know why he had done them. He asked whether he was simply evil or brain-damaged. Jonathan Pincus of Georgetown University, who had reviewed brain scans of more than 100 killers, including some of Rifkin's, told ABC that his frontal lobes were "very, very seriously damaged."
In January 2011 he spoke to CBS New York at Dannemora, after about 16 years in maximum-security prisons. He said that much as he had wanted to stop, there would probably have been more killings if he had not been caught. "Certain things are very hard to stop," he said. Asked why he killed, he answered with a question about why people try all their lives to quit smoking.
Later in 2011, when remains were found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach, there was speculation that some might be his. Rifkin told Newsday from prison, "I have nothing to do with those bodies." He suggested the killer might be a local man whose work let him carry bags without notice, such as a landscaper, contractor or fisherman, and compared such a man to the clam fishermen of the South Shore, where he had fished with his father as a child. Investigators said they were not especially interested in his theories.
In 2020 Peter Reiss, a documentary producer who had first contacted Rifkin in 1998 for a science program on whether biology can drive people to kill, read about investigative genetic genealogy and decided to try to identify Number Six and Number Nine. The result was the A&E series Cold Case Files: The Rifkin Murders, broadcast on September 30, 2023. For at least one of the two women, investigators have no DNA. The program showed clothing and jewelry and gave a number for viewers to call. Reiss said his team had also spoken with the families of two other women who were never found.
Reiss said Rifkin claimed to want to help, cut off contact and then returned on his own terms, complained of memory problems and told stories that did not match. "He's the only one who has the answers we're looking for," Reiss said, adding that he was still unsure whether Rifkin really wanted to help. No identification of either woman had been reported in any source found by October 2026.
The East Meadow house was sold in 2011 for 322,000 dollars, 102,500 dollars below its original asking price, Patch reported. In June 2026 it came on the market again, listed on Zillow at 799,999 dollars and described as a "beautifully maintained" expanded Cape on a corner lot. News 12 Long Island and other outlets noted that some of the women had been killed and dismembered there.
Rifkin is serving his sentences in the New York State prison system. Newsweek reported in June 2024 that he was 65 and held at Clinton Correctional Facility. June 2026 reports on the sale of the house said he was serving a 203-year sentence. CBS New York said in 2011 that the length of his sentence made parole impossible. No report of his release, death or any new court proceeding was found as of October 19, 2026.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Tiffany Bresciani (Nassau, jury verdict); the murders of Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez (Suffolk, plea); the murders of Lorraine Orvieto, Mary Ann Holloman and an unidentified woman (Brooklyn, plea); one murder in Queens (plea). News accounts put the total at nine murder convictions; the details of the convictions beyond those seven were not reported.
Admitted but never tried: the death of Heidi Balch, which New Jersey and New York authorities attribute to him on the strength of his statements and the physical evidence; and the deaths of the other women he described to police, including the two still unidentified.
Details that vary between sources: whether two or four of the women's remains were never found (two at his 1994 trial; four in AP reports in 2011); the age of Leah Evens (22 or 28) and the spelling of Leah's surname (Evens or Evans); whether the plate he lacked was the rear one (State Police) or the front (CBS New York, 2011); and where the chase ended (the State Police place the crash on Old Country Road, west of Washington Avenue; Patch says Wantagh, where the chase left the parkway). Several later reports say he was "convicted of killing 17", which is wrong: he confessed to 17.
January 20, 1959: Joel David Rifkin is born; he is adopted and grows up in East Meadow, Long Island.
1979: meets Robert Mladinich as a journalism student.
August 22, 1987: arrested in a Hempstead police sweep after offering money for sex to an undercover officer.
March 1989: Heidi Balch's head is found at the Hopewell Valley Golf Club, New Jersey; her legs are found that spring, and a torso is recovered from the East River.
September 23, 1991: Yun Lee's body is found off Randalls Island.
December 1991 to January 1992: Lorraine Orvieto, Mary Ann Holloman and an unidentified woman are killed; their bodies are found in Brooklyn creeks in 1992.
May 25, 1992: Anna Lopez's body is found upstate.
November 17, 1992: Jenny Soto's body is found in the Bronx.
1993: Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez are killed; their bodies are left in Suffolk County.
Late June 1993: Tiffany Bresciani, 22, is killed.
June 28, 1993, about 3:15 a.m.: Troopers Spaargaren and Ruane try to stop his pickup on the Southern State Parkway; after a chase of 20 to 25 minutes he crashes on Old Country Road, and her body is found in the truck. He confesses to 17 killings.
June 29, 1993: he leads police to two more bodies and is arraigned in Hempstead.
July 3, 1993: state police identify two women missing since 1991 as his victims.
December 1993: suppression hearing in Mineola.
May 9, 1994: Nassau jury finds him guilty of murder and reckless endangerment and rejects the insanity defense.
June 8, 1994: Nassau judgment (Judge Ira Wexner).
August 24, 1995: pleads guilty in Suffolk to the murders of Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez.
September 18, 1995: sentenced in Suffolk to 50 years to life (Judge John Jones).
December 1, 1995: pleads guilty in Brooklyn to three murders; judgment December 13 (Justice Pesce).
January 25, 1996: Queens judgment on a further murder plea (Justice Hanophy).
After his convictions: placed in administrative segregation; his court challenge fails (Matter of Rifkin v. Goord, 273 AD2d 878).
December 3, 2001: Appellate Division affirms all four judgments.
2002: Mladinich's book on Rifkin is published; Rifkin interviewed by ABC News.
January 2011: CBS New York interview at Dannemora.
March 2011: the East Meadow house is sold.
April 2011: he denies any link to the Gilgo Beach remains.
March 2013: Heidi Balch is identified as his first victim.
September 30, 2023: Cold Case Files: The Rifkin Murders airs.
June 2024: Newsweek reports him at Clinton Correctional Facility.
June 2026: the East Meadow house is listed for sale again.
October 19, 2026: serving his sentences; no later development found.