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[uneasy music] [overlapping voices]

[foreboding music]

- I heard joel rifkin's name on the radio.

- A 34-year-old new york man will be in court this morning.

Joel rifkin has told police he's a serial killer.

- I remember gasping that that was my college friend.

He looked so harmless. I had to have answers.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- There were plenty of kids in the hall who were scary,

But joel was not.

- I was trying to figure out how the joel that I knew

Became a deadly killer.

- He's riding around all night looking for girls,

And then he's butchering the bodies next door?

- And no one knew.

- So he was invisible, certainly, to law enforcement.

- As a youngster, he'd be accosted, assaulted.

- Where does that go psychologically?

- I never got to say goodbye to my friend

Or to even understand what happened to her.

- He felt no guilt, no remorse, no pain.

- He was a monster.

♪ ♪

[suspenseful synth music]

♪ ♪

- New york city in the late '80s and the early '90s,

Crime was rampant.

- Policeman was shot dead in his patrol car.

- There were more than 2,000 murders a year.

- This has reached epidemic proportions.

- It is a crack epidemic which police say is causing

An increase in murder and other violent crime.

- Parents--they were terrified

To have their children move there.

Back then, I was a police officer,

And it was frightening for me, so I can't even imagine

What it must have been like for the populace back then.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- It was a quiet night.

There was really no one on the road.

It was approximately 3:15 in the morning.

We observed a pickup truck in the center lane.

As we got closer, we realized there was no license plate.

We turned on the lights to initiate a car stop.

The pickup truck did not pull over.

We pulled up alongside of him.

He just kind of slowly looked over,

Just had a very blank look on his face.

Possibly he was intoxicated,

So I pointed to him to pull over to the side of the road.

We thought he was pulling up onto the shoulder,

At which time, he exited the southern state parkway.

He just wasn't stopping, and at that point,

I called in that we were in pursuit.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

He was getting faster and faster,

Up to 90 miles an hour.

We started getting into tighter, windier roads.

We stayed right behind him.

There's clearly something he's hiding.

He was debating which way to turn.

At the last minute, he decided to go left.

He drove up onto the sidewalk and struck a light pole...

[glass shattering]

Knocking down the pole, and the pursuit was over.

I approached white male subject

With his hands up.

I opened the door,

Grabbed him out, and put the cuffs on him.

I asked him his name, his address, date of birth.

He said his name was joel rifkin,

And that's when I noticed the smell.

As we looked into the back of the truck,

There was a blue tarp.

The decision was made to pull back the tarp,

And we could see the head and shoulder of a female

Deceased for several days.

- That was the first time joel rifkin raised

To the level of anyone's attention.

He wasn't on our radar. Prior to this,

He was invisible, certainly to law enforcement.

My job at the scene is to take control

And supervise the investigation.

I directed that they take him back

To the state police headquarters in farmingdale.

Our goal was to lock him in to the victim we had,

And rifkin was cooperative.

He couldn't deny that he had the body in the vehicle.

And that's when they started to ask--

- "well, has this ever happened before?"

And joel rifkin answered, "well, what if it did?"

- Is it more than 10, less than 20?

He kind of leaned back in the chair and said,

"one or 100, what's the difference?"

I knew what serial murderers were.

I certainly never thought I was gonna meet one.

- This is just getting crazier and crazier.

What is going on here? Who is joel rifkin?

[desolate music]

[radio tuning]

- Two troopers on uniformed night patrol

Stopped a pickup truck

That contained the body of a female victim.

- I was driving out to long island

When I heard joel rifkin's name on the radio.

- There was an arrest of joel rifkin.

- I remembered gasping.

I immediately realized that that was my college friend.

We were both journalism students

At the state university of new york at brockport.

I had received my very first paid assignment

For a boxing magazine featuring a local fighter.

The journalism department recommended joel rifkin

As the wonder kid of the photography department.

We drove the 30 miles or so to the fight.

I remember thinking, "you know,

This guy is really unique. He's really cool."

There were a lot of commonalities.

We were both long island kids.

This assignment for the boxing match

Was on a Friday night.

Joel wound up getting some phenomenal shots.

We saw each other a couple of times after that,

But the semester was soon over.

When I went back for the spring semester,

I had hoped to see him.

I asked around.

I found out that joel dropped out.

When I heard about his arrest, I was dismayed

Because that differed so much from the joel that I knew.

This guy had so much potential.

I had just assumed that he was out there conquering the world

While I was just a cop.

I had lots of questions.

I wanted to know everything there was to know.

I fired off a letter to joel at attica prison,

And I said, "I was taken aback by what you did.

I'd love to learn more about your motivations."

I was curious

If he had that secret life when I knew him,

How long he'd been conducting that secret life.

How did it all go wrong?

Did it go wrong before I even met him?

When joel rifkin responded to me,

He told me that he remembered me.

We had some pretty friendly letters,

And then 7 years after he was arrested,

I went up to see him.

- He was very kind of disarmingly friendly,

Very open, honest and candid.

What drove a guy that I once considered a friend to murder?

And how could joel have gotten away with this for so long?

Anything I asked him, nothing was off limits.

- As a cop, sometimes you can sense

That people are relishing

Telling you about their antics,

But joel was so unemotional about this

And so matter of fact.

There was this complete disconnect from reality.

[ominous music]

- I spoke to my college friend joel rifkin

At attica prison in 1999

Because I just couldn't reconcile the fact

That the joel rifkin I knew became this invisible killer.

When joel talked about his childhood,

I expected him to get a little more emotional,

But he was pretty much matter of fact.

What I found most interesting was, unlike most people

That have a desire to harm others,

There was no bed-wetting.

There was no purposeful harm of animals.

There was no fire-starting.

So he really is unique.

His behaviors did not reflect any of the normal patterns

Of such a nefarious criminal.

He talked about him and his sister being adopted

From a jewish agency in new york,

And I remember him saying, you know,

Sort of self-deprecatingly

That the dream came true for his parents

When they adopted a boy and a girl.

- Joel's family settled in east meadow, long island.

- It was joel and his sister, and his parents, ben and jean.

East meadow was

A quintessential middle class place to grow up.

- It wasn't just looked upon as a middle class home.

It was looked upon

As the future of which dreams were made.

It was their piece of the american pie.

- They were our neighbors. We were in the same class.

I used to walk to school with him.

- Joel was just a regular kid who was extra quiet,

Really polite, nice, sweet,

The kind of guy who's in his own world,

Doing his own thing.

- Joel came to my bar mitzvah,

But at the same time, he's different.

He didn't really fit with anyone.

- For joel, living in east meadow,

What he perceived to be his inferiorities

Took center stage.

It was not a blissful existence for him.

- While we might have been throwing the ball,

He was looking at the sidewalk

With a magnifying glass at a bug or something.

I do remember joel being called turtle.

He had always seemed like he was kind of a little slower

And a step behind.

- It became readily apparent

That he couldn't play sports.

- Joel would be probably the last person to be picked,

And I know that that frustrated his father.

- His father had been an athlete in college,

So joel didn't quite meet up to his level

Of what the father wanted his son to be.

- That caused a tremendous amount

Of frustration for joel

And kind of retarded his development

As far as, you know, feeling good about himself.

It went into his schoolwork as well.

Joel had a very high iq--

128 was the exact number--

But he didn't concentrate well

Unless something really interested him.

His father, who was scholarly,

Would sit at the kitchen table with him

And pore over the homework.

- That was the first person to interview rifkin in prison,

And he said he was tortured by the fact

That he couldn't live up to his father's expectations.

- The mother embraced him and pulled him

To her favorite hobbies: Photography and horticulture.

- He did a lot of photography,

And he was actually very good at it,

But at the same time, something is amiss.

- Joel described to me the bullying that he endured.

He would walk home from school. He'd be accosted, assaulted.

On one occasion, he had underwear

Stuffed in his mouth.

There'd be all sorts of physical assaults,

Mocking, name calling.

- He wasn't harming anyone. He wasn't combative.

There were plenty of kids in the hall

Who were scary, but joel was not.

Some kids get picked on, they go home, they cry.

Their parents take care of it.

He just took it.

- He experienced that all his life.

I'm sure that that experience shaped his psyche

Because acceptance by one's peers

Is the be-all and end-all to a child's psyche.

It must have built up impotent rage

When you feel such anger

But you really can't do anything about it.

You're not strong enough. You don't have enough allies,

And I imagine that joel rifkin built up this reservoir of rage

With no place to put it.

- Joel said that he dreaded going to school every day,

So he devised this complex plan.

In the morning, he would time it

So he would get to school

Seconds before the bell rang

So nobody would have the opportunity to harass him.

- He would take this circuitous route

Through the woods to his home,

Where he would secure himself in his room

For the rest of the night.

- How did this behavior help joel get away with what he did?

He seemed very ordinary.

He used this process to his advantage.

He became a master of not only being stealth,

But being stealth in plain sight.

Joel is like the invisible man,

Which contributed greatly to his success as a murderer

As well as his longevity as a murderer.

But how did joel transition from social outcast to killer?

[ominous music]

- I first began interviewing joel rifkin in the late '90s

'cause I wanted to know, how did joel learn

To never raise any suspicions?

As a cop, I've interviewed lots of people

That did really horrible things,

But this guy was my college friend.

I never thought, "ah, I should have saw that.

I should have noticed that."

He told me in high school his life became hell.

He felt as if the only people that noticed him

Were the people that wanted to harm him.

- Where does that go psychologically?

I'm sure you try to do something

To spare yourself further humiliation,

Emotional pain.

- Joel went to great pains in his private life

To make people not see him

And to be invisible while being in plain sight.

Joel told me when he was going through puberty,

He first started to have psychosexual fantasies.

There was an alfred hitchcock movie called "frenzy."

Joel remembers being sexually fascinated

With this scene

Where a woman gets strangled with a tie.

- Fantasies are not a blueprint.

They don't determine your life unless they do.

In his particular case,

His preoccupation with strangulation

Did determine his life and his fate and his destiny.

- He was masturbating to thoughts

Of having sex with women

And ultimately killing them,

But he could just push it down at that point in his life.

He wanted to date.

He just wasn't terribly successful with women.

Prostitutes not only provide that kind of sexual release,

But there's this illusion

Of going out on a date with someone

Or making this connection.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- To his credit, joel's father never gave up on him,

And he offered to send joel,

Who by then was in his late 20s,

Back to college, and if he got two as,

He would pay for a curriculum.

He took a biology class and a botany class,

Which ultimately led to him

Starting his own landscaping business.

- Joel felt that he was just

Gonna disappoint him one more time,

But he got the two as.

Joel excitedly went to the hospital

And thought his father would be very proud of him,

But his father never got the news.

- His father's death really kind of blew the doors

Off of joel's emotional state.

- The desire to please his father kind of always been

At the core of his emotional life,

But with his father gone, that burden lifted.

[dramatic music]

His mother was preoccupied with her life

As she was getting older. It gave him the freedom to act

On his worst impulses and fantasies.

[dark electronic music]

- He lived for the nighttime.

Driving through manhattan, through queens,

And he would frequent all of the strolls.

- It became an addiction.

Joel, who really was in charge of nothing in his real life,

Between his father and the bullying,

He felt while he was having sex with prostitutes,

He was in charge.

- He did hate himself and the addiction,

But when he met these women, he projected--

He took all that bad feeling about himself

And gave it to them.

He could look at them as lower and look at them

As somebody you don't respect and you don't have esteem for.

- When I would talk to my folks,

Invariably my parents would say,

"well, joel doesn't seem to be holding a job.

"we're afraid that he's going to cause jean

To be out on the street,"

So my parents hired him to, like, trim the trees.

He clearly had a different agenda.

He's riding around all night looking for girls,

So how is he gonna have energy to cut the trees?

In the end, we would see his tools out in the rain.

- In early 1989, about 2 years after his father's suicide,

Joel decided to make

His murderous fantasies a reality.

- Joel saw a woman named susie who he had been with before

On the lower east side.

In his mind, he's gonna go on a date with her.

She agrees to go with joel 30 miles or so

To the long island home

That he shares with his mother,

Where he can spend more time

Than just a usual encounter on the street.

His mother was away.

They wind up having sex on the couch.

She falls asleep.

He's annoyed that she's not paying him more attention.

At some point, she wakes up. She immediately wants drugs.

Joel, at this point, is exasperated with her,

And he impulsively just starts hitting her on the head.

[dramatic musical crescendo]

- As a cop, sometimes you can sense

That people are relishing

Telling you about their antics,

But joel was so unemotional about this

And so matter of fact.

There was this complete disconnect

From reality.

- I didn't want him to think anything he was telling me

Shocked me,

So I was trying to maintain my own sort of monotone.

- He was so dispassionate about it.

Didn't seem to faze him in the least.

He didn't seem to be getting any pleasure

From telling me this,

And he didn't seem to mind

What my opinion would be of him.

- He threw some of her body parts

Into one of the rivers in manhattan,

And he took the head,

And he discarded that in new jersey at a golf course.

- The first kill is always significant.

Being comfortable with murdering someone

Is a massive psychological leap,

And now you've crossed that rubicon

From fantasy to reality.

[tense music]

- There was nothing to hold him back.

♪ ♪

- A golfer was at the the hopewell valley country club.

He had hooked his ball into the woods

And discovered a human head.

- Joel is convinced at that point

That he was gonna get caught.

[ominous music]

- After joel rifkin committed this first murder

And disposed of the body,

The head of this victim,

Poor susie, was found pretty quickly.

- It was a cold, overcast day.

It was shortly after a major rainstorm.

A golfer was at the hopewell valley country club.

He was on the seventh hole.

He had hooked his ball into the woods.

He went into retrieve his ball and discovered a human head.

- I arrived in the golf course.

It drops down maybe 10 to 15 feet

To, like, a small creek,

And there you can see a severed head.

- New york at that time, in the '80s,

Had a tremendous amount of unidentified deceased persons,

But it was quite the shock because we've only had

A few homicides in hopewell over the last 3 or 4 decades.

All the teeth were removed,

With the exception of four teeth.

- The jaw was pretty much gone.

- It was clearly a female

By the hair and the eyes and the facial features.

- We did an intensive search of the area.

We were hoping to find additional body parts

Or some physical evidence. We found nothing.

- We really had no other evidence to go on

Other than the physical head.

Not having a name means

We can't even pursue dental records.

It then became a question

On whether the homicide occurred in hopewell,

Or was just this an alternate crime scene?

- Not long after dumping, susie's head was discovered,

And joel heard a report about this on the radio.

He remembers thinking,

"I went through all these efforts,"

To cut the body up into as many parts as he could

And discard them in different places to stay invisible.

He was convinced at that point that he was gonna get caught.

- About a month after we found the severed head,

We received a call from jefferson township

In morris county, new jersey.

It was opening day of trout season.

That's when fishermen found two legs in a creek

Right off of an interstate. They looked like female legs.

- Dna was taken from her head and the legs,

And they were confirmed to be a match.

- But still, we were unable to identify her.

[ominous music]

- The guys that commit serial murders--you know,

They're essentially living in their heads.

For a moment, you are god because you have the ability

To let someone live or die.

- Even when you let someone live and don't kill them

But thought about it, there's a high there, too.

You made a godlike decision.

You knew, having killed other people,

That you could've easily killed that person.

- One thing that joel was able to appreciate

After susie's head was found

Was the fact that she was never identified,

So his efforts at concealment actually worked.

- He experienced with this murder

The greatest success of his life.

He fulfilled lifelong fantasy.

He did it. He got away with it.

He got pleasure from it.

It was a thunderous success in his mind.

- Those desires were reactivated.

It's time to go out and try this again.

- He did not strike again until the fall of 1990.

Like victim number one,

She's picked up on the lower east side.

They have sex in his childhood bed,

And in the morning, she promises more sex

For more drugs,

But he's unable to get her money.

She's complaining, and impulsively,

He picks up a table leg

That's laying around the house,

And he just starts bashing her over the head

With the table leg.

This time, he used a little different mo.

He went out and bought cement and tarps.

- He threw the concrete into a river,

Which we know sinks to the bottom,

Never to be found.

That was probably because he was determined never to repeat

What he thought was the big mistake

Of his first murder.

He was improving his technique, so to speak.

- He was able to once again get away with that one,

And after one more victim,

Starts what he describes as his acceleration period,

Where, in the space of, like, 1 or 1 1/2 months,

He kills four women in rapid succession.

[dramatic musical sting]

- Joel's desire and ability to be invisible,

Developed so successfully at a young age,

Contributed greatly to his murderous life.

The way he looked, as well as the way he acted

And the ways he purposefully projected himself

Made him look completely harmless

To the women that got into his car.

♪ ♪

He looked like he could blend in

In any crowd.

The police that he encountered never would've taken him

For being a danger to anybody.

- And since he was able to get away with killing

His first couple victims, rifkin was very confident.

- If joel rifkin was feeling emboldened,

Would this lead to his arrest?

[ominous music]

[suspenseful music]

- Joel rifkin had a right to feel confident

Of his first murders.

Only the first murder of susie was a body part found,

But even after they found this head,

It was impossible for them to identify it.

- We contacted frank bender in philadelphia,

A well-known reconstruction individual in law enforcement,

Contracted him to do a reconstruction of the head.

We knew she was a white female,

Probably in her late teens

Or early 20s, up to 30 years old.

She had a mole on her left chin.

She had an old scar over her left eye.

- They did a full rendition of what they believed

This person would've looked like.

The head was completely intact.

♪ ♪

- It was put on the news. It was put in the newspaper.

It was sent to law enforcement.

[suspenseful music]

They received thousands of missing-persons leads,

And none of them panned out.

It was just kept as a cold case, unidentified.

The person who did it was still out there.

- Initially, joel perpetrated these crimes at home.

He felt comfortable there when his mother would go away,

But in 1991, he seems ready to get out of his comfort zone.

He kills in a public place,

A local motel on long island.

The next murders are all committed in his car.

Joel had learned to be invisible at a young age.

- Because of this, he just got better at killing, you know?

He was really a killing machine.

[tense music]

- Victim number six he killed in his car

And then drove to an industrial area

Up around northern manhattan.

He drives off the road a little bit,

Treks through a little wooded area,

Dumps the body into a waterway,

And when he's walking back to his car...

[electronic music]

He sees cops coming towards him.

He hears their radios. He sees the flashlight.

- He summoned up from his long background

Of knowing how to avoid conflict

A clever, clever lie.

- He immediately picks up something from the ground,

An auto part, and before the cops

Have an opportunity to say anything,

He says, "I'm not auto-stripping.

I'm just scavenging."

- Rifkin stayed really cool and really calm.

He had his wits about him

And could literally be dumping a victim into the river

And simply talk his way out.

That reflects the psychopathic dimensions of who he was.

The average person would most likely flip out.

- The police gave him a warning,

So he was able to get away with that one

And dodge that bullet.

Victim number six to this day has not been identified.

Had those cops maybe looked a little further,

They would've found that body,

And things would've turned out different

For many of the women.

Instead, joel felt on top of the world.

He outsmarted the police, and that incident made him

Feel much more confident of not getting caught.

Joel was very aware not only of his ability

To be unnoticed by others,

But also by the work

That he had put into cultivating that ability,

And he seems to relish in that anonymity.

♪ ♪

His choice in women also helped joel stay anonymous.

Most of the women that he would look at fell victim to drugs,

Like so many other people in that era,

And wound up on the streets.

- Quite often, nobody knows their real names.

They have no ties to the community.

They're easy targets.

- Quite a few of the victims

Had not even been reported missing.

Lorraine orvieto was different.

- Lorraine was my first cousin.

She went missing when she was 28.

- Her family spent a lot of time,

You know, trying to find her. She was a missing person.

- My aunt wrote letters, made a million phone calls

To hospitals and morgues all over long island,

Looking at pictures, even looking at a body,

And they came up with nothing.

It was very surreal

To just have a family member completely disappear.

Lorraine was like a sister to me growing up.

She was always very loving, very generous.

She just had so much vigor, so much life.

She wanted to be an accountant.

I think she knew very clearly what she wanted in her life.

Unfortunately, some things got in the way.

I remember lorraine's frustration at struggling

To pass the cpa exam.

She tried twice, but she couldn't pass this test.

She was really deflated.

At the same point, she had been admitted to the hospital.

Lorraine needed a blood transfusion for a surgery.

She had to remove a very large fibroid,

And they had just started checking the blood in 1985,

When she had her transfusion.

She did develop hiv,

Which eventually became full-blown aids.

I remember going to the hospital

To visit lorraine.

She became too unstable to keep it together,

And that just led to shady characters and drugs

And eventually going missing.

- Joel meets lorraine orvieto,

Picks her up in bay shore, long island,

A once-affluent town.

- With lorraine orvieto, it was a circumstantial thing.

He solicited this girl,

And in the process of receiving sex from her,

He did what he was already in the habit of doing.

It's just habitual.

- After taking her life, he used a different mo.

Lorraine orvieto is the first of several victims

That he places in a 50-gallon drum.

- And that led to a very long year

Of having no idea what happened to her.

[sighs]

- You have to wonder if joel ever took

The lives of his victims

Or their loved ones into consideration.

Even though lorraine orvieto was reported missing,

Her body was not immediately discovered,

So joel became so confident

That he started to get

These feelings of invincibility

That he couldn't be caught. Will anyone ever take notice?

[ominous music]

- Lorraine orvieto was joel rifkin's seventh victim.

About 7 months later, her body was discovered,

But at that time, it was never identified.

- Joel was emboldened by the fact

That he had gotten away with this for this long.

Joel was getting a little more careless.

He picks up iris sanchez

On the lower east side during the day,

Which was unusual for joel up until this point,

Strangles her during sex.

After he killed her,

He drove her out near kennedy airport.

- He picked this woman up during the day.

He killed her during the day,

And he dumped her body carelessly

Under a mattress during the day.

I asked if there was any specific trigger

As to why the ones that were killed were,

And he said it was the ripe opportunity

Where there was very little chance of getting caught,

But that didn't seem to matter anymore.

He killed her and just wanted to get rid of the body

And did so in the most expeditious manner.

- This just fed, added to his sense of power,

Potency, success,

And the amazing thing was, as brazen as he was getting,

This was completely under the radar.

No one knew.

- In the early '90s, I wasn't living

At my parents' house anymore,

But I was visiting them, you know, all the time,

And I'd see joel outside and be like,

"hey, man. How's it going? What are you up to?"

I had no idea what was going on.

[dark music]

- At this point, I was already with my band,

The new york ska-jazz ensemble.

I had, like, a local gig.

I was walking with my horn

Just somewhere down in the village near the club,

And I see joel in a car.

Oh, there's a girl with him, so in my mind, I'm thinking,

"haven't really seen him with too many girls."

I'm not going to interrupt, and I'm just going to be like,

You know, "hey, bro. How you doing?

Oh, yeah. Just did a show. All right. See you soon."

After it all went down, it occurred to me

That the woman I saw in the car

Might have be one of those women he strangled.

That's a tough one to wrap your head around.

- On the one hand, joel rifkin despised these women

Because they represented to him

Exactly what he thought about himself,

But I think a guy that's not successful socially

Is very responsive to somebody who's nice to him,

So it was a very unique experience to him,

And he would form little micro relationships.

[brooding music]

♪ ♪

- I played quarterback for myers park high school.

Catherine was the head cheerleader on the squad

That was our cross-town rivals,

So we had the quarterback of one high school

Dating the cheerleader of the cross-town rival,

So it kind of bred a little bit of notoriety

For us as a couple.

Her family was well off. Her father was a dentist.

Catherine had this tremendous, charismatic energy about her

And a tremendous confidence.

- Catherine broke up with me in high school,

So I would see her on national television.

Catherine was sort of the top of the pyramid type of girl.

I heard through the grapevine, through some friends,

That she moved to new york--

And completely lost touch with catherine.

And then I met her again.

I went to the methodist church.

I looked up there,

And there she stood, catherine williams.

When everyone was quiet, she just turned around.

She looked right at me. Bang.

I knew at that moment that I was going to marry her.

I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

At that moment, she knew it too, and she goes,

"well, I know of a justice of the peace down the road.

Let's go tomorrow."

We got married without anybody knowing.

We began to have parties that were filled with drugs,

Dangerous parties.

I can't imagine, in the 1980s, you hadn't done any cocaine.

Very quickly, that just spun way out of control.

It got really frightening,

And I just said, "we're gonna die.

"you need to go back home to your family,

And I need to go back to my family."

She finally decided

That she wanted to go back to new york.

She had a support system up there,

And so I put her on a plane. She, you know, took off.

That was the period of time

Where we just both kind of let the dust settle.

But I was still married to catherine.

I was in love with catherine.

After several months, she said,

"well, I'm coming back to get you.

Don't move. I'm coming."

So three days, nothing.

Five days, nothing. Seven days, nothing.

- The incident with catherine williams

I thought was particularly curious

Because joel had said

That he had been with her numerous times in the past.

- Catherine was known for walking around with a suitcase

In which she carried so many of her possessions,

Including pictures of her football player husband.

- As a cheerleader and a homecoming queen,

Mary catherine was the symbol and the reality of the girl

Not only that he could never get,

But the girl who chose the bullies,

So she was a symbol of everything that he hated,

That he was envious of.

- The fact that she was married to a standout football player,

She might have mentioned

That she was getting the money to go back

And bring him to new york. That could've set joel off.

- When she was in that car with him

Was the very time frame I was waiting for her to come,

And that was the moment that she died.

- Rifkin continued killing, and he got away with it.

[ominous music]

- Mary catherine was rifkin's 13th victim.

Joel was quite confident that she would never be discovered

Because he had been successful before.

Other bodies were found but never identified,

And no one was looking for joel rifkin.

- We just didn't have the technology we have now.

Law enforcement is much more efficient now.

- Rifkin was so clever in where he picked them up,

How he picked them up, and where he killed them

And how he disposed of them that it was

Virtually impossible for law enforcement

To put this together.

He's dumping these bodies

In nine or ten different jurisdictions.

- There was absolutely no reason why joel rifkin

Should've been on any of our radar,

But leah evans stands out because she exemplifies

Just how brazen and careless joel was getting.

- Leah was sweet to the point of really not having

A malignant bone in her body.

- Leah evans went to sarah lawrence college

And seemed to be on track, at least after college,

To having a very bright future.

- It was a very distinctly privileged school,

And leah didn't come from that kind of wealth,

So she felt, I think,

Somewhat alienated from the culture there.

Leah's drug use started during her college years.

It was the '80s.

There were drugs kind of everywhere,

And that's when I discovered leah really had a disease.

She would be gone for days on end.

We all knew that this addiction was spiraling.

It was terrifying to the people who loved her.

[brooding music]

♪ ♪

I have a beautiful memory of leah

Arriving at my apartment.

We were just 23, and she had her beautiful son, julian,

And she was so proud

And asked me to be his godmother.

She just was not present any more in her body.

The ravages of heroin addiction

Are really profound.

She became homeless.

No one ever saw her again.

[spacey music]

- It is impossible for me to digest the scene.

In this case, leah said no.

It seems to have triggered something in him

That made him feel she should die.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- Joel rifkin dug a very shallow grave

Out in the eastern end of long island.

- Some people who were out looking, you know,

For flowers or something,

And they saw the hand sticking up out of the ground,

And that's how that body was found.

- Soon thereafter, the body was the first one to be identified.

- Leah's hand eerily sticking out of the shallow grave

Was extremely sloppy.

- His cloak of invisibility was slipping.

That's a very serious error for somebody

Who was so meticulous to have committed.

- It was light out, and there were going to be commuters,

People going to work,

Figuring, "I can't dispose her body right here,"

So he put newspapers all over the body

So that if anybody did look inside,

They wouldn't see the body.

- So he wound up taking her

Back to his house in long island

Where he lived with his mom and his sister.

- His mother greeted him angrily.

She needed the car because she had an errand

She had to run right away.

He doesn't panic, and he says, "okay, mom,"

Hands over the keys to the mother,

Who goes out and runs her errand for an hour or so,

And his mother brings the car back unknowing

That there's a body in the trunk,

At which point joel moves the body into the garage,

Where it lays for a couple of days in the stifling heat.

- Rifkin then spent the rest of the weekend with the body

Decaying in his garage, working on two trucks,

Changing an engine from one into another.

- He doesn't move her out until Sunday night

Into Monday morning.

It's, like, 96 hours where he's held onto this victim,

So the odor was overpowering.

- Rifkin waited until it was nighttime.

Nobody was watching.

He took the body, put it in one of the pickup trucks.

Rifkin then drove on to the state parkway,

Where the state police try to pull rifkin over.

- Joel rifkin made a fatal mistake.

Instead of pulling over, he accelerated.

- He lost it. There was panic.

He didn't behave rationally.

There's no way that he could've outrun the state trooper

In a beat-up truck.

- Ultimately he was exposed, became visible.

- Joel rifkin had asked me why he was being stopped,

And I said,

"because you didn't have a license plate on your car."

And he always responded, "it's always a ¢25 part."

If there was a license plate,

Would there have been another reason to stop him?

I don't know.

- As he was being interviewed, I was on the other side,

Listening to the discussion

With a nassau county homicide detective,

And he looks at me. He's like, "hey, kid.

Let me tell you something. This guy has done this before."

- Everyone in that room was wondering,

How many more victims did this guy have?

Then he asked for, you know, a pen and a piece of paper.

He wrote down the victims in reverse chronological order

Starting with 17.

- Went from a simple car stop to a dead body

To "what if there's more?" to now there's 17.

- Rifkin's bedroom was

A crime scene technician's nightmare.

Once we opened that door,

We knew we found the rosetta stone.

- There was clothing, jewelry.

[ominous music]

[dramatic music]

- Joel rifkin was caught with a dead body

In the back of his car.

And then rifkin told the police

About 16 other women that he had killed.

- We wanted to prove what joel was telling us was true.

He told us about the leah evans case,

But that was also in the newspaper,

So he could've read that.

- At which time he starts giving details

On all 17 of these homicides, what they look like,

What he did with the body, just off the top of his head.

- There was a certain part

Of his confession that was bragging.

You know, joel had been picked on for years

And not looked at as somebody that had any talent,

And I think this was his opportunity

To tell people that, "you're wrong.

"I'm really smart. I'm capable,

And look at what I did."

- The braggadocio sets in and him saying,

"I've fooled you by my invisibility.

"now you caught me. Want to see visibility?

Want to see accountability? Here it is."

- He gave such details

That when the police went to the scene,

It was exactly how he said.

- We went out to kennedy airport,

And we found the victim that was under a mattress,

So that was when we pretty much believed

Everything he said.

- And then I applied for a search warrant

From the judge to search his house for evidence.

- They were looking for everything and anything

They could find that would, one, help identify the victims

And anything else related to these crimes.

They had very little to show for what he was admitting to.

- Rifkin's bedroom was

A crime scene technician's nightmare.

Once we opened that door,

We knew we found the rosetta stone.

- It was almost like digging for treasure.

There was driver's license of some of the victims.

- So now we had pretty clear corroboration

Once we matched those ids

To the people he claimed to have killed.

- There was clothing, jewelry.

- There was an earring that we matched

To a victim from upstate new york

That had already been recovered.

- There was also articles on arthur shawcross,

The serial killer from rochester area of new york,

And he had a book on the green river killer,

Almost how-to guides for him.

- All his life, joel rifkin was a background guy,

An invisible man.

- Deep down, I think he actually did crave

A certain degree of notoriety

That prolific serial killers had attained in the press.

- I felt bad for his family.

Police were, like, staking out the house.

You only heard about these kind of things on television,

In the newspaper. You know, this didn't happen

Next door, let alone quaint old east meadow.

His mother, who was clearly distraught now and alone,

She seemed to love him, her son.

He said she's the only one that showed him true love

After it all went down.

- But mrs. Rifkin was not that accessible to reporters

Or to anybody that questioned her.

She didn't want to talk about it.

- There's a pretty extensive search.

I know it continued into the next day.

The murders that he had committed in his house,

Rifkin apparently did a really good job

Of cleaning up.

Obviously he didn't want his family to see.

Must have been a bloody mess

Where he dismembered some of his victims,

But there was no evidence of that in the house.

- The contents of joel rifkin's room

Were removed and brought to farmingdale.

- We collected over 8,000 pieces of evidence.

What we had to do in this case in the beginning

Was a crime scene search,

Recovering the bodies that hadn't been found yet

And linking them to the bodies that had been found.

- They were very methodical and organized and objective,

And they were able to corroborate 13 or 14 of them.

- It became such a major investigation,

All sorts of news coverage.

- Joel rifkin has told police he's a serial killer.

The man told police

He killed 17 prostitutes over the last several years.

- Turn on the tv one night, and I saw that joel rifkin

Had been arrested, and they listed his victims,

And my best friend, leah evans, was among them.

I just don't have words to describe what I felt.

Sorry.

- I remember being shocked at the cover of "newsday,"

Biggest long island newspaper, and the main story,

Which was about long island serial killer,

And there's my family.

There's my name on the cover of "newsday."

When they searched his room, they found lorraine's license.

That's how we found out exactly what happened to her.

- I'm reading the "nashville banner."

My eye gets caught about this article on this guy

That the new york police

Had pulled over in a pickup truck,

And I'm just thinking,

"that's the weirdest thing ever."

A day or two later, I get a phone call,

"this is detective or inspector.

Are you married to catherine williams?"

I said, "yes, I am," and he said,

"well, have you ever heard of joel rifkin?"

He goes, "well, we found

Catherine's credit cards in his home."

- There's a whole culture that depicts women

As just these erotic beings for the taking,

And it's easy, then, to devalue them

And for someone like joel rifkin to think,

"who cares? No one cares

If I kill this person."

- The tragedy of this and everything that rifkin did

Was that these are 17 different people,

17 different human beings with different backgrounds,

Different families, different hopes and dreams,

And I had to get them justice.

We would try the case over the victim

That we found him with first. It was the strongest.

We had caught him with the body,

But surely somebody who killed 17 people,

And I'm the first one to try the case.

There was a decent amount of pressure.

[ominous music]

- When joel rifkin was caught with the body,

He didn't know her name.

We recovered beads from a necklace

That she had on when he abducted her,

And we found those beads in his bedroom,

In his mom's car.

- She also had some tattoos on her body,

And we put them in a newspaper.

- And we found a witness in the city who knew her

And was able to identify those beads.

- So we were able to identify her as tiffany bresciani.

She came from a good family. She was educated.

- Tiffany bresciani was a 23-year-old woman

From metairie, louisiana,

Came to new york to be an actress,

Didn't have the easiest go of it,

Fell into a downward spiral.

- So by the time of joel rifkin's trial,

They had found 14 of his victims

And identified all of them

Except for the first one, susie.

- Because the rifkin case in nassau

Was going to be the first trial,

I was the first one up.

- Are we ready to proceed?

- You are joel rifkin?

- Yes, sir.

- We present the evidence with respect to bresciani only.

- Pain and the suffering that he caused to tiffany bresciani

Has to be taken into account by this court.

- Joel rifkin was asserting the insanity defense,

Claiming that he was legally insane at the time

He killed tiffany bresciani.

He didn't have much of an option, rifkin.

He's caught red-handed. He confessed to it.

- You look at all the evidence in the case, his background,

His upbringing

And what he did with respect to tiffany bresciani.

He can best be described as a killing machine.

- Joe rifkin was the most prolific serial killer

In new york state history.

He had killed more people than any other single person.

It would certainly make it much more difficult

To get convictions on his 16 other cases

If rifkin was found insane at the first trial.

This creates a lot of pressure for me.

- The hope of rifkin's lawyer was, a jury would look at this

And say, "17 women? This guy has got to be nuts."

- I was hired by joel rifkin's defense counsel

To look at the issue of competency.

The situation with rifkin

Is that he's extremely personality disordered.

At the end, he was falling apart,

And that's what led me to think about whether or not

He was really fully competent to waive his rights

And not have a lawyer in the room

When he spilled the beans

And just confessed to all these murders.

- The problem for that is the confession is so detailed

And methodical

That what normal person is going to believe him,

That he didn't understand what he's talking about

When he was so organized in describing years' worth

Of killing, you know, over a dozen women?

One of the really weird things

He had told some of the psychiatrists were that,

After he had killed most of these women,

Rifkin took the money back from them

That he had initially given them

To perform the sex act.

The jury was very persuaded by that little piece of evidence

That this guy knew exactly what he was doing.

We were able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt

That he was guilty of killing tiffany bresciani.

We were able to disprove that he was insane

At the time he did this,

And ultimately, rifkin was sentenced to 28 years to life.

Never saw any human connection from rifkin

About what he had did to 17 human beings.

He is a sexual sadistic murderer.

- Even after joel rifkin was convicted,

The last chapter wasn't written

Because, after 24 years, susie, his first victim--

Her head had been dumped on the golf course--

Had not been identified.

- When he confessed, joel rifkin clearly explained

That the head that was found in hopewell township

Was his first victim

And that he only knew her as susie.

That was the extent of what he explained during his interview,

So we had what was called

An unidentified deceased person.

- In hopewell township,

It was the only unsolved homicide that we had on file,

The only unsolved homicide I had in my career.

She had a mother somewhere. She had a father somewhere.

She may even have had children,

So it became almost personal with me.

I continued to work the case

Until the time I retired in 2005.

- I was a patrol officer

And then subsequently a patrol sergeant.

Over the years, I always joked with the bosses

That if I ever got the opportunity,

I was going to solve this case.

I was told by my then-boss at the time

That I wasn't a detective.

Eventually, I got my shot.

- What caused this? Why?

How could this have happened?

I saw him through this period.

He wasn't invisible. He was there.

[ominous music]

- We were always confident from 1993 on

That the head that was found

At the hopewell valley country club

Was absolutely joel rifkin's first victim.

We just didn't have a name

That was associated with that victim.

When I became lieutenant in 2012,

I had the opportunity to look into it.

Susie was picked up

On the lower east side 9th precinct area.

I said, "why don't we just go up there and see

"if there's, like, an old-school detective

"up there who can look through some files

"and maybe give some names of girls

That were arrested multiple times in that area?"

One detective kept looking in the old computer system.

He gave us a list of 19 names. When I walked out of there,

I thought it was a complete waste of time, but it wasn't.

One of the names on the list that was provided

Was susan spencer.

The date of birth was right for our victim.

The eye color matched.

I thought I was on the right path.

The name susan spencer led us down a path

That didn't lead anywhere.

However, on this criminal history

Was numerous alias names, numerous alias date of births,

Numerous social security numbers,

So we decided to run every single date of birth,

Every single name,

And we located a missing-persons report

That was filed in new york city in 1995.

If someone's reporting someone in 1995

But our head was found in 1989,

There could be no correlation.

However, I decided not to discard it.

The name on the missing person was heidi balch.

Heidi balch was reported missing by her aunt

Who lived in new york.

My chief, as I'm explaining to it,

He just goes like this and points,

"get to new york and go find the aunt."

Aunt looked at the picture, said,

"yeah, that's my niece, heidi balch."

I said, "well, you know, when she got arrested here"--

It was a picture from 1986--

"she used the name susan spencer,"

And I'll never forget this moment

Because she grabs my arm like a little old lady would

And just said,

"oh, she went by susie for the longest time."

Literally the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

We solved this.

The head belongs to heidi balch.

I called my chief. He's like,

"do you know what today is?" I go, "it's March 5th."

He goes, "yeah, it's March 5th, 2013.

We found the head March 5th, 1989."

It was 24 years to the day that we actually solved the case.

- When I spoke to the other patrolmen,

That's what I always told them,

"don't give up until you've solved the case."

Having bill springer solve it, I was overjoyed.

I worked hard on it.

It meant a lot to me, and it was closure.

I believe that justice is finally served,

May have taken nearly 30 years, but we did it.

- The joel rifkin I remember was just a regular kid

Who was really polite,

Nice, sweet, never thought he was creepy.

How could he do these horrible things?

- You're trying to contemplate, like, what caused this?

Why? How could this have happened?

I saw him through this period.

He wasn't invisible. He was there.

This is something that disturbs me.

He looks like the guy next door.

He was the guy next door.

He did not look

Like a serial killer from my point of view.

In every high school,

There's a kid that's the last to get picked.

In every high school, there's a kid that doesn't get girls,

But they don't go ahead and murder 17 women.

There is evil there.

- I never got to say goodbye to my friend.

I did not have the opportunity then to attend her funeral

Or to be part of any of the honoring of her,

Laying her to rest, or finding closure myself.

- When you think of somebody you love,

You think about the person at their finest.

Lorraine, you know, had big goals, big plans.

It's just so sad. It's just not fair.

- Catherine was a fearless person.

She would stare in the face of just horrendous danger

And just felt like she could conquer the world.

I will always remember her primarily as a courageous soul

That will always continue to impact my decisions

Regardless of what comes.

- It is unthinkable

That someone that I loved so fiercely,

Who had such a beautiful life ahead

And who was a mother to two young children

Would be taken in that way and disposed of in that way.

That's the message I want to give to joel rifkin.

Leah was not a throwaway.

None of them are throwaways, none of them.

- I think what you learn from a person like joel is,

Childhood trauma needs to be examined.

If not for the people that bullied him and abused him,

He was pretty much invisible,

And I think that created issues with his identity.

That anonymity helped joel, the serial killer,

But hurt his psyche,

And this was his way of lashing out.

- He never once expressed anger towards women in general

Or even prostitutes in general.

Instead, most of that anger was directed at himself

And the fact that he couldn't break his addiction

To the women on the streets.

Had he gotten some help maybe about the bullying,

Maybe some counseling about his sexual urges,

You know, maybe this wouldn't have happened,

And maybe, you know,

A lot of these lives would've been saved.

- Joel and I had a rapport instantly.

We had it in 1979 the first time we met,

And that rapport was picked up the minute we were reconnected

In that prison visitation room,

But the joel that I interviewed differed so much

From the joel that I knew in college.

He felt no guilt, no remorse, no pain.

You still have thoughts of killing people?

- It's like the alcoholic says.

They're in recovery.

You put a beer in their hands, that they can relapse.

It's not guaranteed, but there's a possibly.

Where I am right now today,

I know this is the best place for me.