Joel Rifkin
| Joel Rifkin | |
|---|---|
Rifkin in court
|
|
| Born |
Joel David Rifkin January 20, 1959 New York |
| Other names | Joel the Ripper |
| Criminal penalty | 203 years to life in prison |
| Killings | |
| Victims | 9–17+ |
|
Span of killings
|
1989–1993 |
| Country | US |
| State(s) | New York |
|
Date apprehended
|
June 28, 1993 |
Joel David Rifkin (born January 20, 1959) is an American serial killer. In 1994, he was sentenced to 203 years in prison for the murders of nine women between 1989 and 1993. He is believed to have killed up to 17 victims between 1989 and 1993 in New York City and in Long Island, New York. Although Rifkin often hired prostitutes in Brooklyn and Manhattan, he lived in East Meadow, a suburban town on Long Island.
He is also suspected to be responsible for some of the Gilgo Beach Killer murders whose remains were found in March and April 2011. In an April 2011 prison interview with Newsday, Rifkin denied having anything to do with then-recently discovered remains. Experts and victims' rights advocates, however, believe that Rifkin's recent statements have no value.
Rifkin's birth mother was a 20-year-old college student, and his biological father was a 24-year-old college student and army veteran. At three weeks old he was adopted by an upper-middle class Long Island couple, on February 14, 1959. His adoptive father Benjamin Rifkin, was of Russian Jewish descent, and his adoptive mother, Jeanne (Granelles), of Spanish descent, who converted to Judaism when she married.
Rifkin committed his first murder in 1989, killing a woman in his home in East Meadow, Nassau County, Long Island, New York. He then dismembered her body, removing her teeth and fingertips, putting her head in a paint can and then leaving the paint can in the woods of a southern New Jersey golf course and her legs farther north in New Jersey and then dumping her remaining torso and arms into the East River around New York City.
Over the next four years, it is presumed he killed 16 more women. After his final arrest in 1993, Rifkin was implicated in the murder of a woman whose severed head was discovered on a Hopewell, New Jersey, golf course on March 5, 1989. In 2013, investigators determined this victim, a prostitute named Heidi Balch, was the same woman that he described as his first victim.
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Wikipedia