"From the Mouth of the Monster"

Abstract-

Joel Rifkin was convicted of savagely murdering seventeen young women in the 1990's.  He targeted prostitutes and attempted to and completed in having sex with them and then violently killing and dismembering them.  His rampage lasted for a few years before he was caught during a high speed police chase.

                                            "From the Mouth of the Monster"

    Joel Rifkin was convicted of savagely murdering seventeen young women, mostly prostitutes, in New York in the 1990's.  His reign of terror began two years after his father passed away.  Rifkin planned to pick up a prostitute from the street corner, as he usually did, and bring her back to his mother's house, where he lived, to kill her.  Rifkin was a self-described sex addict whose lust for sex with prostitutes evolved into an even greater desire to kill them.  He never saw his victims as people, but more as objects for his own substandard desires.

    Rifkin's first victim was a petite blond prostitute.  He had picked her up at his usual street corner.  After they stopped to satisfy her drug craving, he took her back to his mother's house.  After they had sex and hung out, he hit her over the head with a 10 pound plastic shell from the beach using both his hands.  Rifkin then stuffed her body into a plastic bag and dragged her down to the basement.  He then continued to dismember her entire body and place the parts into separate plastic bags.  Next, Rifkin drove a few hours away to dispose of the body parts.  Rifkin's other sixteen victims' murders followed the same pattern as the first.  He would pick up prostitutes and then violently murder them and rid of their bodies wrapped in plastic tarps.

    After reading "The Joel Rifkin Story: From the Mouth of the Monster" written by an old friend of his, Robert Mladinich, who happened to become a police officer ten years after meeting Rifkin, I was able to produce a profile which similarly fits the profiles discussed in Profiling Violent Crimes."  Joel Rifkin could be classified as a disorganized asocial offender.  He is disorganized in his daily activities as well as in his general surroundings, including his personal hygiene, lifestyle, and psychological state.  Offenders with a disorganized asocial personality tend to be non-athletic, introverted, and have problems making friends throughout their childhood.  Rifkin possesses all of these characteristics making him a very likely candidate for the disorganized asocial offender category.  Disorganized asocial offenders are considered to be nocturnal, which Rifkin is, and they may have limited intelligence and involvement in unskilled labor, as well as few dates or social contacts with women.  Rifkin very well fits this profile, however there are a few characteristics that he lacks.  Tests have shown that Rifkin has an above average intelligence level.  Although he may be a loner, he has always lived with his mother, except for a brief period of time when he lived with his girlfriend.  After discovering his depression, she left him and he returned home.

    Joel Rifkin also fits the profile of a mission and hedonistic serial killer.  The mission serial killer feels that it is his self-imposed duty to rid the world of a particular class of people.  Rifkin felt the need to kill the prostitutes he picked up to kill his reliance on them.  "But he had no deep-rooted hatred for women or prostitutes, he was just trying to stem his overpowering and degrading need for their sexual services" (Mladinich, p. 63).  When these serial killers are arrested, their neighbors are typically surprised to learn of the crimes they commit.  When Rifkin was arrested after a high speed police chase, his neighbors were very shocked to find out that Joel had murdered seventeen young women.  They had always thought of him as a "good kid."

    The hedonistic serial killer is also known as the lust or thrill killer.  Although Rifkin denied that his killings were in any way sexually motivated, hedonistic serial killers derive sexual gratification through the murders.  Rifkin claimed to never have touched the women after they were already dead, but he did have sex with all the women before he killed them.  One characteristic of the hedonistic serial killer which fits Rifkin completely is the dismemberment.  Rifkin dismembered almost all of his victims after he murdered them, sometimes even waiting till the next day.

    The most common serial killer encountered by law enforcement is the offender who targets prostitutes.  About fifteen or sixteen of Rifkin's victims were prostitutes.  When police searched Rifkin's house, they found newspaper clippings analyzing the Green River killings in the 1980's, which he claimed to have stolen a few ideas from.  The hardest serial murder cases to solve are those involving buried or hidden bodies.  Rifkin had stuffed most of his bodies in some compartment, such as a plastic tarp, or he either threw them in a large body of water or buried them so they would not be found.

    Joel Rifkin was a sex addict.  He had troubles in school maintaining relationships with women; he barely had any girlfriends.  All he really wanted was a true, normal, adult relationship, but once he started buying prostitutes, he could not stop.  He became addicted to paying for sex, and spent all of his money from the few jobs he could hold down.  He kept souvenirs from his killings, mostly on accident, even though he was a compulsive collector.  His souvenirs generally consisted of the prostitutes' jewelry.  Psychologists would say that Rifkin has a bipolar disorder and also extreme depression with some social anxiety.  He lived a pretty normal life up until his father passed away in his 20's, which started his downfall to murder.

    Joel Rifkin was caught by accident.  He was being pulled over for having no license plates on his battered Mazda pickup truck with a bumper sticker reading 'Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Whips and Chains Excite Me!'  Instead of pulling over for the officer, Rifkin continued on in a high speed police chase lasting about twenty minutes.  When the finally apprehended Rifkin, they found the body of his last victim, a 22 year old prostitute, wrapped in a plastic tarp in the bed of his truck.  He had used both his truck and his mother's car to transport all of his victims to outside areas of the city.  Rifkin's trial ended in 1994 and he was found guilty of murder and a felony count of reckless endangerment for leading the police on the high speed chase.  In 2000, he was transferred from a solitary cell in Attica to a protective custody wing at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York and is currently serving a 200 year term.