The Landscaper's Secrets

By Kevin Fedarko

THE HOME JOEL RIFKIN SHARED WITH his sister and widowed mother on Long Island is a horticulturist's delight. Lush beds of lavender, lamb's ears, lilies, begonias, irises and poppies surround the house. The box hedges are perfectly manicured. A magnolia tree thrives. The plants are a living testament to Joel Rifkin's gifts as a gardener. "Joel could tell you exactly what's growing," says Frank Barton, who lives across the street from the landscaper. "He knew how long it'll grow and when it'll die." But Joel Rifkin cultivated life and death in other, more odious ways. And last week he revealed a terrifying bouquet of evil.

At 3:15 a.m. on June 28, New York State troopers spotted a pickup truck without a license plate cruising Long Island's Southern State Parkway. The officers tried to pull the vehicle over, but the driver refused to stop. The ensuing chase ended 15 minutes later when Rifkin, 34, obliged his pursuers by crashing into a utility pole. The troopers opened the door. They removed him from the cab. They cuffed him. And then somebody noticed the odor coming from beneath the tarpaulin in back.

It was the body of a woman, bloated with decay. She had a purple rose tattooed on her left wrist. Another tattoo, a cross of leaves, adorned her hip. Rifkin admitted to picking up the woman -- a prostitute, he said matter- of-factly -- in Manhattan the previous week. She got into his mother's car. They had sex. He strangled her. Now he was on his way to Republic Airport in East Farmingdale to dispose of her corpse.

During the next 10 hours, Rifkin coolly explained to a group of incredulous officers that scattered throughout the woods, canals and industrial dumps of the New York metropolitan area, lay the bodies of 16 other women he murdered during the past three years. The interrogation ended only when his family hired a lawyer and police were told to stop asking questions.

By week's end, based on his own testimony, investigators connected Rifkin with the murders of at least 13 women. The bodies of Leah Evens, Anna Lopez and two others had been dumped in remote areas off highways on Long Island and in upstate New York. Three more unidentified women had been jammed into 55- gal. oil drums and submerged in local canals. The skeletal remains of another was found stuffed beneath a rotting mattress near Kennedy Airport. (Investigators located the remains only after Rifkin told them where to look.) Suddenly, a perpetrator had emerged for unsolved mysteries -- a body found two years ago in a steamer trunk adrift in the Harlem River; a torso and dismembered limbs discovered last summer floating off Manhattan. A bloodied wheelbarrow and a chainsaw found in Rifkin's garage suggested macabre labors.

The women Rifkin preyed on came from New York City's estimated 5,000 streetwalkers. For them murder is only one of many occupational hazards. About half have AIDS. Still more are addicted to drugs. Most have lost contact with their families and quietly slipped through the cracks; their disappearances tend to draw little attention and even less concern.

Rifkin, though, wanted to remember them. From each, it seems, he kept some souvenir. In his cluttered bedroom police found credit cards and driver's licenses. Other items were more poignant -- and pitiable. A shoe. An earring. A bra. A brooch.

"I don't go out with everybody -- I gotta look at'm first, gotta talk to'm first," says "Maria," a denizen of Rifkin's Lower Manhattan hunting grounds. But who would have suspected? Those who knew the adopted son of a respected Long Island school-board official are reeling in disbelief. "When I would come home at 1 or 2 in the morning," said Barton's 23-year-old daughter, "if I saw the garage light on, I'd feel safe because I knew Joel was around. Scary thought . . ."

In grade school, his hunched shoulders earned Rifkin the nickname "the Turtle." He never dated. The bumper sticker on his truck reads, STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES, BUT WHIPS AND CHAINS EXCITE ME. Still, no one knew that beneath Rifkin's banal facade lurked an abomination. And therein, say experts, lies the paradox of the serial killer: even as he lives a secret life of sex-driven crime, on the surface he is your neighbor.

The FBI estimates that somewhere between 10 and 50 serial killers are still at large in America. Trolling the night, they serve as reminders that the Jeffrey Dahmers, the Ted Bundys, the Joel Rifkins rend a community far wider than the victims they butcher. Who can be sure that a neighbor's yard does not harbor a garden of satanic delights?

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/New York