2004-11-30 Joel Rifkin |
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Fame—and a serial killer |
Whenever somebody did, or was accused of, something so terrible that it made headline news, my mother reflexively would say out loud, "I hope he's not Jewish." She had lived through times when unfortunately "he" or "she" were Jewish—most notably Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians, and executed. Had mother lived to see it, she would have cringed to watch the A&E Biography tonight of Joel David Rifkin, who between 1989 and 1993 murdered 17 prostitutes and hid their bodies, often dismembered, in various locales around New York and New Jersey. Although no one in the program said that this sicko was Jewish, mom would
have envisioned anti-Semites having a field day with Rifkin's twisted tale of
sexual compulsion. The program worried me too, but for different reasons. One certainly could get the idea from this A&E biography that "crime does pay"—if not financially, then at least in Rifkin's sense of satisfaction, even pride, in the deeds for which he will be remembered. On camera, he smiled, grinned, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy reliving the circumstances surrounding his brutal killing of 17 prostitutes—victims whom, he conceded, he did not consider to be fellow human beings. "They were objects," he said. "In my mind, they never had families or anything." Could some social misfit want to go out and replicate Rifkin's misdeeds
after watching such a program? The mass media certainly had a
deleterious effect on Rifkin, himself. He kept clippings on other mass
murderers, among them Jeffrey Dahmer and the so-called "Son of Sam,"
David Bercowitz. Additionally, Rifkin told an interviewer that he was inspired
to strangle his victims by the Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller,
Frenzy. |