Garden of Graves by Maria Eftimiades

Author:Maria Eftimiades
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 12

AS police released names of Joel Rifkin’s victims, bands of journalists raced to interview family members. One of the first they found was María Alonso. By late afternoon, shortly after Rifkin was arraigned, a line snaked outside her Brooklyn apartment. Everyone wanted to know how María Alonso felt. What did she think about Joel Rifkin? What would she do to him if she could?

“I always thought that I was going to be so happy once I knew what happened to my daughter,” she told reporters. “I’d get my life back. But it’s worse than the beginning—to know that that man killed my daughter. I see his face and I can’t get to him.”

Reporters asked her how she’d feel if Joel Rifkin pleaded insane. María Alonso’s voice grew bitter.

“He’s not insane,” she said. “If he remembers where he threw my daughter’s body thirteen months before and the details of all these girls, where he threw them, nobody in the world can convince me that that guy is insane. He’s just plain evil. That’s how he got his kicks. That’s how he felt powerful: killing innocent, defenseless women. Because otherwise he’s nothing, he’s a nobody. He’s not good at anything. He’s a sadist personality.”

She told reporters how she had tried to tell police about her daughter’s disappearance. She told them about the officer who said Annie had probably met someone and gone to the Bahamas.

“If they would have listened to me, maybe a few lives could have been saved,” she said. “But they didn’t care. They don’t care for drug addicts. They really don’t. How many girls did that monster kill after he killed my daughter?”

And then María spoke for the other mothers who would learn the fate of their children. Her words were quoted on the front pages of the newspapers and broadcast on the evening news.

“He did not kill seventeen prostitutes—he killed seventeen daughters,” she said evenly. “Some of them were mothers. They have sisters and brothers. And they left a lot of people behind suffering and missing them. There is a story behind every one of them.”

María paused to wipe away her tears. “When I see one of these girls in the street, I do not look at them with disgust. I look at them with pity. They’re still people. My daughter had to sell her body to support her drug habit. I’m not naive. When you have a drug addiction, whatever money you make working is not enough. If you are into crack, you do what you do. I never saw my daughter doing drugs or selling her body, but I knew she did it. But my daughter was not born a prostitute. Only drugs made her a prostitute.”

Over the next few days police fended off criticism. Why had no one linked the murders of more than a dozen young prostitutes over the past two years? Were women who sold their bodies unsympathetic victims? Did their deaths somehow mean less? In their defense, police said that no one had reported these women missing.

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