Heidi “Susie” Balch, a 25-year-old White woman, was killed on February 20, 1989, in East Meadow on Long Island, a death that would not be publicly connected to a named victim for nearly a quarter century.
What became known first was not a missing-person headline, but something far more haunting: on March 5, 1989, a severed head was discovered on a golf course in Hopewell, New Jersey, left inside a paint can.
Weeks later, additional remains were found miles away, and investigators linked the recovered parts through forensic testing, yet the woman’s identity remained out of reach as years turned into decades.
Authorities later said Balch had worked in New York City and moved through the streets under multiple names, the kind of life that too often vanishes into the noise of a city that never stops. Investigators came to believe she had been targeted, killed, and dismembered, with identifying features deliberately removed to make sure she stayed anonymous—just another grim riddle scattered across state lines.
The story shifted in 1993, when Joel Rifkin was arrested and ultimately imprisoned for a series of killings; over time, law enforcement compared what he had said about his first victim with the long-unidentified 1989 remains from Hopewell. In 2013, after investigators used family DNA to finally put Balch’s name to the evidence, police announced they believed she was Rifkin’s first victim, linking the 1989 homicide to him through physical evidence and statements he made to investigators.
Rifkin’s case already carried the weight of multiple convictions and a sentence designed to keep him behind bars for life, so Balch’s name did not arrive with the shock of a new arrest, but with the colder resolution of recognition—proof that the woman found in fragments in 1989 had been real, had been someone, and had finally been brought back from anonymity.
