Iris Sanchez was a 25-year-old Latina woman from New York City who vanished on Mother’s Day weekend, May 10, 1992. Friends and family remembered her as lively and warm, someone who loved to dance, even as she struggled with addiction and drifted into street-level sex work to survive. Then, without warning, she stopped showing up. In a city where disappearances could blur into background noise—especially when the missing person lived on the margins—her absence stretched from days into
weeks, and then into a year of unanswered questions.
Investigators would later learn that her last hours began in Manhattan, where she was approached in broad daylight along First Avenue by Joel Rifkin, a quiet Long Island man who prowled the city looking for victims. He drove her to a secluded spot and, after sex, strangled her. With the calm routine of someone who had done it before, he carried her body across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Queens, steering toward an illegal dumping ground near John F. Kennedy International Airport. There, just off Rockaway Boulevard, he stripped her of small valuables—her watch and jewelry—then used a discarded mattress as camouflage, wedging her remains beneath it as if hiding her in plain sight.
For more than a year, Iris stayed there—swallowed by trash and neglect—until a separate killing finally cracked Rifkin’s world open. In the early hours of June 28, 1993, New York State Police tried to stop his pickup on the Southern State Parkway because it had no rear license plate. Rifkin took off, leading troopers on a chase that ended when he lost control and crashed into a light pole. When police searched the vehicle, they found the body of another victim hidden in the back. Rifkin was taken into custody, and the arrest triggered a sweeping investigation that quickly expanded beyond a single homicide.
As detectives pressed him, Rifkin began confessing to a string of murders across New York City and Long Island. He directed investigators to dumping sites and, for Iris, provided a map that led them back to the Queens illegal dump where she had been left. Her remains were recovered near the airport in late June 1993, finally giving her family the truth after months of uncertainty and dread—an answer as devastating as it was final.
Rifkin was charged in Queens with second-degree murder for Iris Sanchez’s death and later pleaded guilty. In January 1996, a Queens judge sentenced him again, adding another major term onto the stack of punishments he was already serving for other killings. By then, Rifkin had been convicted and sentenced repeatedly, effectively ensuring he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. No other suspects were charged in Iris Sanchez’s murder; the case resolved with Rifkin as the sole perpetrator, and her name became one more tragic entry in the long, brutal tally of his confessed crimes.
