Lauren Marquez, 28, a Hispanic/Latina woman, came to New York looking for a way forward, but her last night in the city unfolded in the orbit of a man who was already leaving a trail of women behind him. On April 2, 1993, she was working along Second Avenue in Manhattan when Joel David Rifkin approached and picked her up.
They drove through the city and ended up near the Manhattan Bridge, where the encounter turned violent.
Accounts of the killing describe strangulation, a desperate struggle, and injuries consistent with a brutal assault before Rifkin left her for dead.
For a time, Marquez was one of the missing. Her remains were discovered months later, on June 29, 1993, discarded far from where her life had last been seen—left in the Long Island Central Pine Barrens in Suffolk County. She was identified on August 21, 1993, putting a name to what had first been another grim recovery in a widening pattern of dumped bodies.
Rifkin’s arrest came abruptly, triggered not by a break in a cold case, but by a routine traffic stop in Manhattan on June 28, 1993, after he drove with no license plate. What police found in the vehicle set off a rapid unraveling, and jurisdictions across New York moved to lodge or prepare charges tied to multiple victims.
As the case spread outward from the stop, investigators linked Rifkin to a series of murders spanning 1989 to 1993. He was convicted after trial in Nassau County for the murder of Tiffany Bresciani, then later entered guilty pleas to additional killings, including two murders prosecuted in Suffolk County—one of them Marquez’s—bringing consecutive sentences that effectively ensured he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
