"Joel Rifkin was raised on middle-class values and grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood. After school he worked in his local library and his high school year-book shows he was a member of the debating team, the athletics squad and the photography club. On 28 June 1993, 34-year-old Rifkin was stopped by the police for not having licence plates on the pick-up truck he was driving. A minor crime, not something that would make the headlines, or so the police thought. Until, that is, they found the decomposing body of a young woman wrapped in a tarpaulin in the back of his truck. After his arrest, Rifkin told police of his horrific habit of picking up prostitutes in Manhattan and killing them, usually by strangulation, then dumping their bodies. He claims to have killed a total of 17 women. This book tells the story of this killer."
"On October 25, 1994, a hysterical Susan Smith told police a tale that would strike terror in the hearts of mothers everywhere: An unidentified gunman had sped off with her two little boys, leaving her screaming on the side of the road.
For more than a week, the people in the tiny town of Union, South Carolina, rallied around the young mother. They combed the woods and neighborhood parks for the missing children and prayed for their safe return, while FBI teams launched a massive manhunt.
No one ever suspected that the pretty twenty-three-year-old who tearfully pleaded for her children in front of millions of TV viewers could be capable of such a heartless act . . . until she led police to the watery graves of her young sons. Now, as a shaken community confronts its outrage and sorrow, a stunned nation asks how is could have happened."
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