New documentary seeks to ID victims of notorious 90s New York serial killer Joel Rifkin

The upcoming A&E documentary “Cold Case Files: The Rifkin Murders” examines 1990s New York serial killer Joel Rifkin and a team attempting to discover two of his unidentified victims.

The special, which will air Saturday was produced by Peter Reiss, who first met Rifkin in 1998 after contacting him for a documentary he was creating about how biology factors into killing.

“I was intrigued by Rifkin because he didn’t seem to have a lot of the normal traits that people associate with being a serial killer,” Reiss told CNN.

“He came from a loving home with loving parents, had a good relationship with his sister, went to good schools and kind of was given a lot of the things that you need to succeed in life. And, yet, he still turned into a serial killer,” he said.

Rifkin is thought to have murdered 17 female prostitutes in New York throughout the early 1990s and is currently serving multiple life sentences in prison, stemming from his 1994 conviction for the murder of nine of the women.

In a trailer for the new documentary, Rifkin can be seen in conversation with Reiss trying to recall details about one of his potential victims from years ago.

“So much has changed, is there anything still left to look for?” Rifkin asks. He’s shown “well over a hundred” images of women to try to find the missing ones.

But even in the short clip, it’s difficult for him to remember anything specific, even after pinpointing one woman he suspects as being a potential match.

“I dumped them hundreds of miles apart,” Rifkin told the Daily News in 2010 during a 70-minute interview at the upstate prison where he’s being held.

“I became addicted to sex and companionship,” he said. There was no sentimentality in his words as he described what he did to the women after they were beaten and strangled. “You carve ’em like a turkey,” he grimly stated.

Rifkin was ultimately arrested in 1993 at age 34 after a slow-speed chase with police in Mineola, L.I., that ended with him crashing into a utility pole.

When cops found a dead body in the back of the pickup truck he was driving, Rifkin bluntly told them, “I killed her. She was a prostitute.”