In 1988, an unemployed gardener and loner from Long Island, New York, takes the life of a desperate, drug addicted prostitute in the home he shares with his mother and sister. Joel Rifkin, a man who had never committed a serious crime in his life, then proceeds to cut up his victim’s body with a small hobby knife before disposing of her body parts around New Jersey. In this one moment of uncontrollable madness, Rifkin develops a taste for murder. Over the next 4 years, Rifkin claims the lives of 16 more prostitutes in a brutal bloody rampage. Then, in the summer of 1993, Rifkin sets out in the early morning to dispose of his seventeenth victim in his beat up truck. But he has made a catastrophic mistake. He has failed to secure his back license plate. State troopers spot this minor traffic violation and pull him over, only to discover the rotting corpse of his latest victim. In an eight-hour interrogation, Rifkin stuns police as he confesses to seventeen murders. He is currently serving a 200 year prison sentence in New York’s correctional facilities.