Excerpt: Adoption Forensics "Adopted Child Syndrome."

From: Steve O'Keefe

Excerpt: Adoption Forensics & Joel Rifkin


I have permission from Juneau Press to distribute an excerpt from the
new book, "Adoption: Uncharted Waters," by psychologist David
Kirschner, Ph.D., well-known for his work concerning Adopted Child
Syndrome or ACS.

The excerpt finds the author in prison with New York's most prolific
serial killer, Joel Rifkin. Kirschner prepared a psychological profile
of adoptee Rifkin for the defense and spent an unprecedented 110 hours
interviewing and examining the man who murdered 17 women.

Kirschner has been involved in over 20 homicide cases, most notably
Joel Rifkin, "Casino Killer" Jeremy Strohmeyer, and serial wife-and-
mother poisoner, Steve Catlin. He also provides an in-depth chapter on
adoptee and multiple murderer David Berkowitz -- the infamous "Son of
Sam." This book provides a rare, inside look how psychology and the
law mesh in murder trials.

Kirschner is a staunch advocate of opening birth records, which he
sees as a human and civil right of adoptees. In his book, he shows how
secrecy, lies, and sealed records can lead adoptees into a fantasy
life that sometimes explodes in deadly rage.

You can find the excerpt on Joel Rifkin at the following URL -- or
email me and I will send it as a text file:

http://www.authorviews.com/authors/k...er/excerpt.php





- Excerpt



ADOPTION: UNCHARTED WATERS
A Psychologist's Case Studies...Clinical and Forensic Issues

by David Kirschner, Ph.D.

INTRODUCTION

In Adoption: Uncharted Waters, renowned psychologist David Kirschner,
Ph.D., opens his case files showing the connection between adoption and
murder.

Kirschner has prepared psychological evaluations of numerous murderers,
including "Casino Killer" Jeremy Strohmeyer, serial wife-and-mother
poisoner Steve Catlin, and New York's most prolific serial killer, Joel
Rifkin. There's also an in-depth chapter on adoptee and multiple
murderer David Berkowitz -- the infamous "Son of Sam."

The author takes no prisoners in telling his side of these famous cases.
He rips into Dr. Barbara Kirwin, the defense witness who botched the
Rifkin case, and slams famous attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose book "The
Abuse Excuse" attacked Kirschner's "Adopted Child Syndrome."

"Adoption is a lifelong process, not a one-time event," says the author,
a staunch advocate of opening birth records, which he sees as a human
and civil right of adoptees. Kirschner shows how secrecy, lies, and
sealed records can lead adoptees into a fantasy life that sometimes
explodes in deadly rage.

The excerpt below describes the author's first encounter with Joel
Rifkin, New York's most prolific serial killer.

My First Encounter With Serial Killer Joel Rifkin

by David Kirschner, Ph.D.

With [Joel] Rifkin in custody and the number of murders he confessed to
mounting [17 in all], the police knew that a media circus was in the
offing when the doors were flung open to the press. It was not often
that they had in tow a suspect who was confessing to crimes faster than
they could count them, and so they were eager to keep the press at bay
for as long as possible.

However, Jeanne Rifkin, [Joel's adoptive mother], knew that something
was amiss when she arrived home at around three o'clock that afternoon
and found policemen swarming all over her yard and around her house.
When she learned the reason for their presence, she phoned her estate
lawyer, who then called Robert Sale, a highly regarded defense attorney.

Sale notified the police and the district attorney's office that he was
representing Rifkin and that all questioning was to cease immediately.
He advised Jeanne that police would soon be arriving with a search
warrant and she would have to let them look for evidence in any area of
the house that was used or shared by Joel. He told his client that Joel
was scheduled for an arraignment the following morning in Hempstead
District Court. He would be charged with the second-degree murder of
Tiffany Bresciani. Other charges would follow in Suffolk County and in
other jurisdictions.

Rifkin was finally paraded before the press that night when he was led
from the station house to his jail cell. More than one reporter would
note that he looked none the part of a maniacal serial killer. He did
not have the crazed look in his eye of the Unabomber or Oklahoma City
bombers or the overgrown beard and unruly mane of a Charles Manson. Even
in his hooded jump suit, wearing chains on his feet and his hands
manacled, Joel Rifkin looked like a shy, tight lipped accountant with
his neat little mustache and broad, gold rimmed glasses.

At the same time, police who were searching the Rifkin home turned up a
large collection of mementos he had assembled to commemorate his
conquests, items such as lace panties, pantyhose, lipstick containers,
bracelets, and necklaces that were taken from the bodies of his victims.

Not surprisingly, given his confession and the abundance of physical
evidence that had been collected, Rifkin's attorney decided to go for an
insanity defense. With his down-home kind of country style and low-key
manner, Sale had been there before. He had won an acquittal by reason of
insanity of a man who had killed and dismembered his wife and three
children with a bayonet. He had also won a number of other difficult
cases, including a successful entrapment defense for a New York City
police officer and his brother who were caught as they tried to pull off
an armed robbery, and the dismissal of armed robbery charges for Malcolm
X's bodyguards.

Sale had spent eight years at the Legal Aid Society in Nassau County,
during which time he put together a string of sixteen straight trial
victories, a feat that has never been equaled, according to a senior
trial lawyer with the society. He was elevated to bureau chief in charge
of felony cases at Legal Aid before entering private practice. He would
need all of that and a bit more in defense of Rifkin, however, for no
serial killer had ever been found not guilty by reason of insanity.

~ Preparing Rifkin's Insanity Defense ~

I first read about the Rifkin case while I was on vacation in Sante Fe.
It captured my attention because Rifkin was precisely the type of
subject -- an adoptee killer -- I had been studying and he came from my
immediate Long Island neighborhood. Soon after I returned from Sante Fe,
Sale contacted me, told me of his plans to mount an insanity defense,
and gave me psychological reports from Joel's childhood and teenage
years in East Meadow.

Early in my career I had worked in the East Meadow school district, and
two of the reports Sale gave me were written by close friends and school
psychologists I had worked with -- Edna Dublirer in the junior high
school and Norm Pollens in the high school. I was especially interested
to note that both reports stated that Joel had been troubled by memory
problems, a finding that could be crucial to an insanity defense based
on dissociative identity disorder, commonly referred to as multiple
personality.

During my discussions with Sale, I also discovered that I knew the
psychotherapist, Joseph Nemovicher, who had treated Joel in twenty-five
sessions from May 1977 to January 1979. As it developed, Nemovicher had
documented Joel's learning difficulties and memory problems but had
never considered the effects of adoption on his psychological profile.

In my first face-to-face meeting with Sale (which, as it turned out,
would also be my last) I told him that the reports from Joel's school
psychologist would be valuable in supporting his defense strategy since
they documented a pre-existing childhood history of emotional
disturbance, mental illness, and severe memory loss. I also suggested
getting additional reports from neurologists that might reveal some
organic brain condition that could contribute to a mental-status
defense. Most critically I recommended that we begin a search for his
birth mother immediately.

A genetic predisposition toward violence has been documented with
growing authority by a number of researchers, most notably Dr. Sarnoff
Mednick, who has been studying the relationship between adoption,
genetics, criminality, and violence in Denmark, where precise and
thorough adoption records are kept.

I made arrangements to meet with Joel and do a thorough psychological
evaluation. Over the course of the next twenty months we met for more
than 110 hours, and the result was perhaps the most complete
psychological profile of a serial killer ever developed.

~ My First Meeting With Rifkin ~

My first meeting with Joel took place on September 9, 1993, just over
two months after his arrest. His recollection of events and how he felt
was still fresh at that time, uncolored by subsequent tellings and
retellings, by accounts rendered by others involved in the case, and
perhaps by suggestions of how to frame his story for the optimum legal
effect. I met with him in the Nassau County Correctional Center (NCCC)
just a few blocks from his alma mater, East Meadow High School.
Coincidentally, East Meadow High is the school district where I had
worked as a young psychologist.

A maximum security institution, NCCC was a forbidding granite structure
that had recently been enlarged, renovated and modernized so that it now
looked like a high tech control center with banks of TV monitors and
video cameras recording every move in every corridor. When I walked
through the thick steel front door, I was asked to present my
credentials and authorization letter from an attorney. The correction
officers on duty had me empty my pockets, searched me with metal
detectors, and finally led me through a maze of corridors. As each metal
door clanged shut behind me I felt a sense of foreboding that it might
be easier to enter than it would be to exit.

My destination was a small cubicle, eight-by-eight feet, that was glass
enclosed and looked out onto a large, central visitors' area where
prisoners met with their families. I waited for about ten minutes,
seated at a small metal table, with a writing pad open to take notes as
we talked. Finally Rifkin was brought in.

Rifkin initially appeared to be timid, passive, and somewhat distracted
as he sat across from me, looking down or off into space, rarely making
eye contact. He was, however, not at all shy about talking. It was
apparent that he enjoyed being the center of attention, people hanging
on his every word. In fact, Rifkin's problem was not talking, but
listening. As our sessions continued, I would often say to him, "Joel,
shut up and listen for a change."

What struck me most about him in that first meeting was the *duality* of
his nature, abruptly shifting from a timid, passive, nonagressive type
to an assertive, egocentric, grandiose personality. I was also
interested to note his failure to display any real emotion. He never
came across as angry or hostile, and certainly not as violent. Even when
he described the seventeen gory "events," as he referred to them, he
showed no emotion -- neither rage nor regret nor remorse. It was as if
he were describing acts committed by someone other than himself.



Copyright ©2007 by David Kirschner. All Rights Reserved. Please feel
free to duplicate or distribute this file as long as the contents are
not changed and this copyright notice is intact. Thank you.





Re posted By FX From alt.support.foster-parents

Interesting story. I'm pleased to know that only adopted children turn
out badly. Who'd a thought.

Any day now the birth rate should plummet given the logic presented
here, if applied to reality....where birth child turn out this badly
often had a little help in early life by parents.

By the way, if you knew anything about adoption these days, you'd know
the argument here has been met in many states, if not all.

Records aren't sealed, and lies are not told to children about their
origins.

The one area that is still pretty sensitive is with the child that is
the product of incest.

Tough one that.

Got any ideas how that should be handled?

I can go back at least 15 years, and I know the concept was around
before that, that one does not lie to a child about their birth
parents....in fact an album is created with the child, for the child,
for life, on all their prior adoption history...parents, warts and
diamonds and all.

It's only you folks that lie and claim otherwise.


This story, even the interview event, began September 9, 1993

Joel Rifkin was born January 20, 1959. He would have been 34 at date
of his interview.

1959 was 48 years ago last January. Much of the author's argument are
long responded to.

Nevertheless one cannot predict how any child will turn out as an
adult with certainty they will not be a serial killer. We THINK we
know, but inevitably people who knew him well never suspected.

Oh, they will say they did, but others wills strongly contradict them.

Adoption is no more dangerous in this regard than making a baby
yourself. You can't predict your spouses dealing with the child, or
others that come into his or her life, nor the genetics that would
predispose the child one way or the other...though on the last we are
getting a little better.

No one does an in depth study on a child about to be born, or much
afterward...but an adopted child, through the state, has gone through
a great deal of background and information gathering.

So your print a story, about a child 48 years ago, and pretend
adoption had a significant role, or are you trying to scare people
away from adoption so children will languish in the system?

Yer kinda missing a little info:

D2 Press- True Crime Corner-Joel Rifkin-Prostitute Killer
Joel Rifkin was the butt of all jokes for his entire childhood.
Taunts, pranks, cruel nicknames and ridicule followed him wherever he
went. ...
http://www.doubledarepress.com/2004/...mecorner.shtml - 16k -
Cached - Similar pages

And here's a little piece to entertain you if you thought you were
doing children a service:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search






On Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:44:13 -0700, fx wrote:

From: Steve O'Keefe

Excerpt: Adoption Forensics & Joel Rifkin


I have permission from Juneau Press to distribute an excerpt from the
new book, "Adoption: Uncharted Waters," by psychologist David
Kirschner, Ph.D., well-known for his work concerning Adopted Child
Syndrome or ACS.

The excerpt finds the author in prison with New York's most prolific
serial killer, Joel Rifkin. Kirschner prepared a psychological profile
of adoptee Rifkin for the defense and spent an unprecedented 110 hours
interviewing and examining the man who murdered 17 women.

Kirschner has been involved in over 20 homicide cases, most notably
Joel Rifkin, "Casino Killer" Jeremy Strohmeyer, and serial wife-and-
mother poisoner, Steve Catlin. He also provides an in-depth chapter on
adoptee and multiple murderer David Berkowitz -- the infamous "Son of
Sam." This book provides a rare, inside look how psychology and the
law mesh in murder trials.

Kirschner is a staunch advocate of opening birth records, which he
sees as a human and civil right of adoptees. In his book, he shows how
secrecy, lies, and sealed records can lead adoptees into a fantasy
life that sometimes explodes in deadly rage.

You can find the excerpt on Joel Rifkin at the following URL -- or
email me and I will send it as a text file:

http://www.authorviews.com/authors/k...er/excerpt.php





- Excerpt



ADOPTION: UNCHARTED WATERS
A Psychologist's Case Studies...Clinical and Forensic Issues

by David Kirschner, Ph.D.

INTRODUCTION

In Adoption: Uncharted Waters, renowned psychologist David Kirschner,
Ph.D., opens his case files showing the connection between adoption and
murder.

Kirschner has prepared psychological evaluations of numerous murderers,
including "Casino Killer" Jeremy Strohmeyer, serial wife-and-mother
poisoner Steve Catlin, and New York's most prolific serial killer, Joel
Rifkin. There's also an in-depth chapter on adoptee and multiple
murderer David Berkowitz -- the infamous "Son of Sam."

The author takes no prisoners in telling his side of these famous cases.
He rips into Dr. Barbara Kirwin, the defense witness who botched the
Rifkin case, and slams famous attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose book "The
Abuse Excuse" attacked Kirschner's "Adopted Child Syndrome."

"Adoption is a lifelong process, not a one-time event," says the author,
a staunch advocate of opening birth records, which he sees as a human
and civil right of adoptees. Kirschner shows how secrecy, lies, and
sealed records can lead adoptees into a fantasy life that sometimes
explodes in deadly rage.

The excerpt below describes the author's first encounter with Joel
Rifkin, New York's most prolific serial killer.

My First Encounter With Serial Killer Joel Rifkin

by David Kirschner, Ph.D.

With [Joel] Rifkin in custody and the number of murders he confessed to
mounting [17 in all], the police knew that a media circus was in the
offing when the doors were flung open to the press. It was not often
that they had in tow a suspect who was confessing to crimes faster than
they could count them, and so they were eager to keep the press at bay
for as long as possible.

However, Jeanne Rifkin, [Joel's adoptive mother], knew that something
was amiss when she arrived home at around three o'clock that afternoon
and found policemen swarming all over her yard and around her house.
When she learned the reason for their presence, she phoned her estate
lawyer, who then called Robert Sale, a highly regarded defense attorney.

Sale notified the police and the district attorney's office that he was
representing Rifkin and that all questioning was to cease immediately.
He advised Jeanne that police would soon be arriving with a search
warrant and she would have to let them look for evidence in any area of
the house that was used or shared by Joel. He told his client that Joel
was scheduled for an arraignment the following morning in Hempstead
District Court. He would be charged with the second-degree murder of
Tiffany Bresciani. Other charges would follow in Suffolk County and in
other jurisdictions.

Rifkin was finally paraded before the press that night when he was led
from the station house to his jail cell. More than one reporter would
note that he looked none the part of a maniacal serial killer. He did
not have the crazed look in his eye of the Unabomber or Oklahoma City
bombers or the overgrown beard and unruly mane of a Charles Manson. Even
in his hooded jump suit, wearing chains on his feet and his hands
manacled, Joel Rifkin looked like a shy, tight lipped accountant with
his neat little mustache and broad, gold rimmed glasses.

At the same time, police who were searching the Rifkin home turned up a
large collection of mementos he had assembled to commemorate his
conquests, items such as lace panties, pantyhose, lipstick containers,
bracelets, and necklaces that were taken from the bodies of his victims.

Not surprisingly, given his confession and the abundance of physical
evidence that had been collected, Rifkin's attorney decided to go for an
insanity defense. With his down-home kind of country style and low-key
manner, Sale had been there before. He had won an acquittal by reason of
insanity of a man who had killed and dismembered his wife and three
children with a bayonet. He had also won a number of other difficult
cases, including a successful entrapment defense for a New York City
police officer and his brother who were caught as they tried to pull off
an armed robbery, and the dismissal of armed robbery charges for Malcolm
X's bodyguards.

Sale had spent eight years at the Legal Aid Society in Nassau County,
during which time he put together a string of sixteen straight trial
victories, a feat that has never been equaled, according to a senior
trial lawyer with the society. He was elevated to bureau chief in charge
of felony cases at Legal Aid before entering private practice. He would
need all of that and a bit more in defense of Rifkin, however, for no
serial killer had ever been found not guilty by reason of insanity.

~ Preparing Rifkin's Insanity Defense ~

I first read about the Rifkin case while I was on vacation in Sante Fe.
It captured my attention because Rifkin was precisely the type of
subject -- an adoptee killer -- I had been studying and he came from my
immediate Long Island neighborhood. Soon after I returned from Sante Fe,
Sale contacted me, told me of his plans to mount an insanity defense,
and gave me psychological reports from Joel's childhood and teenage
years in East Meadow.

Early in my career I had worked in the East Meadow school district, and
two of the reports Sale gave me were written by close friends and school
psychologists I had worked with -- Edna Dublirer in the junior high
school and Norm Pollens in the high school. I was especially interested
to note that both reports stated that Joel had been troubled by memory
problems, a finding that could be crucial to an insanity defense based
on dissociative identity disorder, commonly referred to as multiple
personality.

During my discussions with Sale, I also discovered that I knew the
psychotherapist, Joseph Nemovicher, who had treated Joel in twenty-five
sessions from May 1977 to January 1979. As it developed, Nemovicher had
documented Joel's learning difficulties and memory problems but had
never considered the effects of adoption on his psychological profile.

In my first face-to-face meeting with Sale (which, as it turned out,
would also be my last) I told him that the reports from Joel's school
psychologist would be valuable in supporting his defense strategy since
they documented a pre-existing childhood history of emotional
disturbance, mental illness, and severe memory loss. I also suggested
getting additional reports from neurologists that might reveal some
organic brain condition that could contribute to a mental-status
defense. Most critically I recommended that we begin a search for his
birth mother immediately.

A genetic predisposition toward violence has been documented with
growing authority by a number of researchers, most notably Dr. Sarnoff
Mednick, who has been studying the relationship between adoption,
genetics, criminality, and violence in Denmark, where precise and
thorough adoption records are kept.

I made arrangements to meet with Joel and do a thorough psychological
evaluation. Over the course of the next twenty months we met for more
than 110 hours, and the result was perhaps the most complete
psychological profile of a serial killer ever developed.

~ My First Meeting With Rifkin ~

My first meeting with Joel took place on September 9, 1993, just over
two months after his arrest. His recollection of events and how he felt
was still fresh at that time, uncolored by subsequent tellings and
retellings, by accounts rendered by others involved in the case, and
perhaps by suggestions of how to frame his story for the optimum legal
effect. I met with him in the Nassau County Correctional Center (NCCC)
just a few blocks from his alma mater, East Meadow High School.
Coincidentally, East Meadow High is the school district where I had
worked as a young psychologist.

A maximum security institution, NCCC was a forbidding granite structure
that had recently been enlarged, renovated and modernized so that it now
looked like a high tech control center with banks of TV monitors and
video cameras recording every move in every corridor. When I walked
through the thick steel front door, I was asked to present my
credentials and authorization letter from an attorney. The correction
officers on duty had me empty my pockets, searched me with metal
detectors, and finally led me through a maze of corridors. As each metal
door clanged shut behind me I felt a sense of foreboding that it might
be easier to enter than it would be to exit.

My destination was a small cubicle, eight-by-eight feet, that was glass
enclosed and looked out onto a large, central visitors' area where
prisoners met with their families. I waited for about ten minutes,
seated at a small metal table, with a writing pad open to take notes as
we talked. Finally Rifkin was brought in.

Rifkin initially appeared to be timid, passive, and somewhat distracted
as he sat across from me, looking down or off into space, rarely making
eye contact. He was, however, not at all shy about talking. It was
apparent that he enjoyed being the center of attention, people hanging
on his every word. In fact, Rifkin's problem was not talking, but
listening. As our sessions continued, I would often say to him, "Joel,
shut up and listen for a change."

What struck me most about him in that first meeting was the *duality* of
his nature, abruptly shifting from a timid, passive, nonagressive type
to an assertive, egocentric, grandiose personality. I was also
interested to note his failure to display any real emotion. He never
came across as angry or hostile, and certainly not as violent. Even when
he described the seventeen gory "events," as he referred to them, he
showed no emotion -- neither rage nor regret nor remorse. It was as if
he were describing acts committed by someone other than himself.



Copyright ©2007 by David Kirschner. All Rights Reserved. Please feel
free to duplicate or distribute this file as long as the contents are
not changed and this copyright notice is intact. Thank you.





Re posted By FX From alt.support.foster-parents