Mapping Synchronicity

"...time is not absolute and independent but is dependent upon the motion of the observer."

~ J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time

I was reading an article about the two murderers who escaped from Danemora Prison in upstate New York, Richard Matt and David Sweat.  It caught my eye because they are the only two prisoners who have ever escaped from that prison since it was built in the 19th Century and because they were assisted in their escape by a seamstress who worked at the prison, Joyce Mitchell.

She apparently smuggled power tools in to them.  That made me think: how bewitched by someones personality can you be to do something like that? 

Anyway, I was reading about the prison.  It has a church.  Saint Dismas, the Good Thief (he was the thief who was crucified next to Jesus).  A master forger who was imprisoned there decorated the stained glass window.  It's a maximum security prison and has housed a ton of famous inmates.  I was reading who was imprisoned there.  The dude who was the pedophile in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans (Jesse Friedman).  TuPac did some time there.  And then I came across this one dude, Joel Rifkin, who was a serial killer who killed 17 prostitutes (and looks disturbingly like Alan Moore in some pictures...).   Rifkin was interested in horticulture and had befriended the then chief of the CIA's son who got him a job tending dwarf pines.  Weird.  Anyway.  Rifkin's birth parents were college students (his mom was 20 and his dad was 24) so they put him up for adoption and he was adopted by a Russian Jewish couple.  He was adopted on Valentines Day, 1959.  On a side note, I wonder if being abandoned by your birth parents to an orphanage played some part in him becoming a serial killer.  And if there's any truth to that, how much blame if any should his birth parents assume in giving him up for adoption?  Did their actions ripple out and play a part in the grisly deaths of 17 women?

Alan Moore (left), Joel Rifkin (right)

So, that's the first date.  Future serial killer adopted on Valentine's Day.  Weird, right?  That a guy who would grow up and kill prostitutes was adopted on the one day of the year which is all about 'love' and on the eve of the decade of 'free love'...

Anyway.  Turns out his last victim was Tiffany Bresciani, who was the girlfriend of the punk singer Dave Insurgent (born Dave Rubenstein) from the band Reagan Youth (I never heard of them).  So, I start reading about the punk band Reagan Youth and Dave Insurgent.  The band's name was a take on 'Hitler Youth' and meant to satirize the young republican movement.  Dave's parents were actual holocaust survivors, so it gave the whole thing a bit of extra energy. 

The day Reagan ended his presidency the band broke up.  Dave tried a few other bands (House of God) but never was as successful.  He went downhill and got involved in heroin.  On one occasion he got into an argument with a drug dealer who hit him on the head with a baseball bat and caused so much trauma that Dave had to have a lobectomy and his eyelid apparently drooped all the way down to his upper lip...  The lobectomy left him with permanent scars over his forehead from ear to ear.  It must have given him a kind of Shane McGowan or Boris Karloff kind of messed up charisma though.  Why?  Read on.

It was at this time that he met Tiffany Bresciani.  She supported his heroin addiction (she was an addict too) and he would wait for her while she worked tricks to get money for drugs.  Sounds like they had a kind of Sid and Nancy type of relationship.  I dunno.  Anyway, one day she gets picked up by Joel Rifkin.  And he kills her.  And then days later Rifkin is caught speeding by a traffic cop and he tries to escape.  When they finally catch him they find Tiffany's dismembered body in the trunk.

Meanwhile, Dave is waiting for Tiffany to turn back up from her trick with Rifkin.  When she doesn't show up, after an hour or whatever he goes to "all the local Emergency Rooms" and the police stations and basically scours the area looking for her (obviously totally in love with her, right?  To show that much concern.  Which is at odds with letting her trick herself out for drugs, but then, life is complicated I guess).  So, when he finds out she has been killed by this serial killer he sinks into depression and a few days later he commits suicide (by overdosing on anti-depressants), aged 29.

He commits suicide on July 3rd, 1993.  A week after Rifkin is caught with Tiffany's body in his trunk.  And more notably, to me at least, on the eve of the 4th of July.  It's ironic to me, because he spent his life as a punk, singing about his hatred for conservatives, and you can kind of misconstrue the patriotism of the 4th of July with conservative fervor, ya know -  'American Idiot' kind of Green Day thing, right?

Kind of weird as a date to kill yourself, as a punk rocker, the eve of the 4th of July. 

So there you have this circle of tragedy, from Valentines Day, when Rifkin was adopted to the eve of the 4th of July when Dave Rubenstein commits suicide. 

I dunno.  To me, it's kind of fucked up.  But have a look at the one and only photo of Tiffany Bresciani that I could track down.  She's got very haunting eyes.  Like she's mocking life.  It's weird.  In a cool way. 



Sometimes I feel as if tragedy has a way of seeking out other tragedies.  Like a piece of music creates a certain mood if you're within earshot, sometimes almost subconsciously.  Hidden lives leave a vapor trail that, if you cross you get sucked into without really realizing or understanding.  Nothing truly happens in isolation.