Woman's head is identified

Almost 25 years after her severed head was found on a New Jersey golf course, police on Wednesday identified the woman they believe was the first victim of a notorious Long Island serial killer.

New Jersey state police said Heidi Balch is believed to be the first of 17 women killed by Joel Rifkin during a four-year spree that ended when he was pulled over for a missing license plate in 1993 with a dead woman's body in the back of his pickup.

Authorities have long believed the woman whose head was found in March 1989 on a golf course in Hopewell Township, near Trenton, was the first woman Rifkin killed. He all but admitted it after his arrest, when he provided details on where he disposed of her head and legs.

Rifkin was eventually sentenced to more than 200 years in prison for the killings. But Balch's identity remained a mystery for more than two decades.

State police Detective Sgt. Stephen Urbanski said Balch's parents did not initially list her as a missing person and Balch, who worked as a prostitute in New York City, used several aliases and Social Security numbers.

"It's very rare that you have a story like this," Urbanski said. "The first thing is to ID the body, and then you move on with the investigation, you look at acquaintances and things like that. In this one, the answers were there all along, we just had to put them together."

Rifkin had told police he killed a prostitute he'd known as "Susie," Urbanski said. The search led to New York, where investigators focused on a prostitute who'd gone by the name Susan Spencer - and about 15 other names. Some of the bogus Social Security numbers she'd used were traced to Ohio and Florida, so Urbanski went to those states to check missing-persons reports.

Finally, investigators learned the woman had once used the name Heidi Balch, who had been listed as a missing person in New York by an aunt in 2001. Even that discovery was complicated by the revelation that the last sighting of Balch was in 1995, six years after the remains were found on the golf course. Urbanski said it was later revealed that Balch's aunt had not actually seen her niece but that someone had mistakenly told her Heidi had been seen.

The big break came this month, when Balch's aunt identified her niece from an arrest photo of Susan Spencer. Subsequent DNA tests of Balch's mother and father, who live in Maryland and Florida, confirmed the identification.