As Halloween month comes to a close, I’ll round out this series of spooky history accounts with something that’s more haunting than any story of ghosts or aliens: mass murder. An actual human being doing a senseless, horrible, yet completely real thing.
Don’t fret – I may not be the most serious psuedo-historian, but I know when to draw the line. I’m not going to glorify or make too many playful quips about an actual murderer. If only I could supplement such a terrifying story with something a little more light-hearted, right?
Well, it turns out there exists a story that can give us the best of both worlds.
In 1984, residents of the New York City metropolitan area picked up the newspaper on the morning of April 16th and promptly lost their appetites. The story on the front page was shocking in the worst possible way. “10 IN BROOKLYN ARE FOUND SLAIN INSIDE A HOUSE.” The header screamed the horrific news to its unsuspecting readers. And so the world became aware of one of the largest mass-murders in Brooklyn’s history, the Palm Sunday Massacre.
Mass-murder always comes as a terrible shock, and finding out it had taken place inside a home – where one is supposed to feel safest – certainly doesn’t help, but oh, it gets even worse.
The ten victims were women (one pregnant) and children. When a detective, Bo Dietl, arrived at the home, he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. “It looked like a wax museum,” he told the New York Post. “Bodies everywhere. And then you had to grasp they were humans.”
The crime scene was reportedly gruesome enough to make several hardened detectives and police officers empty their stomachs.
Each victim had been gunned down, execution-style, and taken by surprise, if the way they were calmly positioned on couches and chairs meant anything. The wax museum comment, eerie as it is, seems apt – one woman, still mid-action, held a spoon and a pudding cup in her cold hands.
A New York Post article featuring an image of Jaffe holding Rivera. Photo via the Daily Mail. © New York Post.
The NYPD arrived quickly, and Officer Joanne Jaffe – a beat cop at the time – was equally as horrified by what she saw. Then, movement caught her eye. Some small, uncoordinated thing was weaving its way through the mass of bodies, covered in the blood of the dead.
The thing turned out to be Christina Rivera, an 8-month-old infant and the sole survivor of the massacre that killed her loved ones, including her mother. Jaffe quickly picked her up, cradled the shell-shocked baby to her chest, walked away from the traumatic scene, and promised to protect the baby in her arms from any further harm, as long as she could help it.
She tended to the baby as long as she could, but Rivera was swiftly placed under the guardianship of her grandparents. Jaffe was hesitant to say goodbye to the little girl. “I fell in love with her,” she later told the New York Times.
Jaffe frequently visited Rivera – bringing her toys, watching her grow, and even taking her on family vacations with Jaffe’s husband. Rivera’s grandmother told her that Jaffe was simply a family friend – Rivera had never been informed of the massacre she had unknowingly survived as an infant.
That is, not until she was 10, when one of her classmates informed her that her mother had been brutally murdered. And then teased her about it.
Kids can be real dicks sometimes.
Once the truth was out, Rivera’s grandmother came clean about the entire ordeal, including the real role Jaffe played in Rivera’s life. Rivera had always felt a special bond with the police officer, and it strengthened tenfold once she found out that Jaffe had effectively mothered her the second her biological mother could do so no longer.
When Rivera turned 14, her grandmother couldn’t handle raising her – teenagers can be pretty brutal, and Rivera carried trauma to boot – and Jaffe happily took the girl into her home.
There she stayed as she grew into a young woman, graduated high school, and eventually started a prosperous career. Rivera was thriving, and Jaffe was there to support her through it all, but Rivera still felt as though there was a gaping hole in her life.
Despite taking in part in and then later taking over the raising of Rivera, Jaffe never became her legal guardian. “I felt very orphaned, if that makes sense, even though she was still my mom and still there for me,” Rivera said in the New York Post. “It was almost like I wanted to be claimed, like, ‘I’m her daughter, I belong to her.’ ”
Jaffe felt guilty for unintentionally harming the child she promised to protect, so in 2014, 30 years after the Palm Sunday Massacre that put these two women on the same path, Jaffe officially adopted Rivera as her daughter. That year also marked Jaffe’s promotion to the Chief of Community Affairs, making her the highest-ranking female police officer on the force.
There’s something about those NYPD women, am I right?
So, yes, murderers are horrible. Mass murderers are horrible. And cold-blooded, drug-crazed executioners who target an innocent family and keep them posed like department store mannequins are truly terrifying.
But, hey, at least Joanne Jaffe isn’t.
Herstory Untold 
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