Iris Sanchez was a 25-year-old Latina from New York City who disappeared on Mother’s Day weekend, May 10, 1992. Friends and family remembered her as lively and warm and said she loved to dance; she had struggled with addiction and was doing street-level sex work when she stopped showing up and her absence went unexplained for more than a year.

Investigators later determined her last known interaction in Manhattan was with Joel Rifkin, who drove her to a secluded spot, had sex with her and then strangled her. According to his statements, he carried her body across the Brooklyn Bridge into Queens, stripped her of small valuables, and hid her beneath a discarded mattress near Rockaway Boulevard, close to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Her remains were recovered in late June 1993 after Rifkin’s arrest led detectives to multiple dumping sites; he was charged in Queens with second-degree murder in Sanchez’s death and later pleaded guilty. No other suspects were charged. Does anyone have information about Iris’s life in 1992 or recall sightings around First Avenue or the Rockaway Boulevard area that could add detail to her final days?