A depraved drifter living in Brooklyn with a transgender girlfriend was busted Thursday in the vicious sex assault of a 85-year-old woman on the upper East Side, police said.
Jeffrey Ritter, 32, was nabbed in an East New York apartment around 1 a.m. after cops got a tip from a neighbor who recognized him from surveillance footage shown on TV.
"\[The caller\] described the individual in front of the building, saying he looked very much like the person in the tapes we showed," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Ritter was charged with criminal sexual act, robbery and sexual abuse, cops said.
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" the heavily tattooed suspect yelled Thursday morning, after cursing at reporters outside the NYPD Special Victim's Unit headquarters in East Harlem.
Ritter, who works as an itinerant tatoo artist, had moved into the Brooklyn apartment with his strapping girlfriend about six months ago and did odd jobs around the building, neighbors said.
He has a tattoo of the New York Yankees logo beneath his left eye, the name "Tahtianna" above his left eyebrow. On one side of his neck are the words "Slow Poke," and on the other the initials "SHLK" for "Six Hood Latin Kings," a gang in Chicago.
The shocking Memorial Day attack occurred in one of the city's wealthiest zip codes - just a few blocks from Mayor Bloomberg's home.
The 100-pound victim was taking a stroll at 5:40 a.m. when she encountered the sicko, who was lurking around Madison Ave. and E. 83rd St., pretending to talk on a cell phone.
Surveillance footage showed the beefy Ritter wrap his bulging, tattooed arms around the elderly woman's head and drag her into a sunken stoop of a luxury home.
Ritter then allegedly forced her to perform oral sex and stole her ring before fleeing.
Raised in Minnesota, Ritter has drifted around the country for much of the past decade and has 11 arrests in five states, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
The most serious was a 2001 conviction in Nebraska for attempted sexual assault for which he was sentenced to four years in prison and required to register as a sex offender.
Authorities say Ritter and an accomplice were working as traveling magazine salesman when they approached a 23-year-old woman and 16-year-old boy in a car, robbed them and threatened to rape and kill the woman.
In a bizarre twist, cops initially arrested Ritter's identical twin brother in the assault, but eventually realized their mistake.
Newspaper reports at the time noted that both twins sported matching teardrop tattoos on their faces.
When investigators initially picked Ritter up in Brooklyn, they charged him with failing to register in New York as a sex offender.
Under interrogation, Ritter confessed to Monday's assault on the elderly woman, Kelly said.
Neighbors in Brooklyn said Ritter was an odd figure in the building and often talked about women in a way that gave them the creeps.
"It's like obsessive, the way he talks about it," said neighbor Kendrick Murray. "Some people brag about it different. He was more dirty. It's too graphic. You don't have to tell me that."
Murray, 32, said he and his wife saw reports of the assault on TV and immediately thought of their neighbor when the surveillance images were shown.
"\[We\] were like, 'That might be him' when we saw the tattoos. Me and her made a bet," he said. "It's a good thing the cops arrested him. I live here with my kids. I would have whooped his ass."
Investigators say they believe Ritter may have been responsible for another attempted rape on the upper East Side on May 22.
Kelly said investigators still have no direct information tying Ritter to that incident, but that he will be put in a lineup.
With Sarah Armaghan, John Lauinger, Melissa Grace and Whitney Evans
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