My mother has been missing pretty much my entire life,” says Benjamin Torres, 32. Valerie Mack was just 17 when she gave birth to him in New Jersey.
“She was just scared of love. She was scared of anything good, she probably felt like she didn’t deserve it, and she would run away,” says Torres.
Mack’s childhood had been deeply traumatic. Child services took her and her six siblings into foster care at a young age, due to her mother’s mental illness.
“Before she was separated from her children, my mom’s biological mom lined all of them up in front of the fireplace and got this hot iron, and they all had a matching scar because she branded them all,” says Torres, who is speaking publicly for the first time.
Soon, Mack was adopted by a couple but they died a few years later. At age 10, she was adopted by a new family, who provided her with a loving home. They enrolled her in horseriding lessons and cultivated her interests. Life was good for a few years. But from her teens onwards she grappled with opioid addiction. She also had a few spells in jail, after being convicted for sex work she undertook to support herself.
Torres was brought up by his dad, who was 16 when he was born. Mack would pop back into his life for visits and he has precious memories from those visits.
“She was very much into music, she was a good singer. She was an excellent artist. She had this sense of style that was just amazing. She was really pretty too.”
The last time they were together, Torres was six years old. Mack had taken him to her adoptive parents’ house for a sleepover. They played the video game Mortal Kombat, and had teased each other about who would win. When he awoke, he found a goodbye note. Mack had gone again.
“Knowing what I know now about addiction, I’m sure that the chains were pulling at her,” says Torres. “She was probably becoming sick. The drugs got the better of her.”
‘Heroin was my way to feel close to her. There’s a hole in my heart that I have been trying to fill with drugs for a long time’
‘Heroin was my way to feel close to her. There’s a hole in my heart that I have been trying to fill with drugs for a long time’
Benjamin Torres
While growing up, Torres thought his mother was out in the world somewhere, and that one day, maybe they’d be reunited.
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“I always said that if she would just come back, I would just accept her with open arms and forgive her instantly,” he says. “I just wanted to know her so bad. I was hoping that she wouldn’t think that I was mad at her for leaving, that that was what was keeping her away.”
It would be 19 years before Torres learned the truth about his mother’s fate.
As the years passed, his memories of his mother began to fade. His father rarely discussed her. One of the few things Torres knew about his mother was her heroin addiction, so he started using the drug as a way to connect with her.
“Heroin was my way to feel close to her. There’s a hole in my heart that I have been trying to fill with drugs for a long time,” he says.
One day in 2020, the FBI knocked on his door. The remains of a woman – her dismembered torso was discovered in 2000 in Manorville, NY, and her head, hands, and a foot, were found on 4 April 2011 along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach – had been identified as his mother.
“Finding out that a Jane Doe was my mother was a bombshell,” he says.
Valerie Mack
Valerie Mack became the seventh victim that Rex Heuermann was charged with murdering. Torres had never heard of the Long Island serial killer. Since then he has seen some documentaries about the crimes, and has read the manifesto-type document detailing torture techniques that police retrieved from Heuermann’s computer.
“That was really hard to read, because I know that some of that stuff was either derived from the experience of my mother’s murder, or was used thereafter. His ‘rules to hunt’ are incredibly sick,” he says.
On 8 April, Heuermann admitted to murdering Mack, along with seven other victims between 1993 and 2010, in a Long Island courtroom.
Torres is now focused on rebuilding his life. He is fighting his addiction, and plans to train as a recovery coach to “help people in my mom’s memory”, he says.
Grief hits him in waves of feelings of numbness, pain, and shock.
“When I found out that she was murdered, everyone’s narrative changed, because now it is clear she hadn’t abandoned me,” he says. “She would have been in my life if her life wasn’t stolen from her. She was murdered not long after I last saw her.”
Photograph by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu Agency via Getty