Lynbrook · Nassau County · New York · October 2025 | ForensicTimes.com | Cold Case · DNA Forensics · Wrongful Conviction
Table of Contents
- November 10, 1984: The Night Theresa Fusco Disappeared
- The Wrong Men: Three Wrongful Convictions and 18 Years Each
- The Cold Case That Would Not Close
- The Smoothie Straw: A Forensic Masterstroke
- Richard Bilodeau: The Man One Mile Away
- Forensic Analysis: From Vaginal Swab to Genetic Genealogy
- Criminal Psychology: The Profile of a Stranger Killer
- Law and Legal Implications: Double Murder Charges and the Shadow of Prior Convictions
- Global Context: Investigative Genetic Genealogy Rewrites Cold Case Justice
- Investigation: What Remains Unknown
- She Lives in My Heart
November 10, 1984: The Night Theresa Fusco Disappeared
At 9:47 p.m. on November 10, 1984, Theresa Fusco clocked out of her part-time job at the Hot Skates roller rink in Lynbrook, a small community on Long Island’s South Shore in Nassau County, New York. She was 16 years old, a high school junior, and she had just been fired from her snack bar job. Witnesses later recalled she had been seen crying as she left the building. She walked out into the November night and was never seen alive again.
Her body was found on December 5, 1984 — three and a half weeks after she disappeared — in a wooded area near Park Place in Lynbrook, approximately half a mile from her home and a few blocks from the rink. She was found naked, buried under leaves. The medical examiner determined she had been strangled with a ligature and raped. She had been dead for some time before her discovery. The precise circumstances of how she came to be in those woods — who she encountered after leaving the rink, what happened between 9:47 p.m. and her death — were not established in 1984 and are a central question of the prosecution 41 years later.
Thomas Fusco, her father, stood with prosecutors at a press conference in October 2025. He pulled a small photograph of his daughter from his suit jacket pocket. “I never gave up hope,” he said. “I loved her, and I miss her. She lives in my heart.” Theresa’s mother had died in 2019 without seeing an arrest. Four decades of uncertainty had accumulated between the night his daughter left the roller rink and the morning investigators knocked on Richard Bilodeau’s door.
The Wrong Men: Three Wrongful Convictions and 18 Years Each
The Theresa Fusco case is not only a cold case murder story. It is one of the most consequential wrongful conviction cases in New York State history — a sequence of prosecutorial and investigative failures that sent three innocent men to prison for nearly two decades each, consumed millions of dollars in civil judgments, and ensured that the real killer spent those same decades living freely one mile from where he had committed the crime.
In 1986, two years after Fusco’s death, three men — John Kogut, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead — were convicted of her rape and murder following a trial that relied heavily on a confession and circumstantial evidence. All three maintained their innocence. All three were sentenced to prison terms that would keep them locked up for decades.
The collapse of those convictions began in 1993, when DNA testing showed that none of the three men’s genetic profiles matched the male DNA recovered from Fusco’s body. Prosecutors countered that the samples tested were of lower quality and that semen from the defendants might not have been detected. The three men remained in prison. In 2003, defense lawyers discovered police property records revealing the existence of an intact, previously untested vaginal swab recovered from Fusco at autopsy. When that swab was tested, the result was the same as in 1993: the DNA found on and in Theresa Fusco’s body did not belong to John Kogut, John Restivo, or Dennis Halstead.
Their convictions were overturned in June 2003. Charges against two of the men were dismissed. The third — Kogut — was retried in 2005, and in that retrial the Nassau County DA’s office argued, astonishingly, that the unidentified male DNA from the swab was meaningless and that the original evidence against Kogut remained valid. Kogut was acquitted. He had spent approximately 18 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
In 2014, a federal jury awarded John Restivo and Dennis Halstead $18 million each in civil suits against Nassau County and the police investigators involved in their prosecution. The scale of those settlements reflects not merely the years lost but the documented investigative misconduct that had produced the original convictions.
The Cold Case That Would Not Close
After the 2003 exonerations, the Nassau County DA’s office was left with a confirmed male DNA profile — extracted from the 1984 vaginal swab — that belonged to an unknown person. Standard short tandem repeat profiling, the primary DNA identification method available in 2003 and for the decade that followed, can confirm a match when a suspect’s profile is already in a database. It cannot identify an unknown person from a crime scene sample alone. The profile existed. The person it belonged to did not appear in any criminal database. The case went cold.
For twenty years, the profile sat in forensic storage while the technology available to act on it improved around it. Periodically, investigators would run comparisons against expanding databases as new offenders were entered into the system. Each comparison returned no match. Richard Bilodeau had no prior criminal record. His DNA was not in any law enforcement database. There was no digital footprint that connected him to the case, no informant tip, no surviving witness who placed him at the scene. He was invisible to every investigative tool available until a new generation of forensic science made him visible.
In August 2023, Nassau County investigators submitted the intact 1984 vaginal swab to Othram, a forensic genomics laboratory in Houston that specialises in cold case DNA analysis using techniques well beyond conventional STR profiling. Othram’s approach — described by CEO David Mittelman as genome sequencing capable of building a complete DNA profile from degraded or low-quantity biological material — produced a usable genetic profile from the four-decade-old sample. That profile was then submitted to the FBI’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Unit, which used it to search public genealogical databases and reconstruct a family tree pointing toward a possible suspect. The investigative leads that emerged identified Richard Bilodeau in 2024.
The Smoothie Straw: A Forensic Masterstroke
By February 2024, Nassau County Police Department’s Homicide Squad and the FBI had identified Bilodeau as a suspect and had placed him under surveillance. What they needed was a direct, uncontested sample of his DNA — biological material collected from him personally, without his knowledge, that could be compared against the 1984 crime scene profile with no chain-of-custody ambiguity.
They obtained it from a smoothie café in Suffolk County. Investigators observed Bilodeau use a cup and straw and discard them. They recovered both items from the trash. DNA extracted from the straw matched the profile extracted from Fusco’s 1984 vaginal swab. The match was, in DA Anne Donnelly’s characterisation at the October 15 press conference, one hundred percent. “DNA doesn’t lie,” Donnelly said. “When you have a DNA match, a 100% match, we got the guy.”
The legal framework for this collection is the same as in similar covert DNA cases: a person has no Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy in material they voluntarily discard in a public place. A cup and straw thrown into a café waste bin are legally abandoned property, recoverable without a warrant. The DNA on the straw — saliva deposited involuntarily through the act of drinking — is, once discarded, legally accessible to investigators who choose to retrieve it. The technique is clean, legally airtight, and produces evidence that cannot be challenged on grounds of illegal search.
Before his arrest, investigators went to Bilodeau’s workplace and spoke with him directly. He denied knowing Theresa Fusco. Then he said something that would be quoted in every subsequent press conference and courtroom appearance: “People got away with murder back then.” At the October 15 arraignment, Assistant DA Jared Rosenblatt quoted it back to him in open court: “Well, Mr. Bilodeau, it’s 2025, and your day of reckoning is now.” Donnelly had her own version: “It’s 2025 and I got you now.”
Richard Bilodeau: The Man One Mile Away
Richard Bilodeau was 23 years old in November 1984. He was living with his grandparents at 16 Tredwell Avenue in Lynbrook — approximately one mile from the Hot Skates roller rink where Theresa Fusco worked, and approximately one mile from the Fusco family home. He operated a mobile coffee truck in the area at the time, which would have given him regular, unexceptional reasons to be present in the neighbourhood at various hours.
In the 41 years between Theresa Fusco’s murder and his arrest, Bilodeau accumulated no criminal record of any kind. He eventually moved to Center Moriches in Suffolk County. He lived alone. He worked overnight shifts at a Walmart. Investigators described him as having spent his adult life below the radar — no close relationships, no visible social network beyond a brother, a reported habit of sports gambling. His Lynbrook neighbours, interviewed by CBS New York after his arrest, said they were not surprised — that they remembered him as “a troubled young man” and that some had warned their children away from him. None of Theresa Fusco’s friends or family recognised Bilodeau’s name or face when investigators showed them his photograph. He was a stranger to her. She was, by every investigative account, unknown to him before the night she left the roller rink.
How Bilodeau came to encounter Theresa Fusco on the night of November 10, 1984 — whether he was in the area by plan or chance, whether he approached her or followed her, what happened between her departure from Hot Skates at 9:47 p.m. and the events that led to her death — has not been publicly established and will be contested at trial.
Forensic Analysis: From Vaginal Swab to Genetic Genealogy
The Theresa Fusco case is a forensic timeline spanning four decades of evolving DNA science, and each phase of that evolution played a specific role in ultimately producing the arrest of Richard Bilodeau.
The original 1984 autopsy recovered a vaginal swab containing semen — biological material that, at the time of collection, could not be DNA-profiled using any available technique. DNA profiling did not exist as an investigative tool in 1984. The swab was preserved in police property storage — a decision whose importance could not have been fully understood at the time but which would prove decisive four decades later.
In 1993, standard DNA testing — restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis, the earliest form of forensic DNA comparison — was applied to available biological samples. The results excluded all three convicted men. Prosecutors challenged the quality of the samples tested. The technique was sufficiently limited that the challenge had forensic plausibility. The convictions were not overturned.
In 2003, short tandem repeat analysis — the technique that had by then become standard — was applied to the intact vaginal swab that defense lawyers had discovered in police property records. STR profiling produced a clear male DNA profile that excluded all three convicted men. Their convictions were overturned. But STR profiling, as Othram’s CEO David Mittelman explained to CNN, can only confirm a match once a suspect is already identified — it cannot point investigators toward an unknown person.
The breakthrough came from next-generation sequencing and investigative genetic genealogy — the same methodological family that had identified the Golden State Killer in 2018. Othram’s genomic sequencing of the 1984 swab built a complete DNA profile from the four-decade-old sample. The FBI’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Unit then used that profile to search public genealogical databases — consumer platforms where individuals upload their DNA results for ancestry research — and constructed a family tree working outward from partial matches. That process identified relatives of the unknown suspect, and investigative narrowing of the family tree to the most plausible candidate produced the name Richard Bilodeau.
The smoothie straw provided the direct confirmation. Standard STR comparison of the straw DNA against the 1984 swab profile established the match at the level of certainty required for prosecution. The retired detectives who returned to assist with the case worked through 150 boxes of original case files to ensure the evidentiary chain could survive every challenge the defence would mount.
Criminal Psychology: The Profile of a Stranger Killer
The Fusco case presents a profile consistent with what forensic psychologists classify as an opportunistic stranger homicide — a category in which the victim and offender have no prior relationship, the encounter is situational rather than targeted, and the crime is not premeditated in the conventional sense but reflects a prepared psychological state of willingness to act when opportunity presents.
Bilodeau’s profile at the time of the murder — 23 years old, living with grandparents, operating a mobile coffee truck with irregular hours in the neighbourhood — describes a person whose daily routines gave him legitimate reason to be in the vicinity of the Hot Skates rink at various times, including late at night. That proximity, combined with the absence of any prior relationship with Fusco and the absence of any evidence of targeted surveillance or planning on his part, is consistent with an encounter that was situational rather than premeditated — a young woman alone, distressed, walking home late at night, and a man who chose to act.
The 41 years of subsequent behaviour — no further criminal record, no violent incidents, no confessions or boasts, the quiet Walmart job, the anonymous life in Center Moriches — is consistent with research on non-recidivist single-incident violent offenders. Not all sexual homicide perpetrators go on to reoffend. Some commit a single act of extreme violence and then, whether through fear, circumstance, or the satisfaction of whatever psychological need drove the original act, do not repeat. Bilodeau’s unremarkable subsequent life does not establish his innocence — the DNA evidence addresses that question — but it complicates the popular assumption that sexual murderers are inevitably serial.
His statement to investigators — “People got away with murder back then” — is forensically and psychologically significant. It is not a denial structured around alibi or alternative explanation. It is a reflection on impunity — an acknowledgment of the era’s investigative limitations framed as a general proposition rather than a personal one. Whether that comment reflects confidence that he had escaped accountability or simply a detached observation about the 1980s is a question that prosecutors and defence lawyers will interpret very differently at trial.
Law and Legal Implications: Double Murder Charges and the Shadow of Prior Convictions
Richard Bilodeau was arraigned on October 15, 2025, before Judge Helene Gugerty in Nassau County on two counts of Murder in the Second Degree — one count of intentional murder (an A-I felony under New York Penal Law) and one count of murder committed in the course of a rape. He pleaded not guilty and was remanded without bail. If convicted on either count, he faces up to 25 years to life in prison. He was 63 at the time of his arrest.
On November 21, 2025, prosecutors filed a motion asking the court to order Bilodeau to provide a buccal swab — a DNA sample from inside his cheek — to formally enter his DNA into the evidentiary record for trial purposes. A prosecutorial brief stated that a buccal swab profile from Bilodeau “will provide material evidence identifying [him] as the individual responsible for the crime that took place on November 10, 1984.” Judge Gugerty gave defense lawyers until January 2026 to respond.
The most significant legal complication in the Bilodeau trial is one that the prosecution did not create but cannot escape: the history of the three wrongful convictions. Defense attorney Daniel Russo — Bilodeau’s court-appointed counsel — has already signalled the defence’s posture: “This incident took place over 40 years ago, and three men were convicted after trial and served almost two decades in prison before being exonerated. If ever a case exemplifies that someone accused of a crime is entitled to the presumption of innocence, it is this case.” The wrongful convictions are not merely historical background. They are the defence’s opening argument — a concrete demonstration that Nassau County investigators and prosecutors have been wrong before, and wrong with devastating consequences.
Paul Casteleiro, John Kogut’s former defence attorney, raised a further concern: that Bilodeau’s defence team may attempt to revive the theory that the three exonerated men were responsible, pointing to the volume of evidence assembled against them in the original trial. That strategy — using the prior wrongful convictions as an alternative suspect framework — would require confronting the DNA evidence directly, which shows that the biological material recovered from Fusco’s body matches Bilodeau and not the three exonerated men. Whether the defence can construct a plausible alternative account in the face of that evidence will determine much about how the trial proceeds.
Global Context: Investigative Genetic Genealogy Rewrites Cold Case Justice
The Theresa Fusco case is one of hundreds of cold case homicides across the United States that have been cracked or advanced since 2018 through investigative genetic genealogy — the technique that identified the Golden State Killer and has since become the most significant new tool in cold case investigation since the introduction of DNA profiling itself.
The technique’s power lies in its ability to work from crime scene DNA outward — through public genealogical databases, family tree reconstruction, and investigative narrowing — to identify an unknown suspect without requiring their profile to already be in a criminal database. It transforms the cold case problem from “we have a profile but no name” to “we can find the name from the profile.” For cases like Fusco’s, where the perpetrator had no criminal record and therefore no database entry, it is the only viable path to identification short of a confession or eyewitness.
Othram, the Houston laboratory that processed the 1984 swab, has become one of the primary private-sector partners for law enforcement agencies pursuing this approach. Its genomic sequencing capability — able to build complete DNA profiles from degraded, low-quantity, or mixed biological material — has extended the technique to cases where conventional STR profiling would have failed. The Fusco case represents a particularly demanding application: biological material that was over 38 years old at the time of submission, preserved in storage conditions that were adequate for their era but not optimised for long-term genomic integrity.
The legal and ethical dimensions of investigative genetic genealogy are actively contested in the United States. Several states have enacted legislation restricting or regulating the technique, concerned about the privacy implications of using consumer genealogical databases — populated by people who uploaded their DNA for ancestry research, not criminal investigation — as a law enforcement tool. The FBI’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Unit operates under internal policy guidelines, but no federal statutory framework governs the technique’s use. The Bilodeau case will add to the body of precedent shaping how courts evaluate evidence obtained through this method.
Investigation: What Remains Unknown
The precise circumstances of Theresa Fusco’s encounter with Richard Bilodeau on the night of November 10, 1984 have not been established and are not in the public record. Prosecutors have not publicly described a theory of how Bilodeau came to be in contact with Fusco after she left the roller rink — whether he encountered her on foot, in a vehicle, at a specific location, or through some other means. The DA stated she did not want to speculate about motive.
The buccal swab ordered by the court — Bilodeau’s direct DNA sample for trial purposes — was still awaiting a judicial ruling on the defence’s response as of January 2026. Whether the court orders its collection, and whether that order is challenged by the defence as a further constitutional issue, will shape one dimension of the evidentiary proceedings.
The question of whether Bilodeau may have committed other crimes — sexual assaults, attacks, or killings that were never attributed to him — has not been publicly addressed by investigators. His mobile coffee truck operation in 1984 gave him mobility across Nassau County’s residential areas during hours when streets were less populated. No additional cases have been publicly linked to his DNA profile, but whether investigators have run that comparison against other cold case biological evidence from the same era has not been disclosed.
The trial date had not been set as of the time of this report. The defence’s posture — leveraging the three prior wrongful convictions as a framework for reasonable doubt — creates a trial that will require prosecutors to present the DNA evidence with extraordinary clarity and to address directly the history of investigative failure that preceded the current indictment. Whether a Nassau County jury, fully aware that three innocent men once spent 18 years each in prison for this crime, will convict Richard Bilodeau is a question no forensic analysis can answer in advance.
She Lives in My Heart
Thomas Fusco was in his thirties when his daughter walked out of a roller rink in Lynbrook and did not come home. He is in his eighties now. He stood at the October 15 press conference and pulled a small photograph of Theresa from his suit jacket pocket — the same pocket he had carried it in, one imagines, for longer than he could remember. His wife, Theresa’s mother, had died in 2019 without ever knowing who had killed their daughter.
“I never gave up hope,” he said. “I loved her, and I miss her. She lives in my heart.”
The man prosecutors say killed her had been living one mile away in 1984. He had spent 41 years working night shifts, gambling on sports, living alone, and apparently counting on the observation he eventually made aloud to investigators: that people had gotten away with murder back then. He was not wrong about the era. He was wrong about himself.
A smoothie straw in a Suffolk County café trash can ended his impunity. It did not end the grief of a father who has carried a photograph in his suit pocket for four decades. It did not restore the years that John Kogut, John Restivo, and Dennis Halstead lost to a case that was built on the wrong foundation. It produced an indictment — which is a beginning, not an ending. Whether it produces a conviction is for a jury in Nassau County to determine. Thomas Fusco, who has seen this case fail before in the most catastrophic way possible, is waiting to find out.
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