On March 22nd, 1980, a 20-year-old woman named Eve Wilkowitz boarded the last train out of Penn Station.
She had just had dinner with a friend in Manhattan. She was heading home to Bay Shore, Long Island, a ride she had made hundreds of times before.
She never made it to her apartment. Three days later, her body was found on a front lawn on Center Avenue in Bay Shore, four houses from where her killer had been sleeping that week.
She had been held captive, [music] bound at the wrists with rope, and strangled. Suffolk County [music] Police launched one of the largest investigations in the department’s history.
They canvassed every street in the neighborhood. They interviewed hundreds of people. They knocked on every door on Center Avenue, including the door of the killer’s own mother.
She told detectives [music] she had not noticed anything, and for 42 years, they had nothing.
Not a name. Not a suspect. Not a single match in any DNA database in the country.
Then, in 2022, investigators drove to a small [music] cemetery in Bay Shore, opened a coffin that had been sealed for over 30 years, >> [music] >> and pulled DNA from the bones of a man who died in 1991.
>> [music] >> The results came back on March 23rd, almost 42 years to the day Eve disappeared.
The DNA matched. This is the story of how they solved Suffolk County’s oldest cold case by exhuming the killer from his own grave.
And it starts not with the crime, but with who Eve Wilkowitz actually was, because she deserves to be remembered for the life she was building, not just the night it was taken from her.
If you follow cold cases, and you want to see these stories told the right way, take a second and hit subscribe.
We go deep on the cases everyone thought would stay buried. Eve Wilkowitz was 20 years old in the spring of 1980, and by all accounts, she was just getting started.
She’d grown up on Long Island with her younger sister Irene and their parents, Alfred and Dorothy.
The Wilkowitz family lived in Oakdale, a small Hamlet in the town of Islip on Long Island’s South Shore.
The sisters were close in the way that sisters sometimes are when life forces them together early.
Their mother Dorothy was diagnosed with breast cancer when the girls were young. She fought it for years.
She lost. Dorothy died in 1976. Irene was about 13. Eve was 16 or 17.
And in that moment, the family fractured in a way that never fully healed. Alfred was left raising two daughters alone, and Eve, the older sister, stepped into a role that went beyond just being a sibling.
She became a second anchor in a household that had just lost its center. Irene would later describe it simply.
“Mostly,” she said, “she liked being a big sister to me.” Eve was outgoing, social, and curious about the world in a way that made people gravitate toward her.
She had a lot of friends and kept them close. She loved horses. That was her real passion, horseback riding, spending time at stables and around open fields on Long Island.
Growing up on the South Shore, she had access to riding stables scattered across Suffolk County, and horses gave her something that the rest of her world couldn’t always provide, a kind of freedom, a kind of calm.
Irene later said horses were her passion above everything else. Beyond that, Eve loved music.
She loved reading and writing and drawing. She was the kind of person who was always creating something, always engaged with the world around her.
She wasn’t just passing through life at 20. She was building one. By 1980, Eve had landed what Irene called her dream job.
She was working as a secretary at McMillan Publishing Company in Manhattan, one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses in the country at the time.
Their offices were in Midtown Manhattan. >> [clears throat] >> It was entry-level work, answering phones and handling correspondence, but she was 20 years old and surrounded by books and writers and editors in one of the literary capitals of the world.
For someone who loved reading and writing, it was exactly where she wanted to be.
The commute was brutal, more than 1 hour each way every [music] day from Bay Shore on the South Shore of Long Island into Penn Station in Manhattan.
She rode the Long Island Railroad packed in with tens of thousands of other commuters making the same trek between the suburbs and the city.
Morning train in, evening train home, 5 days a week. It was a grind that chewed up 3 hours of her day before she even started working.
But Eve was making it work. She had bigger plans beyond the secretary desk. She wanted to eventually move into the city, cut down the commute, and build a career closer to where the action was.
She talked about studying social work, about helping people, about doing something meaningful with her life.
She was living in Bay Shore with her boyfriend at the time, a 21-year-old construction worker, and she’d recently struck up a friendship with a young writer at McMillan named Jack Dempsey.
Life was in motion. She had people who loved her, a career she was excited about and the kind of energy that comes with being 20 and deciding who you want to become.
That all mattered. It still matters because in cases like this, the victim so often becomes a name in a police file, a line in a database, a set of facts in a news brief.
Eve Wilkowitz was a real person with a real life and a real future. She had a sister who idolized her, a father who was doing his best after losing his wife, and plans that stretched far beyond the small apartment in Bay Shore where she was living in the spring of 1980.
She was going somewhere. And on a Friday night in March, all of that was taken from her on a quiet street in Bay Shore, Long Island.
We cover cases like these every week on this channel. Stories of the victims who waited decades for justice and the people who refused to let them be forgotten.
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On the evening of Friday, March 21st, 1980, Eve finished her work day at McMillan Publishing in Manhattan.
She had dinner with a friend in the city that night, a normal evening, the kind of thing a 20-year-old living between Manhattan and Long Island did on a Friday.
After dinner, Jack Dempsey, the writer she’d befriended at the office, drove her to Penn Station.
Penn Station in 1980 was not the Penn Station of today. It was darker, grittier, a cavernous transit hub that funneled hundreds of thousands of commuters underground every day.
Late on a Friday night, the crowds thinned out. The last trains of the evening carried a different population than the morning rush.
Fewer commuters in suits, more people heading home late from the city, tired, maybe a little buzzed, looking for a seat by the window and a quiet ride back to the suburbs.
Eve boarded the 12:39 a.m. Long Island Railroad train heading east toward Bay Shore. It was the last train of the night heading in that direction.
If she missed it, she’d have to find another way home or wait until morning.
She didn’t miss it. The ride from Penn Station to Bay Shore took a little over an hour.
The train rattled through Jamaica, through the towns of Nassau County, and out into the darker stretches of Suffolk County, where the station platforms got smaller and the gaps [music] between streetlights got longer.
When the train finally pulled into the Bay Shore station sometime after 1:30 in the morning, Eve stepped off onto the platform and started walking.
Her apartment on 5th Avenue in Bay Shore was roughly a 10-minute walk from the station.
She’d done this walk many times before. Down the quiet residential streets of Bay Shore, past small single-family homes, past parked cars and darkened porches and sidewalks that emptied out long before midnight.
Bay Shore in 1980 was a working-class community on Long Island’s South Shore. Not a dangerous neighborhood by most measures.
Not the kind of place where a woman walking alone at 1:30 in the morning would expect the worst.
Her boyfriend was expecting her home by around 2:00 in the morning. He fell asleep waiting.
When he woke up around 7:00 a.m., Eve was not there. The apartment was exactly the way he’d left it the night before.
Her side of the bed untouched. Her coat not hanging by the door. No sign she’d ever made it home.
No note. No message. Nothing. He called the police and filed a missing person report that same morning.
And then came 3 days of silence. No calls from Eve. No sightings. No reports of anyone seeing her on the walk from the station.
No witnesses stepping forward. Nothing from hospitals. Nothing from friends. Nothing from the LIRR. For 3 full days, Eve Wilkowitz was simply gone.
Swallowed by the darkness of a 10-minute walk between a train station and her own front door.
There’s a detail that makes this silence even harder to sit with. In the weeks before her disappearance, Eve had mentioned something to people in her life.
She told them she’d been frightened. She said that man had followed her on that late night walk home from the Bayshore station.
She didn’t name anyone specific. She didn’t file a police report, but she noticed and she was scared and she told the people around her about it and she kept making the walk anyway because it was her route home and she didn’t have another option.
Somewhere on that 10-minute stretch between the Bayshore Long Island Railroad station and her apartment on 5th Avenue in the dark early morning hours of March 22nd, 1980, Eve Wilkowitz was abducted.
Three days later, on the morning of Tuesday, March 25th, 1980, a neighbor walking outside on Center Avenue in Bayshore noticed something that stopped them cold.
There was a figure lying on the front lawn of a house at 26 Center Avenue.
The figure was barefoot. It was a young woman. She was not moving. It was Eve.
Her coat was missing. Her blouse was missing. Her shoes were gone. Her pocketbook, the one she had carried with her from Manhattan that Friday night, was nowhere to be found.
Her wrists bore ligature marks, deep impressions left by rope, the kind of marks that only come from being bound tightly for an extended period of time.
There were signs she had been assaulted during the time she was held. The Suffolk County Medical Examiner conducted the autopsy and determined the cause of death.
Eve Wilkowitz had been manually strangled and then came the detail that would haunt every investigator who touched this case for the next four decades.
[music] Based on the condition of her body and the forensic timeline, the medical examiner determined that Eve had likely been held alive for most of those three missing days.
She had not been killed on the night she was abducted. [music] She had been taken somewhere, held captive, bound with rope, and kept alive.
She was killed only hours before her body was found on that Tuesday morning lawn.
Think about what that means. For approximately 72 hours, while her boyfriend was filing a missing person report, while her family was wondering why she had not called, while the machinery of normal daily life continued in Bay Shore, Eve Wilkowitz was alive somewhere nearby, held by someone, >> [music] >> bound, terrified, and nobody in the world knew where she was.
The location where her body was discovered would turn out to be one of the cruelest ironies in the entire 42-year history of this case.
Center Avenue in Bay Shore sits between the Long Island Railroad Station and Eve’s apartment on 5th Avenue.
It was directly along her route home. The house at 26 [music] Center Avenue, where she was found on that front lawn, was approximately four houses away from the residence where the man who killed her had been staying with his mother.
Four houses. Maybe a hundred yards of sidewalk. The killer and the victim, practically neighbors.
Police recovered a rape kit at the scene and carefully preserved the biological evidence that had been collected from Eve’s body.
In 1980, forensic DNA profiling did not exist yet. The technology that would eventually crack this case open was still more than a decade from being developed, but the Suffolk County Crime Lab made a decision that seems almost prophetic in hindsight.
They stored those samples carefully. They maintained the chain of custody. They held onto evidence from a case they could not solve, banking on the possibility that someday, somewhere, science would catch up to the crime.
That decision, made by people who had no way of knowing how important those biological samples would become, is the single reason this story has an ending at all.
The Suffolk County Police Department treated the murder of Eve Wilkowitz like what it was, one of the most disturbing and baffling [music] homicides the department had ever encountered.
Detectives fanned out across Bay Shore in the days after the body was found. They canvassed [music] dozens of streets surrounding Center Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and the Long Island Railroad Station.
They knocked on doors in expanding concentric circles from the crime scene. They asked everyone the same questions.
Did you see anything? Did you hear anything? Do you know this woman? Have you noticed anyone acting strangely?
They interviewed hundreds of people over the course of the investigation. Neighbors, commuters, co-workers, friends, acquaintances, strangers who happened to be in the area.
They showed Eve’s photograph to Long Island Railroad riders and station attendants and asked if anyone had seen her board the train, ride the train, or step off the platform at Bay Shore that night.
They retraced her entire route from the McMillan offices in Midtown Manhattan to Penn Station to the Long Island Railroad platform to the Bay Shore Station to her apartment, looking for a single witness who might have seen something at any point along the way.
They looked hard at the people closest to Eve. They investigated Jack Dempsey, the friend from McMillan who dropped her at Penn Station that Friday night.
They investigated her boyfriend, the young construction worker she lived with in Bay Shore. Both men cooperated fully with the investigation.
Both were cleared. Neither was charged. They cast a wider net. They questioned local parolees and registered sex offenders living in the Bay Shore area.
They tracked down anyone who had been reported acting suspiciously near the train station or on the Long Island Railroad around the time of the abduction.
They compiled exhaustive lists of neighborhood residents and worked through them systematically, name by name, door by door, interview by interview.
One of those doors belonged to a woman living on Center Avenue. Her name was Mrs.
Rice. She was the mother of a 29-year-old man named Herbert Rice, who had recently been kicked out by his wife and was temporarily staying at his mother’s house.
>> [music] >> When detectives knocked, Mrs. Rice told them she had not noticed anything unusual on the night in question or in the days that followed.
The interview was logged in the case file. The detectives marked it as routine and moved on to the next door.
Over the following months, investigators went further. They collected DNA samples from many of the people they interviewed, building a growing database of elimination profiles.
They tested suspect after suspect. At one point, years later, they obtained DNA from the brother of a deceased man who had been connected to a string of killings in the 1980s, testing whether Eve might have been among his victims.
The DNA did not match. One detective who worked the case early on later described it as one of the biggest mystery murders we’ve ever had.
They had poured everything into it, manpower, time, resources, hundreds of interviews, dozens of tested leads, an entire community turned inside out.
And none of it produced a name, a confession, a match, or a meaningful break.
The case went cold. But not for everyone. Lieutenant Kevin Bearer, who oversaw the Wilcowitz investigation, kept three banker’s boxes in his office at the Suffolk County Police Department.
They were filled with yellowed police reports, crime scene photographs, newspaper clippings, interview notes, and forensic records.
The Wilcowitz files. He kept them close, not in a storage room, not in an archive, >> [music] >> right there in his office, within arms reach, year after year after year.
It was the only cold case whose files he refused to put away. Every other unsolved homicide eventually went to storage.
Eve’s case stayed at Lieutenant Byrer’s desk. A reminder that the work wasn’t done. If you believe cases like Eve’s deserve to be told and the victims behind them deserve to be remembered, take a second and subscribe to the channel.
We do this every week. Deep dives into the cases everyone thought would stay buried.
The years passed. The evidence sat in storage. The DNA profile sat in a database without a match.
And Irene Wilkowitz grew up carrying the weight of her sister’s unsolved murder like a shadow that never left her side.
Irene was 17 years old when Eve was killed. Their mother had already been dead for four years.
And now her big sister, the person who had stepped into that gap, who had become her anchor and her role model, was gone, too.
Murdered. And the person who did it was walking free somewhere. Maybe in the same town.
Maybe on the same street. Maybe passing her on a sidewalk without either of them knowing.
That thought stayed with Irene for decades. It didn’t fade with the passing of years.
It didn’t soften with time or distance. She later told reporters that she had lived those 42 years in a constant state [music] of fear.
She was afraid the man who killed Eve would come for her next. She was afraid she would encounter him somewhere.
[music] A grocery store, a parking lot, a train platform, and never even know she was standing next to her sister’s killer.
Fear like that doesn’t expire just because a case file gets shelved. For Irene, it renewed itself every single morning.
She built a life anyway. She married and became Irene Broziner. She had two children.
She went through a divorce. She eventually moved from Long Island to Rhode Island, putting physical distance between herself and the place where her sister was taken.
When she had a son, she named him Evan. It was as close to Eve’s name as she could get without giving him the exact same name.
A quiet memorial woven into the next generation. A way of making sure that something of Eve was carried [music] forward.
Their father, Alfred Wilcowitz, died in 2010. He went to his grave without ever learning who killed his oldest daughter.
With his death, Irene became the last close family member who could speak for Eve.
No parents left. No other siblings. No one else who had known Eve the way Irene knew her.
Just one woman in Rhode Island carrying the full weight of a case that the rest of the world had largely forgotten.
“I’m the only person on the face of the earth who can be her voice,” she told a reporter in 2016.
And she meant it. Irene used that voice relentlessly. She gave interviews on every anniversary of the murder.
She called detectives. She reached out to local news stations on Long Island and in New York City.
She appeared on camera for PIX 11 in 2016 publicly appealing for the case to be solved.
Looking directly into the lens and saying that her sister mattered, that the case shouldn’t be allowed to disappear, that someone somewhere knew what happened that night in 1980.
“I’ve lived these last 42 years afraid all the time that I was going to be killed next,” she said in one interview.
42 years of looking over her shoulder. 42 years of jumping at sounds in the dark.
42 years of wondering if the man who strangled Eve was still out there, still alive, still capable of doing it again.
Meanwhile, inside the Suffolk County Crime Lab, small steps were happening in the background. >> [music] >> In May of 2000, 20 years after the murder, the Suffolk County Police Department Homicide Squad resubmitted the preserved biological samples from the original evidence for testing.
DNA technology had advanced dramatically since 1980. The science that didn’t exist when Eve was killed was now being used to solve cases across the country.
Using a technique called short tandem repeat analysis, lab technicians developed a male DNA profile from the biological evidence.
A profile from a man whose identity was still unknown. In July of 2000, that profile was completed and entered into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, the national criminal database that links DNA profiles from convicted offenders across all 50 states.
They waited for a hit, a name, a match, some connection to a known criminal in the system.
Nothing came back. The killer’s DNA was not in CODIS. Whoever left that biological evidence had never been required to submit a sample [music] to any law enforcement database.
He was, as far as the system was concerned, invisible. In 1990, on the 10th anniversary of the murder, >> [music] >> police had publicly sought tips once again.
They made press appeals. They asked the community to come forward. Nothing came of it.
In 2017, New York State legalized familial DNA searching of its criminal data bank, a newer technique that looks for partial matches, >> [music] >> connections between a suspect’s profile and the profiles of their blood relatives.
If a brother or a father or a son of the killer was in CODIS.
Familial searching might catch the similarity. In 2019, Detective Jeffrey Butari was assigned to the Wilkowits case.
He had the lab generate a full Y-chromosomal STR profile from the evidence and submitted it to the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services for familial analysis.
No investigative leads were produced. No partial matches. No relatives in the system. Every tool law enforcement had at its disposal was coming up [music] empty.
The evidence existed. The DNA existed. The answer was locked inside biological material that Suffolk County had preserved for two decades.
[music] They just couldn’t reach it. Not with CODIS. Not with familial searching. Not with anything New York allowed them to use.
The case was solvable. Everyone who touched it knew that. The problem wasn’t the evidence.
The problem was that the right key hadn’t been invented yet. On April 24th, 2018, something happened in Sacramento, California that changed cold case investigations across the entire country.
The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office announced that investigators had identified the Golden State Killer, a serial predator responsible for at least 13 murders and dozens of violent assaults across California between 1974 and 1986.
His name was Joseph James DeAngelo. He was 72 years old. He’d been living in the Sacramento suburbs for decades, completely undetected, working as a mechanic and collecting a police pension from a department that had fired him decades earlier.
They caught him using a technique called investigative genetic genealogy. The method was fundamentally different from anything law enforcement had used before.
Instead of comparing a suspect’s DNA against the CODIS database of [music] convicted criminals, investigators extracted a different type of DNA marker called a single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP profile.
They uploaded that profile to GEDmatch, a free public genealogy database where ordinary people voluntarily share their DNA results to explore their ancestry and trace their family trees.
Millions of Americans had uploaded their profiles to these platforms. Not because they were criminals, because they were curious about where their great-grandparents came from.
When the Golden State Killer’s SNP profile was uploaded to GEDmatch, the database returned hits.
Not on DeAngelo himself. He’d never used a genealogy service. The hits were on distant relatives, third cousins who shared enough genetic material with the killer to establish a family connection.
From those distant matches, investigators built a family tree. They worked backward through generations of births, marriages, and deaths.
They narrowed the list. And at the end of the tree sat one man, Joseph James DeAngelo.
It was a revolution in criminal investigation. Genetic genealogy didn’t require the suspect to have a criminal record.
It didn’t require the suspect to have ever given DNA to law enforcement. All it required was that some distant cousin, some relative they might never have even met, had uploaded their own DNA to a consumer genealogy website.
That single data point, combined with traditional genealogical research and public records, could identify someone who had evaded the criminal justice system for decades.
For Irene Wilkowitz, sitting in Rhode Island in 2018, the Golden State Killer case hit like lightning.
Her son Evan told her about the breakthrough. She immediately contacted CeCe Moore, the well-known genetic genealogist who was working with Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company that had become the leading provider of investigative genetic genealogy services to law enforcement.
Moore told Irene she wanted to help. She believed the technology could solve Eve’s case.
There was one problem, a big one. New York wouldn’t allow it. At that time, New York was effectively the only state in the country that restricted law enforcement from using investigative genetic genealogy.
The barrier was regulatory, not legal. Under a decades-old New York State Department of Health regulation, private forensic laboratories needed a specialized permit called a forensic identity permit to perform the kind of SNP analysis required for genetic genealogy.
No private lab in the country had been granted one for this purpose. Parabon NanoLabs had applied for the permit.
The application was sitting in a bureaucratic queue. Weeks turned into months. Nothing moved. Irene lobbied.
She contacted state health officials directly. She made phone calls and wrote letters and pushed everyone she could reach.
Lieutenant Kevin Beyer, the detective who’d kept Eve’s files in his office for all those years, was equally frustrated.
“The technology’s there,” he told reporters at the time. “Other states have used it. This is a case that’s almost screaming for it.”
State Senator Phil Boyle, who represented parts of Suffolk County on Long Island, publicly criticized the Department of Health for dragging its feet.
He pointed out that the technology was being used successfully in cold case after cold case across the rest of the country.
New York was the only state blocking it. And this was the cruelest part of the entire case up to that point.
The DNA evidence existed. It had been preserved since 1980. The technology to decode it existed.
It had been proven in the most famous cold case arrest in American history. But a bureaucratic bottleneck in Albany, a permit that nobody had signed was the wall standing between Eve Wilkowitz and justice.
The answer was right there. Science could reach it. New York’s own regulations wouldn’t let anyone try.
In December of 2019, Suffolk County authorities found a way around the wall. The problem was New York’s regulation of private laboratories.
The FBI, however, is a federal agency. It operates its own forensic laboratories, and federal facilities are not subject to New York State Department of Health permits.
Suffolk County asked the New York Department of Health for permission to send the DNA evidence from the Wilkowitz case to the FBI for genetic genealogy analysis.
It was a simple workaround to a complicated problem. The state reviewed the request. The FBI agreed to take the case.
And in 2020, four full decades after Eve Wilkowitz was murdered on a quiet street in Bay Shore, the genetic genealogy process officially began.
FBI Special Agent Lori Giordano, who specialized in investigative genetic genealogy, took the lead on the analysis.
Her team worked with the Suffolk County Crime Lab to develop a SNP profile from the biological evidence that had been collected from Eve’s body in 1980 [music] and preserved by the county crime lab for 40 years.
The profile was uploaded to a public genealogy database. And then the waiting started again.
This kind of work isn’t instant. The database search can take weeks or months to produce a usable lead.
And even when a distant match appears, building out the family tree is painstaking genealogical detective work.
Names, marriage records, birth certificates, death records, census [music] data. Each branch of the tree traced forward and backward until the candidates narrow and the list gets shorter.
Months passed. The investigation moved at the pace of science, which is not the pace of television.
There were no dramatic breakthroughs announced on cable news, just quiet, methodical laboratory work happening in a federal facility while Irene waited in Rhode Island and Detective Betarria waited on Long Island and the case file sat in its banker’s boxes, patient as ever.
Then, in July of 2021, Agent Giordano called Suffolk County detectives with news that changed everything.
She had found a distant relative of the unknown suspect in the genealogy database. Someone who shared enough DNA with the killer to establish a verifiable family connection.
The match came with something else. A surname, Rice. That single surname pulled from a public genealogy database where a distant relative of the killer had uploaded their own DNA for personal ancestry research was the first real break in 41 years.
From that one data point, investigators began working the family tree. They built it outward from the match, tracing lines of descent and marriage and relation, cross-referencing every name with Suffolk County records, with addresses in Bay Shore, with the timeline of the 1980 murder, the trail led to one man, Herbert Rice.
Herbert Rice, who had been 29 years old in March of 1980. Herbert Rice, who had been living with his mother on Center Avenue in Bay Shore at the time of the murder.
[music] Herbert Rice, who had been dead since 1991. Herbert Rice was not a name that had ever surfaced during the original investigation.
Not once [music] in 42 years. In March of 1980, at the time Eve Wilkowitz was [music] abducted and murdered, Rice’s wife had recently thrown him out of their home.
He was staying temporarily with his mother, who lived on Center Avenue in Bay Shore.
Her house was roughly four houses from the address at 26 [music] Center Avenue where Eve’s body was found on the morning of March 25th.
It was within easy walking distance of the Bay Shore Long Island Railroad Station. The same station where Eve stepped off the last train from Penn Station in the early hours of March 22nd.
Prosecutors would later characterize the killing as a crime of opportunity. District Attorney Raymond Tierney told reporters at the press conference that Rice often hung around the station drinking late at night in the dark near the platform where commuters came and went.
He was there on the night Eve walked past and what happened next was not planned.
It was opportunistic, predatory, and fatal. Rice had three prior convictions on his criminal record, all for minor non-violent offenses.
The specifics of those convictions were never publicly detailed. Under the laws of the time, none of them were serious enough to require Rice to submit a DNA sample to any criminal database.
That is why his profile never appeared in CODIS. That is why the DNA sitting in the national database since the year 2000 waiting for a match never found one.
Herbert Rice existed in the the justice system just enough to have a record, >> [music] >> but not enough to leave a genetic footprint.
He was a ghost in the machine. He died in 1991 at the age of 40.
The official cause of death was cancer. He was buried on October 18th, 1991 at Oakwood Cemetery in Bay Shore.
The same town where he had lived. The same town where he had killed Eve Wilkowitz 11 years earlier.
The cemetery was less than a mile from the crime scene. He left behind two sons.
>> [music] >> Neither of them knew what their father had done. Neither of them had any idea that the man who raised them, or didn’t raise them, had taken a woman’s life and gotten away with it completely.
Rice was never a suspect in any other homicides. Prosecutors stated clearly at the press conference that they did not believe he was responsible for additional murders.
This was, in their assessment, a single crime committed by a man who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time with the wrong intentions on a night when a 20-year-old woman walked past him alone in the dark.
The detail that makes this case almost unbearable is the proximity. Herbert Rice wasn’t a stranger who traveled to Bay Shore, committed a murder, and vanished into another state.
>> [music] >> He was right there. He lived on the same street where he left Eve’s body.
His mother answered her door when detectives came knocking during the original canvas and said she hadn’t seen anything.
Investigators walked past the house where Rice was staying, logged the interview, and moved on.
The answer to a 42-year mystery had been sleeping four houses away, and then it was buried in a cemetery less than a mile down the road.
In the summer of 2021, Herbert Rice had been dead for 30 years. Investigators couldn’t arrest him.
They couldn’t question him. They couldn’t sit him in an interrogation room and ask him what happened on the night of March 22nd, 1980.
They couldn’t collect a DNA sample from a living suspect. What they could do was find his sons.
Detective Jeffrey Buttari located one of Herbert Rice’s sons. He initially tried to collect a DNA sample from the son discreetly.
Using surveillance-style collection methods that sometimes work in cold case investigations. You wait for the person to discard a coffee cup, a cigarette butt, a straw.
Something with saliva on it that can be tested without the person’s knowledge. It didn’t work.
The discreet approach failed. So, Buttari made a different choice. He drove to the son’s home, walked up to the front door and knocked.
He stood on the doorstep and explained who he was. He explained that he was a Suffolk County Homicide Detective.
He explained that he was investigating a murder that happened in 1980. And he told the son as carefully as he could that his father, Herbert Rice, was the primary suspect.
The son listened. He told Buttari that he hadn’t been close to his father. He didn’t resist.
He didn’t refuse. He agreed to provide a cheek swab voluntarily. In late August of 2021, the results came back from the DNA lab.
The analysis confirmed that the son’s father, Herbert Rice, was the man who had left biological evidence on Eve Wilkowitz’s body 41 years earlier.
The match was definitive. The probability was overwhelming. The son and his mother filled in more of the picture for investigators.
They confirmed the timeline. Rice’s wife had kicked him out of their home around the time of the murder.
He had moved in with his mother on Center Avenue, placing him within walking distance of both the train station and the exact spot where Eve’s body was found.
The geographical puzzle fit perfectly. And then the son said something that the detectives did not expect.
He told them he wished he could apologize to the Wilkowic family for what his father had done.
There is something deeply human about that moment. A son learning the worst possible [music] truth about his own father, and his immediate instinct being to say he was sorry.
Not defensiveness, not denial. Just sorrow for what his father had taken from someone else’s family.
On December 6th, 2021, Detective Bettari and a homicide sergeant made the long drive from Suffolk County, Long Island to Rhode Island.
They went to the home of Irene Wilkowic Brosnan. They knocked on her door, 41 years after her sister’s murder.
Irene opened her door to two detectives who told her they finally knew who killed Eve.
Irene described the moment later. She said it felt like they were telling her all over again that her sister was dead.
The relief she had imagined for four decades, the closure she had built up in her mind as the thing that would finally set her free, didn’t arrive the way she thought it would.
Instead, there was a different kind of heaviness. The confirmation of what had happened. A name attached to the nightmare.
And the knowledge that the man who did it had been dead for 30 years.
Beyond the reach of any courtroom, any jury, any prison cell. The answer she’d spent her entire adult life waiting for didn’t bring peace.
It brought a different kind of grief. The grief of knowing, finally, exactly who had done it.
And knowing that there [music] was nothing left to punish, nothing left to confront, nothing left but the truth and the weight of carrying it.
The DNA from Herbert Rice’s son was more than enough for investigators to be confident in the identification.
>> [music] >> But prosecutors wanted something beyond confident. They wanted absolute unassailable certainty before they made a public announcement.
They did not want to close the oldest cold case in Suffolk County history on a familial match alone.
They wanted DNA directly from Herbert Rice himself, which meant they needed to open his grave.
Detective Botari formally requested that the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office obtain a search warrant for Herbert Rice’s burial plot at Oakwood Cemetery.
The request went before New York Supreme Court Justice John B. Collins, who reviewed the evidence, the DNA results from Rice’s son, and the full investigative record.
He authorized the warrant. On March 10th, 2022, a team assembled at Oakwood Cemetery in Bay Shore.
It was a small, quiet cemetery. The kind of place where rows of headstones sit in neat lines under old trees.
Unremarkable in every way except for what was about to happen. Cemetery personnel were there to manage the grounds.
>> [music] >> Members of the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s office were present with equipment for biological extraction.
Technicians from the county crime lab stood by to maintain chain of custody over whatever they recovered.
Detective Botari supervised the operation. They excavated the plot. Slowly, carefully, with the same forensic discipline that had governed every step of this investigation since 1980.
They raised the coffin of Herbert Rice from the ground where it had rested for 31 years, since October of 1991.
31 years of silence beneath the soil of the same town where he committed a murder [music] that nobody could solve during his lifetime.
The coffin was opened. The Suffolk County Chief Medical Examiner personally examined the remains and removed bone samples for DNA extraction.
[music] The material was transported to the crime lab under strict forensic protocols. And then they waited one more time.
The same kind of waiting that had defined this case for decades. Except this time, everyone involved believed the answer was already known.
They were just confirming what the science had already told them. On March 23rd, 2022, the results [music] came back from the lab.
The DNA extracted from Herbert Rice’s skeletal remains matched the male DNA profile that had been developed from the biological evidence collected from Eve Wilkowitz’s body [music] in 1980.
The same profile that had been entered into CODIS in the year 2000. [music] The same profile that had returned zero matches for over two decades.
The same profile that familial DNA searching couldn’t crack. The match was direct, confirmed, from bone.
March 23rd, 2022. Almost exactly 42 years to the day that Eve Wilkowitz boarded the last train from Penn Station and never made it home.
The oldest cold case in Suffolk County history was solved. Not by a confession, not by a witness coming forward after decades of silence, [music] not by a living suspect sitting across a table from a detective.
It was solved by pulling the answer out of the ground from the bones of a man who had taken the truth with him when he died and held it in his grave for three decades [music] until science reached deep enough to take it back.
One week later, on March 30th, 2022, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney and Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison stood before reporters at a press conference in Riverhead, New York.
Tierney spoke [music] first. He announced that the 42-year-old homicide case of Eve Wilkowitz had been solved.
He called the investigation a study in persistence and determination to work the case no matter what obstacles appeared.
He said something that captured the weight of the entire investigation in a single sentence.
“Without DNA,” Tierney told the room, “this wouldn’t have ever been solved.” He was right.
Without the biological evidence preserved in 1980, without the DNA profile developed in 2000, without the genetic genealogy analysis performed by the FBI in 2021, without the exhumation in 2022, there was no other path to Herbert Rice.
No witness, no confession, no paper trail. The only road to the truth ran through 42 years of preserved evidence, and a technology that didn’t exist when the crime was committed.
Commissioner Harrison spoke next. He called the announcement the end of a more than four decades-long investigation by Suffolk County police detectives who never gave up.
He credited the partnership between the police department, the district attorney’s office, and the FBI.
He thanked his predecessor, Commissioner Geraldine Hart, for initiating the relationship with the FBI that made the genetic genealogy analysis possible.
And he said something that cut through the formality of the press conference. “I pray that nobody else has to go through this type of ordeal.”
Irene Wilkowitz had driven hours from Rhode Island to be there. She walked into the press conference and for the first time in her life saw a photograph of Herbert Rice, the man who killed her sister, the face she had spent 42 years trying to imagine and trying not to imagine the last face that Eve ever saw.
“This is my first time seeing him.” Irene said to reporters afterward. “I didn’t want to see the last face that Eve saw while she was still alive.”
She paused, and then she said the words that she had waited more than four decades to hear herself say out loud.
“I still can’t believe I heard those words. We have identified the person responsible for the death of Eve.”
And then Irene did something that surprised the room. She expressed sympathy for Herbert Rice’s family, for his sons, for the relatives who were now learning for the first time what their father and family member had done more than 40 years ago.
“I feel badly for them.” Irene said. “A family member is responsible for a crime like this, and they have to live knowing that.”
42 years of fear, four decades of anger and grief, and unanswered questions. And at the moment of truth, Irene Wilkowitz found the grace to think about the other family’s pain alongside her own.
Lieutenant Kevin Bayrer, the detective who had kept those three bankers boxes of yellowed reports and photographs in his office for years, who had refused to send the files to storage, who had carried the case in his mind through every rotation and every retirement conversation, credited Irene for the outcome.
“She deserves the credit.” He said. “I think she’s the star in this case.” Because Herbert Rice was dead, there would be no prosecution, no trial, no conviction, no sentencing.
The case was closed posthumously. Justice, in the traditional legal sense, could never be fully served.
There was no defendant to face, no one to stand before a judge, but the truth was now in the open.
The name was known. The evidence was confirmed down to the bone. And the uncertainty that had consumed Irene’s life for 42 years, the not knowing, the looking over her shoulder, the fear that the man who killed her sister might still be out there walking the same streets, breathing the same air, was finally permanently over.
The Wilkowitz case didn’t just give one family answers. It changed how Suffolk County approaches the cases that everyone else has given up on.
The resolution of Eve’s murder was the first cold case in Suffolk County history solved using investigative genetic genealogy.
It was the first time a DNA match from a public genealogy database had been used to close a homicide in the county.
And it proved, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, that the technique works. Even when the suspect is dead.
Even when the evidence is four decades old. Even when the state’s own regulations had blocked the technology for years.
In April of 2024, two years after the Wilkowitz announcement, District Attorney Tierney formalized what Eve’s case [music] had started.
He established the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Cold Case Task Force, a specialized unit of investigators, analysts, and forensic experts working alongside the SCPD Homicide Squad.
The task force uses [music] genetic genealogy, advanced forensic analysis, and cross and cross-jurisdictional collaboration to reopen and resolve the cases that went cold years or decades ago.
It has already produced results, solving additional long-dormant cases since [music] its creation. Eve’s case opened the door.
Her evidence, preserved for [music] 40 years by investigators who could never have imagined what it would eventually make possible, became the proof of concept for an entirely new chapter in Suffolk County’s approach to unsolved homicides.
What happened to Eve Wilkowitz proved that no case is truly cold if the evidence survives.
That time is not a barrier if the science keeps advancing. That a case shelved in 1980 can be cracked open in 2022 if the right people refuse to accept the word unsolvable.
Every cold case that gets solved by genetic genealogy in that county from this point forward traces its origin in part back to the biological evidence collected from a front lawn on Center Avenue in Bay Shore in 1980.
Irene Wilkowitz has continued to be a voice for her sister and for other families living in the same limbo she endured for four decades.
In interviews after the press conference, she was clear about what she wanted people to take away from the case.
Not the forensic details, not the legal maneuvering, the person. “She wasn’t famous,” Irene said.
“She wasn’t a celebrity. She was my sister and she matters.” Eve Wilkowitz was 20 years old.
She loved horses and music and drawing. [music] She loved being a big sister. She had a dream job at a publishing company in Manhattan.
She wanted to study social work. She wanted to help people. She was commuting an hour each way on the Long Island Railroad every day because she was building something and she was willing to put in the work to get there.
On a Friday night in March of 1980, she boarded the last train from Penn Station.
She stepped off at Bay Shore. She started walking home. She never made it. And for 42 years, the man who took her life was lying in a cemetery less than a mile from where he left her body.
The answer to the longest unsolved murder in Suffolk County history was buried in the same small town where it happened.
Four houses from the crime scene, waiting beneath the ground for science to catch up to the crime.
It took four decades. It took a detective who refused to shelve the files. It took a sister who never stopped calling, never stopped lobbying, never stopped saying her sister’s name.
It took a regulatory workaround, an FBI agent specializing in genetic genealogy, a distant DNA match in a public database, a son who opened his front door and rolled up his sleeve, and a court-order to dig up a coffin in a Bay Shore cemetery, but they found him.
They proved it. And Eve Wilkowitz, the girl who loved horses and wanted to change the world, finally got the one thing her sister had been fighting for since 1980, the truth.
