The detective sat in his car outside a modest house in Bay Shore, watching. Jeffrey Buttari was a Suffolk County homicide detective working a case that had gone cold before he was born, and he was trying to collect a DNA sample from the son of a man who had been dead for thirty years. The discreet approach had failed. He had waited for the son to discard a coffee cup, a cigarette butt, a straw, something with saliva on it that could be tested without the person ever knowing.

That had not worked. So Buttari made a different choice. He got out of the car, walked up to the front door, and knocked. When the son answered, Buttari explained who he was.

He explained that he was investigating a murder from 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 he had not been close to his father.

He did not resist. He did not refuse. He agreed to provide a cheek swab voluntarily. In late August of 2021, the results came back.

The DNA confirmed that Herbert Rice was the man who had left biological evidence on Eve Wilkowitz’s body forty-one years earlier. The match was definitive. But the son said something the detectives did not expect. He told them he wished he could apologize to the Wilkowitz family for what his father had done.

Not defensiveness, not denial. Just sorrow for what his father had taken from someone else’s family. It was the end of a hunt that had lasted more than four decades. It had taken a preserved rape kit from a crime scene in 1980, a DNA profile entered into a national database in 2000, a genetic genealogy analysis performed by the FBI, and the exhumation of a coffin that had been sealed for over thirty years.

It had taken a sister who never stopped calling, never stopped lobbying, never stopped saying her sister’s name. And it had taken a bureaucratic workaround, a distant DNA match in a public genealogy database, and a son who opened his front door and rolled up his sleeve. But they found him. They proved it.

The story begins with a 20-year-old woman named Eve Wilkowitz, and it does not start with the crime. It starts with the life she was building. Eve had grown up on Long Island with her younger sister Irene and their parents, Alfred and Dorothy. The 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 thirteen. Eve was sixteen or seventeen. In that moment, the family fractured in a way that never fully healed.

Alfred was left raising two daughters alone, and Eve stepped into a role that went beyond 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, 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.

She loved music, reading, writing, and drawing. She was the kind of person who was always creating something, always engaged with the world around her. At twenty, she was not just passing through life. 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. It was entry-level work—answering phones, handling correspondence—but she was twenty 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 an hour each way every day from Bay Shore on Long Island’s South Shore into Penn Station in Manhattan. She rode the Long Island Railroad packed in with tens of thousands of other commuters. Morning train in, evening train home, five days a week.

It was a grind that chewed up three 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, 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 had recently struck up a friendship with a young writer at McMillan named Jack Dempsey. Life was in motion. On the evening of Friday, March 21st, 1980, Eve finished her work day at McMillan.

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 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. 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 would have to find another way home or wait until morning. She did not 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 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 was roughly a ten-minute walk from the station.

She had 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 had left it the night before. Her side of the bed untouched.

Her coat not hanging by the door. No sign she had ever made it home. No note. No message.

Nothing. He called the police and filed a missing person report that same morning. Then came three 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 three full days, Eve Wilkowitz was simply gone. Swallowed by the darkness of a ten-minute walk between a train station and her own front door. There is 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 had been frightened. She said a man had followed her on that late-night walk home from the Bay Shore station. She did not name anyone specific. She did not 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 did not have another option. Somewhere on that ten-minute stretch between the Bay Shore Long Island Railroad station and her apartment, 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 Bay Shore 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, 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. Then came the detail that would haunt every investigator who touched this case for the next four decades. 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.

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. For approximately seventy-two 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, 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 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 collected from Eve’s body. In 1980, forensic DNA profiling did not exist yet.

The technology that would eventually crack the 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 homicides the department had ever encountered. Detectives fanned out across Bay Shore in the days after the body was found.

They canvassed 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. 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 they had 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 Beyrer, who oversaw the Wilkowitz 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 Wilkowitz files. He kept them close—not in a storage room, not in an archive, right there in his office, within arm’s 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 Beyrer’s desk. A reminder that the work was not done. 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 seventeen 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 did not fade with the passing of years. It did not soften with time or distance. She later told reporters that she had lived those forty-two years in a constant state of fear. She was afraid the man who killed Eve would come for her next.

She was afraid she would encounter him somewhere—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 does not 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 Brosnahan. 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. Their father, Alfred Wilkowitz, 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 should not 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. Forty-two years of looking over her shoulder.

Forty-two years of jumping at sounds in the dark. Forty-two 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. In May of 2000, twenty 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. 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 fifty states.

They waited for a hit. A name. A match. Nothing came back.

The killer’s DNA was not in CODIS. Whoever left that biological evidence had never been required to submit a sample to any law enforcement database. He was, as far as the system was concerned, invisible. In 1990, on the tenth anniversary of the murder, 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—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 Buttari was assigned to the Wilkowitz 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 empty. The evidence existed.

The DNA existed. The answer was locked inside biological material that Suffolk County had preserved for two decades. They just could not reach it. Not with CODIS.

Not with familial searching. Not with anything New York allowed them to use. The problem was not the evidence. The problem was that the right key had not 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 thirteen murders and dozens of violent assaults across California between 1974 and 1986. His name was Joseph James DeAngelo. He was seventy-two years old.

He had 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 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, but 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 had 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. At the end of the tree sat one man: Joseph James DeAngelo. It was a revolution in criminal investigation. Genetic genealogy did not require the suspect to have a criminal record.

It did not 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 sitting in Rhode Island, 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 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 would not 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 Beyrer, the detective who had 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. 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 collected from Eve’s body in 1980 and preserved for forty years. The profile was uploaded to a public genealogy database. Then the waiting started again. This kind of work is not 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 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. 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 Buttari 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 forty-one 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 twenty-nine 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. Herbert Rice, who had been dead since 1991.

Herbert Rice was not a name that had ever surfaced during the original investigation. Not once in forty-two years. In March of 1980, at the time Eve Wilkowitz was 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 26 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. 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 justice system just enough to have a record, but not enough to leave a genetic footprint. He was a ghost in the machine. He died in 1991 at the age of forty. 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 eleven years earlier. The cemetery was less than a mile from the crime scene.

He left behind two sons. Neither of them knew what their father had done. Neither of them had any idea that the man who raised them, or did not 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 was not a stranger who traveled to Bay Shore, committed a murder, and vanished into another state.

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 canvass and said she had not 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 thirty years. Investigators could not arrest him. They could not question him.

They could not sit him in an interrogation room and ask him what happened on the night of March 22nd, 1980. They could not collect a DNA sample from a living suspect. What they could do was find his sons. After the cheek swab from Herbert Rice’s son confirmed the identification in late August of 2021, 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, and 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. The DNA from Herbert Rice’s son was more than enough for investigators to be confident in the identification. 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 Buttari 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. 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 Buttari 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 thirty-one years, since October of 1991. Thirty-one years of silence beneath the soil of the same town where he committed a murder 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. The material was transported to the crime lab under strict forensic protocols. 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 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 in 1980. The same profile that had been entered into CODIS in the year 2000. The same profile that had returned zero matches for over two decades. The same profile that familial DNA searching could not crack.

The match was direct, confirmed, from bone. March 23rd, 2022. Almost exactly forty-two 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. 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, 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 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.

Then 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 forty-two years of preserved evidence and a technology that did not 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 forty-two 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. Then she said the words 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. ”

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 forty 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. ”

Forty-two 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 Beyrer, the detective who had kept those three banker’s 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 forty-two 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 did not 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 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 genetic genealogy, advanced forensic analysis, 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 its creation. Eve’s case opened the door.

Her evidence, preserved for forty 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.

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 twenty years old. She loved horses and music and drawing. 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 forty-two years, the man who took her life lay 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.