Richard Bilello spent his later life in the quiet routines of Long Island, living alone in Center Moriches, working nights at Walmart, moving so far below the radar that almost nothing about him suggested a 16-year-old girl had been raped and strangled after leaving a roller rink in Lynbrook in November 1984. He was 63.

 Three other men had already lost 18 years to the same case. It took 41 years. If this story has a human spine, it runs through Thomas Fusco. He was Teresa’s and for decades he stayed in the case long after the headlines thinned out, long after the convictions collapsed, long after the county had to admit that the first answer had been the wrong one.

 The file changed hands, detectives retired, science changed, Thomas Fusco remained. The institutional guide arrives later. Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County District Attorney who announced the 2025 indictment, said she had grown up in the same county, hung out at Hot Skates as a kid and remembered what Teresa’s killing did to the way young women saw safety in the 1980s. That matters.

 This was not a cold file that landed on a random desk. It was a case that had already altered the county once before. Thomas carried his daughter in memory for more than four decades. At the 2025 press conference, he pulled a small photo of Teresa from his jacket pocket and said the same thing grief had been telling him for years. He loved her.

 He missed her. And he never gave up hope. Then the story goes back to the night it started. Teresa Fusco was 16 years old, a Lynbrook High School junior, a girl from the Long Island suburbs in 1984. In the Ghostbusters and Footloose year, in the era of pen pal letters and roller rinks and neighborhoods where teenage girls still walked home alone without turning that walk into a family crisis.

Her parents were divorced. Her father was Thomas. Her brother was John. Her closest friend was Lisa Kaplan, now Lisa Johnson, who remembered that the two of them tried to dress alike, bought the same clothes, wore makeup the same way, and told each other everything. Teresa also moved through a wider circle of girls who later became witnesses to absence.

 Kelly Morrissey was one of them, another teenager who had disappeared months earlier. Vicki Papanio remembered handwritten letters from Teresa, stationery with a Lynn Brook postmark, and a voice that still sounded like a regular teenager asking regular things. “When are you visiting? Call me. Are the boys cute?” That is the loss in this case, not a symbol, not a headline.

 A girl still writing notes and making plans. On November 10th, 1984, Teresa went to work at the snack bar at Hot Skates on Merrick Road. It was a Saturday night at the place where local teens met friends, flirted, listened to music, and killed time. After work, she was supposed to go to the sleepover at Lisa’s house. That detail matters because it freezes the night before anything became monstrous.

 A shift, a short walk, a friend waiting, a normal plan that never started. The last confirmed public timeline is brutally plain. Teresa was fired from her snack bar job at Hot Skates and left the rink in tears at about 9:45 to 9:47 p.m. She was walking toward home, only about four blocks away.

 There is no public witness statement that cleanly bridges the gap between that walk and the attack. That gap is where the whole case lived for decades. 25 days later, on December 5th, 1984, two boys in a wooded area near the rink found a body and ran for help. Teresa Fusco had been beaten, raped, and strangled.

 Her body had been left near the Long Island Railroad tracks, covered under leaves and wooden shipping pallets. The medical evidence that mattered most was preserved at autopsy. Vaginal swabs carrying semen and spermatozoa, and hairs that investigators believed would support their theory. At the time, police had fear, pressure, and very little else.

 No digital trail, no phone data, no easy map of her last hour. The killing hit Lynbrook hard because another teenage girl, Kelly Morrissey, had already vanished months earlier. And soon a third young woman, Jacqueline Martorella, would disappear, too. Nassau County did what police departments under pressure often do: Move fast, commit early, and build confidence around a theory before the science is ready to test it.

 The first suspect who seemed to give police a path was John Kogut, a 21-year-old landscaper and former Lynbrook resident who had briefly dated Kelly Morrissey. He was brought in while police were looking for links between Kelly’s disappearance and Teresa’s murder. He agreed to a polygraph. Police told him he failed. After prolonged interrogation, and after being kept in custody for roughly 18 hours and questioned for nearly 12, he gave the confession that would reshape three lives.

 Kogut’s confession implicated two other men, John Restivo and Dennis Halstead. Halstead looked bad to police because he had minor prior brushes with law enforcement and an apartment near the Shell station payphone where Kelly Morrissey was last seen. Restivo looked usable because he had a van and prosecutors said hairs from Teresa had been recovered inside it.

 The story police put forward was simple and cinematic. Three local men in a van, a vulnerable teenage girl, rape, strangulation, disposal. It was powerful. It was also wrong. The suspect elimination montage that should have happened in 1985 happened years later instead. Kogut’s confession was attacked as coerced and staged, including a videotaped statement that defense lawyers later argued had been guided off camera.

 Restivo’s van, according to later reporting, was allegedly out of commission and up on cinder blocks on the night Teresa vanished. The hair evidence, once treated like corroboration, was later challenged as autopsy contamination or planted evidence with a retired detective’s later affidavit describing postmortem root banding that should not have existed if the hairs had been shed during an abduction.

 Then DNA arrived and did what arguments alone could not. It excluded Kogut, Restivo, and Halstead. This is where the institutional failure becomes its own antagonist. Kelly Morrissey’s disappearance was initially treated like a likely runaway case. Teresa’s murder unfolded inside that atmosphere of fear and pressure.

 Police leaned on a confession. Prosecutors leaned on hair comparison testimony that later collapsed. Even after DNA began undermining the convictions, the office retried Kogut in 2005 and floated the theory that Teresa had consensual sex with some unknown man before being abducted, a theory her best friend Lisa flatly rejected.

 False closure lasted years. Then, even after the wrong men were freed, the true name was still missing. By June 2003, all three convictions had been vacated. By December 2005, after a retrial, John Kogut was acquitted and charges against Restivo and Halstead were dismissed. That should have cleared the air. It did not. It deepened the wound.

 Teresa’s family had lived through the original murder, the trials, the apparent answer, and then the demolition of that answer. Relief never arrived clean. Thomas Fusco kept going. He and his family had once gone to Parents of Murdered Children looking for the thing people always promised exists at the end of a case, closure.

 Then the case broke open in the wrong direction. Lisa Johnson had to testify again. Vicki Papaneo kept a scrapbook of articles about Teresa and Kelly. The years marked themselves not by calendar pages, but by what vanished with them. Adolescence, confidence, one version of the justice system, then eventually Teresa’s mother, who died in 2019 before any new suspect was charged.

The world around the case changed completely. In 1984, girls used payphones, wrote letters, and disappeared into blind spots that remained blind. By the 2000s, DNA could exclude. By the 2020s, it could identify. That is the time wait in this story, not one long line, but several eras laid over the same file.

 By the time Nassau County announced a new name in 2025, Thomas Fusco was the parent still standing at the podium, still carrying Teresa’s photo, still waiting for the county to say something final and true. The modern breakthrough begins in 2023 when investigators sent a preserved vaginal swab from Teresa’s 1984 autopsy to Astreum, a forensic lab in Houston.

 Earlier DNA rounds had already proved what the state did not want to admit in the 1980s. The original defendants were not the source, but exclusion is not identification. Investigators still needed a path from an unknown male profile to an actual person. This is where the technology changed. Traditional STR DNA testing is powerful when there is already a suspect to compare against.

 Investigative genetic genealogy does something different. It turns old biological evidence into a family tree problem. By building a broader SNP profile, genealogists can look for distant relatives and begin narrowing branches. The comparable case that proved this could change cold cases forever was the Golden State Killer investigation in 2018 when genealogy-based work helped move from crime scene DNA toward Joseph James DeAngelo’s identity.

 After that, old files all over the country stopped looking quite so dead. In Teresa Fusco’s case, Othram built the new profile, and the FBI’s investigative genetic genealogy unit worked the family tree side. Nassau County investigators developed leads in early 2024 and began watching a man named Richard Bilodeau. He had been 23 in 1984.

 He had lived with his grandparents in Lynbrook, about a mile from Hot Skates, and about a mile from the Fusco home. Suddenly, the case did not just have DNA. It had geography. Genealogy can narrow a bloodline. It cannot, by itself, walk into court and name one man beyond challenge. That was the next obstacle.

 Science had likely taken investigators to the right family. It had not yet taken them to a courtroom-ready comparison sample from the suspect himself. So, surveillance mattered. In February 2024, investigators watched Bilodeau get a smoothie near his home in Suffolk County. Later, after the cup and straw had been discarded, they recovered them from the trash.

 That detail sounds almost absurd beside the gravity of the case. 40 years of grief, 18 years stolen from the wrong man, and then, in the end, a straw. The comparison was the hinge. Prosecutors said DNA from the smoothie straw matched the male DNA recovered from Teresa’s body in 1984, describing it publicly as a 100% match. That was the moment the case crossed from family tree probability into named accusation.

 The unknown male profile now had a face, an address history, and a date of birth. Richard Bilodeau. The shock in this reveal comes from how ordinary the public version of Richard Bilodeau looked. By 2025, he was 63, living alone in Center Moriches, working nights at Walmart, described as someone with no known criminal record, never married, a man prosecutors said mostly went to work and gambled on sports.

 No monster mask, no obvious double life. Just a Long Island man who had apparently stayed close enough to disappear into the background. But the proximity is the part that lands hardest. In 1984, prosecutors said Bilodeau lived with his grandparents at 16 Tredwell Avenue in Lynbrook, about a mile from Hot Skates, about a mile from Teresa Fusco’s house.

 A local man in the same small map the whole time. Not a drifter passing through, not a phantom from another county. A name near the victim, near the rink, near the family, near the search area. Close enough that ordinary life and catastrophic violence sat on top of each other for decades without touching in public. When investigators spoke to him, prosecutors said Bilodeau denied knowing Teresa.

Then came the line that instantly attached itself to the case. People got away with murder back then. Nassau prosecutors answered with one of their own. It’s 2025. And Donnally said, “I got you now.” Thomas Fusco stood nearby and said what fathers in these stories always end up saying in the simplest language available. He loved her.

 He missed her. She lived in his heart. And he had never given up hope.” Bilodeau was arrested on October 14th, 2025 by members of the Nassau County Police Department Homicide Squad. The next day, October 15th, he was arraigned before Judge Helene Gogerty in Mineola on two counts of second-degree murder, intentional murder and murder in the course of a rape.

 He pleaded not guilty and was remanded. Prosecutors said that if convicted, he faced up to 25 years to life in prison. The county’s public posture was careful on one point and forceful on another. Careful about motive, careful about whether Bilodeau could be tied to the other Long Island teen cases that haunted the area in the mid-1980s.

No public charge connected him to Kelly Morrissey or Jacqueline Martorella, but forceful on the DNA. Ann Donnolly called the indictment proof that the past had not been forgotten. Science, she said, had led them straight to him. For the Fusco family, this was the first official step that felt like justice had restarted without lying to them.

 Not closure yet, not sentence, not certainty, but a named defendant, formal charges, and a courtroom that no longer depended on a confession everybody should have distrusted from the start. This is where the honest version of the story refuses false closure. As of 2026, there has not been a final conviction in Teresa Fusco’s case.

 A Nassau County judge allowed the prosecution against Biledo to move forward after the defense sought dismissal, and the court set further responses around additional DNA testing issues. With Biledo scheduled back in court in 2026, the case is active. The final chapter is not written yet.

 That unfinished status changes the emotional center of the resolution. The question is no longer whether Teresa’s case had biological evidence worth trusting. It did. The question is whether prosecutors can carry that evidence after decades of institutional error all the way to a conviction that survives scrutiny. Biledo’s attorneys have already signaled the obvious defense theme.

 This is the same system that once put three innocent men in prison for Teresa’s murder. That fact will hang over every future proceeding. And still, for Thomas Fusco and Lisa Johnson, the emotional direction has shifted. Thomas said the indictment felt like finalization after years of cold case limbo. Lisa said she trusted the DNA this time and hoped the courtroom would finally put the case to rest.

 Hope is back in the file, so is doubt. Both are real. The [music] map never changed much. Hot skates, Merrick Road, the tracks, a few Long Island blocks that held onto a secret longer than some entire lifetimes. Evidence sat in storage. Bad answers took up space. Then better science arrived and forced the case to speak again.

 And at the center of all that time is the sleepover at Lisa’s house. A small teenage plan that never happened. That is what murder steals first. Not courtroom years. Not headlines. Just the ordinary next thing. A short walk after work. A friend waiting. A night that should have been forgettable. 41 years passed between Teresa Fusco leaving Hot Skates and Nassau County naming Richard Bilodeau in court.

 In that time three innocent men lost nearly two decades in prison. Teresa’s mother died before hearing a new suspect named. Kelly Morrissey’s disappearance remains unsolved. Jacqueline Martorella’s murder remains unsolved. So this story does not end with a perfect lock. It ends with science finally cutting through one layer of silence.

 And a family still waiting for the legal system to finish what the evidence restarted.