How Theresa Fusco’s Cold Case Was Solved 41 Years Later

 

On a winter afternoon in February 2024, a 63-year-old man walked out of a tropical smoothie cafe in Center Moriches, Long Island, and tossed his cup into the trash. Two investigators were sitting in a car across the parking lot watching him. They waited until he drove away, walked over, and retrieved the cup from the garbage.

 They bagged the straw separately and sent it to a lab. The DNA on that straw matched a vaginal swab taken from the body of a 16-year-old girl 40 years earlier. Three men had already gone to prison for her murder. They spent 18 years locked up before DNA proved it wasn’t them. It took another 20 years to put a name on the profile that did match.

 Teresa Fusco was 16 years old, a junior in high school in Lynbrook, a small village on the South Shore of Long Island, about 20 miles east of Manhattan. She worked part-time at the snack bar of Hot Skates, a roller skating rink in town, earning her own money and building a life. Her close friend, Kelly Morrissey, who was 15, had disappeared from the same area earlier that year and was never found.

 On the night of November 10th, 1984, Teresa clocked out of her shift at Hot Skates at 9:47 p.m. She’d just been fired from her job at the snack bar that evening, and people who saw her leaving remember that she was crying. She walked out into the night and never made it home. Nearly a month passed. On December 5th, a man walking through a wooded area near the Baldwin and Sunrise Highway interchange, not far from the rink, uh found her nude body buried under leaves and shipping pallets.

An autopsy determined she’d been raped, beaten, and strangled to death with a ligature. The medical examiner collected a vaginal swab that contained biological material from the assault, the only evidence that might ever identify who had done this. DNA testing didn’t exist yet. All they could do was blood type work.

 They had to preserve the swab and store it in evidence, waiting for technology that might someday exist. Her parents, Thomas Fusco and Concetta Minopoli, buried their 16-year-old daughter and waited for someone to be caught. Lynbrook is a small place, a tight village where people knew each other. The community was already on edge.

Everyone talked about what happened. Teresa’s murder came just months after Kelly Morrissey’s disappearance from the same area. Her parents started questioning the risks they’d been taking. Two girls from the same neighborhood gone in the same year. Nassau County police worked the case hard through the winter of 1984 and into 1985.

Tips came in from across Long Island. Detectives interviewed everyone they could find who’d been near Hot Skates that night, anyone who had seen Teresa in the hours before she disappeared, anyone who might know something. The case was high profile, a 16-year-old girl murdered, her body dumped in the woods.

 Two teenage girls missing from the same village in the same year. Nassau County was under intense public pressure to make an arrest. The media covered the case extensively, and detectives faced constant questions about when they’d produce a suspect. Four months after Teresa was found, Nassau County police arrested a 21-year-old named John Kogut.

 Detective Joseph Volpe led the case. He and his partner brought Kogut in for questioning on the evening of March 25th, 1985, and kept him there through the night. The interrogation lasted nearly 18 hours. Kogut testified later that Volpe and his partner screamed at him, threatened him, and told him they had scientific evidence and eyewitnesses tying him to the murder.

 None of that was true. There was no physical evidence, no scientific match, and no eyewitness who could place him at the crime. Volpe fed him details and told him various versions of what happened to Teresa until Kogut gave in and agreed to sign whatever was put in front of him. By 9:00 a.m. the next morning, after nearly 18 hours without sleep, Volpe had produced a seven-page handwritten confession.

The detective wrote it himself. Kogut didn’t write a word of it. And it was the sixth version of the story that Volpe had laid out during the interrogation. The first five versions were never written down, so there was no way to know what had been said or how the narrative had changed. The detective had shaped it to match the facts he wanted, then got an exhausted, sleep-deprived suspect to agree to sign.

In that signed statement, Kogut implicated two other men, John Restivo, 26, and Dennis Halstead, 31. All three were arrested and charged with rape and murder. At trial, the prosecution needed something beyond the confession to corroborate the story Volpe had written. They presented two hairs found in the front passenger seat of Restivo’s van, and a forensic analyst testified under oath that the hairs were microscopically similar to Teresa’s hair with a high degree of probability.

 That testimony was not accurate. Microscopic hair comparison can say two hairs look alike under a microscope, but it can’t say where they came from or how often that type of hair appears in the general population. The analyst presented it as if it meant something close to a solid match. The jury heard it as scientific evidence and accepted it as proof.

 Kogut was convicted in May 1986 and sentenced to 31 years and 6 months to life. Restivo and Halstead were convicted 6 months later in November 1986 and each received 33 years and 4 months to life. The sentences reflected the conviction of murder, one of the most serious crimes on the books. So, three men were in prison for the murder of Teresa Fusco. Kogut was 21 when he went in.

Restivo was 26, and Halstead was 31. All three maintained their innocence from the beginning. The physical evidence from the crime scene didn’t support the confessions. The semen recovered from Teresa’s body didn’t match any of the three men. But in 1986, the DNA testing available was limited. The prosecution told the jury it wasn’t enough to matter.

 The hair testimony and the confession were enough. The community believed it was over, and so did Teresa’s parents. Thomas and Concetta could tell themselves that the men who killed their daughter were behind bars and would be there for decades. The case was closed, and the file went into storage. For 17 years, three innocent men sat in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

 Meanwhile, and the man who actually killed Teresa Fusco was free, walking around, living his life. Through the 1990s, as DNA technology gradually improved, defense attorneys pushed for testing of the crime scene evidence. Labs ran multiple rounds of analysis on various items. Each round excluded all three men.

 The semen from the crime scene came from a single unknown male, and it excluded Kogut, Restivo, and Halstead completely. But the legal system moved slowly, and the prosecution fought every challenge. Defense attorneys filed appeals that were denied, and motions stalled for years. The science said these men didn’t do it, but the courts didn’t act on it, and all three stayed locked up.

 The break came in 2002. A senior staff attorney at the New York Innocence Project named Nina Morrison took on the case. She spent a year digging through records, requesting files, and rebuilding the timeline of what had been tested and what hadn’t. She obtained property records from the Nassau County Police Department. In those records, she found an entry for an evidence envelope that had been in storage since 1984.

Inside was an intact vaginal swab, sealed and marked, that nobody had ever run a DNA test on. 18 years of litigation, multiple rounds of testing on other evidence, and this swab had been sitting in that envelope the entire time. Morrison had it tested. The DNA on the swab was a clear male profile. The results conclusively excluded Kogut, Restivo, and Halstead.

 The DNA didn’t belong to any of them. It belonged to one unknown male who was someone else entirely. On June 11th, 2003, all three convictions were vacated. Kogut, Restivo, and Halstead walked out of prison after roughly 18 years behind bars. Kogut had gone in at 21 and came out almost 40. Uh Restivo and Halstead were in their late 40s and early 50s.

The prosecution retried Kogut. Even after the swab excluded him, they put him back in front of a judge. On December 21st, 2005, after a 3-month bench trial, Judge Victor Ort acquitted him on all counts. Eight days later, the prosecution dismissed the charges against Restivo and Halstead. It had taken more than 2 years after their release for the state to officially acknowledge they were innocent.

A federal court found that Detective Volpe had violated their constitutional rights. He had planted and withheld evidence during the original investigation. Volpe was dead by the time the civil case went to trial. In April 2014, a jury awarded Restivo and Halstead $18 million each in a federal civil rights lawsuit.

Joel Kogut received $1.5 million from the New York Court of Claims. $37.5 million total. Three men who lost their 20s, their 30s, and most of their 40s inside a state prison. After the exonerations, the case went cold again. The male profile from the swab existed in a lab file. A full genetic identity of the man who killed Teresa Fusco.

But it didn’t match anyone in CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders. CODIS only works if the person’s DNA is already in the system. Mandatory DNA collection from convicted offenders didn’t start in most states until the mid to late 1990s. If the killer had been convicted before that, he wouldn’t be in the database.

 If he’d never been convicted at all, the system had nothing. That profile sat in a file with no name attached. Same investigators ran it through CODIS periodically as the database grew with new entries from new convictions across the country. Every time, the result came back empty. No match in the system. Thousands of profiles were added each year, but the killer’s wasn’t among them.

The case went quiet for 20 years. Thomas Fusco never stopped waiting for an answer after his daughter was killed in 1984. Three men were convicted 2 years later, and for 17 years, he and his wife, Concetta, believed the case was closed. Then DNA proved those men didn’t do it, and the whole thing reopened.

 The killer was still out there. His DNA existed, but couldn’t be matched to anyone. The years kept passing. Thomas and Concetta grew older while the case sat open with no suspect. 20 years with no news. Concetta Napoli died in 2019. She went without ever knowing who killed her daughter. 35 years of waiting, and she never got an answer. Thomas kept going.

He attended every hearing, every press conference, every meeting with investigators. He carried a small photograph of Teresa in the pocket of his suit jacket. He’d been carrying it since she was killed. In August 2023, nearly 39 years after the murder, the investigation took a new approach. The Nassau County Office of the Medical Examiner, working with the FBI, submitted the original vaginal swab to Authurm Labs in The Woodlands, Texas.

Authurm is a private lab that specializes in recovering DNA from old evidence. Samples that have sat for decades where normal testing would fail. Standard testing in the 1980s could read about 20 genetic markers from a sample. Authurm’s lab could read hundreds of thousands of markers from the same sample, even if it was degraded.

 They extracted a detailed profile from the 40-year-old swab. It was the same swab that Nina Morrison had found back in 2002. The one that freed three innocent men. This time, the lab was looking for who the DNA actually belonged to. She had the profile went to the FBI’s investigative genetic genealogy unit. The idea behind genetic genealogy is simple.

Even if the killer never submitted his own DNA to an ancestry database, a distant relative might have. People upload their DNA test results to sites like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA to learn about their family history. If a relative of the suspect is in one of those databases, genealogists can trace the family tree from that relative to the person who matches the crime scene profile.

The FBI’s investigative genetic genealogy unit ran the Authurm profile against consumer databases and found distant relatives. From those initial matches, the investigators built the family tree outward, checking public records, cross-referencing names and locations, and in narrowing the pool over months until they landed on one man living on Long Island.

Investigators began surveillance in early 2024. They watched the man’s daily routine, learned where he went, and waited for an opportunity to collect something with his DNA on it without alerting him. They followed him to a Tropical Smoothie Cafe in Center Moriches on the far eastern end of Long Island in neighboring Suffolk County.

He ordered a smoothie, finished it, and tossed the cup into the trash on his way out. After he left, the investigators moved in and pulled the cup from the garbage. The straw went to the lab. It contained everything they needed, the genetic fingerprint of the man who had killed Teresa Fusco 40 years before. Results came back a 100% match with the DNA from the vaginal swab collected in 1984.

A certain match. Should the man was 63 years old and had been 23 in 1984. He’d lived with his grandparents in Lynbrook, about a mile from both Hot Skates and Teresa’s home. When investigators talked to him, he told them he’d operated a mobile coffee truck in the area at the time of the murder. He knew the neighborhood.

 He knew the rink. But Teresa’s family and friends told police they didn’t recognize him as anyone she’d known. He wasn’t in her circle. He wasn’t anyone the original detectives had ever looked at. When investigators confronted him days before his arrest, he denied knowing Teresa. But he said something else. He told them people got away with murder back then.

His name was Richard Bilodeau. Bilodeau was arrested on October 14th, 2025, 41 years after Teresa Fusco was killed. The next morning, he was arraigned before Judge Helene Gugerty in Nassau County on two counts of second-degree murder, intentional murder, and murder during the commission of a rape. Bilodeau pleaded not guilty and was held without bail.

He had no known prior criminal record. He had never been arrested or convicted of anything that would have put his DNA into CODIS or any other law enforcement database. That’s why the system never found him. He’d been invisible to it for 40 years. After 1984, Bilodeau stayed on Long Island.

 Eventually, he settled in Center Moriches, about 50 miles east of Lynbrook, where he lived alone in a rented apartment and worked nights at a Walmart. On his Facebook page, he listed himself as a Mets and Dallas Cowboys fan. And for 41 years, he lived a quiet, anonymous life on the same island where he’d killed a 16-year-old girl. If convicted, he faces 25 years to life in prison.

Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly held the press conference. She stood at the podium and repeated what Bilodeau had told investigators, that people got away with murder back then. Then she answered him, “It’s 2025, and I got you now.” Thomas Fusco stood beside her at the podium. He was elderly now, 41 years older than the father who’d buried his daughter in 1984.

His wife was gone. He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a small photograph of Teresa. He held it up for the cameras and said he loved her, and he missed her, that she lives in his heart, that he never gave up hope. Then he said, “It’s heartbreaking to go through this over and over again, but this seems like closure.

” Bilodeau’s case is pending. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail in Nassau County. His next court date was set for November 2025. The case remains open and active. Prosecutors are now investigating whether Bilodo is connected to other disappearances and deaths in the Lynbrook area during the 1980s.

Those cases include Kelly Morrissey, Teresa’s close friend who vanished earlier in 1984 and has never been found, and Jacqueline Martorella, another young woman from the same area who went missing around the same time. The DA declined to say whether Bilodo is a suspect in those cases. Teresa Fusco was 16 years old.

 The last time anyone saw her, she was walking out of Hot Skates on a November night in 1984 crying after losing her job. Her father was at the press conference when they announced the arrest. His wife Concetta had died 6 years before the answer came in 2019 after 35 years of waiting. Thomas was still there. He pulled out the photograph he’d carried since 1984, held it up, and said her name.