On October 14th, 2025, Richard Bilodeau was arrested for the murder of Theresa Fusco, a crime committed 41 years earlier. For four decades, the DNA from the rape kit that would eventually put his name before a judge had sat untested in a police property log, while three innocent men languished in prison for a murder they had nothing to do with. The arrest did not just close a cold case; it exposed the full arc of a tragedy that had consumed five decades, two sets of defendants, and one family’s entire lifetime of grief. The story began on November 10th, 1984, in Lynbrook, New York.
Theresa Fusco, a 16-year-old who dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina, had just been fired from her shift at the snack bar of the Hot Skates roller rink. At 9:47 that night, she walked out alone, in tears, into the cold autumn air. She was never seen alive again. Her body was found on December 5th, buried under leaves and a discarded pallet in a wooded area near the Long Island Rail Road tracks, not far from the rink.
The autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled with a ligature. The murder struck a community already on edge. Earlier that year, Theresa’s close friend, 15-year-old Kelly Morrissey, had disappeared and was never found. In March 1985, 19-year-old Jacqueline Martarella went missing; her body was later discovered strangled on a private golf course.
Three young women from the same tight-knit town in less than a year. The pressure on the Nassau County Police Department to deliver answers was immense, and the response to that pressure would prove catastrophic. Instead of building a case on evidence, detectives built one on desperation. Their focus narrowed to three local men: 21-year-old John Kogut, 27-year-old John Restivo, and 31-year-old Dennis Halstead.
The connections between them were thin. Kogut had done occasional landscaping work for Restivo’s brother’s moving business. The men were not even close friends. There was no physical evidence linking any of them to the crime.
No fingerprints. No weapon. No DNA. Nothing placed any of them near Theresa Fusco that night.
But the police had already written the script. By the time detectives brought Kogut in for questioning, they had already placed an eavesdropping warrant on Halstead’s home and had surveillance teams following Restivo’s van. They had their suspects. What they needed was a confession to make those suspects stick, and they were prepared to get one.
Kogut was brought in for three polygraph examinations. Each time, he was told he had failed, even as he maintained his innocence. Then came nearly 18 hours of relentless interrogation. At the end of it, exhausted and frightened, Kogut signed a seven-page written confession.
The statement was handwritten by the interrogating detective, and when investigators took Kogut to the crime scene afterward, he was unable to point to a single piece of missing evidence. The confession contained nothing that was not already known to law enforcement. It was a script handed to a broken young man to sign. Prosecutors shored up the hollow case with two additional pillars.
A forensic analyst testified that two hairs found in Restivo’s van were microscopically similar to Theresa’s and could only have been deposited there after her death, using a method called advanced banding analysis. It sounded scientific and convinced the jury. Years later, the same expert signed a sworn affidavit declaring the hairs could not, in fact, be linked to Theresa through that method. By then, the damage was done.
Prosecutors also relied on jailhouse informants, people with pending charges and obvious incentives to lie, who claimed the men had made incriminating statements. Kogut was tried first. On May 28th, 1986, he was convicted and sentenced to 31 and a half years to life. Restivo and Halstead were tried together and convicted on December 3rd, 1986, each sentenced to 33 and a third years to life.
Three men with no credible evidence against them were convicted of a crime they had nothing to do with. Restivo, who entered prison in his mid-20s, would not taste freedom again until he was approaching 50. Halstead, who had children when he was arrested, tried to stay present in their lives through letters and collect calls. For 18 years, all three maintained their innocence, filing appeal after appeal, holding on to the slimmest thread of hope.
Meanwhile, the real killer walked free. In the early 1990s, a quiet revolution in forensic science began. DNA testing had become the gold standard of truth. In 1994, Centurion Ministries began working on behalf of all three men, and the Innocence Project joined Restivo’s case in 1997.
The first rounds of DNA testing, beginning in 1993, showed alarming results. None of the three men matched the DNA profile recovered from Theresa’s body. But prosecutors refused to yield, arguing the vaginal slides tested were degraded samples, and any DNA from the real perpetrators might have deteriorated beyond detection. Then, in 2003, attorneys reviewing 150 boxes of old case files made a critical discovery in a police property log.
An intact vaginal swab from Theresa’s 1984 rape kit had been preserved all along. It had never been tested. When advanced DNA testing was finally performed, the results were explosive. The DNA from the semen on that swab did not match Restivo, Halstead, Kogut, or any of the 86 other individuals known to Theresa who had been tested and excluded.
It belonged to a single unknown man. The prosecution’s theory of a group attack was scientifically impossible. All three convictions were vacated in June 2003. Restivo and Halstead walked out of prison as free men.
Kogut, released on parole in 2001, still faced a retrial because of his confession. In a landmark moment, his defense successfully argued for the admission of expert testimony on false confessions, the first time in New York State history that such testimony was allowed. On December 21st, 2005, after a three-month bench trial, a Nassau County judge acquitted Kogut outright, declaring the confession not credible. Within a week, all remaining charges against Restivo and Halstead were dropped.
Freedom after 18 years behind bars was not the same as being okay. Halstead struggled with what years of incarceration had done to him. His children had grown up without him. Restivo would later say, “A million dollars a year, it isn’t going to give me back those 18 years.
” In 2014, a federal jury deliberated just two hours before awarding Restivo and Halstead $18 million each from Nassau County for malicious prosecution, a verdict a federal appeals court later upheld in full. Kogut received separate compensation through the state. The lead detective on the original case, Joseph Volpe, died before the civil trial concluded. But a painful reality remained.
Theresa Fusco’s case was colder than it had ever been. The killer’s DNA sat in a database under a John Doe label, silent and nameless. Theresa’s mother would go to her grave in 2019, never knowing who had taken her daughter. Behind the scenes, something was quietly shifting.
In August 2023, Nassau County investigators sent the 39-year-old vaginal swab to Othram, a forensic laboratory in Houston known for working on cold cases with degraded DNA. Using forensic investigative genetic genealogy, they built a detailed genetic profile from the ancient sample, cross-referenced it against public ancestry databases, and traced bloodlines across generations until the web of relatives converged on one name: Richard Bilodeau. In 1984, Bilodeau was a 23-year-old man living with his grandparents on Treadwell Avenue in Lynbrook, one mile from Hot Skates and one mile from the Fusco family home. He drove a Mobile Coffee truck through the neighborhood.
He was part of the fabric of the community Theresa moved through every day. By 2024, he was 62, living alone in Center Moriches, working overnight shifts stocking shelves at a Walmart. He had no meaningful criminal record. Investigators needed a DNA sample with a legal basis, so they began surveillance, waiting for the moment he threw something away.
In February 2024, Bilodeau walked into a Tropical Smoothie Cafe, finished his drink, and dropped the cup and straw into a trash can. Investigators retrieved the straw and ran the DNA against the 41-year-old profile from Theresa’s rape kit. It was a match. District Attorney Anne Donnelly put it plainly: “When you have a DNA match, a 100% match, we got the guy.
”
Days before his arrest, Bilodeau made a remark that would follow him into the courtroom. He said, casually, with the confidence of a man who had spent four decades believing he had gotten away with it, “People got away with murder back then. ” Donnelly’s response was immediate: “It’s 2025 and I’ve got you now. ”
On October 14th, 2025, Richard Bilodeau was arrested.
The following morning, he was arraigned on two counts of second-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty and was remanded without bail. In April 2026, a judge ruled the case legally sufficient to proceed to trial, affirming that the DNA evidence alone was more than enough for the indictment to stand. On October 15th, 2025, Theresa’s father, Thomas Fusco, stood at a podium beside the district attorney, reached into his suit jacket, and pulled out a small photograph of his daughter.
He had never stopped believing the truth would come out. “It’s heartbreaking to go through this over and over again,” he said, “but this seems like a finalization, and I’m very grateful. ”
For John Restivo, Dennis Halstead, and John Kogut, the arrest was the ultimate vindication. Someone else did this.
And now that someone has a name, a face, and handcuffs. The case is moving through the courts, another trial in a case that has already consumed five decades. But this time, the science is pointing where it was always supposed to point.
And the lie, at long last, has nowhere left to hide.