Eve Wilkowitz cold case SOLVED.
From Newsday 3/29/2022
Suffolk investigators solve 42-year-old cold case
Thank you for the surprising update, so happy for Eve's sister to finally have an answer!
She waited 42 years to learn who killed her sister. The answer didn’t ease her pain. (msn.com)
''His name was Herbert Rice. He died of cancer in 1991, with two sons who had no idea what he’d done, Bottari said. In the sweeping and exhaustive investigation of the murder, in which police canvassed dozens of streets and interviewed hundreds of people, Rice had never attracted suspicion. He had a short record of arrests for nonviolent offenses, which did not require him to provide a DNA sample that would have been put in criminal databases. A query for relatives in the criminal database, known as a familial DNA search, failed as well.
It was the new technology, known as genetic genealogy, that finally gave police the answer.
“Without DNA, this wouldn’t have ever been solved,” Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said.
On Wednesday, Suffolk County authorities will hold a news conference naming Rice as the killer. Wilkowitz will travel from Rhode Island to thank the detectives and speak for Eve. But knowing who killed her sister won’t repair four decades of terror, anxiety and loss.
“For 42 years, this was all I wanted — I just wanted it to be over,” Wilkowitz said this week. “My goal was to be a mom, and beyond that I didn’t allow myself to dream any other dream because I was afraid someone would come along and murder me. So I can’t process that it’s solved now, and that I’m still here.”
''At the time of the murder, the son’s mother said, she had kicked Rice out of their house, according to detectives. Rice had moved in with his mother, who lived about four houses from the yard where Eve Wilkowitz’s body was discovered on March 25, 1980, detectives said. In the case file, detectives saw that Rice’s mother had been questioned by police who canvassed the neighborhood. She told them she hadn’t noticed anything, Bottari said.
Rice’s son had done nothing wrong, but he told detectives he still wished he could apologize to Wilkowitz’s family, police said.''
