The Original Investigation
On November 10, 1984, Fusco disappeared after leaving a roller rink in Lynbrook, Long Island, a little before 10 p.m. On December 5, her body was discovered near the rink; she’d been strangled to death and raped. Vaginal swabs found semen and sperm, but DNA testing was not used when the original investigation occurred.
Fusco’s death wasn’t the only local tragedy at the time. A 15-year-old friend of hers, Kelly Morrissey, had disappeared in June of that year, and in March 1985, a 19-year-old, Jacqueline Martarella, went missing; her body was discovered on a golf course the following month. Both cases remain unsolved.
During the spring of 1985, police said John Kogut confessed to murdering Fusco and implicated two other men: Dennis Halstead and John Restivo. The three were arrested and charged with raping and killing Fusco. In 1986, they were found guilty at two separate trials—one for Kogut, the other for Halstead and Restivo.
All three appealed their convictions. Kogut argued his confession was coerced after an 18-hour session with police.
“False confessions are a very well-known phenomenon,” Andrew Pollis, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “There are people in prison right now who were convicted on the strength of false confessions.”
Starting in 1993, testing showed none of the three men’s DNA was a match to the DNA found on Fusco’s body. However, prosecutors countered that the vaginal slides tested were lower-quality samples, so semen from the defendants might not have been detected.
Defense lawyers in 2003 found police property records revealing the existence of an intact vaginal swab from Fusco. When sperm on this swab was tested, the DNA results were the same as before. The men's convictions were overturned in June 2003.
A New Suspect
In 2003, standard DNA testing relied on short tandem repeats (STR): DNA sequences that repeat in the genome, with the lengths varying between individuals.
“Traditional STR testing can only confirm a match once a suspect is already identified, but it can’t point investigators to that person,” David Mittelman, a scientist and the CEO of forensics lab Othram, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
In 2023, Othram used Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing (FGGS) to analyze the sample collected from Fusco almost 40 years earlier. Instead of STR testing, FGGS is a form of whole genome sequencing the company developed for forensic applications.
“FGGS allowed us to build an SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] profile from the same DNA that was previously used for STR testing,” Mittelman explains.
Investigative genealogists (the FBI’s forensic genetic genealogy unit in this instance) use SNP profiles to generate new leads by looking in DNA databases for relatives. Mittelman says the “search for distant genetic relatives ultimately helped identify a suspect” in Fusco’s murder: Bilodeau, who in 1984 lived in Lynbrook with his grandparents.
A Smoothie Leads to an Arrest
By 2024, Bilodeau, who then lived in Long Island’s Suffolk County, was under surveillance. In February, investigators saw him leave a cafe with a smoothie, then witnessed the smoothie cup and its straw get tossed in the garbage outside his house. Investigators took the trash after it was placed on the street.
They could collect the smoothie cup because it was thrown out and then left in public. “You have no expectation of privacy [after] leaving something in a public place of any sort,” Pollis explains.
According to police, testing showed that DNA from the smoothie straw matched the male DNA found on Fusco.
On October 14, 2025, Bilodeau was indicted and arrested for raping and murdering Fusco in 1984. The next day, he was arraigned in a Nassau County courtroom on two counts of murder in the second degree. He faces a second charge because he is accused of committing murder in the course of a rape.
What’s Next in the Case
Despite the smoothie straw providing an apparent DNA match, Pollis notes it presents evidentiary issues: “Just because a police officer testifies that he pulled a straw out of a garbage can does not necessarily mean that it's the straw that the defendant actually used, and just because it's a straw that the defendant actually used does not necessarily mean that it hasn't been contaminated in the garbage by being in contact with other items.”
And while investigators could take a straw from publicly discarded trash, Pollis says that obtaining “hair, saliva, blood, whatever it is from an individual is a much more intrusive act. That's one where we do all have reasonable expectations of privacy.” As such, it requires a warrant or court order.
On November 21, 2025, prosecutors asked a judge to order Bilodeau to provide a DNA sample via a swab from inside his cheek, known as a buccal swab. A prosecutorial brief stated “a genetic profile developed from a buccal swab specimen from defendant Richard Bilodeau will provide material evidence identifying [him] as the individual responsible for the crime that took place on November 10, 1984.”
The judge said Bilodeau’s defense lawyers have until January 2026 to respond.
But Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly has asserted that prosecutors are certain about this arrest. At a press conference on October 15, she said, “DNA doesn't lie. When you have a DNA match, a 100% match, we got the guy.”
