Exactly 42 years ago, on 22 March 1980, Eve Wilkowitz took the last train of the day at Penn Station in Manhattan to return to her boyfriend’s house in Bay Shore (Long Island, NY). But she never came.
Her friend, her writer, Jack Dempsey was the last known person to see the young woman from alive in NYC years. Three days later her body was found not far from the train station in Suffolk County. She had been beaten, tied up, raped and strangled. Now, finally, her murderer and rapist has been identified by DNA. But he is no longer alive to pay for the crime.
A genetic genealogy portal led FBI detectives and Suffolk police to Herbert Rice, a Bay Shore man who had 30 years when Wilkowitz disappeared.
Rice died of cancer in 1991 and now his body has been exhumed to confirm his role in the murder, explained to Pix11 the victim’s younger sister, Irene Wilkowitz. His voice filled with emotion as he shared, “They were able to get an ID from 100%.”
Irene received the news of the positive identification last Thursday 24 of March, just when they were fulfilled 42 years of the crime. Earlier in December, detectives and FBI agents traveled to his home in Rhode Island to tell him that they were pretty sure they finally knew who had killed his sister.
The discovery was made possible because a distant relative of Rice’s had submitted his DNA to a genealogy portal, thereby making a first family link to the evidence collected in the Wilkowitz murder. FBI and Suffolk detectives then located Rice’s son, who agreed to provide a DNA sample to help the case.
In 2022, after decades of waiting, Irene took up the unsolved case of her sister in public. “I have to be her voice,” she said at that time to the television station Pix . “They kept her alive for three days before they killed her,” she recalled sadly.