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Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney and Suffolk County Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison announced on Wednesday, March 30, the solving of the murder of 20-year-old Eve Wilkowitz, whose body was found 42 years ago in Bay Shore this month.
“We tackled this case as soon as I got into office and figured out a way to legally expedite the exhumation of Ms. Wilkowitz’s suspected killer in order to truly confirm what investigators knew all along,” said Tierney. “I hope this brings closure and comfort to her loved ones knowing that we never truly stopped looking for the person responsible for cutting her young life short.”
According to her friends and co-worker, Wilkowitz was last seen alive on March 22, 1980. She had been employed as a secretary for a publishing company in Manhattan and was reported to have boarded the 12:39 a.m. Long Island Railroad train at Penn Station for purposes of returning to her home in Bay Shore, the DA's Office said.
Wilkowitz never made it home. Her live-in boyfriend reported her missing that same day. Her body was recovered on March 25, 1980, on the lawn of a property located at 26 Center Avenue in Bay Shore, police said.
When she was discovered, she was missing her coat, blouse, shoes, and pocketbook. There were ligature marks on her wrists and there were signs that she had been raped, the DA's Office said.
The cause of her death was later determined to be manual strangulation, police said.
Samples of fluids that did not belong to Wilkowitz were obtained from her body and stored in evidence for years, the DA's Office said.
Utilizing the new advances in genetic genealogy, detectives found a possible match and had the suspect's body exhumed earlier this month, and a DNA analysis found it matched the semen found on Wilkowitz's body, the DA's Office said.
The suspect has been identified as Herbert Rice, who died in 1991 and was 29-year-old at the time of the crime, police said.
Rice lived four houses from the street where Wilkowitz's body was found and within walking distance from the Bay Shore Railroad Station, police said.
“Today’s announcement marks the end of a more than four-decades-long investigation by Suffolk County Police detectives who never gave up on the pursuit of justice for Eve Wilkowitz,” said Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison.
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