A DNA match helped police solve the murder of a 20-year-old woman who was killed in 1980, authorities in New York announced last week.
Prosecutors in Suffolk County on Long Island said Herbert Rice, who died of cancer in 1991, was the attacker who killed Eve Wilkowitz in 1980 after raping and strangling her.
“We’ve solved the 42-year-old homicide case of Eve Wilkowitz,” Suffolk District Attorney Raymond Tierney said at a news conference. “This was a study in persistence, in determination to work the case no matter what.”
Wilkowitz, who worked as a secretary in Manhattan, was attacked as she walked home from a train station in Bay Shore on March 22, 1980. Her body was found three days later.
Suffolk County police and prosecutors said advances in genetic genealogy pointed to Rice, who was 29 years old at the time of the killing and was living with his mother near where the body was found.
An official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Newsday that the break came when police discovered Rice’s son’s DNA on a public genealogical website.
The son voluntarily gave a DNA sample to police, the official told the newspaper, which helped confirm Rice’s identity as the attacker. Officials have not identified the son who provided the DNA sample.
Authorities then exhumed Rice’s body and genetic analysis of his DNA found it matched semen found on Wilkowitz’s body, officials said.
Genetic genealogy has been used to solve many crimes in recent years, most notably in the case of so-called Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo in 2018. DeAngelo pleaded guilty to a series of rapes and murders in 2020 and is serving a life sentence without parole.
But critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say broad genetic searches may violate suspects’ constitutional rights.
A poll conducted in 2018 by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans do not support unrestricted access to genetic data by law enforcement. Half of those polled said such data should be shared with law enforcement only with the consent of the person tested. Thirteen percent said law enforcement should not use that information at all, while about 30% said it should be shared without consent.