Sheila Heiman, a 33-year-old White woman, was killed on July 20, 1973, inside her family’s home on Mulberry Place in North Woodmere, New York. That morning began with the ordinary rhythms of a quiet neighborhood, but the house was unusually empty of noise: her children were away at summer camp, and her husband left on an errand to a nearby department store.
When he returned in the early afternoon, he found her in the bathroom, dead, and the day that should have ended with a routine reunion instead collapsed into a scene of violence and disbelief.
Investigators determined she had been brutally attacked. Authorities described severe injuries, including multiple lacerations to her skull, a fractured jaw, and a lacerated jugular vein—wounds consistent with a vicious, close-range assault carried out with relentless force. In the aftermath, the household details that had defined her life—work, family, and routine—became part of the timeline that detectives tried to assemble, including the fact that she was employed by a Brooklyn book company at the time. Yet the immediate answers that might have explained who entered that home, and why, did not arrive quickly.
For years, the case remained a haunting unanswered story on Long Island, one of those deaths that refused to settle into a neat conclusion. The passage of time did not soften what happened in that bathroom; it only widened the distance between the moment she was found and the moment anyone could name the person responsible in a court of law.
Nearly five decades later, a breakthrough in a different Nassau County homicide—driven by renewed forensic work and investigative persistence—brought her name back into public view. In 2021, evidence in the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick was retested by the Nassau County Office of the Medical Examiner, and a DNA profile generated in early 2022 matched Richard Cottingham, a convicted serial killer imprisoned in New Jersey. After extensive interviews with detectives and prosecutors, Cottingham admitted to additional Nassau County killings from the early 1970s, and in open court on December 5, 2022, he allocuted to the deaths of multiple women, including Heiman.
That admission, however, did not lead to a separate prosecution for her murder. Nassau County prosecutors agreed not to prosecute Cottingham for the additional deaths he admitted—Heiman’s included—because he was already serving sentences that ensured he would remain incarcerated for the rest of his life. The legal outcome left no trial focused solely on her final hours, no new jury weighing evidence specific to her case, and no distinct conviction bearing her name; instead, the resolution came as a grim confession folded into a plea and a lifetime already locked behind prison walls.
