A NY woman is found raped \u0026 murdered 3 blocks from her home In March of 1980, the life of 20-year-old Eve Wilkowitz was tragically cut short, leaving a void in the community of Bayshore, New York. A secretary in Manhattan, she was making her way home late one evening after a date. Having taken the Long Island Rail Road train to the Bayshore station, she began the familiar walk to her apartment, a journey she would never complete. Days later, her body was discovered on the lawn of a nearby home, casting a pall over the quiet neighborhood.
An autopsy would later reveal the grim details: she had been raped and strangled.
For more than four decades, the case of Eve Wilkowitz's murder remained a painful, unanswered question for her family and for law enforcement. Investigators collected DNA evidence from the scene, a crucial foresight in an era before the advent of advanced forensic technology. Over the years, this evidence was periodically compared against criminal databases, but no match was ever found. The trail had gone cold, yet the memory of Eve and the quest for justice for her death never faded, largely due to the persistence of her younger sister, Irene.
A breakthrough finally came in the early 2020s with the rise of genetic genealogy, a revolutionary investigative tool that had already proven successful in solving other cold cases. At the urging of Eve's family, Suffolk County detectives pursued this new avenue. By creating a DNA profile from the evidence preserved decades earlier and uploading it to public genealogy databases, investigators were able to identify a distant relative of the unknown suspect. This crucial link led them to a man named Herbert Rice. At the time of the murder, Rice was 29 years old and lived with his mother just a short distance from where Eve's body was found.
Further investigation revealed that Rice had died of cancer in 1991. To definitively confirm his involvement, authorities obtained a court order to exhume his remains. A DNA sample was taken from Rice's body and compared to the evidence from the crime scene. The results were conclusive: a perfect match. After 42 long years, the individual responsible for the death of Eve Wilkowitz had been identified. Though he could never face a trial for his actions, the resolution of the case brought a long-awaited, albeit bittersweet, sense of closure to Eve's surviving family members, who had never given up hope that one day, they would have an answer.
