In general, as a person, I am highly anxious and don’t deal well with the unknown. Open-ended books, movies, or even documentaries stress me out — I like to know how things will ultimately settle. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live through a horror quite like enduring a cold case. Thankfully, a family on New York’s Long Island may finally be able to heal after 41 years of wondering who raped and killed 16-year-old Theresa Fusco. And it is all thanks to a smoothie straw.
According to CNN, Fusco disappeared on November 10, 1984. Witnesses last saw her in tears as she was leaving the Hot Skates roller rink in Lynbrook, New York, after being fired from her snack bar job. A month later, her naked body was recovered from a pile of leaves in a wooded area just a few blocks from the rink. The medical examiner determined she was strangled and raped.
The New York Post reported that three local men — John Restivo, Dennis Halstead, and John Kogut — were arrested and convicted for the teen’s death, but DNA evidence cleared all three after they had already served up to 18 years. The men were freed in 2003 and awarded $43 million for the wrongful conviction.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, said investigators identified Richard Bilodeau, 63, as a potential suspect and began trailing him. Their big break came in February 2025, when he bought and discarded the remnants of a smoothie from the Tropical Smoothie store near his Suffolk County home. They retrieved the cup and determined that the DNA from the straw was a match to the sample taken from Theresa Fusco’s body.
“He was 24 years old,” Donnelly told the outlet. “He was operating, according to him, a mobile coffee truck in Nassau County and was living with his grandparents about a mile from the rink.”
The arrest comes as a relief to the teen’s heartbroken parents. “I never gave up hope,” Thomas Fusco, her father, told reporters. “I always had faith in the system. For me, hearing that there was someone [who took] my daughter’s life will bring closure to me and my family. It’s heartbreaking to go through this over and over again, but this seems like a finalization and I’m very grateful. Very grateful.”
Bilodeau is being held without bail, with a return to court scheduled for November 21. His defense attorney denied that he was behind the murder.
