Solved cold cases in New York
5 documented cases.
Etan Patz
Etan Patz, 6, vanished on the morning of May 25, 1979, the first day he was allowed to walk the two blocks from his family's apartment on Prince Street in SoHo to his school bus stop alone. No trace of him was ever found. His face went on milk cartons, the anniversary became National Missing Children's Day, and he was declared dead in 2001. For two decades the investigation circled a convicted child molester who had dated his babysitter, but no prosecutor charged him. In April 2012, two years after the Manhattan district attorney reopened the case, the FBI dug up a basement on Prince Street and found nothing. The coverage prompted a New Jersey man to call police about his brother-in-law, Pedro Hernandez, who had been a teenage stock clerk at the bodega beside the bus stop in 1979 and had told a church group, a neighbor and his first wife that he had killed a child in New York. On May 23, 2012, after about seven hours of unwarned questioning, Hernandez confessed and then repeated it on video: he said he had lured Etan into the store's basement with a soda, choked him and left him in a box with the trash. There was no physical evidence. A 2015 jury hung 11 to 1; a second jury convicted him of kidnapping and felony murder on February 14, 2017, and he was sentenced to 25 years to life. The Second Circuit overturned the conviction in July 2025 over the judge's answer to a jury note; the Supreme Court reinstated it, 6 to 3, on June 22, 2026.
Eve Wilkowitz
Eve Wilkowitz, a 20-year-old publishing-company secretary, took a late train home to Bay Shore, Long Island, on the night of March 22, 1980 and was abducted while walking from the station. She was raped and strangled, and her body was found three days later on a Bay Shore lawn. The case stayed cold for 42 years until investigative genetic genealogy led the Suffolk County Police and the FBI to Herbert Rice, a neighbor who had lived a few houses from where the body was found and who died of cancer in 1991. Rice's body was exhumed in March 2022, and DNA from his remains matched evidence preserved from the crime, allowing the Suffolk County District Attorney to name him as the killer.
Gail Katz-Bierenbaum
Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, 29, a graduate student in clinical psychology, vanished on July 7, 1985 from the Upper East Side apartment she shared with her husband, Robert Bierenbaum, a surgical resident. He told police she had left after an argument to sunbathe in Central Park. Detectives doubted him but had no body, weapon or witness. In October 1986 an investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney learned that he had rented a Cessna 172 at a New Jersey airport that same day, a flight he never mentioned. A torso that washed ashore on Staten Island in 1989 was identified as hers from X-rays and buried. When the case was reopened in 1998, DNA showed it was not. Investigators re-interviewed the women Bierenbaum had dated since, who described accounts of Gail's disappearance that kept changing. He was indicted in December 1999. At trial in October 2000, prosecutors relied on circumstantial evidence: the hidden flight, his shifting stories, Gail's statements to friends, and a police demonstration of dropping a 110-pound bag from the same type of plane. The jury convicted him of second-degree murder after less than six hours, and he was sentenced to 20 years to life. In December 2020 he admitted at a parole hearing that he had strangled her and dropped her body into the Atlantic. It has never been found.
JoAnn Nichols
JoAnn Nichols, 55, taught first grade at Gayhead Elementary School in Hopewell Junction, New York, and lived with her husband James in the Town of Poughkeepsie. She taught her last day before the winter break on December 20, 1985. The next day she missed a hair appointment and was reported missing. James told detectives he had last seen her when he left for work that morning and had found a typed note at home; her locked car was found at a nearby shopping center on December 22. The couple's only child had drowned three years earlier, and a detective said the note showed depression but was not a suicide letter. James later said she telephoned on Christmas Eve; police could not confirm the call and said he described it to them differently. Police reviewed the file every year and said James, who let detectives into the house at first, grew guarded; he was never ruled out. He died of natural causes in the house on December 27, 2012, aged 82. No relative claimed him, so Dutchess County buried him and hired a contractor to clear the house. On June 28, 2013 the contractor found a sealed plastic container behind a false wall in the basement. The medical examiner identified JoAnn by dental records: she had been struck in the head, her hands tied, her body wrapped in a sheet and plastic. Police reopened the case and said it was now safe to call James Nichols a suspect. He was never charged, because he was already dead.
Reyna Angélica Marroquín
Reyna Angélica Marroquín, a 27-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, vanished from her New Jersey apartment in early 1969. She had been working at Melrose Plastics, a Manhattan artificial-flower company, and was pregnant by her married boss, according to a friend who spoke to CBS. On September 2, 1999, a man moving out of a house in Jericho, Long Island, pried open a steel drum from the crawl space and found a mummified, nine-months-pregnant woman who had died of a blow to the head. Detectives dried a decayed address book, read a name under a video spectral comparator, and identified her. A plastic flower stem in the drum and the drum's origin led to Melrose Plastics and to Howard Elkins, who in 1969 owned the factory and the Jericho house. Detectives questioned Elkins in Boca Raton, Florida. He said he could not recall the employee he admitted an affair with and refused a DNA swab, and about a day later he shot himself. Elkins was never charged. DNA from his autopsy was reported to show a 99.93 percent probability that he fathered the baby, and in March 2000 a detective said the case was closed. Marroquín's body was returned to El Salvador for burial.