Theresa Fusco killing: Best friend hopes for closure after arrest made in the cold-case killing

On the evening of Nov. 10, 1984, Lisa Kaplan waited at her Lynbrook home for her best friend, Theresa Fusco, to arrive for a sleepover.

Fusco, a 16-year-old junior at East Rockaway High School, never showed up for their girls night. Twenty-five days later, the teen's body was found partially buried near the village's Long Island Rail Road tracks.

"I didn't think anything of it at the time," the now Lisa Johnson, 57, said of Fusco's failure to show up for their sleepover. "I just thought maybe something else came up, or she decided to go home."

'Absolutely horrifying'

Until this week, the question of what happened to the curly haired teen, who loved ballet and tap and hoped to one day become a dance teacher, remained one of Long Island's most baffling and enigmatic mysteries — one that involved the arrests, and eventual exoneration, of three men first charged with Fusco's killing.

But on Wednesday, nearly 41 years after Fusco went missing, Nassau County prosecutors charged Richard Bilodeau, 63, of Center Moriches, who works the evening shift at a Suffolk County Walmart, with the teen's brutal rape and murder. He has pleaded not guilty.

At the time of Fusco's death, Bilodeau was 23, driving a coffee truck and living with his grandparents on Tredwell Avenue, a mile from the victim's house, prosecutors said.

The unexpected arrest sparked a flood of painful memories for Johnson, who has remained close with the Fusco family.

"When Theresa went missing, it was definitely very upsetting to myself, to her family and to her friends," Johnson said in an interview Thursday. "We really didn't know what to think or what happened to her at that point. But as the days went on, it became more and more concerning that something was wrong."

The two teens, friends for a half dozen years, had become close, shopping together at the mall, doing each other's makeup and hanging out at Hot Skates. Fusco was fired from her job at the now-shuttered Lynbrook roller rink's snack bar and was on her way home, police said, when she went missing.

Nearly a month after Fusco disappeared, her body was discovered by two teenagers — Marcelo Baez and Andrew Tursi — near the LIRR tracks at Rocklyn Avenue, partially buried under leaves and several shipping pallets. Authorities said the teen had been sexually assaulted, strangled and beaten.

"It was absolutely horrifying," Johnson said. "At 16 years old, it was hard to process something that devastating."

A 'traumatic' discovery

While family and friends grieved the loss of the social and family-focused teen, Baez, now 55 and a physical education teacher who still lives in Lynbrook, struggled to make sense of the grisly discovery.

"It was extremely traumatic," Baez said in an interview Thursday. "After 41 years, I still can't go over there [to the railroad tracks] ... It really affected me. I was 14 years old, and I had never seen a dead body before."

Baez recalled that he and Tursi were on their way home from middle school when they noticed a stack of pallets. When the teens moved the bottom pallet they saw Fusco’s head and arms. The boys then ran to a corner deli operated by an NYPD officer and alerted him of the body.

"I couldn’t even look at the body," Baez said. "I was crying. We originally thought that it might be a mannequin left by an older kid. But it was the real thing."

Baez later testified at the trial of the three men convicted of Fusco’s rape and murder and became friendly with her mother, Connie Napoli, who died in 2019.

One of the then-suspects, John Kogut, had confessed to the murder — he later recanted — following 12 hours of police interrogation and implicated two other men, John Restivo and Dennis Halstead, in the crime.

Kogut, who had written a seven-page confession and had professed his guilt on videotape, was convicted in June 1986. Restivo and Halstead were charged with rape and murder and tried and convicted several months later.

More than 17 years later, the three men were released from prison and their verdicts were set aside after advanced DNA techniques showed they were not involved in the crime.

In 2006, the men sued Nassau County, its district attorney and police department for wrongful conviction and malicious prosecution.

Restivo and Halstead prevailed in their federal lawsuit, which alleged that a police detective had planted evidence implicating them in the killing, and were each awarded $18 million. Kogut sued separately, lost his civil trial and was not awarded any damages.

On Wednesday, after news broke that Bilodeau had been charged in Fusco’s killing, the floodgate of memories came rushing back for Baez.

"I opened Newsday and there was Theresa, who’s been such a big part of me since 1984," he said.

Johnson, who now lives in Suffolk County, said she never gave up hope that her best friend's killer would one day be brought to justice.

"This was an unsolved mystery for all these years, and there has never been closure," she said. "Hopefully this arrest will bring some type of closure to all of the family and friends who were close to Theresa."

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.