Daughter solves mum’s murder after 52 years — and finally clears her father’s name

For most people, slipping over in the snow on the way to school probably isn’t the kind of moment that stays with you forever. For Marla Waldman Conn, however, it became the last memory she had of her mother.

Barbara Waldman stood at the front door of the family home in Oceanside, Long Island, on January 11, 1974, waving goodbye as her three children headed towards their big yellow school bus. Marla slipped on the icy driveway while her brothers laughed nearby.

‘Marla, be careful, are you okay?’ Barbara shouted after her. They were the last words Marla ever heard her say.

Just 20 minutes later, Barbara, who was just 31 at the time, was dead. She’d been sexually assaulted and viciously murdered inside her own home.

To add to the tragedy of it all, she was found by her five-year-old son Eric, who had returned home from his nearby school during his lunch break.

Barbara was found upstairs with her hands tied behind her back. A pillowcase had been stuffed into her mouth and she had suffered a gunshot wound to the head.

Police created a sketch of the suspected killer at the time of the murder, but despite the abject and shocking horror of the case, nobody was ever arrested.

Decades passed without answers while suspicion quietly spread through the local community as to who may have been responsible.

Much of the speculation focused on Barbara’s husband, Gerald Waldman, who worked as a dentist and was treating a patient at the time of the murder. The rumours only intensified after he remarried six months later.

‘My mother’s side of the family always implied that my father had killed her,’ Marla said. ‘We were aware that a large part of the community accused him of having our mother killed. Processing that as a child was tough.’

According to Marla, discussion about the case was virtually non-existent following Barbara’s death.

‘After my mother died, my father remarried quickly and pictures of her were taken off the wall,’ she said. ‘She was wiped from our lives.’

Even so, traces remained hidden away. Marla said her father kept a secret box of photographs tucked out of sight, which her brother would occasionally sneak into so he could look at pictures of their mother.

For years, Marla avoided asking too many questions about the murder. That all changed, however, when she became an adult and started contacting the police herself, repeatedly asking investigators to reopen the case – something they were very reluctant to do.

Then, in 2022, something dramatic happened.

Serial killer Richard Cottingham, also known as ‘The Times Square Ripper’, confessed to several murders connected to Long Island, including one involving a home invasion. The similarities immediately caught Marla’s attention.

‘I called the detective, and he said that he will reopen the case to see if the DNA evidence matches Cottingham’s,’ she said.

Investigators developed a full DNA profile from evidence that was gathered at the crime scene at the time.

Marla believed they were finally getting somewhere, but after eight long months there was still no match to Cottingham, nor to anyone else whose details were sitting on the national database.

‘The police told us there was nothing else they could do at that point,’ she said.

But Marla refused to leave it there. She pushed Nassau County police to involve the FBI so more advanced DNA and genetic genealogy testing could be carried out.

Eventually, it ended up paying off. In August 2024, investigators identified a DNA match pointing towards Thomas Generazio, a local refuse worker who had lived near the Waldman family home at the time Barbara was killed. Generazio died in 2004.

‘When I was told there was a DNA match, I fell to the floor,’ Marla said. ‘I was beyond baffled. He looked like a regular person.’

Over several months, Marla managed to track down a number of Generazio’s relatives, searched records from around Oceanside, and contacted his children, some of whom had never even met him.

‘I made it my mission to prove that this m*********** killed my mother, and he might have hurt other people,’ she said.

One of Generazio’s daughters eventually sent Marla photographs of him, including one showing him wearing a coat with a fur-lined collar. The photograph appeared to match the decades-old police sketch.

In March of this year, Nassau County police publicly announced they had identified Generazio as responsible for Barbara Waldman’s killing. Thanks, in no small way, to Marla’s incredible perseverance and determination.

For Marla, the revelation brought with it a huge amount of relief, as well as plenty of grief and trauma. But knowing he was gone comforted her.

‘When I heard he had died, that satisfied me that he couldn’t hurt or kill anyone else,’ she said. ‘The element of the unknown killer is gone; he is dead.’

The discovery also finally removed decades of suspicion hanging over her father’s name.

‘It was a brutal murder. My mother deserved more than that.’