Speaker 1: So imagine carrying a really horrific, just crystal clear memory
Speaker 1: from the time you were just five years old. Oh wow, yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: picture the sheer weight of that, a memory that is
Speaker 1: so profoundly devastating that it completely redefines the entire trajectory
Speaker 1: of your family.
Speaker 2: Right, it becomes the dividing line.
Speaker 1: Exactly, the dividing line of your entire existence. You know,
Speaker 1: you have the world before that memory and then the
Speaker 1: world after. And then imagine sitting with that trauma, just
Speaker 1: waiting fifty two agonizing years for a single concrete answer
Speaker 1: as to why that memory even exists.
Speaker 2: I mean, it forces you to consider the sheer cognitive
Speaker 2: dissonance of living that reality for half a century. You
Speaker 2: have the visceral reality of the trauma on one side,
Speaker 2: and then absolute deafening silence from the universe on the other. Yes,
Speaker 2: a gap that stretches across decades.
Speaker 1: That is exactly the reality we are stepping into today.
Speaker 1: We are exploring a landmark true crime case out of New.
Speaker 2: York, the nineteen seventy four murder of Barbara Woldman.
Speaker 1: Right, this was a case just sat dormant, essentially a
Speaker 1: ghost story in a long Island suburb until it was
Speaker 1: finally solved in March of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Six, which is pretty recent.
Speaker 1: Extremely recent. But our mission for this deep dive today
Speaker 1: isn't just to recount a tragedy. We're going to explore
Speaker 1: the massive, compounding nature of generational trauma. And we're going
Speaker 1: to look at the stunning evolution of forensic.
Speaker 2: Science, specifically the deep mechanics of genetic genealogy, the way
Speaker 2: it reaches back through time.
Speaker 1: Yes, and we are also going to confront the agonizing
Speaker 1: asymmetry of justice, that terrible reality where a guilty person
Speaker 1: walks entirely free while innocent people are punished endlessly by
Speaker 1: public suspicion.
Speaker 2: Which is really the focus of our conversation today. Endurance.
Speaker 2: While the crime itself is brutal, what we're really examining
Speaker 2: is the physical endurance of microscopic evidence over half a century. Oh. Absolutely,
Speaker 2: and more importantly, the relentless endurance of three children who
Speaker 2: just refuse to let their mother become just a forgotten
Speaker 2: statistic in a cold case fireland cabinet.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And to understand why they fought with such such ferocity,
Speaker 1: we have to understand exactly what was taken from them
Speaker 1: in the world. They were taken from setting the sea
Speaker 1: right picture ocean side, Long Island in the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: specifically the thirty nine hundred block of Sally Lane. This
Speaker 1: was a classic working and middle class suburb. It's the
Speaker 1: kind of place where the rhythm of life is aggressively predictable.
Speaker 1: It's a neighborhood where people are out washing their cars
Speaker 1: on Saturday mornings, waving to each other from their driveways.
Speaker 2: It was an era defined by a very specific kind
Speaker 2: of intrinsic trust. You knew the houses on your block,
Speaker 2: and you knew the families inside them. The post war
Speaker 2: suburban boom created these incredibly tight knit enclaves where the
Speaker 2: prevailing psychology was one of absolute safety.
Speaker 1: I think of it like a snow globe, a snowg Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have this intricate, self contained little world. Ocean Side
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy four just feels like a snow globe.
Speaker 1: It's pristine, it's enclosed, and the concept of random brutal
Speaker 1: violence felt completely foreign.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just that violence rarely happened. It was the
Speaker 1: deeply held psychological belief that violence inherently couldn't breach that perimeter.
Speaker 2: Which really highlights how jarring the impact is going to
Speaker 2: be when that perimeter is breached totally.
Speaker 1: And at the center of this particular community was Barbara Waldman.
Speaker 2: She was thirty one years old, an NYU graduate.
Speaker 1: Right, highly active in the Ocean Side Cancer Society unit.
Speaker 2: She wasn't just a resident, she was a vibrant, visible
Speaker 2: thread in the daily fabric of this community.
Speaker 1: Yeah. She was a mother of three young kids, Mara
Speaker 1: who was seven, Larry who was six, and Eric, the
Speaker 1: youngest just five years old. Wow, so little, so little.
Speaker 1: And she was married to a local dentist, Gerald Waldman.
Speaker 1: She had long blonde hair, She was well liked, and
Speaker 1: she consistently showed up for her neighbors. She was just
Speaker 1: fully alive to the world around her.
Speaker 2: The kind of person whose sudden absence would leave a
Speaker 2: cavernous hole in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Exactly, which makes the morning of January eleventh, nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four all the more devastating. The contrast between the ordinary
Speaker 1: routine and what was about to happen.
Speaker 3: Is just stark, very stark.
Speaker 1: It was a bitterly cold, Long Island winter day, and
Speaker 1: the mundane details of that morning are incredibly grounding. The
Speaker 1: kids are getting bundled up in their heavy coats, grabbing
Speaker 1: their school bags, heading out the door toward.
Speaker 2: The car, the standard chaotic rhythm of any household with
Speaker 2: three kids under eight trying to get to school on time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just a normal morning. And as they head
Speaker 1: down the driveway, seven year old Marra slips on a
Speaker 1: patch of ice.
Speaker 2: Oh no.
Speaker 1: Barbara, reacting purely on maternal instinct, calls out to her.
Speaker 1: She says, Marla, be careful. Are you okay?
Speaker 2: Be careful?
Speaker 1: Those are the last three words she ever spoke to
Speaker 1: her daughter. Yes, And those words carry a massive psychological weight,
Speaker 1: because I mean, in normal timeline, a mother telling her
Speaker 1: child to be careful on the ice is forgotten. Ten
Speaker 1: seconds later, you brush it off and get in the car.
Speaker 2: But trauma freeze frames the mundane Yes exactly when an
Speaker 2: ordinary moment is immediately followed by an apocalyptic, life altering event,
Speaker 2: the preceding memory undergoes this.
Speaker 3: Terrible alcody changes completely right.
Speaker 2: The human brain, in an attempt to process the sudden
Speaker 2: influx of horrific stress, latches on to the last known
Speaker 2: point of safety. It turns a throwaway maternal caution into
Speaker 2: a haunting relic. Marl Waldman would carry those three words
Speaker 2: for fifty two years. It became a psychological anchor, a
Speaker 2: loop playing in her mind because it was the final
Speaker 2: moment the world made sense.
Speaker 1: That is just heartbreaking. So the kids go to school
Speaker 1: and the snow globe shatters. Yeah, the reality of what
Speaker 1: happened inside that house on Sally Lane is grim. The
Speaker 1: clinical facts is later outlined by Nasau County Police Commissioner
Speaker 1: Patrick Ryder detail of violent sexual assault. Barbara was tied
Speaker 1: up with the stockings she was wearing, she was strangled,
Speaker 1: and ultimately she was shot in the back of the
Speaker 1: head while lying face down in her bedroom.
Speaker 2: The clinical language is necessary for the record, but it
Speaker 2: requires us to look behind the procedural terminology.
Speaker 1: We have a thirty one year old woman, completely alone, terrified,
Speaker 1: suffering in the exact place she believed was the safest
Speaker 1: environment on earth.
Speaker 2: And there is a crucial detail here that completely altered
Speaker 2: the trajectory of the investigation.
Speaker 3: The house was not ransacked exactly.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy four, a daytime home invasion resulting in
Speaker 2: murder would almost universally be assumed to be a burglary
Speaker 2: gone horribly wrong.
Speaker 1: Like someone breaks in looking for cash, right, right.
Speaker 2: Someone breaks in looking for cash or jewelry, they're surprised
Speaker 2: by the homeowner. Panic ensues and it escalates to violence.
Speaker 2: But the lack of forced entry and the untouched valuables
Speaker 2: points to something infinitely darker.
Speaker 1: It was targeted. Yes, this wasn't a crime of opportunity
Speaker 1: regarding property. Whoever walked into that house on Sally Lane
Speaker 1: that morning came with a singular intent. They executed a coordinated,
Speaker 1: brutal sequence of events, and then they simply walked back
Speaker 1: out into the quiet suburban morning.
Speaker 2: Nobody saw them leave.
Speaker 1: They vanished into the background scenery, which sets up the
Speaker 1: most harrowing, dear detail of this entire area of the afternoon, Yeah,
Speaker 1: afternoon rolls around, kindergarten lets out. Five year old Eric
Speaker 1: Waldman comes home from school. He walks into his house,
Speaker 1: walks upstairs, and discovers his mother's body on the bedroom floor.
Speaker 2: It is the kind of detail that forces you to
Speaker 2: pause and just consider the sheer magnitude of the shock.
Speaker 1: I just I struggle to comprehend how a child's brain
Speaker 1: at that age processes this. At five years old, kids
Speaker 1: still think in terms of magic and cartoons. The finality
Speaker 1: of death is an abstract concept. I have a hard
Speaker 1: time believing a five year old brain can actually process
Speaker 1: a visual trauma of that magnitude without completely shutting down
Speaker 1: or fragmenting.
Speaker 2: Well. A brain at that developmental stage doesn't process it
Speaker 2: in the way an adult does. It doesn't, no, it
Speaker 2: simply records it. It bypasses the higher reasoning centers of
Speaker 2: the prefrontal cortex and sears directly into the.
Speaker 3: Amigdala brain's threat center.
Speaker 2: Exactly, It burns the image into the neural pathways, like
Speaker 2: a flashbulb going off in a dark room. The trauma
Speaker 2: becomes foundational to the child's entire cognitive architecture. Decades later,
Speaker 2: standing at a press conference in his mid fifties, Eric
Speaker 2: articulated this perfectly.
Speaker 1: What did he say?
Speaker 2: He said, I've had the image of my mom in
Speaker 2: my head since i was five, and it won't go
Speaker 2: away until I die.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. That is the invisible toll of an
Speaker 1: unsolved murder. It isn't just the tragic loss of the
Speaker 1: victim's life. It is the lifetime of psychological imprisonment for
Speaker 1: the survivors.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Eric carried that specific, horrific visual every single day of
Speaker 1: his adult life. When a case is unsolved, there is
Speaker 1: no narrative resolution to help contextualize the memory.
Speaker 2: There's no beginning, middle, and end right.
Speaker 1: It just sits there, raw and unprocessed, a perpetual open wound.
Speaker 2: The Nassau County Police launched a massive homicide investigation immediately
Speaker 2: they recognized the severity and the targeted nature of the attack.
Speaker 2: They were aggressively pursuing the killer, but they were about
Speaker 2: to hit an unyielding brick wall built entirely by the
Speaker 2: technological limitations of the era.
Speaker 1: Let's look at what the investigators actually had to work with.
Speaker 1: Because they weren't starting with an empty file. They found
Speaker 1: fingerprints at the crime scene. They found witnesses who had
Speaker 1: seen a man fleeing the general area around the time
Speaker 1: of the murder. Good leads usually yeah, and based on
Speaker 1: those witness accounts, they worked up a highly detailed police
Speaker 1: sketch of a potential suspect. They papered the town with it.
Speaker 2: And the devastating irony of this case is that the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy four sketch was remarkably accurate.
Speaker 1: It's crazy to look back at.
Speaker 2: It, it really is. When the case was finally solved
Speaker 2: decades later, investigators noted that the original drawing was an
Speaker 2: almost perfect match to the actual killer.
Speaker 1: But a perfect sketch without a name is just a
Speaker 1: drawing on a bulletin board, right. It is functionally useless
Speaker 1: unless someone in the community comes forward, points it to
Speaker 1: paper and says, I know exactly who that is, and
Speaker 1: no one did. Nobody did the police have this perfect face.
Speaker 1: They have fingerprints from the scene, but they are trapped
Speaker 1: in a technological vle. DNA testing as a standard forensic
Speaker 1: tool wouldn't exist for another two.
Speaker 2: Decades, and biological evidence in nineteen seventy four, things like blood,
Speaker 2: saliva or seamen could perhaps give you a blood type
Speaker 2: if the sample was large enough and perfectly.
Speaker 3: Preserved, which doesn't help much.
Speaker 2: Not really. That might narrow the suspect pulled down to
Speaker 2: forty percent of the population, but it could never provide
Speaker 2: a unique identifier, and the fingerprints they recovered were equally problematic.
Speaker 1: Let's dive into that because I think people today assume
Speaker 1: fingerprints have always been this magic bullet. We are used
Speaker 1: to watching procedural shows where a detective scans a print
Speaker 1: into a computer, a digital grid flashes on the screen,
Speaker 1: and three seconds later a suspects driver's license pops up.
Speaker 2: It's very Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that is not how it worked in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four.
Speaker 2: Not even close. In the nineteen seventies, police departments relied
Speaker 2: on the Henry classification system, a manual method developed in
Speaker 2: the late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: Yes, fingerprints were sorted based on physiological patterns whirls, loops
Speaker 2: and arches, and assigned a numerical value. These were kept
Speaker 2: on physical ten print cards in massive floor ceiling filing cabinets.
Speaker 1: So if the detectives found a latent print at the
Speaker 1: Salulaning crime scene, they couldn't just query a database. No,
Speaker 1: if they didn't already have a specific suspect in mind,
Speaker 1: they had no way to find a match. They would
Speaker 1: literally have to pull a physical card out of a
Speaker 1: drawer and have a human being sit there with a
Speaker 1: magnifying loop comparing the ridges lined by line Exactly. If
Speaker 1: the killer wasn't a known local criminal whose card was
Speaker 1: sitting in the active file, that fingerprint was just a
Speaker 1: smudge of oil on a piece of evidence tape.
Speaker 2: It was an agonizing limitation. The investigation is fueled entirely
Speaker 2: by human legwork. The tips come in, the detectives follow them,
Speaker 2: and when those leads go nowhere, the engine runs out
Speaker 2: of fuel.
Speaker 1: It just skulls.
Speaker 2: Right, there were serial killer theories floated, investigated, and ultimately eliminated.
Speaker 2: Once the human element dried up. There was no scientific
Speaker 2: mechanism them available to generate new leads. The science of
Speaker 2: the day had given them everything it could.
Speaker 1: I mean, think of it like having a thousand piece
Speaker 1: jigsaw puzzle dumped on your dining room table. You have
Speaker 1: all the pieces, the fingerprints, the perfect sketch, the timeline,
Speaker 1: but you don't have the picture on the front of
Speaker 1: the box to show you what it's supposed to look like.
Speaker 3: Right, You're blind.
Speaker 1: And worse, the pieces themselves don't even have interlocking edges yet,
Speaker 1: you just have flat cardboard shapes. No matter how hard
Speaker 1: you push them together, they physically cannot connect.
Speaker 2: When a community is faced with a brutal unsolved crime,
Speaker 2: human nature struggles to accept the ambiguity. The community demands answers.
Speaker 2: Of course, they demand a narrative that imposes order on
Speaker 2: the chaos, and if the science fails to provide the
Speaker 2: real killer, the social ecosystem will invariably settle for a scapegoat.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to one of the most destructive collateral
Speaker 1: narratives of this case. In domestic homicides, suspicion naturally and
Speaker 1: logically gravitates toward the spouse.
Speaker 2: It's always the husband, right, that's the trope.
Speaker 1: That's the trope. Law enforcement has to clear the inner
Speaker 1: circle first. It is standard operating procedure, but in the
Speaker 1: Waldman case, this procedure mutated into a lifelong curse for
Speaker 1: Gerald Waldman.
Speaker 2: Gerald was the local dentist. He was the grieving widower
Speaker 2: and a father left to raise three traumatized children alone.
Speaker 2: From a legal standpoint, his status was immaculate.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He was never charged with a crime, He was never
Speaker 2: formally named as a suspect. He cooperated fully with the investigation,
Speaker 2: giving the police everything they asked for.
Speaker 1: Wait, if he cooperated fully and there was absolutely zero
Speaker 1: physical evidence pointing to him, why didn't law enforcement issue
Speaker 1: a definitive public statement completely clearing him. Why let him
Speaker 1: hang out to dry while the neighborhood rumors spun out
Speaker 1: of control.
Speaker 2: It comes down to the grim reality of police, public
Speaker 2: relations and liability. Especially in cold cases, police departments are
Speaker 2: notoriously hesitant to definitively publicly clear anyone who is close
Speaker 2: to a victim unless they have another suspect and cuffs.
Speaker 1: Really just to keep their options open.
Speaker 2: In their minds. Closing a door completely is an investigative risk.
Speaker 2: What if new evidence emerges ten years later? What if
Speaker 2: there was a conspiracy or a hired hit.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: By maintaining a position of vague ambiguity, they protect the
Speaker 2: integrity of the open file, but they completely sacrifice the
Speaker 2: reputation of the innocent survivor in the process.
Speaker 1: So Gerald was left to live his life under a
Speaker 1: corrosive cloud of community suspicion. The very people who used
Speaker 1: to wave from their driveways filled the void of the
Speaker 1: unsolved mystery with whispers.
Speaker 3: It's tragic.
Speaker 1: Marra described this suspicion as a powerful social mark of disgrace.
Speaker 1: Imagine walking into your local grocery store, the same one
Speaker 1: you've shopped at for a decade. You turn down the aisle,
Speaker 1: and the conversation suddenly stops.
Speaker 2: The sideways looks yeah.
Speaker 1: People suddenly find the canned goods fascinating and refuse to
Speaker 1: meet your eye. That was Gerald's daily reality.
Speaker 2: The asymmetry here is profound. You have an innocent man
Speaker 2: whose life has been leveled by tragedy, and instead of
Speaker 2: receiving the unconditional support of his community, he becomes the
Speaker 2: focal point of their paranoia. He absorbs the fear that
Speaker 2: should be directed at the actual killer.
Speaker 1: I would argue it is almost harder to fight that
Speaker 1: kind of unspoken, atmospheric suspicion than it is to fight
Speaker 1: a formal legal accusation. I agree completely right, if the
Speaker 1: state charges you with a crime, you hire a defense attorney,
Speaker 1: You stand in a courtroom, present an alibi, cross examined witnesses,
Speaker 1: and you force a jury to give you a verdict.
Speaker 1: You get a piece of paper that declares you not guilty.
Speaker 1: But how do you cross examine a neighborhood rumor?
Speaker 2: You can't.
Speaker 1: You can't subpoena a sideways glance at the gas station. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't put a whisper on the witness stand. You
Speaker 1: are shadow boxing a ghost.
Speaker 2: It is a daily, low grade psychological torture. The guilty
Speaker 2: man is walking free, entirely unbothered by the community's gaze,
Speaker 2: while the innocent man wakes up every day, looks the
Speaker 2: people of Oceanside in the eye and has to pretend
Speaker 2: he doesn't know what they are thinking.
Speaker 1: And Gerald stayed in the community. He raised the kids,
Speaker 1: he maintained his dental practice, He kept his head up.
Speaker 2: And he endured it for decades.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tragically, Jerald passed away in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1: He went to his grave never knowing who murdered his wife,
Speaker 1: and he went to his grave never having his name
Speaker 1: formally publicly cleared in the minds of the people he
Speaker 1: lived alongside.
Speaker 2: It is a silent secondary cruelty of the unsolved murder.
Speaker 1: It really is. The primary victor is gone, but the
Speaker 1: survivors are trapped inside the wound indefinitely.
Speaker 2: But while Gerald endured that suspicion in silence, his three
Speaker 2: children took a vastly different approach. Mara, Larry, and Eric
Speaker 2: transform their grief into an unstoppable engine of advocacy.
Speaker 1: Because in the ecosystem of unsolved homicides, if a family
Speaker 1: doesn't fight.
Speaker 3: The case dies plain and simple.
Speaker 1: Police departments are constantly inundated with fresh solvable crimes, resources
Speaker 1: are finite, and detectives are overworked. If a family does
Speaker 1: not actively, loudly and persistently advocate for a fifty year
Speaker 1: old cold case. That file goes into a box in
Speaker 1: a basement, the administrative triage of the department moves on
Speaker 1: to yesterday's homicide.
Speaker 2: The Waldman children recognize this reality and refused to accept it.
Speaker 2: They went on the offensive.
Speaker 1: It really did.
Speaker 2: They contacted major local newspapers like Newsday to drag public
Speaker 2: attention back to their mother's story. They relentlessly pressured the
Speaker 2: Nassau County Police and the FBI. Every time a new
Speaker 2: technological advancement in forensics hit the news cycle, they were
Speaker 2: on the phone demanding that the old evidence from Sally
Speaker 2: Lane be retested.
Speaker 1: The psychological toll of that advocacy is unimaginable because it
Speaker 1: is not a steady, triumphant client toward justice. It is
Speaker 1: a brutal roller coaster of false starts.
Speaker 2: Oh, the false hope.
Speaker 1: Yes, at one point, a man who was already sitting
Speaker 1: in prison actually confessed to killing Barbara. Imagine getting that
Speaker 1: phone call from a detective You've waited decades and they
Speaker 1: tell you they have a confession. The emotional surge must
Speaker 1: be overwhelming. You let yourself believe.
Speaker 2: It's finally over, but the DNA didn't match. It was
Speaker 2: a false confession, likely from an inmate seeking attention or
Speaker 2: at tempt to manipulate his incarceration circumstances, which is just
Speaker 2: vile it is, and this wasn't an isolated incident. Investigators
Speaker 2: later zeroed in on another suspect who had committed a
Speaker 2: chillingly similar murder in nineteen sixty eight in nearby Valley Stream.
Speaker 1: Oh Right.
Speaker 2: The geography matched, the methodology matched, it looked like a
Speaker 2: perfect suspect, and once again the DNA ruled him out.
Speaker 1: It is emotional whiplash. You are drowning in the dark
Speaker 1: for thirty years, and finally your head breaks the surface.
Speaker 1: You take one huge, gasping breath of fresh air, and
Speaker 1: then a hand grabs your ankle and pulls you right
Speaker 1: back down.
Speaker 3: To the bottom. That's exactly what it feels like to
Speaker 3: survive that cycle.
Speaker 1: To have the door to closure open a crack, only
Speaker 1: to have the authority slam it in your face and
Speaker 1: say not him back to the beginning requires a staggering
Speaker 1: level of psychological fortitude. They simply refuse to yield.
Speaker 2: Their persistence was essential because it kept the evidence in play.
Speaker 2: Long enough to collide head on with a paradigm shifting
Speaker 2: moment in the history of forensic science.
Speaker 1: Let's dive deep into the science because the catalyst that
Speaker 1: changed the game here was the twenty eighteen Golden State
Speaker 1: Killer case in California.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: That was the watershed moment that introduced forensic genetic genealogy
Speaker 1: to the.
Speaker 2: World for decades, the Golden State killer evaded identification despite
Speaker 2: leaving biological evidence at dozens of crime scenes. Traditional DNA
Speaker 2: testing failed because his specific genetic profile wasn't in any police.
Speaker 3: Database, and that's a huge point.
Speaker 2: Traditional forensics, specifically the CODIS database used by law enforcement,
Speaker 2: relies on a direct one to one match.
Speaker 1: So if the killer was never arrested for a felony
Speaker 1: that mandated a DNA swab, running his DNA through CODIS
Speaker 1: is like looking for a specific book in a library
Speaker 1: that has never been cataloged. The computer spits back a
Speaker 1: no match notification, and the investigation hits a wall.
Speaker 2: The twenty eighteen breakthrough proved that investigators no longer needed
Speaker 2: that direct match in a police database. They could leverage
Speaker 2: consumer DNA.
Speaker 1: Data like the ancestry web sites.
Speaker 2: Exactly the kind of information people voluntarily upload to learn
Speaker 2: about their heritage. They could use that to build a
Speaker 2: map to the suspect. It demonstrated that decades old crimes
Speaker 2: could be solved using the genetic footprints of a killer's distant,
Speaker 2: unsuspecting relatives.
Speaker 1: And the Waldman family was watching this unfolding California, and
Speaker 1: it reignited a hope that had begun to dim. They
Speaker 1: pushed investigators to apply this exact science to the evidence
Speaker 1: collected in Barber's bedroom back in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: Four, which led to the massive breakthrough in August of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. Fine investigators managed to pull a partial
Speaker 2: DNA match from the crime scene evidence, and they linked
Speaker 2: it to a relative of a possible suspect. To do this,
Speaker 2: they bypassed standard police labs and teamed up with a
Speaker 2: private facility in the Woodlands, Texas.
Speaker 3: Called Athram AUTHRM.
Speaker 2: Yes, Authrum operates at the absolute cutting edge of genetic genealogy,
Speaker 2: utilizing an identity inference process. This is a monumental leap
Speaker 2: forward from traditional forensic testing, and it requires understanding of
Speaker 2: how DNA is analyzed.
Speaker 1: I have to pause here because when you are dealing
Speaker 1: with evidence from nineteen seventy four. You are dealing with
Speaker 1: heavily degraded biological materials.
Speaker 2: Oh, very degraded.
Speaker 1: This isn't a fresh swab. This DNA has been sitting
Speaker 1: in an evidence locker for half a century. How does
Speaker 1: the science overcome fifty years of degradation to pill a
Speaker 1: viable profile?
Speaker 2: That is exactly why traditional police labs fail on cold
Speaker 2: cases and why authorm's methodology is necessary. DNA degrees over
Speaker 2: time due to environmental factors. Ultraviolet light, bacterial activity, and
Speaker 2: simple hydrolysis break down the sugar phosphate backbone of the
Speaker 2: DNA molecule. It fragments into tiny, disconnected pieces. Traditional forensics
Speaker 2: uses a method called STR analysis, which stands for short
Speaker 2: tandem repeats. STRs are looking for specific repeating sequences at
Speaker 2: around twenty specific locations on the genome.
Speaker 1: So if the DNA is degraded and broken into tiny fragments,
Speaker 1: the odds of those twenty specific STR locations viving intact
Speaker 1: are incredibly low.
Speaker 2: Precisely, STR analysis on fifteen year old degraded DNA often
Speaker 2: yields an incomplete profile, which is useless for a database search. AUTHOROM, however,
Speaker 2: uses forensic grade genome sequencing, which looks at single nucleotide
Speaker 2: polymorphisms or SNPs.
Speaker 3: Pronound snips right, yes snips.
Speaker 2: Instead of looking at twenty large locations, SNPs look at
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of single letter changes across the entire
Speaker 2: genetic blueprint. Even if the DNA is heavily fragmented, the
Speaker 2: sheer volume of data points analyzed allows the scientists to
Speaker 2: stitch together a massive comprehensive profile.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they extract this incredibly detailed biological map from
Speaker 1: the degraded evidence. What is the next step? How do
Speaker 1: you get from a genetic map to a specific name
Speaker 1: without violating the privacy of millions of people who just
Speaker 1: wanted to build a family tree.
Speaker 2: The privacy mechanism is crucial here. The comprehensive profile is
Speaker 2: securely compared only against consumer databases where users have explicitly
Speaker 2: opted in to allow law enforcement matching, like ged match exactly,
Speaker 2: ged match or family Tree. DNA investigators are not hacking
Speaker 2: into private medical records. They are searching for shared genetic
Speaker 2: segments with these opted in users.
Speaker 1: We aren't looking for the killer in the database. They
Speaker 1: know the killer hasn't uploaded his own DNA. They are
Speaker 1: looking for third, fourth, or fifth.
Speaker 2: Cousins, people who submitted their DNA out of pure curiosity.
Speaker 1: Right, completely unaware that they share genetic material with a
Speaker 1: phantom from a nineteen seventy four cold case.
Speaker 2: Once a match is found, the genetic distance is measured
Speaker 2: in unit called centi.
Speaker 1: Morgans cent to morgans.
Speaker 2: Yes, the higher the shared center Morgans, the closer the relationship.
Speaker 2: A parent and child share around thirty four hundred cent
Speaker 2: of morgans, a third cousin might share only seventy cent morgans.
Speaker 1: So the FBI's forensic genetic genealogy team takes these distant
Speaker 1: cousin matches and starts building massive family trees.
Speaker 2: That's the genealogy part.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They step away from the microscope and move into
Speaker 1: historical records. They use census data, birth certificates, marriage licenses,
Speaker 1: and obituaries. They work backward in time to find a
Speaker 1: common ancestor perhaps a great great grandparent from the late eighteen.
Speaker 3: Hundreds, and then they work forward right.
Speaker 1: They painstakingly work for through the generations. They follow every
Speaker 1: single branch of the family tree down to the present day.
Speaker 1: They eliminate branches based on age, gender, and geography. Constantly
Speaker 1: narrowing the field until all the intersecting lines point to
Speaker 1: one single individual who is in the right place, at
Speaker 1: the right time, with the right genetic makeup.
Speaker 2: It is a stunning convergence of molecular biology and archival genealogy.
Speaker 2: You have space age, high tech science happening in a
Speaker 2: lab in Texas in twenty twenty four, reaching back through
Speaker 2: time to solve a mystery from the Disco era.
Speaker 1: The contrast is absolutely staggering. You have this incredibly complex,
Speaker 1: highly sophisticated scientific infrastructure working around the clock to isolate
Speaker 1: this predator, and when they finally pull his name out
Speaker 1: of the genetic ether, the reality of who he was
Speaker 1: is just so painfully, aggressively mundane.
Speaker 2: Thomas Generassio.
Speaker 1: Yes, the name that the genealogists finally circled on that
Speaker 1: family tree was Thomas Generasio.
Speaker 2: And the most chilling detail uncovered immediately is his proximity
Speaker 2: to the crime. Thomas Generasio was not a drifter passing
Speaker 2: through town on the highway. He didn't cross state lines.
Speaker 2: He lived in Oceanside. He lived less than four miles
Speaker 2: away from the Waldman family home on Sally Lean.
Speaker 1: But it is his profession that really shifts the perspective
Speaker 1: on this case. Generasio worked as a sanitation worker in
Speaker 1: the area.
Speaker 2: We need to dive into the psychology of how humans
Speaker 2: perceive service workers in their environment. It explains exactly how
Speaker 2: he was able to operate with such impunity.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When I think of a sanitation worker, or a
Speaker 1: mail carrier or a delivery driver, I think of people
Speaker 1: who possess what you might call invisible access to our lives.
Speaker 1: We suffer from a kind of societal inattentional blindness.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: We see the uniform, the truck, the predictable routine, and
Speaker 1: our brains filter them out as background scenery. Because they
Speaker 1: belong in the neighborhood, and because there is a logical
Speaker 1: reason for their presence, they do not trigger our threat response.
Speaker 1: They become effectively invisible.
Speaker 2: They are the ultimate urban camouflage. Consider the practical tactical
Speaker 2: knowledge as sanitation worker acquires simply by executing their daily route.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Generacio drove those specific streets, He walked up to those
Speaker 2: specific houses. He learned the schedules of the families living inside.
Speaker 2: He knew exactly what cars were in the driveway, at
Speaker 2: eight am versus nine zero am. He knew when husbands
Speaker 2: left for work and when children left for school.
Speaker 1: He didn't randomly stumble upon the Waldman house. He used
Speaker 1: his completely ordinary, mundane working life to build an intimate,
Speaker 1: tactical map of that community. And somewhere in the routine
Speaker 1: of picking up the neighborhood's trash, he targeted Barbara. He watched,
Speaker 1: he learned the routine, and he struck when the house
Speaker 1: was vulnerable. But here is where I have to challenge
Speaker 1: the historical narrative of this investigation. If he lived four
Speaker 1: miles away and he worked a municipal job, the exact
Speaker 1: neighborhood with the murder occurred, why on earth wasn't he
Speaker 1: caught in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2: It's a very fair question.
Speaker 1: I mean, the police had a perfect sketch. They had
Speaker 1: witnesses who saw a man running. Generasio wasn't a pristine
Speaker 1: citizen with no record. He had prior arrests for assault
Speaker 1: and for position to stolen mail. You were telling me
Speaker 1: a guy with a violent record who works in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: It perfectly matches a widely distributed sketch, and the police
Speaker 1: just completely missed him.
Speaker 2: It is a valid frustration, but it highlights the sheer
Speaker 2: volume of noise in a nineteen seventies investigation and the
Speaker 2: critical flaws in record keeping before digitization.
Speaker 1: So it was just lost in the shuffle.
Speaker 2: Basically, Generasio had a record, yes, but he wasn't on
Speaker 2: the radar for this specific type of crime, in this
Speaker 2: specific jurisdiction. At that exact moment, he was one of
Speaker 2: thousands of local men who vaguely matched a physical description.
Speaker 2: The sketch was accurate, but without someone directly linking his
Speaker 2: name to the drawing, he was just another face in
Speaker 2: a blue collar uniform.
Speaker 1: The ultimate failure point comes back to the life lack
Speaker 1: of biological databases. Today, if you are arrested for assault,
Speaker 1: your DNA is swabbed and entered into CODIS. You are
Speaker 1: permanently mapped into the system, right. But in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: an assault charge just generated a paper file in a drawer.
Speaker 1: There was no biological record to connect his past behavior
Speaker 1: to the microscopic evidence left at the crime scene on
Speaker 1: Sally Lane.
Speaker 2: He took his perfect disguise, the uniform, the routine, the
Speaker 2: local residency, and he simply blended right back into the
Speaker 2: fabric of Ocean Side, which leads us to the most bitter,
Speaker 2: frustrating truth of this entire deep dive.
Speaker 1: The ultimate escape. We wait fifty two years for the
Speaker 1: high tech science to deliver a name. The family waits
Speaker 1: fifty two years for justice, the community waits for closure.
Speaker 1: And what do we find out?
Speaker 2: Thomas Genrossio died.
Speaker 1: Died of cancer peacefully in his bed at home in
Speaker 1: the year two thousand and four. He was fifty seven
Speaker 1: years old.
Speaker 2: It requires us to sit with the brutal contrast of
Speaker 2: these two aftermaths.
Speaker 1: Let's map out that contrast. On one side of Ocean Side.
Speaker 1: You have the Waldman children is carrying the visual trauma
Speaker 1: of finding his murdered mother, a flash bul memory burning
Speaker 1: in his amigdala for decades. Mara and Larry are growing
Speaker 1: up motherless, feeling her absence at graduations, at weddings, at
Speaker 1: the births of their own children. You have Jerald Waldman
Speaker 1: walking through his own town every day under the crushing
Speaker 1: weight of public suspicion, eventually dying in two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven without ever knowing the.
Speaker 2: Truth, and on the exact same streets, navigating the exact
Speaker 2: same town you have Thomas Generassio unbelievable. He lived quietly
Speaker 2: in Oceanside for thirty years after the murder. The horrific
Speaker 2: likelihood is that he routinely crossed paths with the Waldman family.
Speaker 2: They could have stood in line behind him at the
Speaker 2: grocery store or pumped gas next to him at the station,
Speaker 2: completely unaware that they were standing next to the man
Speaker 2: who destroyed their family.
Speaker 1: He got to live a full life, he got to
Speaker 1: grow old. He died in the comfort of his own home.
Speaker 1: He never faced a judge, he never faced a jury,
Speaker 1: and he never spent a single second in a jail
Speaker 1: cell for what he did to Barbara Waldman on that
Speaker 1: cold January morning.
Speaker 2: The science succeeds flawlessly, but the traditional courtroom concept of
Speaker 2: justice is fundamentally denied by the passage of time.
Speaker 1: How does a family process that kind of resolution. It
Speaker 1: forces a complete psychological redefinition of the word closure.
Speaker 2: It really does, Which brings us to the press conference.
Speaker 1: Right. We jump forward to Wednesday, March eleventh, twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: The Nassau County Police Department and the FBI hold a
Speaker 1: massive joint press conference to officially announce the killer's identity
Speaker 1: to the world. And standing there in the room are Mara, Larry.
Speaker 2: And Eric, the little kids from sally Land Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now adults in their fifties and sixties. Yeah, they are
Speaker 1: standing there to finally hear the absolute truth spoken out
Speaker 1: loud on the official record.
Speaker 2: What happens at that podium is incredibly moving. They don't
Speaker 2: just use the platform to condemn Thomas Jenrossiu. They use
Speaker 2: the intense media spotlight for something far more important to
Speaker 2: their family's historical narrative.
Speaker 1: They used it to rescue their father. Yes, Marl Woldman
Speaker 1: Kahn stepped up to the microphones and delivered a powerful statement.
Speaker 1: She said, Happily today, fifty two years later, I get
Speaker 1: to say to the world that our father, Jerry Waldman,
Speaker 1: is exonerated. He was a victim, not a villain.
Speaker 2: You can feel the generational weight lifting off the family
Speaker 2: in those words. For decades they had to watch their
Speaker 2: father suffer the indignity of community doubt. In that press conference,
Speaker 2: Mara posthumously restored his legacy.
Speaker 1: It's so powerful.
Speaker 2: She makes sure that history would record Gerald Waldman exactly
Speaker 2: as he was, a loving husband and a tragic victim,
Speaker 2: not the architect of the crime. Larry echoed the sentiment,
Speaker 2: calling it vindication for a father who went to his
Speaker 2: deathbed not knowing who or why they gave their father
Speaker 2: back his good name in front of the cameras.
Speaker 1: But the press conference also laid bare the deep frustration
Speaker 1: inherent in the case's resolution. Police Commissioner writer openly expressed
Speaker 1: his anger, stating clearly that authorities would have greatly preferred
Speaker 1: to see Generassio spend the rest of his life rotting
Speaker 1: in a prison cell. Of course, which brings up a
Speaker 1: critical question for you listening to this right now in
Speaker 1: their shoes, when the killer is already dead, does knowing
Speaker 1: the name actually feel like a victory?
Speaker 2: It's a tough question.
Speaker 1: Does the absence of a trial, the absence of watching
Speaker 1: the killer put in handcuffs and forced to answer for
Speaker 1: his crimes, leave a hollow space that a scientific report
Speaker 1: just can't fill?
Speaker 2: It is the central tension of modern cold case resolutions.
Speaker 2: But Mara provided a very specific, deeply personal perspective on
Speaker 2: this exact tension. What does she say when reporters asked
Speaker 2: her about Generacio dying before he could face a trial.
Speaker 2: She didn't express anger at the universe for cheating her
Speaker 2: out of a conviction. Instead, she said she was satisfied
Speaker 2: because he couldn't hurt or kill anyone else. She stated,
Speaker 2: the element of the unknown killer is gone. He is dead.
Speaker 1: The element of the unknown killer is gone.
Speaker 2: It is a highly specific psychological form of resolution. She
Speaker 2: isn't claiming it is courtroom justice. Courtroom justice was stolen
Speaker 2: from them by time in biology, right, But she's claiming peace,
Speaker 2: the piece of knowing that the monster in the dark
Speaker 2: finally has a name, that the monster has been permanently disarmed,
Speaker 2: and that the absolute truth of what happened to her
Speaker 2: mother is finally out in the light. The Boogeyman is
Speaker 2: dead and he can never come back.
Speaker 1: As we look back at the entire scope of this narrative,
Speaker 1: the journey is staggering. We started with a shattered suburban
Speaker 1: snow globe in nineteen seventy four, a brutal targeted murder
Speaker 1: that the forensic science of the era simply couldn't touch.
Speaker 1: We watched a grieving husband endoored decades of tholent accusation,
Speaker 1: fighting a phantom rumor he could never cross examine.
Speaker 2: And we watched a killer hide in plane site leveraging
Speaker 2: the invisibility of his mundane job to blend seamlessly into
Speaker 2: the background.
Speaker 1: And we watched three children completely refuse to accept that
Speaker 1: their mother's story ended on the floor of that bedroom.
Speaker 1: Their relentless advocacy, keeping the pressure on the system, demanding retesting,
Speaker 1: refusing to let the file gather dust is the only
Speaker 1: reason this case collided with the miracle of modern genetic genealogy.
Speaker 2: They reached back fifty two years and yanked the truth
Speaker 2: into the present.
Speaker 1: If you are listening and you were so, someone you
Speaker 1: know is waiting on a cold case, waiting for answers
Speaker 1: that feel like they are never going to come. This
Speaker 1: story proves that the landscape of justice is fundamentally changing.
Speaker 1: The science is catching.
Speaker 2: Up biological evidence sealed in a plastic bag in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four, Evidence that was considered functionally useless for decades,
Speaker 2: gave up its darkest secrets in twenty twenty four because
Speaker 2: the tools to read the genetic language finally existed.
Speaker 1: Silence in the realm of forensics is no longer permanent.
Speaker 2: It is a testament to human endurance and scientific innovation.
Speaker 1: But as we wrap up this deep dive, I want
Speaker 1: to leave you with one final provocative thought, Tom Allover.
Speaker 1: Thomas Generasio died peacefully in his bed, having evaded detection
Speaker 1: because the biological trip wires didn't exist in his era.
Speaker 1: But look at where we are heading today.
Speaker 2: The technology is everywhere.
Speaker 1: We are entering an era of absolute genetic certainty, a
Speaker 1: pinopticon where almost any biological traits can be mapped back
Speaker 1: to a specific family tree. So the question is this,
Speaker 1: if genetic genealogy eventually reaches a point where absolute identification
Speaker 1: is guaranteed, we're leaving a single skin cell at a
Speaker 1: scene means a one hundred percent chance of being caught.
Speaker 1: Will that sheer inevitability fundamentally alter human behavior?
Speaker 2: That's a fascinating thought.
Speaker 1: Will the fear of absolute genetic exposure deter the darkest
Speaker 1: crimes before they happen? Or will it simply force the
Speaker 1: most predatory parts of humanity to adapt, to evolve, and
Speaker 1: to find entirely new, non biological digital ways to hide
Speaker 1: their cruelty. Are we witnessing the end of the unsolved
Speaker 1: mystery or just the beginning of a terrifying new breed
Speaker 1: of invisible predator?
Speaker 2: Something to really think about.
Speaker 1: Keep asking those hard questions, Keep looking for the hidden
Speaker 1: connections in the stories around you, and remember even a
Speaker 1: fifty two year old memory can eventually find the light.
Speaker 1: We'll talk to you next time.