More than 50 years after their mother’s murder, perseverance leads family to her killer

Barbara Waldman in Long Island in 1974, the year she was murdered. (Courtesy Marla Waldman via CNN Newsource)

Marla Waldman Conn was on a family vacation, relaxing by a pool in Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, when she got a call from a New York detective. She walked to a private corner, picked up the phone, and heard the words she had been waiting on for decades: “We have a match.” Marla fell to her knees.

That news was in reference to the homicide case of Marla’s mother, Barbara Waldman, who was murdered in her Long Island, N.Y., home on January 11, 1974. Fifty years later, police had matched crime scene DNA to a man who had lived in Waldman’s Oceanside neighbourhood at the same time.

Waldman’s killing languished as a cold case for decades, but her children refused to accept not knowing. They relentlessly pursued answers, and finally found them.

‘We didn’t talk about it’

Marla and her two brothers, Larry and Eric, were just 7, 6 and 5 when their mother died at the age of 31.

It was Eric, the youngest child, who discovered his mother’s body in the family’s house after hopping off the school bus from a day at kindergarten. He says his final memory of his mom is of her lying on the floor upstairs in her rose-covered bathrobe, her hands tied behind her back and a pillowcase stuffed in her mouth. The Nassau County Police homicide squad determined Waldman had been shot in the head.

“I’ve had that image in my head since I found her when I was 5, and I’m going to have it until I die,” Eric said.

Neighbours saw a person walking near the house on the day of the murder, and police produced a sketch of a man in a snorkel coat – a heavy jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. But the sketch wasn’t enough. A suspect couldn’t be identified, and the case went cold, joining the sad ranks of hundreds of thousands of unsolved violent crimes.

After their mother’s death, the Waldman children tried their best to live normal lives. Their father, local dentist Dr. Gerry Waldman, remarried six months later, and the young children accepted his new wife as their stepmom.

“It was tough growing up. We didn’t talk about it,” Eric said. “The pictures came off the walls — one, two, three of my mom in the house, so there was nothing of her.”

But as they got older, the children began thinking more and more about their mother and what happened to her.

“I think we disassociated and basically kept the secret and pretended,” Marla said. “Until I got pregnant, and that’s when I really started questioning my dad: ‘Dad, this isn’t right, I want to know about my mom.’”

‘I’m not letting this go’

There was also family division and gossip surrounding their father, playing into that secrecy. Some neighbours and relatives speculated he might have been involved in his wife’s killing, and his quick move into a second marriage didn’t “look good,” Eric said. But in 2004, as DNA matching techniques evolved, police say he provided detectives a swab with his genetic material. It was then, his children said, that their father was ruled out as a suspect. He died a couple of years later, never knowing who was responsible for his wife’s death.

Marla said she became “a little bit obsessed” over her mother’s case after that. She began watching true crime shows and calling the Nassau County Police Department every year to check in on the case, which she says officers told her could not be reopened without new evidence.

In what she thought might be a big break, Marla recalls her family members “blowing up my phone” in December 2022 when serial killer Richard Cottingham admitted to killing five Long Island women in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the same timeframe and location as her mother’s murder. She and her brother reached out to detectives and the district attorney. It was enough to get their mother’s case reopened, and a full DNA profile extracted from evidence at their mother’s crime scene.

“I was beyond, beyond happy — I can’t even explain it, like euphoria,” Marla said. “In my mind, whether it was Cottingham or not, we had a full profile of the person that killed my mom. So, after watching all those shows, I’m like: I’m going to find out who it is regardless.”

The DNA, it turned out, did not match Cottingham’s, the family said. Undeterred, Marla pushed for Nassau County police to bring in the FBI for access to more advanced DNA techniques. “I’m not letting this go,” Marla remembers saying. “It is not happening.”

The FBI eventually agreed to take the case and attempt to zero in on the suspect using investigative genetic genealogy.

“I knew they were going to find the person. I didn’t know who that person would be, and it was a little scary, because at that point, it could be anybody. It could be a neighbour; it could be a family member,” Marla said.

It was a year and a half after the case had been reopened that Marla received that life-changing phone call. A DNA match had been made, police said.

Law enforcement identified the person as Thomas Generazio, who had lived in their Oceanside neighbourhood at the time of Waldman’s death. He was not mentioned in the original case file from 1974, but had been previously arrested for assault and possession of stolen mail, police said. Generazio died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 57.

But the DNA link alone was not enough to close the case, police told Marla. “DNA alone does not always constitute probable cause, the Nassau County police told CNN. “Sometimes further investigation is necessary.”

‘I became obsessed with him’

Undeterred, Marla dug in. In an effort to connect him to the man in the sketch, she began researching where Generazio had lived and worked in her hometown, digging through local records, contacting his family members — looking for anything that might help detectives confirm that he was indeed the one who had killed her mother. She filled in a large whiteboard with names, dates, places and notes from countless conversations.

“I became obsessed with him,” Marla said. “I called people from the yearbook. … Who were his friends? And just really delved into, who was this piece of sh*t?”

Over the course of many months, Marla said, she spoke with several of Generazio’s children — some of whom, she added, had never met their father. It wasn’t until Marla connected with one of Generazio’s daughters that her investigation moved forward. They talked on the phone and messaged for days.

Generazio’s daughter ended up sending Marla several photos of her father, including one in which he is wearing a coat with a fur-lined collar strikingly similar to the one depicted in the 1974 police sketch. That photo became a key piece of evidence linking Generazio to the person seen walking away from the crime scene, Marla said.

Generazio’s daughter, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity, citing privacy concerns, said that she did not think the photo proved her dad matched the person in the police sketch and could not imagine him killing anyone.

Ultimately, police said it was “the totality of evidence derived from DNA, IGG, interviews, photo images” that brought the family some final closure. This month, more than 52 years after Waldman’s killing, the Nassau police department announced it had found Generazio responsible for Barbara Waldman’s homicide. Case closed.

“Being able to say it to the world,” Marla said, “that felt so rewarding. I’m never going to get my mom back. I mean, that’s a given, right? She’s not coming back. It did open up some really messed-up memories and painful things, but some of those memories were very good memories that I should cherish.”

For Eric, too, closing the case couldn’t bring him full closure — but it was a step toward truth and justice for his mother and father.

“It doesn’t bring my mom back at the end of the day,” he said. “I’m still sad and everything, and I wish she was here. But I’m happy because we don’t have to wonder now who did it.”

After years of working what felt like a “full-time job” on the case, Marla said she feels closer than ever to her mother.

“I feel good about that,” Marla said. “I know who she was. … She was a beautiful, beautiful person, a wonderful mother and a friend.”

Eric and Marla said they hope their success in solving their mother’s case can galvanize other families enduring the long wait of learning what happened to loved ones.

“There is an answer to every single murder,” Marla said. “Someone knows something. I mean, I truly believe that.”

She encouraged others to dig in and persevere.

“I really, really hope that there are other people out there that will feel inspired by the story, because seriously, if you’re not persistent and you don’t have the guts and the balls, it’s not happening,” Marla said. “You have to really find the strength and have the hope and know.”

By August Phillips, CNN