On the morning of Monday, July 21, 2014, Suffolk County homicide detectives arrested a 48-year-old carpenter at his home in Manorville, on eastern Long Island. His name was John Bittrolff. He was married, had two sons, and ran two contracting businesses out of a house he had built himself. The next day he was arraigned in Central Islip on two counts of second-degree murder, for the deaths of two women whose bodies had been found in the woods of Suffolk County more than twenty years earlier.
The case against him rested on DNA, and the route to it was indirect. The genetic profile that pointed detectives toward Bittrolff belonged to his brother. Three years later a jury convicted him of both murders after seven days of deliberations. Since then his lawyers have challenged the science used at trial, commissioned new DNA analysis, and pointed to the 2024 indictment of Rex Heuermann, the man accused in the Gilgo Beach killings, in the death of a third woman whose case prosecutors had once tied to Bittrolff's. As of the latest records found for this page, his appeals were still pending.
Most of what is on the public record about John Bittrolff's life before his arrest comes from news coverage in July 2014, and much of it from neighbors and relatives. He was 27 in late 1993 and early 1994, when the two women died, and lived then in the Mastic-Shirley area, according to District Attorney Thomas Spota. County property records cited by the Riverhead News-Review list earlier addresses in Shirley, Center Moriches and Mastic Beach; he bought the Manorville house, on Silas Carter Road, in 2003.
CBS New York reported that he worked as a carpenter and ran two contracting companies from his home. He was described as an avid hunter with a house upstate. His older son was about to leave for college; his lawyer told the court at arraignment that one of his children had just graduated from high school. The Long Island Press reported that he had a prior assault conviction from around 1990. CBS New York reported that he had had no run-ins with the law in roughly twenty years.
Neighbors described a sociable, helpful man. "He's like the mayor of this town, knows everyone, helps everybody out," Roger Schwarting told CBS New York. Another neighbor, George O'Toole, said Bittrolff had done work on his upstairs bathroom and had been pleasant. "That was the crazy part of it," O'Toole said, "that he really fooled us." An uncle, Sheldon Saslona, called him a good father who took his children to karate, baseball and football. At the arraignment, a relative called out "we love you" as he was led away, and family members described him to the Long Island Press only as "a good family man."
Rita Tangredi, who also used the name Rita Tangredi-Beinlich, was 31. The Long Island Press described East Patchogue as her hometown; police at the time listed her address as unknown. She had a son, Anthony, and at least one sister. She had been arrested earlier in 1993 on prostitution charges, and police at the time believed her death was connected to that work.
She was last seen hitchhiking on Montauk Highway, according to police accounts reported by CBS New York and the Riverhead News-Review. Her body was found in a wooded area off Esplanade Drive, near South Country Road, in East Patchogue. Early police accounts give the date as November 2, 1993; the District Attorney's office later gave it as November 3. The Riverhead News-Review reported that a young man riding an all-terrain vehicle found her. She had been beaten and strangled, and the cause of death was recorded as blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation.
Her son was a child when she died. At the start of the 2017 trial he told CBS New York, "Nothing could be harder for a little boy to lose his mom," and said he had given up hope long before that anyone would be caught. When the arrest finally came, he told reporters he felt "really relieved." A woman who identified herself as Tangredi's sister told the Long Island Press that the arrest was "the best birthday present I could ever have."
Colleen McNamee was 20 and lived in Holbrook. She was an outpatient at the South Shore Treatment Center in Islandia. Her father was Lawrence McNamee; her brothers included Thomas and Ken. Like Tangredi, she had a prior arrest for prostitution, and officials told the jury in 2017 that both women had been sex workers and had struggled with drugs.
On January 5, 1994, she was seen getting into a small blue car outside the Blue Dawn Diner in Islandia. That is the last confirmed sighting reported. Twenty-five days later, on January 30, 1994, her body was found in a wooded area near Express Drive South, east of the William Floyd Parkway and south of the Long Island Expressway, in North Shirley. She had been beaten about the head and strangled. The two sites are about nine miles apart.
At Bittrolff's sentencing in 2017, Lawrence McNamee thanked the jury and told the court that his daughter's hopes, and the family's hopes for her, had died with her.
From the start, investigators saw the two deaths as connected. Both women were found nude in wooded areas, both had been beaten and strangled, and, according to prosecutors, both bodies had been left in a similar position. Spota said in 2014 that a significant item of clothing was missing in each case and that similar biological and trace evidence had been found at both scenes. Later court papers filed by Bittrolff's appellate lawyers describe the shared features as each woman found with one shoe missing, and wood chips found at the scenes. Prosecutors at trial called the way the bodies had been left the killer's "signature" and "calling card," according to those papers.
Most important for what came later, detectives preserved semen samples from both women. When those samples were eventually profiled, the DNA showed that the same unknown man had been with both of them. For twenty years, it matched no one.
A third death fit part of the same pattern. Sandra Costilla, 28, of Queens, was found in woods at the Fish Cove area of North Sea, near Southampton on the South Fork, on November 20, 1993, eighteen days after Tangredi. (Some reports say December 1993.) She too had been beaten and strangled. In 1994 detectives said her death might be linked to the other two; in 1996 they said there was no conclusive evidence tying them together.
When Bittrolff was arrested in 2014, Spota said investigators were looking at whether he was responsible for Costilla's death as well, because of similarities in the manner of death, the positioning of the body and trace evidence. He was never charged in her death, and a 2014 analysis excluded him as the source of DNA in her case, according to a Newsday report summarized by the Riverhead News-Review. Ten years later another man would be charged with killing her. That development, covered below, became central to Bittrolff's appeals.
The killings drew hundreds of tips. According to Bittrolff's 2025 court filing, the tips pointed to people around the women, including pimps, members of a motorcycle gang, abusive former partners and police officers. Those descriptions come from a defense filing and are the defense's characterization of the investigative file. In pretrial proceedings his trial lawyer, William Keahon, said the District Attorney's office had given him 7,000 to 8,000 pages of documents. Among them, he said, were three pages describing a statement in which Tangredi's husband admitted killing her, without naming the detective who reported it. He also cited a 1994 incident in which a Suffolk police academy cadet was found with prostitutes and made a remark suggesting harm might have come to one of them, and said he understood two other police officers had been considered suspects. Assistant District Attorney Robert Biancavilla said the office had met its disclosure obligations and would continue to do so. None of those people was charged.
Prosecutors said at trial that more than fifty men had been tested over the years and that Bittrolff was the only one whose DNA matched evidence from both scenes. Bittrolff's name, according to the defense, never appeared in any of the tips.
The break came from a change in New York law. In 2012 the state expanded its DNA databank to cover people convicted of nearly all crimes, including misdemeanors. Spota later called the law a key factor in solving the case.
In September 2013, Bittrolff's brother, Timothy Bittrolff, was convicted of violating an order of protection; the ABA Journal described the conviction as criminal contempt. Under the expanded law, a DNA sample was taken from him and entered into the state databank. It did not match the crime-scene samples, but it came close. The profile was a partial match: it indicated that the man who left DNA on the two women was a close male relative of Timothy's.
Spota said the partial match pointed to a brother with the same parents. Investigators turned to John. CBS New York reported that detectives followed family members and searched garbage from a Manorville house; the Riverhead News-Review reported that police found a cup carrying his DNA. After the arrest, prosecutors said, a second sample came from a glass of water he drank in police custody, and it matched the samples preserved from both scenes.
The method, comparing crime-scene DNA against a relative's profile in a databank, is often called familial DNA searching. "We now have positive scientific confirmation that the brother, John Bitrolff, is the killer," Spota said that week, spelling the name as CBS New York transcribed it. He later credited the "miracle of DNA evidence" for the arrest and conviction.
Bittrolff was taken into custody at his home on July 21, 2014, and arraigned the next day in First District Court in Central Islip. He pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. His lawyer at arraignment, Harry Tillis, asked for $50,000 bail, called him a carpenter and family man, and challenged the DNA evidence, citing a remark by Biancavilla that the county crime lab could "enhance" the samples. Prosecutors said the case would go to a grand jury that week. The indictment that followed charged two counts of second-degree murder.
Police Commissioner Edward Webber said the women's occupations were irrelevant. "Some arrests take a few hours, some days; some take 20 years," he said. The police asked anyone who knew Bittrolff in the early 1990s to come forward. Both police and prosecutors said that day that there was no evidence connecting the two killings to the remains found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011, and law enforcement sources told NBC New York there were "significant dissimilarities" between the cases.
Bittrolff rejected a plea offer. His trial opened in Riverhead in the spring of 2017 before Justice Richard Ambro, and ran about nine weeks; testimony ended on June 26. The jury was not given a motive.
Prosecutors framed it as a case about science. Biancavilla told the jury that Bittrolff was the only man, of more than fifty tested, whose DNA matched evidence from both women. According to a later defense filing, his DNA was found on vaginal and anal swabs from Tangredi, on an anal swab from McNamee, and, as a partial identification, in fingernail scrapings from Tangredi's left hand. Prosecutors said the fingernail result showed a struggle; the defense says the People's witness testified he saw no blood or skin in the scrapings.
The key witness on timing was Suffolk County Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Caplan. According to the Associated Press, he testified that he had analyzed the density of the sperm and concluded that Bittrolff had had sex with each woman shortly before her death; the Riverhead News-Review reported the testimony as within half an hour. The defense did not call an expert to rebut it.
Keahon's defense did not deny the DNA. He conceded that Bittrolff may have had sex with the two women, and argued that this did not prove he killed them. Other men's DNA had also been found on the women. He argued that police had destroyed evidence that could have identified other suspects. During the trial, Suffolk police acknowledged that they had accidentally destroyed wood chips found on one woman's body, and separately wood chips found in a car used by a police sergeant who had been a potential suspect. The police were also accused of destroying that sergeant's investigative file too early.
The jury deliberated for seven days. According to the AP and the defense's later filings, jurors told the judge three times that they were deadlocked. On Wednesday, July 5, 2017, they returned a unanimous verdict: guilty on both counts of second-degree murder, for the deaths of Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee. The verdict was reported by the Suffolk District Attorney's office, the AP, News 12 Long Island, the Long Island Press and the Riverhead News-Review. Bittrolff was 51.
"The families of these women have been through an agonizing long wait for justice and during the trial they had to endure graphic testimony about the death of their loved one," Spota said. "We hope the verdict today gives them some semblance of peace." A trial lawyer for Bittrolff, Jonathan Manley, later told the AP that one juror said afterward that Caplan's testimony had been key to persuading undecided jurors.
Bittrolff was sentenced on September 12, 2017, by Justice Ambro. He declined to speak. Ambro imposed consecutive terms of 25 years to life on each count, a total of 50 years to life, and said the killings were "as brutal as anything I've ever seen." He said the sentence was meant to ensure Bittrolff would never be free again. Manley said his client was innocent and would appeal.
The families spoke. Tangredi's son told the court he would have to explain to his own children how their grandmother was taken. Lawrence McNamee spoke about his daughter, and her brothers Thomas and Ken McNamee also addressed the court. All asked for the maximum.
Biancavilla read from a letter Bittrolff had written from jail to a friend: "They can't prove anything. They've got nothing." He said Bittrolff had chosen the women because they were vulnerable and he believed no one would seek justice for them. He also said he had evidence of cruelty to animals that the judge had not allowed at trial. These were the prosecutor's statements at sentencing, not findings by the jury.
What follows is speculation, and is labeled as such. It has never been charged, tested in court, or supported by any evidence made public.
After the sentencing, Biancavilla told reporters that remains of some of the victims found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach "may be attributed to the handiwork of Mr. Bittrolff." He said the investigation was ongoing and did not say which victims he meant. The Suffolk police declined to comment on an ongoing investigation. NBC New York noted that at the time of the 2014 arrest, law enforcement sources had said there was no link between the Tangredi and McNamee killings and the Gilgo cases, and prosecutors had repeated that there was no such evidence when the trial opened in May 2017.
The Gilgo Beach case began in December 2010, when a police officer and a cadaver dog searching for a missing woman, Shannan Gilbert, found the first of what became, by spring 2011, ten sets of human remains along Ocean Parkway. One of the women linked to that stretch of highway, Jessica Taylor, had a torso found years earlier in Manorville, Bittrolff's hometown. That geographic overlap is the kind of detail that fed public speculation about Bittrolff. No court has ever connected him to any Gilgo victim, and he has never been charged in any of those deaths.
Within months, the official who led the office that prosecuted Bittrolff was himself in trouble. Less than six months after the verdict, Spota was arrested for obstructing an investigation into the county's police chief, who was accused of beating a prisoner. Both men were later convicted and sentenced to prison, the AP reported. That case did not involve Bittrolff's trial, but his supporters have cited it as part of a wider pattern of misconduct in Suffolk law enforcement during those years.
On July 13, 2023, Suffolk authorities arrested Rex Heuermann, an architect from Massapequa Park, and charged him in the Gilgo Beach killings. On June 6, 2024, he was charged in two more deaths, Jessica Taylor's in 2003 and Sandra Costilla's in 1993. Prosecutors said forensic testing of hairs found on Costilla's body pointed to him, and that her killing came shortly after his mother and another person moved out of his home. Heuermann pleaded not guilty. As of a November 10, 2025 New York Post report, he was charged in the deaths of seven women, denied the killings, and was held without bail awaiting trial. He is accused, not convicted, and this page does not treat any of the charges against him as proven.
For Bittrolff's lawyers, the Costilla charge changed the argument. Prosecutors had long linked the three deaths through the way the bodies were left. "You have three women killed in the same time frame and displayed in the same way, and now one is alleged to have been killed by Rex Heuermann," Lisa Marcoccia of the Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County, which handles his appeal, told the AP in June 2024. "The evidence points to one killer, and the new indictment supports John Bittrolff's claim of innocence." The AP also reported that among the many internet searches prosecutors say they found on Heuermann's computer was the query "John Bitroff."
Others joined the call for review. John Ray, a lawyer who has represented families of some Gilgo victims, told the AP the presentation of evidence at Bittrolff's trial had "huge defects" and that prosecutors had an ethical duty to reexamine it. Suffolk Legislator Rob Trotta, a former detective, said, "It's worth another look."
The District Attorney's office disagreed. Marcoccia wrote to the office on June 6 and June 18, 2024, asking it to test hairs found at the Tangredi and McNamee scenes and to release forensic evidence from the Costilla scene. Assistant District Attorney Guy Arcidiacono replied that "there is no basis on law or fact for providing you with these materials," and that neither the absence of charges against Bittrolff in the Costilla case nor the charges against Heuermann cleared Bittrolff of the two murders he was convicted of. District Attorney Ray Tierney, who took office after the trial, said that if he saw a problem with the cases, "I would do something."
The appellate record found for this page is mostly procedural, and it shows a case still moving.
The direct appeal of the September 12, 2017 judgment was docketed in the Appellate Division, Second Department, as No. 2017-11100. The Legal Aid Society later filed a motion in the trial court to vacate the convictions, and on September 19, 2022, the Suffolk County Supreme Court issued an order on it. On February 3, 2023, Justice Joseph J. Maltese of the Appellate Division granted leave to appeal that order, and the same day the court consolidated that appeal with the direct appeal. On August 18, 2023, the court granted assigned counsel limited access to a sealed exhibit to prepare the appeal. The New York Post reported in September 2024 that Marcoccia had filed two unsuccessful motions to overturn the conviction.
The defense's main arguments, as reported by the AP, are these. First, Caplan's sperm-density testimony on timing had no scientific basis; the defense filed an affidavit from Dr. Karl Reich, a DNA analyst and molecular biologist, calling it "pure junk science" with "no precedent in forensic DNA practice." Second, prosecutors failed to turn over an internal police file containing an allegation, by the wife of another officer, that her husband had killed one of the women. Prosecutors say they did turn it over. As of the AP's June 2024 report, a judge had not ruled on that point.
In 2024 the defense sent raw DNA data from the two cases to Cybergenetics, a private laboratory whose TrueAllele software interprets complex DNA mixtures. The county crime lab had used an older method and had called several samples from the McNamee case inconclusive. Cybergenetics reported on December 29, 2024, that it had found three unknown male profiles in those samples, all eligible for the national CODIS database. One, which it called "unknown male A," appeared on McNamee's vaginal swab, on her stretch pants, found hanging on a bush, and on a pair of men's dungarees found near her body. It also excluded Bittrolff from the DNA on the dungarees, a result the county lab had not reported. On January 23, 2025, Marcoccia filed a motion under CPL 440.10 to vacate the convictions, arguing that the jury, which had deadlocked three times, might well have acquitted if it had known. The motion also asked the court to search the new profiles in CODIS, to compare them with Heuermann's DNA, and to order mitochondrial testing of hairs found on both women, which a county crime lab witness had testified were never sent for that testing.
According to New York Post reporting on Suffolk County Medical Examiner records, an October 21, 2025 report compared the unknown male A profile with Heuermann's and concluded that Heuermann was excluded as its source, on the assumption that the profile was a mixture without allelic dropout. The test had been done at Bittrolff's request.
On October 10, 2025, the Suffolk County Supreme Court ruled on the motion. The Appellate Division's later decision describes the order as issued, among other things, under CPL 440.30(1-a), the DNA-testing provision, and says it denied the branch of the motion that sought to vacate the convictions under CPL 440.10. On February 23, 2026, Justice James P. McCormack of the Appellate Division granted Bittrolff leave to appeal that denial, finding that the order raised questions of law or fact that should be reviewed.
Several claims in this case are disputed or unproven, and they belong in separate categories.
Proven in court: a jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that John Bittrolff murdered Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee. That verdict stands. It is under appeal.
Disputed: whether DNA showing sexual contact proved murder; whether the medical examiner's timing testimony was scientifically sound; whether evidence that police destroyed, and files that may not have been disclosed, would have changed the outcome; and whether the unknown male profiles found by Cybergenetics point to another man. Prosecutors and the defense disagree on each point, and the courts have not finished with them.
Suspected, then overtaken: prosecutors once said publicly that Bittrolff was a suspect in Sandra Costilla's death. He was never charged, a 2014 DNA analysis excluded him in her case, and another man is now charged with killing her.
Speculation: the 2017 statement that Gilgo Beach remains "may be attributed" to Bittrolff. No evidence for it has been made public, no charge has followed, and the Gilgo deaths have since been charged against Rex Heuermann, who has pleaded not guilty.
Not tested: the prosecutor's sentencing claims about animal cruelty were excluded at trial, and the tips naming other men, including police officers, have never led to charges.
As of the February 23, 2026 Appellate Division motion decision, the latest court record found for this page, John Bittrolff was serving 50 years to life for the two murders, and his appeals were pending: the consolidated direct appeal and 2022 post-conviction appeal, and a new appeal from the October 10, 2025 denial of his motion to vacate. No decision on the merits by the Appellate Division was found. A January 2025 court filing listed him at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. He has maintained his innocence since his arrest.
1993: Rita Tangredi, 31, is arrested earlier in the year on prostitution charges.
November 2 or 3, 1993: Tangredi's body is found in woods off Esplanade Drive, East Patchogue.
November 20, 1993: Sandra Costilla, 28, is found in woods in North Sea, Southampton (some reports say December).
January 5, 1994: Colleen McNamee, 20, is seen getting into a small blue car outside the Blue Dawn Diner, Islandia.
January 30, 1994: McNamee's body is found in woods in North Shirley.
1996: Detectives say there is no conclusive evidence tying Costilla's death to the other two.
December 2010 - spring 2011: Ten sets of remains are found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach.
2012: New York expands DNA collection to nearly all criminal convictions.
September 2013: Timothy Bittrolff is convicted of violating an order of protection; his DNA profile partly matches the crime-scene samples.
July 21, 2014: John Bittrolff is arrested in Manorville; arraigned July 22 and held without bail.
Spring 2017: Trial opens in Riverhead before Justice Richard Ambro.
July 5, 2017: Jury convicts him of two counts of second-degree murder after seven days of deliberations.
September 12, 2017: Sentenced to consecutive terms of 25 years to life; a prosecutor suggests a link to Gilgo Beach remains.
September 19, 2022: Suffolk County Supreme Court rules on his first motion to vacate.
February 3, 2023: Appellate Division grants leave to appeal and consolidates that appeal with his direct appeal.
July 13, 2023: Rex Heuermann is arrested in the Gilgo Beach killings.
June 6, 2024: Heuermann is charged in Costilla's death; Bittrolff's lawyers ask prosecutors for testing and evidence, and are refused.
December 29, 2024: Cybergenetics reports three unknown male profiles in McNamee case evidence.
January 23, 2025: Motion to vacate filed on the new DNA findings.
October 10, 2025: Court denies the branch of the motion seeking to vacate the convictions.
October 21, 2025: Medical examiner's report excludes Heuermann as unknown male A.
February 23, 2026: Appellate Division grants leave to appeal the October 2025 denial.