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Manorville Carpenter Charged in Two Long Island Cold Case Murders From 1993 and 1994

DNA from his brother's unrelated arrest led Suffolk investigators to John Bittrolff in the killings of Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee.

Published

Illustration of handcuffed hands resting on a scuffed wooden courtroom table, the figure cropped at the chest. Not the actual defendant or courtroom.

For twenty years the two cases had sat side by side in the Suffolk County files, linked by DNA to the same unknown man. On Tuesday, July 22, 2014, the man had a name. John Bittrolff, 48, a carpenter from Manorville, was arraigned in Suffolk County District Court in Central Islip on two counts of second-degree murder and held without bail.

Rita Tangredi was 31. She was found nude in woods off Esplanade Drive in East Patchogue on November 2, 1993, beaten and strangled. Colleen McNamee, 20, of Holbrook, was found less than three months later, on January 30, 1994, in woods near Express Drive South in Shirley. She too was nude, and she too had been beaten and strangled. Detectives at the time recovered DNA that tied the two killings together, but it matched no one.

The break came through Bittrolff's brother. Prosecutors said Timothy Bittrolff had been arrested and convicted the previous summer in an unrelated case involving a restraining order, and the DNA taken from him pointed investigators toward his family. "They shared the same mother and father, and through a process of elimination we have confirmed that through this defendant's DNA, he is the killer," said District Attorney Thomas Spota. "This case was solved, and is a testament to the miracle of modern DNA science."

Authorities said Bittrolff had spent those twenty years living quietly in Manorville with a wife, two children and an extended family. Spota said investigators were also looking at whether he was responsible for the death of a third woman, Sandra Costilla, 28, found in a similar state in the North Sea section of Southampton in December 1993. Suffolk police said there was no evidence connecting the killings to the remains found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011.

What this story covers. The charges, arraignment, the details of where and how the women were found, the brother's DNA and the Spota quotations come from WABC-TV's report of July 22, 2014; on that day the accusations were the prosecutors' and he had not been tried. A later account dates Tangredi's discovery to November 3, 1993, and gives her name as Rita Tangredi-Beinlich. On July 5, 2017, after a two-month trial and seven days of deliberations in Riverhead, a jury convicted him of both murders, as the Long Island Press reported; that report says the brother's sample went into the state databank after a September 2013 conviction and that a direct match came from a glass of water Bittrolff drank in police custody. He was sentenced that September to consecutive terms of 25 years to life. He was never charged in Costilla's death, and he has never been charged in any of the Gilgo Beach killings. The image is an illustration of handcuffed hands at a courtroom table, not Bittrolff.

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