A murder case left unsolved in 1974 was solved by her daughter in 2026, who is 60 years old now. Barbara Waldman was murdered in cold blood in Oceanside, Long Island, New York, in 1974.

Barbara was 31 years old at the time and had just waved goodbye to her three children who were leaving for school. Marla, who is 60 now, recalled the last words her mother said to her before passing away.

“My mum’s last words to me were ‘be careful’,” Marla recalled in a conversation with The U.S. Sun. She revealed that as she and her siblings went down the drive, Marla slipped on the snow, prompting her mother to shout: “Marla, be careful, are you OK?” “Later that day, I remember being picked up from school and being told she was in an accident,” Marla revealed. “I thought she was in the hospital, so I was making her get-well-soon cards. Later that evening, my dad came home and told us she was gone and not coming back.”

Barbara was murdered 20 minutes after saying goodbye to her kids. She was found by one of her children, Eric, who was five at the time. Reports revealed that Barbara was sexually assaulted.  She was found with her hands tied behind her back, her mouth gagged with a pillowcase, and a bullet hole in her head. However, the authorities failed to produce any results, and the case was closed.

According to Marla, talk of the town was that their father murdered Barbara. The suspicions grew even stronger when the father remarried just six months after the murder. “My mother’s side of the family always implied that my father had killed her,” Marla recalled. “We were aware that a large part of the community accused him of having our mother killed. Processing that as a child was tough.”

Marla began questioning her mother’s death only as an adult. She would call the police department every year, urging them to reopen the case. In 2022, Marla got a breakthrough when Richard Cottingham, also known as “Times Square Ripper” confessed to four murders in Long Island. One of them was a home invasion that resembled her mother’s case.

“I called the detective, and he said that he will reopen the case to see if the DNA evidence matches Cottingham’s,” Marla recalled. “We waited eight months, but there was no match on the national database or in Cottingham.” However, Marla then urged Nassau County police to contact the FBI to work with more “advanced DNA techniques.”

The police agreed and sent the crime scene DNA to the FBI. Finally, in 2024, the FBI confirmed a match. The killer was identified as Thomas Generazio, who was a local binman who lived not too far away from the house. However, Generazio had passed away in 2004.

“After the DNA match, I started researching Generazio and did not tell anyone,” Barbara recalled. “I made it my mission to prove that this motherf—er killed my mother, and he might have hurt other people.” Marla stated that she contacted one of Generazio’s children, who provided her with a picture of him wearing a coat with a fur-lined collar.

The picture was strikingly similar to the police sketch of an unknown man seen near the crime scene in 1974. Finally, in March 2026, the Nassau police department announced that Thomas Generazio was responsible for the death of Barbara Waldman. “When I heard he had died, that satisfied me that he couldn’t hurt or kill anyone else,” Marla said. “The element of the unknown killer is gone; he is dead.”