Sanitation worker killed young mom Barbara Waldman inside her home in 1974, police say

Eric Waldman brushed the snow away from his mother’s headstone at Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon as his brother, Larry Waldman, and sister, Marla Waldman Conn, stood nearby.

"Hey, mom, miss you, love you, wish you were here," he said. "And they found your murderer."

"It’s over," Marla said.

"So rest peacefully," Larry said.

Their mother, Barbara Waldman, was murdered in their Oceanside home in 1974. The crime remained unsolved until late last year, when the Nassau County Police Department told the family they closed the case after identifying a suspect, who had died in 2004,through DNA testing of a semen sample on the victim's bathrobe.

On Wednesday, police publicly confirmed the information, naming the suspect as Thomas Generazio, an Oceanside sanitation worker who was 57 when he died of cancer.

"Taking that mother from her three children is inexcusable," Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said at a news conference attended by the Waldman family.

Ryder did not identify a potential motive, and said Generazio's DNA has not been linked to any other unsolved crimes.

In an earlier phone interview with Newsday, Carol Generazio, who was married to Generazio’s brother, said Nassau detectives had spoken with her and that she was “shocked” by the news, adding, “What more is there to say?”

The Waldman family contacted Newsday recently after seeing the Newsday documentary "The Forgotten" on WLIW/21. The documentary chronicled the cold cases of women murdered on Long Island.

Haunted for decades

For 52 years, the murder of Barbara Waldman has haunted her children, who were 5, 6 and 7 years old when their mother was killed. They went on with their lives, had their own families and moved off Long Island. But the case never left them.

Eric was the one who found her.

He got off the bus from kindergarten and went to the front door expecting to see his mother there, but didn’t. He went upstairs to her bedroom. That’s where he found her.

"She was tied up in dark stockings. There was one around her neck. She had a pillowcase in her mouth, and I saw a hole in her head," he recalled.

He tried to untie her, but the knot seemed to tighten when he did. Then he thought he heard a noise in the closet. Terrified, he ran out to a neighbor’s house. The first neighbor didn’t believe him, he said, so he ran to another neighbor’s house. They agreed to check. They found her. He remembers looking out his neighbor’s window and seeing his mother’s body being carried out under a sheet.

Barbara Waldman was 31 years old. She had graduated from New York University with a teaching degree, but stayed home to rear her children. A blonde, she was vibrant, fun-loving and nurturing, her children said. She was always singing and dancing with her children, and toys were scattered all over the house. The morning of the murder, she had been planning to go dress shopping, Marla said.

Their block on Sally Lane in Oceanside was a tight-knit neighborhood, where the children all played with each other and parents vacationed together. It was a new development, and young families with children all moved in around the same time, said Stanley Roban, a family friend.

"People were comfortable leaving their doors open," he said. "After that, no."

Roban had just come home after doing his turn in the neighborhood carpool when Barbara’s husband, Gerald Waldman, called him. He arrived at the house and saw his friend looking down and saying, "They killed my Barbara."

'Us against the world'

Thirty detectives descended on the scene. They set up a special trailer at the corner of Mott and Oceanside roads to collect information, but had few clues. The medical examiner said she had died of strangulation and a bullet wound, according to Newsday stories at the time.

Detectives questioned Waldman, but he was working at his dental office at the time of the killing. Years later, he voluntarily gave police a DNA swab, and testing ruled him out as a suspect, family members said.

Neighbors gave police a description of the man they saw walking away from the house on the day of the murder. A police artist produced a composite sketch of a man with a mustache wearing a fur-lined snorkel jacket, a hooded winter parka. But they never matched the sketch to a suspect.

It fell to Waldman, who died in 2007, to explain to his children what happened. He gathered them together the night of the murder and said, "A bad man came in the house, and your mom’s in heaven. She’s not coming home."

He never spoke about it again. Neither did the children. Their mother’s pictures came off the walls.

"It was something that we all silently decided," Marla said. "We never talked about it."

Their father beefed up their home security. He bought an alarm and two German shepherds. To this day, both Larry and Eric said they share an obsession with security. Larry can’t sleep without his Doberman. Eric checks door locks repeatedly.

Waldman remarried within six months. Years later, Marla asked him what he was thinking. He told her, "I was thinking I was going to jump off the top of a building, and I needed a mother for my children."

There was a falling-out with their mother’s side of the family because they blamed him for her murder, the children said. Neighbors gossiped, too.

"We knew it was there," Marla said.

But their father was adamant that they not let the rumors drive them apart. "It was us against the world," Larry said.

They moved around the corner to a different house. They never went back to Sally Lane, even though they had friends there.

A break in the case

Police zeroed in on a suspect in prison who confessed to the murder. But when they tested his DNA years later, it wasn’t a match. The case went cold. Marla periodically called the department to ask if there had been any developments, but was told police couldn’t reopen the case without new evidence, she said.

Then in December 2022, Eric read a news story that serial killer Richard Cottingham was set to plead guilty to the 1968 murder of dance teacher Diane Cusick outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream after semen found on the victim was retested. He called his sister, who called the police department.

The department agreed to reopen the case. After about eight months, they learned there was no match to Cottingham, Marla said.

She pushed the department to try genetic genealogy, a forensic technique that compares DNA from a crime victim or suspect with genetic profiles in publicly available DNA databases. It was used to identify the remains of Karen Vergata, whose body parts were found in 1996 on Fire Island and in 2011 near Gilgo Beach, Newsday has reported.

In August 2024, Det. Gina Salerno, the Nassau homicide detective handling the investigation, called Marla. "We got a match," she told her.

That wasn’t enough, however, to close the case. "I found out very quickly that just because somebody’s sperm is found at the scene of the crime does not make them a murderer," Marla said.

She made it her mission to find out everything she could about Generazio. Using online databases, she found family members and reached out to them. One sent her photos of him, including one of him in a green snorkel jacket, the same one described by witnesses in 1974, she said.

That was a critical piece of evidence, she said.

Now that the case is closed, the siblings said they feel a sense of relief for their mother and their father.

"I feel like it’s a huge ‘I’ve told you so’ for 50 years because of some people that doubted my father," Larry said.

"You don’t really have closure; but I feel justice has been served, which, for me, was really important. The truth, I wanted the truth to come out," Marla said.

Back at the cemetery, the siblings placed a card on their mother’s headstone from the detective who helped solve the case. The card said, "To the living, we owe respect, but to the dead we only owe the truth."

The siblings then hugged each other and said, "We did it. We did it."

Newsday's Jim Baumbach and NewsdayTV's Shari Einhorn contributed to this story.