Long Island cops break decades-old case of woman bound, murdered in home invasion

Long Island police have finally ID’d the killer in a shocking, long-unsolved case — and the victim’s family is happy to officially clear their father’s name after more than 50 years.

Local sanitation worker Thomas Generazio, who died of cancer in 2004, was identified as the sicko home invader who broke into Barbara Waldman’s Oceanside home, tied her up and sexually assaulted her and then shot her dead on Feb. 1, 1974, cops said.

Although Generazio is long dead, Waldman’s family said they were relieved to have closure and to the rumors finally put to bed over their late father Gerald Waldman, a dentist who was never charged in the crime but was ostracized in the years after the crime.

“Happily today, 52 years later, I get to say to the world that our father is exonerated,” Marla Waldman, one of the couple’s three children, told reporters. Their dad was slapped with a “powerful social mark of disgrace” until his dying day in 2006, she added.

Barbara, 31 at the time of her death, was found bound and shot in the back of the head by her 5-year-old son, Eric, who had just got off the bus.

Generazio, who had lived nearby and died at age 57, was positively ID’d as the killer through familial DNA, Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder announced Wednesday.

The murder had remained unsolved for 50 years and was officially reopened in 2024 after the DNA of a relative of Generazio’s DNA helped establish the link, authorities said. Cops would not say if they linked him to through crimes using a genealogy site.

Although officials had a “near perfect” police sketch of the criminal decades ago, DNA technology had yet to be established at the time of the murder. The killer had left a basic finger print but they never tied the crime to Generazio, who had two prior arrests for assault and stealing.

“An individual that we now know to be Thomas Generazio, entered that residence and committed a violent sexual assault against the mother, and then put a bullet in the back of her head, as she laid on the floor tied up with the stockings that she was wearing,” Ryder detailed, alongside the mother’s emotional children. 

The motive was unclear, but Generazio lived fewer than 4 miles a way and had worked in the neighborhood as a garbage man, cops said. It’s possible he been the Waldman’s garbage man at one point, they added.

“Unfortunately for him, he died at age 57 due to cancer, but we would have liked to see him in jail for that entire time for the brutal murder that he did,” Ryder added. 

The Waldman children said despite the break in the case, the trauma they’ve endured will linger for the rest of their lives.

“I’ve had that image of my mom in my head since I was 5 — and it isn’t going away until I die,” said Eric Waldman, who found his mother’s body.