Suffolk DA Names Six Cold Case Victims Decades After Deaths

Suffolk County prosecutors on Thursday released the names of six people who were found dead in the county between 1976 and 1999 and who had never been publicly identified. Three of them were homicide victims, District Attorney Ray Tierney's office said.

Tierney announced the identifications with Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina at the county police academy in Brentwood. The work came out of a cold case task force that pairs county police detectives with a unit of prosecutors and investigators in Tierney's office. For the three homicides, investigators used next generation sequencing, a newer DNA method, along with genetic genealogy. The same kind of DNA work was used in the Gilgo Beach killings case.

"Every person deserves to be known by their name, and every victim deserves answers and justice," Tierney said in a statement. Catalina said the victims "remained unidentified, but they were never forgotten."

The oldest case began on Nov. 27, 1976, when three rabbit hunters in Deer Park came upon a man who had been badly burned. A bullet wound in his abdomen had killed him. Because of a tattoo reading "Raymond" on his upper arm, investigators called him "Raymond Doe" for almost 50 years. He was Ramon Perez y Rivera, born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in October 1935. The last record of him alive was the 1950 census, which placed him in the South Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He was probably about 41 when he died.

On March 22, 1978, a U.S. airman sitting in his car on his lunch break at a Montauk Highway overlook, East Overlook Park, spotted an elderly woman's body roughly 15 feet away from where cars park. The medical examiner found four gunshot wounds. Called "Montauk Mary" ever since, she was a Pleasantville, N.J., woman named Sofia Margherita Marrone, who was 73. Six days before the body turned up, she walked out of a hospital in Somers Point, N.J., Shore Memorial, and was not seen again.

Tierney named Richard Biegenwald, a New Jersey serial killer who was behind bars when he died in 2008, as a suspect in her death. He pointed to the .22-caliber short rounds used to kill Marrone, the type Biegenwald was known to use, and to his habit of picking up women walking in Jersey Shore towns. Tierney said investigators had not tied Biegenwald to the killing through forensic evidence.

Less than two weeks later, on April 2, 1978, a dog digging in the sand at Heckscher State Park exposed part of a skull. Investigators recovered a skeleton with a belt pulled tight around the neck, and an autopsy found the victim had been strangled. The dead woman, Antoinette Rugg, was 26 and had a son of 10.

The other three cases date from 1990 and 1999. On March 12, 1990, a Riverhead town worker driving a street sweeper near woods off Osborne Avenue found the body of Kyong-Ok Kim, 32. Police had known who she was but had never made her name public. Born in South Korea, she married and moved to Michigan in 1978, and later settled in the Woodside section of Queens. How she died is still under investigation.

Omelios Steward, 28, was the man a Coast Guard crew found floating in the ocean on Nov. 4, 1990, some nine miles off Fire Island. He is thought to have drowned, and improved fingerprint analysis gave him back his name. On Dec. 24, 1999, a partly decomposed body turned up at the high tide line in Montauk, east of Ditch Plains. It was Andreas Kupke, a 27-year-old from Germany who had flown into Newark a month earlier and never took his return flight.

Prosecutors asked anyone who knew any of the six to contact Crime Stoppers, 1-800-220-TIPS.