Who is Richard Bilodeau, the Center Moriches man charged in the 1984 killing of Lynbrook teen Theresa Fusco?

Prosecutors may have revealed the identity of the man accused of killing 16-year-old Theresa Fusco in 1984, but much else about him still remains a mystery.

Richard Bilodeau, 63, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday in Nassau County Court to two counts of murder in the second degree, charged in the rape and strangulation of the East Rockaway High School junior after she left her job at the snack bar of Hot Skates in Lynbrook on Nov. 10 of that year.

Prosecutors have not hinted at a motive behind the crime. His defense attorney, Daniel W. Russo, said outside the courtroom after his arraignment that he has a clean criminal record.

Bilodeau, who lives in Center Moriches, has worked at the Riverhead Walmart for the last 12 years, stocking shelves on the evening shift, prosecutors said.

Authorities arrested Bilodeau after his DNA matched a sample taken from Fusco's body.

But Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly wouldn’t say what led authorities to first suspect him of the 40-year-old killing, and then get his DNA off a straw he had used drinking a smoothie. 

When investigators questioned him about the killing, he said he didn’t know anything about it. But, prosecutors said, he also said: “People got away with murder back then.”

The district attorney said they questioned Fusco's family and friends about Bilodeau, to see if they remembered seeing him around.

“No one recognized this defendant as someone who was ever associated with Theresa in 1984,” Donnelly said.

Bilodeau, who was 23 at the time of the killing, worked on a coffee truck in the area about a mile from the skating rink and Fusco's house, she said.

He lived with his grandparents in Lynbrook at the time of the crime, the prosecutor said. Bilodeau's current neighbors told Newsday they did not know him well.

They said police arrived en masse Monday around 8 p.m. outside his home on Wading River Road.

“They’re aggressive and they’re taking stuff,” Donna Maldonado, 62, who lives four houses away, said her son told her of the police presence.

She said she was startled to have lived so close to someone charged with murder.

“My heart is slamming,” she said after a Newsday reporter informed her of the charges against Bilodeau. “It’s too close.”

“It is very scary,” another neighbor, John Schumpf, 78, said. “You got kids walking down the street here.”

No one answered at Bilodeau's residence, a green ranch-style home with a small dark wood porch, on Wednesday afternoon.

A manager of the Walmart in Gateway Plaza along Old Country Road in Riverhead declined to speak with Newsday.