Overview
- Suffolk County announced on Thursday that Next Generation Sequencing helped identify six previously unnamed remains from cases dated between 1976 and 1999, returning names to families and reopening inquiries.
- The six identified people are Ramon Perez y Rivera, Sofia Margherita Marrone, Antoinette Rugg, Kyong-Ok Kim, Omelios Steward, and Andreas Kupke, and three of the cases are believed to be homicides.
- Investigators say Marrone, long known as “Montauk Mary,” has a possible but unconfirmed forensic link to Jersey Shore killer Richard Biegenwald because the bullets recovered match the .22-caliber short rounds he used.
- Officials plan to apply the same DNA techniques to roughly 210 other unidentified remains and are urging relatives and the public to upload DNA profiles and opt in to law-enforcement searches to improve match chances.
- Beyond naming victims, the identifications give families closure, create new investigative leads that may change case directions, and illustrate how NGS can extract usable DNA from badly degraded old samples such as hair and bone.