As teen-agers on Long Island, John Restivo and Marge Neidecker spent hours in her blue Road Runner, cruising around the towns where Queens gives way to Nassau County. “We did a lot of drag racing,” Neidecker remembered. “I owned a souped-up car—so did everybody back in the seventies.” She had long, straight blond hair parted down the middle, like Joni Mitchell’s. Restivo was a tall, gangly guy; his nickname in the neighborhood was Wimpy. Sometimes they cut class at Lynbrook High School and rode around together, smoking cigarettes and listening to Bob Dylan. They loved his song “Hurricane,” and sang along as they drove: “Here comes the story of the Hurricane / the man the authorities came to blame / for something that he never done.” It seemed like a metaphor for all the injustices of adolescence.

After high school, they went their separate ways. In Neidecker’s yearbook, Restivo wrote, “Best of luck with the future.” She married at nineteen. He went to work for his father, a retired police officer, at the family’s moving-and-storage company. The Restivos were a close family: every Sunday they had dinner together, with as many as twenty relatives at the table.

When Restivo was twenty-four, his father died, of a heart attack. A year later, his girlfriend gave birth to their son. Suddenly, Restivo was the father of an infant and the oldest of three brothers in a business that had relied heavily on the family patriarch. He was overwhelmed, always tense. One day in March, 1985, he was driving in Oceanside, about to make a left onto Rockaway Avenue, to check on some of the company’s trucks. Three unmarked cars drove up next to him. The men inside said that they were cops, and told Restivo to pull over to the curb.

He was taken to the county-police headquarters, in Mineola, where Joseph Volpe, a beefy detective with bushy eyebrows, told him that they were investigating a homicide. Restivo’s first thought was that his girlfriend and their new baby had been murdered. But that wasn’t it. The body of a sixteen-year-old named Theresa Fusco had been found in the woods near the Hot Skates roller rink, where she’d worked at the snack bar; she had been raped, and strangled with a rope. Though Restivo had never met the victim and had no criminal record, it became clear that he was a suspect. One of the detectives grabbed him by the throat, he recalled recently. “He starts screaming, right in my face, ‘Is this how you killed her?’ And I’m, like, This is insane.” They kept him at the station for twenty hours, during which he was not allowed to rest or eat or call his girlfriend and let her know where he was. Restivo remembers that when he said he had a right to a lawyer, Volpe told him, “This is un-America: you have no rights here.” Then Volpe’s partner, Robert Dempsey, hit him in the face.

Restivo had grown up thinking of the police as good guys—his father had spent twenty years on the Nassau County force—and he was stunned by his treatment. As soon as he was released, he went to see a lawyer, who took photographs of his bruises and filed a complaint against the detectives. (Dempsey denied hitting Restivo.) But the police did not relinquish the case. “It’s quite possible that the fact that he called a lawyer right away made them think that he was guilty,” Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann, one of Restivo’s current lawyers, said. “Anything is a sign that you’re guilty, once they get a feeling that they don’t like something about somebody.”

Restivo’s phones were tapped. His home was bugged. “Everywhere I went, they started following me around,” he said. “I’m trying to continue running a business, and if I go to somebody’s house to do an estimate or a moving job, I’m afraid the cops are going to show up. Anybody I associated with, they’re starting to snatch off the street—and they’re not just bringing them in for a half-hour chat.” On the night of the crime, Restivo had been in Wantagh, sanding floors at his new house with a friend; the police brought the friend in and questioned him for ten hours. “They told me, ‘We’re going to turn your life into an effing nightmare,’ ” Restivo said. “ ‘And we’re going to turn your brother’s life into an effing nightmare. We’ll turn your mother’s life into a nightmare. We’ll turn your son’s life into a nightmare.’ And they did.”

There was a mounting sense of menace in Lynbrook and Oceanside at the time: Theresa Fusco was not the only teen-age girl to disappear from the area. Her friend Kelly Morrissey, a fifteen-year-old with winged hair and a giddy grin, had vanished the previous June; she was last seen on her way to the Captain Video arcade. The police had listed Morrissey as a runaway, though before she went missing she had laid out an outfit for the next day on her bed. They likewise assumed that Fusco had fled in protest after she was fired from Hot Skates, but her mother, Connie Napoli, insisted that her daughter had been abducted. “Police should trust a mother’s feelings,” Napoli said at the time. “It is so frustrating knowing your child is somewhere needing help, and you don’t know where to go.” When some children found Fusco’s naked body covered with leaves in the woods by the railroad tracks, people in the neighborhood began to panic. Then, a few months later, a nineteen-year-old named Jacqueline Martarella disappeared in Oceanside on her way to Burger King. Her body was found on a golf course; like Fusco, she had apparently been raped and strangled. There was enormous pressure on the police to find a culprit.

Volpe was an experienced member of the Nassau County force, but this was his first case as the lead detective on a homicide. There was no DNA testing available at that time, so even though the police took vaginal swabs from Fusco to ascertain that she’d been raped, they were unable to identify her assailant based on the semen they recovered. In January of 1985, after several months of investigation, Volpe heard that a local man—a veteran who suffered from P.T.S.D. and had been hospitalized for psychiatric illness—had been bragging that he knew who did it. He named John Restivo.

After the police brought Restivo in for questioning, Volpe began to build his case. During his interrogation, Restivo had mentioned an employee, a twenty-one-year-old named John Kogut. The police picked up Kogut after he had just finished a day of intense physical labor and then drunk a few beers and smoked a joint. Despite his insobriety, Kogut passed a polygraph test in which he insisted that he knew nothing about the crime. But the police told him that he had failed, and interrogated him for eighteen hours—by the end of which he had given six distinct, contradictory confessions. The last one was handwritten by one of the detectives. Kogut signed it, and then, sitting before a video camera, confessed to the crime, hewing to the police’s version of events: He had gone out with Restivo and his friend Dennis Halstead, a thirty-year-old father of five, who sometimes worked with them at the moving company. In Restivo’s van, the three men had picked Fusco up from the street and taken her to a cemetery. There, among the headstones, Halstead and Restivo had raped her and then persuaded Kogut to strangle her with a rope.