✝️ Colleen Tara McNamee, age 20 – January 5 1994, Long Island, New York, USA 🇺🇸💔
Colleen at school was known as a bubbly peacemaker in Sachem High School on Long Island, dressing impeccably. She could be heard in hallways imploring friends in a squeaky voice to stop fighting or sleeping in class.
Colleen was reported missing by her parents one day after she was last seen. According to her mother, she was bipolar and struggling with a drug addiction and was in prostitution. In the morning she left her parents‘ house to attend a drug rehabilitation program. At around 10 a.m., Colleen left the treatment center with another outpatient. Shortly afterwards, she was spotted getting into a small blue car. That was the last time that anyone reported seeing her alive.
Colleen was sexually assaulted, strangled, and beaten to death. Following the attack, her killer left her naked body in this wooded area beside the Long Island Expressway.
She was naked, and her skull had been crushed. Colleen’s attacker left her lying on her back with her legs spread apart. He also positioned one of her arms over her head. The nature of her death and the „pose“ that she was left in caught the attention of investigators. Only three months previously, Rita Tangredi was found strangled, beaten and sprawled out in a similar pose. Furthermore, both were missing a single sneaker. This led detectives to suspect that the killer had taken his victims‘ shoes as trophies.
Twenty years later, a local carpenter named John Bittrolff was charged with Colleens’s murder. During the trial, the court heard that most of the victim’s facial bones were broken and that her skull had been crushed „like an eggshell“. Cigarette burns on her right hand also indicated that she may have been tortured.
His arrest could be traced to his brother Timothy’s conviction on criminal contempt charges for violating an order of protection. His DNA proved a partial match to the DNA in semen found on the bodies of Colleen and Rita Tangredi.
Bittrolff in 2017 was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder to two consecutive 25 years-to-life sentences.
He might be the Long Island Serial Killer.
