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NYC’s most notorious cold cases

Ethan Patz, who went missing in 1979AP

In the last year, two of the city’s most infamous murder cases have moved one step closer to closure. Pedro Hernadez confessed to strangling Etan Patz in the basement of a Soho bodega in 1979, a disappearance that sparked the nationwide movement to find missing kids. And just last week, Conrado Juarez copped to killing 4-year old Anjelica Castillo — Baby Hope  — and then dumping her body in a cooler by the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991. The cases haunted the families of the victims and the investigators trying to bring a sense of closure. But there are many more — the city has had about 9,000 unsolved murders since 1985. Here are a few that the NYPD continues to probe, hoping for a breakthrough like the one that cracked the Baby Hope case:

Phillip W. CardilloAP

Phillip W. Cardillo
April 14, 1972

It’s an unsolved case that hits close to home for the NYPD. Officer Phillip Cardillo was among five cops responding to a 10-13 call — a police officer in distress — inside a mosque that doubled as the New York headquarters of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

But it was bogus. The cops found themselves outnumbered by at least 15-20 men. Cardillo, 32, was beaten up and shot at point-blank range in the torso with his own service revolver. He died six days later.

Some 16 witnesses were identified but were ultimately released as Mayor John Lindsay and Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy feared a race riot might erupt. The only suspect charged in the case — Lewis 17X Dupree — was acquitted after an earlier trial ended in a hung jury.

“There was a full-court press on this one,” a police source said. “Everyone feels they arrested the right guy, he just beat the case.”

A recent push to keep the memory alive came by way of a street renaming proposal; Officer Phillip Cardillo Way would be alongside the 28th Precinct station house where he worked.

Sarah FoxAP

Sarah Fox
MAY 19, 2004

One spring evening, 21-year-old Juilliard student Sarah Fox went for a jog in Inwood Hill Park. She was never seen alive again.

Six days after her disappearance, Fox’s remains were found in the park, so badly decomposed that it was impossible to tell whether she’d been sexually assaulted. Her body had been posed, then ringed with yellow tulip petals and branches.

“I have no doubt that we would have seen her name in lights one day on Broadway,” said her uncle, Isaac Porter.

At the time of her death, the New Jersey native had been living in a fifth-floor walk-up in Inwood with a roommate. It was Fox’s boyfriend, Matthew D’Amico, who called the cops to report her missing. Cops identified a suspect: 47-year-old Dimitry Sheinman, who said he was a psychic who could crack the case, and knew details never made public. But they found no evidence linking him to the murder.

“We have a lot of confidence in the detectives from the 34th Precinct,” Porter said. “We know this takes time. It could take years. We believe an arrest will be made, and we are prepared to wait.”

Chanel Petro-Nixon
JUNE 18, 2006

Chanel Petro-Nixon

Who would want to kill Chanel Petro-Nixon?

The church-going Bed-Stuy teen was on her way to an Applebee’s restaurant on Father’s Day 2006 to meet friends and fill out an application for a summer job.

The restaurant was only a few blocks from her home on Fulton Street — but the pretty 16-year-old honors student never showed up.

Four days later, she was found a mile from her home, in Crown Heights, strangled and stuffed in a garbage bag on Kingston Avenue — a life of promise brutally cast aside on the curb.

Nixon’s parents, Garvin NIxon and Lucita Petro Nixon, with a photograph of their daughterTamara Beckwith

Her Sanyo Sprint 8200 cellphone and Air Jordan sneakers were missing, and investigators said there were no signs of sexual abuse or struggle — suggesting perhaps that she may have known her assailant.

But the case has stymied detectives, even as the reward leading to the killer’s arrest and conviction has climbed to over $30,000.

Investigators say they are “actively working” the case, but leads — including a suspect who was a pimp accused in the grisly murder of a New Jersey girl in 2006 — have not panned out.

“It still feels as if it was yesterday,” mom Lucinda Nixon said at a rally this summer, according to Our Time Press. “I don’t care where I have to go, who I have to go to, what I have to do. I want justice for my daughter, and I want to put my daughter’s killer away.”

Abe Lebewohl

March 4, 1996

Abe Lebewohl, who was owner of the famous Second Avenue Deli

It was supposed to be another mundane Monday morning for Abe Lebewohl. The 64-year-old owner of the famed Second Avenue Deli was en route to make his usual deposit at the NatWest Bank at Second Avenue and Fourth Street when at least two people came up to his van and shot him three times. The murderers dragged him into the back seat of the van, drove a block and then fled, making off with $10,000. Lebewohl — a Holocaust survivor who served up free food to homeless people in the pastrami palace he founded in 1954 — fell out of the van, screaming, “They shot me!” before he died.

Two days later, cops recovered the murder weapon — a chrome-plated Raven .25-caliber handgun tossed near Central Park — and tied it to a double murder in Westchester. But despite a reward posted by Lebewohl’s family that now stands at a whopping $150,000, the killer remains free.

“It hurts,” said retired Lt. Arthur Monahan, the Ninth Precinct squad commander at the time of Lebewohl’s murder. “I think about it every day. Sometimes you second-guess yourself, but in the end I know we had very good detectives work very hard on this.”

“Every day that goes by, we think of him,” said Lebewohl’s nephew, Josh, now co-owner of the deli, which moved from the East Village to Murray Hill in 2007. “He was the ultimate deli man.”

Tiesha Sargeant
MAY 14, 2006

Tiesha Sargeant

From the time she was a little girl, Tiesha Sargeant was a star. One of five children raised by working-class parents in Crown Heights, Sargeant was tapped by Prep for Prep, the organization that places smart, driven, disadvantaged kids in the city’s best schools for free. By age 26, Sargeant was a product of Brearley and Wesleyan and had worked at Credit Suisse and Conde Nast.

tiesha sargeantKevin P. Coughlin

She also had a live-in boyfriend, Keve Huggins, and in the early morning hours of May 14, 2006, Huggins called 911. Three intruders tied Huggins and Sargeant together, he said, covered them both in a sheet, then shot her in the head. Huggins, who’d dealt $6,000 worth of pot that day, was unharmed. His shirt was soaked in her blood.

After his daughter’s murder, Henry Sargeant went to the apartment to gather his daughter’s possessions and was disgusted to find Huggins in tears. “I said, ‘You can’t be crying. I don’t want your tears. I want you to be rational and clear-thinking and help us answer who did this,” Sargeant said. He added that Huggins had never been anything less than “vague” on the details of the crime, and a lie-detector test proved inconclusive. Huggins has never been charged.

Some of Sargeant’s friends told the press they didn’t think Huggins did it. “Tiesha had a mouth on her,” said one friend, who could see Sargeant cutting down one of the intruders so harshly that he “took her out.”

Sargeant’s father isn’t so sure. “Keve doesn’t know where she’s buried,” he said. “And we want to keep it that way.”

“I still cry every day,” Henry Sargeant said. “It’s like it happened yesterday.”

Mitchel Weiser and Bonnie Bickwit
JULY 27, 1973

Bonnie Bickwit

Forty years ago, Brooklyn teenagers Mitchel Weiser and Bonnie Bickwit went to an upstate concert and never came home.

Mitchel, then 16, of Midwood, and Bonnie, then 15, of Borough Park, set out to Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, featuring groups such as the Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead and the Band.

With $25 between them, they hit the road, hitchhiking along State Route 97. They vanished.

Mitchel Weiser

At first, it was just assumed the two may have gone off to a commune somewhere — two hippies who’d eventually go straight.

But as days have turned into decades, there’s been no sign of the two.

Weiser’s older sister, Susan Weiser Leibgott, refuses to say Yizkor, the Jewish prayer of mourning for the dead.

“I won’t say it until he’s found,” she told The Post. “It’s been 40 years and someone knows what happened. Someone has to come forward and say they saw something. They have to find my brother.”

The case is being investigated by the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office, whose Undersheriff Eric Chaboty told The Post that the case remains open and that all leads so far “have gone nowhere.”

Over the years, there have been intermittent efforts to refocus attention to the case. In 2000, their alma mater, John Dewey High School, held a special reunion, where an eight-foot maple tree was planted in their names.

“I always thought they were going to turn up,” said Stuart Karten, Mitchel’s best friend who started a Web site, mitchelandbonnie.com, to bring attention to the case. “Mitchel was a very ethical kid — almost honest to a fault. I don’t believe that they ran away or they did anything like that. I always figured foul play was involved.”

Jam Master Jay
(Jason Mizell)
OCTOBER 30, 2002

Jam Master Jay, a.k.a Jason MizellAP

One of the city’s most shocking unsolved murders. Jason Mizell — one-third of the groundbreaking rap group RUN-DMC known as Jam Master Jay — was shot and killed while working in his recording studio in Jamaica, Queens. He was 37 years old.

“His studio was open to the neighborhood, 24-7,” said friend Eleta Boone. “Anyone who worked with Jay was someone from the ’hood.”

His older sister, Bonita Jones, blamed herself. “A long time ago, his wife wanted to move out of New York, but he said, ‘I’m not leaving my sister.’ That’s the man he was.”

In the days after the murder, theories abounded, motives ascribed to everything from a hip-hop feud to a business dispute to a crew of high-level crack dealers who’d killed Officer Edward Byrne in 1988. At the time, one law enforcement source said that there was a single name that kept coming up.

What cops were able to piece together: At 7:30 in the evening, Jay and a 25-year-old hanger-on named Urieco Rincon were sitting on a sofa, playing a video game, while a female acquaintance sat on a nearby couch. Three others hung in the control room.

Two masked men burst into the room and one of them shot Jay in the head, behind his left ear. The force of the blast knocked the gunman into Rincon’s lap, and the gun went off, leaving Rincon shot in the ankle. Both intruders ran off, and Rincon survived.

Cops fear they will never make an arrest.

“The whole thing was over drugs,” a police source tells The Post. This source says that Mizell was in a lot of debt and was “taking big weight — a couple of kilos of coke got stolen from him.”

After his death, it was reported that Mizell owed $500,000 in back taxes.

“The thing is, there was a witness, and he definitely knows who the shooter is” says the source. “[But] he’d rather go to jail for 20 years than tell us who did it.”