A fingerprint left on a ransacked jewelry box helped cops crack the case of a Holocaust survivor who was strangled in his Queens apartment nearly 32 years ago.
The arrest of a convicted robber for Cecil Schiff’s brutal murder stunned a former neighbor who was close to the victim’s widow, Gertrude, and lived in their Flushing building.
They were just this nice, gentle, sad couple who had escaped the Holocaust,” Candice Hackett, 53, who now lives in South Carolina, told the Daily News.
I’m just stunned. When he was killed, it just broke her heart into pieces. I still remember the blood on her carpet.”
Ernest Mattison, 49, who has been charged with murdering the 73-year-old Schiff, could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted.
Mattison was just 17 when Schiff was murdered in September 1980 and lived a few blocks from the victim on Kissena Blvd.
Schiff, who escaped from his native Poland in 1940 after the Germans invaded, was set to ring in Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when he was killed.
His wife had just left their fourth-floor apartment when, police say, an intruder burst in and beat Schiff over the head, possibly the butt end of a gun.
Schiff collapsed before he reached the phone in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, the killer ransacked the apartment, stole $100 from a wallet — and left behind the tell-tale clue, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
Schiff’s wife discovered his body when she returned home and ran from the apartment screaming, “Someone killed my husband!”
The coroner ruled the cause of Schiff’s death was strangulation.
Gertrude Schiff died about a decade later, said Hackett, never knowing who killed her husband.
Meanwhile, Mattison continued on a life in crime and was doing time in an upstate prison for another robbery when cold case squad detectives traced the fingerprint to him, Brown said.
In addition to technological advances over the years, it was good old-fashioned police work that did the trick. NYPD cold case unit Detective Oscar Hernandez credits the original detectives on the case, Gerald Donohue and David Jackle — who have since retired — for finding and preserving the set of the perp’s prints.
Prosecutors are searching for living relatives of Schiff, whose daughter has also since died. Anyone with information is asked to call the Queens district attorney’s office at (718) 286-5866.
Hackett said they’re not likely to find any kin.
Gertrude Schiff “told me her entire family and his family were wiped out by the Nazis,” she said.
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