Of the 150 people authorities had tracked down and who had given statements to the grand jury about Vicky Cushman's life and her death, none were found through Vicky Cushman's Rolodex. Investigators from the Warwick police department had never gone through it, not during their initial investigation at the bloody crime scene and not in the two years that followed. When state police investigators and prosecutors took over the case, they didn't even know it existed.

If anyone had looked through it, however, they would have found the name Todd Barry. A carpenter by trade, Barry had a brief and torrid relationship with Cushman not long before her death.

In the years that followed, he married and had a child. Through it all, he kept a horrible secret. Maybe it was the birth of his son that did it. Maybe it was the death of his mother. Maybe it was just the fact that the guilt of it all -- and the fact that another man, another father was a rotting away in prison for a crime he didn't commit -- became too much for Barry to bear.

In November 2002, 13 years after Vicky Cushman's body was found in her apartment, Todd Barry confessed to murdering her. As Barry himself would later put it, "Over 13 years ago, I did a horrible thing. I killed another human being. I've lived in torment since."

At first, investigators were reluctant to believe him, assuming that he was just some lunatic trying to get a bit of attention. But as they questioned him they realized that every detail in his story fit the evidence. Even details that investigators had initially overlooked -- things like the shattered antique jewelry box, a detail that no one had even asked Hornoff about, now fit easily into the puzzle.

Providence, R.I., waterfront area (AP/Wide World)

According to his confession, portions of which were later read in court, Barry, like Hornoff, had been out drinking on the night of August 11, 1989, downing shots and beers at a bar called the Hot Club on the riverfront in Providence. Later he moved on to the Club Rocket on Richmond Street where he hooked up briefly with a couple of other carpenters, two Irish immigrants whom he could identify only as Wally and Simon. They smoked a joint or two together.

Before he knew it, Barry said, he was "out of control." He was also pining for his lover.

Barry and Vicky Cushman had dated for a while a few months earlier. By his own estimation, the relationship was shallow. It was, he would later say, "primarily sexual."

All the same, that night, Barry said, he felt a profound desire to see Cushman. Despite his inebriation, he remembered that he had spoken to Cushman at the Alpine Ski and Sport shop some days earlier and that she had mentioned to him that she had moved to an apartment next door. She also told him that she was involved with a Warwick police officer. That detail, however, did little to cool Barry's ardor, at least that night.

Barry told authorities that he broke into Cushman's apartment that night by climbing onto the roof of an adjacent building that stood slightly lower than the building where Cushman lived, then scaling the drainpipe outside her kitchen window, popping a screen, and climbing inside.

Cushman, he said, was asleep in her bedroom. She had taken the time before going to bed to put in a dental device that she used to prevent her from grinding her teeth in her sleep. But she had not bothered to turn out the bedroom light. It was the only light burning when Barry entered the apartment, he said.

Oddly, Cushman didn't seem particularly agitated when he woke her. "She was neither panicked nor angry," he said in his confession. She simply asked, "What are you doing here?"

Though Barry had managed to scale the drainpipe a few moments earlier, he said he was now feeling wobbly and, in his drunkenness, he said, he stumbled and fell to the floor. Cushman helped him to his feet and led him to the living room so they could talk.

The conversation, however, quickly turned icy. She again told Barry about her relationship with Hornoff, and added that she believed the officer would leave his wife for her. Barry told her she was fooling herself and Cushman became angry.

She became angrier still, he said, when she noticed that Barry had left the kitchen window open. Afraid that her cat had escaped, she berated her former boyfriend, climbed out of the window and onto the roof below, crawling around on her hands and knees in search of her cat.

Even now, after 13 years of brooding about it, Barry still can't explain why he felt such an uncontrollable rage. But as Cushman berated him for losing her cat, he became so violently angry that he found the yellow kitchen gloves, pulled them on, and as Cushman climbed back through her kitchen window, he grabbed her by the throat and dragged her inside, throttling her until she collapsed to the floor. Then he grabbed something -- it had "an unusual surface" -- and struck her with it. The object -- an antique jewelry box -- shattered, leaving a mark on the side of her neck that precisely matched the dimensions of the broken heirloom. Then, as she lay motionless on the floor, he grabbed the fire extinguisher that Cushman kept beside her woodstove, hefted it over his head and brought it crashing down on her skull.