“The Butcher of Bellerose,” a two-time killer who slaughtered a 4-year-old Queens girl when he was just 16 — and then murdered a teenager when he was released from prison — will soon be free again.
The state parole board on Jan. 3 approved the release of Vincent DeRosa, 72, who served 35 years of a maximum lifetime prison sentence for killing 18-year-old Finnish exchange student Tomi Uuttu and burying him in a shallow grave in 1983.
Fifteen years earlier he had lured his neighbor, little Theresa Riccio, from her stoop, slaughtered her, and stuffed her in a suitcase.
Chillingly, he then “joined” the citywide search for the missing youngster.
Her family is horrified by his impending release.
“I’m shocked,” Anthony Riccio, 62, said when The Post informed him of his sister’s killer’s parole. “They didn’t send me a letter or anything.”
Theresa’s body was found in the attic of DeRosa’s mother’s home in Woodhaven in May 1968, eleven days after her disappearance.
“I’m heartbroken,” said Riccio, who was in second grade when his sister was killed. “My sister was found in a suitcase in an attic with her legs broken, with her neck broken.”
Riccio, whose two other siblings were aged 10 and 12, remembered the day his frantic mother showed up at school.
“My mom was . . . waiting for us and she said, ‘I can’t find Theresa,’” he recalled. “My mom figured she went to the school to look for us. She always wanted to come to school with us but she was only 4.”
Police helicopters searched for the little girl while neighbors and cops scoured the neighborhood on foot.
The DeRosa “family lived right around the corner from us and was helping us try to find her,” Riccio recalled. “He was helping too.”
When detectives finally quizzed the teenager, DeRosa confessed: “She’s in the f–king attic.”
“She was fighting back and screaming,” Riccio said, remembering testimony at the trial. “That’s why he shoved a rag down her throat.”
“The whole family was heartbroken,” said Riccio. “My mom cried every day until the day she died. She blamed herself. They were sitting on the stoop. She just went upstairs to the bathroom for maybe a minute. She came back and my sister was gone.”
His father Frank never got over the killing. “That’s the first time I saw my father really cry,” he said.
Riccio said the family lived in the same house after the killing and walked by the cemetery where she was buried every day.
DeRosa was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison.
He was released in 1975 after seven years at the age of 23.
In 1983, Uuttu disappeared after a night of drinking with DeRosa.
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Two years later, at DeRosa’s brother’s house in Queens, two of his brothers made a shocking discovery while working in the garden.
“When his brother John is digging in the backyard, he finds the skeletal remains of the deceased,” retired prosecutor Harry Nussdorf recalled.
“He looks up and yells, ‘Hey, mom, Vinnie’s done it again.’”
A pair of the killer’s eyeglasses found in the shallow grave sealed DeRosa’s fate at his 1988 trial.
“He is the Butcher of Bellerose,” Nussdorf declared in the courtroom, referring to the leafy Queens neighborhood near the Nassau border. “This was a grisly and ghoulish murder. This case calls out for justice.”
DeRosa was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for Uuttu’s murder.
He has served 35.
Every two years, Riccio said he and his family wrote letters to the state Parole Board asking that DeRosa remain behind bars.
The board is comprised of 17 members appointed by the governor, and approved by the state Senate.
The Democrat-dominated panel has been criticized in recent years for giving more weight to prisoners’ ages and health than to the brutality of the crimes they committed.
The board has released 38 cop killers since 2017.
DeRosa has an “open date” for release and could get out at any time.