Outrage (30 page)

The victory was short-lived. It took much less time for Karp to take the confessions apart than it had to read them into the record. He started by getting Acevedo to recite from parts of the confession where he told Graziani he bought the ring from a young man named Al at Mullayly Park.

“Why did you eventually tell Detective Graziani that you took it from Olivia Yancy?” Karp asked.

“Because Detective Graziani told me I did,” Acevedo said, hanging his head, “and I wanted to go home.”

“Did you take the ring from Olivia Yancy?”

Acevedo shook his head. “I bought it from Al.”

Karp had grimaced and raised his voice as he’d stalked up to the witness stand, holding up the plastic bag containing a small diamond engagement ring. “Come on, Felix! You took the ring from Olivia Yancy!” the prosecutor thundered. “You
admitted
it to Detective Graziani! You
did
take the ring from Olivia, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I took it,” Acevedo cried out. It might have seemed like theatrics, but even Kadyrov noted the genuine terror in the young man’s voice and eyes.

Karp had then softened his voice and smiled. “It’s okay, Felix,” he said. “Sorry I yelled. Just tell the truth. Did you take this, or any other ring, from Olivia Yancy?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Olivia Yancy?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Beth Jenkins?”

“No.”

“Did you, in fact, kill anyone? Or assault anyone?”

“No.”

“Then why did you tell Detective Graziani and Miss Cohn, sitting behind the prosecution table there, that you did?”

“Because I wanted to go home,” Acevedo said, wagging his head sadly back and forth.

Karp dissected and dismissed the rest of Acevedo’s false confession in much the same fashion. At the prosecutor’s direction, Acevedo would read his first honest responses to the detective’s questions. Then Karp would ask, “Why did you change your answer if it wasn’t true?”

Then Acevedo would answer in one of two ways: “Because Detective Graziani wanted me to” or “I wanted to go home.” Karp would follow this by again angrily accusing Acevedo of not telling the truth, at which point the young man would again admit to crimes he didn’t commit.

At one point in his cross-examination of Acevedo, Karp suddenly asked if anyone in the gallery had a book they’d brought for reading when court wasn’t in session. After overruling the defense objection, Judge Dermondy allowed him to accept a book from a member of the audience.

As Karp walked over to stand in front of Acevedo, he smiled, shook his head, and laughed inwardly when he looked at the title,
Rush to Judgment
by Mark Lane.
So much for spontaneous
courtroom drama
, he thought. He then read a page aloud from the book.

Karp looked up and held the front of the book out so the witness could see it. “Mr. Acevedo, have you ever seen this book before?”

Acevedo hesitated as if he wasn’t sure of the answer he was expected to give. But then he replied, “No.”

“Have you ever read it?”

Acevedo shook his head. “No. I don’t like to read. The words get jumbled up.”

“Your Honor, for demonstration purposes I ask that this book be deemed People’s twenty-eight for identification,” Karp said. He then walked over to the jury box and handed the still-open book to the jury foreman before turning back to the witness stand. “Mr. Acevedo, would you please repeat what you just heard me read from this book? And, Mr. Foreman, would you please follow along on page one fifty-three?”

Acevedo repeated the words; it was clear to everyone in the courtroom that he had it down. When he finished, the jury foreman looked surprised and nodded his head before handing the book to the juror next to him.

Meticulous as a surgeon, Karp cut away at the defense’s case. He asked Acevedo to read from the transcribed statement he gave to Detective Brock about how he received the bruise on his face from a backhand blow by his father. Then Karp called Marianne Tate to the stand as a rebuttal witness after first getting Dermondy to allow Kadyrov and Acevedo to be seated on either side of a court officer in a pew behind the defense table.

“Miss Tate, do you see, here in this courtroom, the man who attacked you?” Karp asked.

Tate looked out over the gallery and then fixed her gaze on Kadyrov. “That’s him,” she said, pointing to the defendant.

“You’re sure?” Karp asked. “The man sitting in the second row with the green shirt?”

The woman nodded. “I’m positive.”

“Your Honor, the record should reflect that the witness has identified the defendant,” Karp said. “Now, Miss Tate, what if I told you that you originally identified the young man in the blue shirt sitting to his right as your attacker?”

“I recognize him, too, but from the police station. I thought he might be the one back then,” she admitted. “But now that I can see them both clearly, I am sure it’s the other man.”

Karp continued. “Miss Tate, could you demonstrate how you fended your attacker off?”

With Karp describing the action for the court stenographer, Tate showed the jury how she used her elbow to strike the “assailant” behind her. “And you struck him hard?” the prosecutor asked.

“Hard enough for him to lose his grip and let me go,” she answered.

Karp dismissed Tate and then re-called the assistant medical examiner, Gail Manning, to the stand. She was shown a blowup of Acevedo’s booking photograph depicting the bruise on his face.

Taking the photograph over to the jury, Karp then said, “Ms. Manning, there has been testimony that the young man in that photograph received the bruise on his face from an elbow
strike. Based on your observation of that photograph, would you agree that the bruise was the result of such a blow?”

Manning shook her head. “No. In my opinion, the bruising was not caused by an elbow.”

“Please explain,” Karp said.

“If the bruising had been caused by an elbow, I would expect to see one larger point of impact,” she said, turning to address the jurors. “As you can see in the photograph, although there is a general area of swelling and discoloration, there are three small, dark purple spots within the general area, and, somewhat fainter, a fourth. Note they are generally aligned vertically on the side of this man’s face.”

“Do you have an opinion regarding what sort of blow would have caused that particular pattern?” Karp asked.

“Yes, based on the pattern, I would say that the bruise was caused by knuckles, as would be expected from a backhand blow,” Manning answered.

Karp had then called Jesus Guerrero to the stand to admit that he stole a purse containing a small diamond engagement ring. “Whose purse did you take?” Karp asked.

Guerrero shrugged. “I don’t know her, but I remember her last name was Lopez because that’s my mom’s maiden name.”

“What did you do with the ring?” Karp asked.

“I sold it to Felix in Mullayly Park,” Guerrero said.

“Did you tell Felix your correct name?”

“No. I told him my name was Al because that was the name on the inside of the ring.”

Kadyrov didn’t even bother to look up anymore when Karp called Amy Lopez to the stand to describe how she’d been
robbed. “Can you identify this ring?” he asked, handing her the plastic bag.

Lopez looked at it for a moment before gazing back up at him with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face. “Yes, this is my engagement ring,” she said. “Can I take it home now?”

The closing summations were more of a victory lap for Karp. Langton insisted that the defense’s case was enough to “throw a cloud of reasonable doubt” over Kadyrov’s guilt based on the confessions and subsequent indictment of Acevedo.

However, Karp had shrugged off Acevedo’s confession as “a pack of lies, manipulated out of a young man who will, as you heard, admit to anything to avoid confrontation and to escape an uncomfortable situation.

“Acevedo’s indictment,” he said, “was a mistake that never should have happened. Because of a failure in my office to adhere to good practices an innocent man was accused of a heinous crime and deprived of his freedom. For that, I am truly sorry.

“However, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what matters here isn’t whether a mistake was made regarding Felix Acevedo,” Karp had said in conclusion. “The only thing that matters here is that the evidence against Ahmed Kadyrov is overwhelming. There is no cloud of reasonable doubt. There is no doubt at all. He is …”

“… guilty of the murder of Olivia Yancy,” Judge Dermondy read to the court, “and guilty of the murder of Beth Jenkins.”

K
ARP HAD SEEN TO IT THAT
F
ELIX
A
CEVEDO WAS RE
leased from the Tombs as soon as Kadyrov was arrested. Sam Hartsfield had then announced that the charges against Acevedo in the Bronx were “without merit” and dropped.

Even so, Karp had expected Acevedo and his family to react angrily, even file a civil lawsuit, which Felix’s father, through a well-known “celebrity” attorney, had vociferously threatened. But the lawsuit never materialized.

Instead, Karp one day received an unexpected visit from Amelia Acevedo, who thanked him for looking more closely at the accusations against her son. “I know it hasn’t been easy,” she said, referring in part to the media storm that, as expected, had followed, even though it was much less than Murrow had originally feared. There were a few editorials questioning “what’s going on over at the Manhattan DAO” and a prominent defense attorney railing on television that “never again” would
the public be able to trust a confession. However, the arrest of Kadyrov and the death of Graziani—with the ensuing “cop kills brother cop” exposé by Stupenagel—had quickly distracted the pundits and press corps.

Amelia said she was having a much harder time forgiving the police detective who’d nearly cost her son his freedom, if not his life. “I know he is dead and in God’s hands now, and as a Christian I’m supposed to forgive him,” she said. “But what he did seems even more evil because he was a policeman.”

Karp still wondered about Graziani. There was no question of his guilt both in trying to frame Acevedo as well as in the murder of Brock. Not only had Marlene and Stupenagel recorded him at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, but ballistics had matched the bullets found in Brock’s head to the gun Graziani had with him at Riverside Park. But what could have pushed him that far over the line?

According to Fulton, who’d talked with Sergeant Jon Marks at the Four-Eight Precinct in the Bronx, it was common knowledge in the detective squad room that Graziani had been unhappy with his transfer from Manhattan. Karp suspected that the detective had not started off intending to dishonor his gold shield. Graziani probably initially believed that he’d caught the killer and had fudged on the confessions, thinking he could make it stick later. Then when the case started to fall apart—beginning with Dale Yancy saying the ring didn’t match—he’d panicked and pretty soon found himself too far down the road to turn back, including killing another detective.

Even if the Manhattan case against Kadyrov had inexplicably
imploded, the Bronx DA would have had a hold on him for the murders of Dolores Atkins, Detective Brock, and Vinnie Cassino, the latter based on the same recording that Karp had used during the trial with Kadyrov boasting he’d taken the blue silk shirt from the apartment where he’d “killed them two bitches in Manhattan.”

The Manhattan case had, of course, not imploded. By the defense attorneys’ and their clients’ faces after final summations in the guilt phase, Karp thought the metaphor of a lopsided heavyweight fight may have occurred to them. The only difference was that in a prizefight, the referee inside the ring would have probably stopped it. But Karp had kept raining blows, right down to connecting Kadyrov’s Chechen childhood to the things he said to women he attacked.

After the guilty verdict, Judge Dermondy announced that the trial would now move into the death penalty phase, which would be run much like a regular “trial within a trial.” The prosecution would first present its case of “aggravating factors”—essentially the reasons why Kadyrov “deserved” death over life in prison. Then the defense would present its case of “mitigating factors”—the reasons why he should be spared. After that, the order would be reversed, with the defense giving its summation followed by the prosecution. The jury would then weigh the aggravating factors against the mitigating, and whichever proved more convincing would decide Kadyrov’s fate.

There were two main aggravating factors Karp and Guma concentrated on. The first was that Kadyrov had committed the murders while in the commission of other felonies—burglary
and rape—to eliminate the witnesses. The other was that the murders had been particularly heinous and inhumane.

Guma handled presenting the evidence for the aggravating factors. The first was easy to prove. Items had been taken from the apartment and the bodies of the victims, making it a burglary. AME Manning had been re-called to the stand to describe in much more detail than she had during the guilt phase the sexual assault on Olivia Yancy.

Under Guma’s careful questioning, Manning testified that in her examination of the crime scene, it was evident to her that “from her position on the bed, Olivia Yancy had a clear view of the assault on Beth Jenkins.”

“Is there anything that would cause you to doubt that Ahmed Kadyrov murdered Beth Jenkins before raping and killing Olivia Yancy, as was testified to by Lydia Cassino during the guilt phase of this trial?” Guma had asked.

“No. In fact, there are indications that Olivia Yancy struggled for quite some time before she was murdered,” Manning replied. “Such as deep bruising, and even cuts, from where she struggled against her bonds, and hemorrhaging of the blood vessels in her eyes. It would make sense that she struggled to get free as she watched her mother being murdered.”

“Can you estimate the length of time it took Ahmed Kadyrov to kill Beth Jenkins?”

Manning pursed her lips and thought about the question for a moment. “Again, there is evidence of a struggle, which means that she wasn’t stabbed in rapid succession or she would have collapsed on the spot. In fact, of the five stab wounds she suffered,
two would have been almost debilitating; the other three might have killed her eventually, but she would have been able to fight. So it stands to reason that she received the two worst blows near the end.”