On the other side of Huntley was the lead counsel, Stacy Langton, who had achieved early success in her career and was noted as a top-flight courtroom strategist. Both of his attorneys’ demeanor just prior to the arrival of the jurors reminded Kadyrov of refugees that he’d known from his childhood in Chechnya, shell-shocked and stupid as cattle as they fled the Russians and their burning villages.
However, when the jurors began filing in, Langton assumed an air of what she probably thought of as “quiet dignity.” She nodded to the jurors with a half smile, as if to say she’d performed as had been required of her but understood if they had not been convinced. There was nothing anybody could have done, her body language suggested.
Kadyrov loathed Langton, too, and the judge, Timothy Dermondy, who was “prejudiced” against him, ruling against his lawyers and in favor of the prosecution at every turn. Of course he despised the jurors as well, especially the women, and had spent quite a bit of time during the trial fantasizing about what it would be like to rape and butcher each and every one of them.
However, for the moment, he was looking at them with puppy-dog eyes and a tiny, doomed smile, as if he could somehow persuade them at the last moment to alter the verdict he was sure they were returning with. But there was another reason for the pitiful look. Before the jurors entered, Langton had leaned over and said, “I think we have a good chance here,” which they both knew was a lie. “But even if for some unfortunate reason they come back with a guilty verdict, we need to remember that we will go immediately into a death penalty trial, where we will be arguing to save your life. We’re going to need at least one of those jurors on our side.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be saved,” Kadyrov had replied. He didn’t mean it. He was a coward and the idea of being strapped down and injected with deadly chemicals like some pound dog terrified him.
“You can’t let yourself think like that,” said Langton, who’d explained when they first met that she was taking the case because she didn’t believe in the death penalty “for philosophical reasons. The state cannot prevent murders by murdering citizens, and in so doing give official sanction to the barbarism of inflicting death.”
It all sounded like tripe to Kadyrov, who had no qualms about murdering. But if Langton believed it and could keep him from a similar fate, he was all for it.
Of course, the worst of his malevolence was reserved for the two men who sat at the prosecution table. The two men who were trying to kill him.
The old white-haired son of a bitch, Guma, stared somberly at the jurors. He’d tried to get Kadyrov to confess after his arrest at Grand Central and then laughed when he refused and demanded a lawyer.
“Good,” Guma had said, smiling. “I want to take you apart in a courtroom so that the entire world sees what a piece of crap you are.”
Next to him sat the worst one of all, the district attorney himself, Butch Karp, whose decision to take the case himself was further proof that the system had it in for poor Ahmed Kadyrov. When the defense lawyers originally approached Karp with the proposition that Kadyrov would plead guilty to two counts of murder in exchange for a sentence of life without parole, the district attorney had not even considered it for a moment. “He can plead guilty and face a death penalty hearing” was the only counteroffer.
It was so unfair. Even though he understood that his evil nature suggested that he deserved to die, he hoped to manipulate the system and count on good-hearted people who believed in “deterrence” and “rehabilitation.”
During the trial, Karp had come after him like a pit bull in a dogfight. It started with the blue silk shirt, which his victim’s husband, Dale Yancy, had identified on the witness stand as a shirt taken from the apartment by his wife’s killer. It even bore the brand name as it had been recorded on the original police report.
Assistant Medical Examiner Gail Manning was called to the stand to explain how DNA skin cell analysis identified flakes of skin on the shirt belonging to Dale and Olivia Yancy, Vinnie Cassino, “and the defendant, Ahmed Kadyrov.”
Under cross-examination by Langton, Manning agreed that if Kadyrov visited the Cassinos, “it was possible” that some of his skin cells could have been deposited on “anything in the apartment, including the shirt.” However, on redirect by Karp, the AME explained that the only skin cells found on the inside material of the shirt were those of Dale Yancy and Kadyrov.
“And what does that say to you?” Karp asked.
“That the shirt was worn by Mr. Yancy and Mr. Kadyrov.”
“And were you able to find any other DNA evidence on the shirt that would be of interest to this case?” Karp asked.
“Yes, using the chemical luminol I was able to detect trace amounts of blood belonging to Olivia Yancy on the inside material of the sleeves.”
“Again, suggesting what?” Karp asked.
“Well, because there were no skin cells from Mrs. Yancy on the inside of the sleeves, it suggests that her blood was transferred there from the arms of someone who did wear the shirt, either Mr. Yancy or Mr. Kadyrov.”
The most damning testimony had come from Lydia Cassino, and, in a way, her dead drug hustling husband, Vinnie. Not long after his arrest, Kadyrov heard that Graziani had been killed. His initial thought was that it was bad news, as he couldn’t turn on the detective to try to save his own skin. But then again, he figured that with Graziani, Brock, and Vinnie dead, the only witness against him would be Lydia, and she had a rap sheet nearly as long as her husband’s. It would be “he said, she said” and he was certain he would come off better in that exchange.
He was wrong. Lydia Cassino took the stand barely able to control her hatred for him, which at first he thought would be her undoing. He knew that his lawyer had made sure that she would not be able to voice her suspicions that he’d killed her husband. If in her anger she did, it would be grounds for a mistrial.
However, under Karp’s deliberate questioning, Lydia stayed focused on her testimony. First she recounted how he showed up at the Cassinos’ apartment after the Yancy-Jenkins murders wearing the shirt, which he then gave to Vinnie.
“I asked him, ‘What’s on your pants? ’cause it looked like dried blood to me,” she testified. “And he said I was crazy. But he went to the bathroom and washed it off.”
Kadyrov returned to buy more meth a few days later, she said, and pointed to a front-page headline about the Columbia U Slasher. “He said, ‘That’s me.’ My husband didn’t believe him at first. But Kadyrov knew too much. He said he only planned to rape and rob that girl and had tied her up with duct tape and cut her clothes off with a knife when another woman-he called her ‘the older bitch’-surprised him.”
“Did he describe the attacks on Beth Jenkins and Olivia Yancy?” Karp had asked.
“Yeah, he said he stabbed the second woman four or five times,” Lydia responded. “Then he said he told the younger woman, Olivia, I guess, that if she didn’t shut up-he said she was crying and scared because she watched him kill the second gal-he was going to cut her fucking head off… His shirt was all bloody so he took it off and got that blue silk shirt he gave to Vinnie.”
Like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together, Lydia’s recollections backed up previous testimony: that of the crime scene technicians who described how Olivia Yancy’s body had been bound and her clothes removed with a sharp instrument-evidence that had been withheld from the public-and AME Manning’s matter-of-fact description of the attacks, from the number of times Beth Jenkins was stabbed to the rape and near decapitation of Olivia Yancy.