8
WEBER AND KATEHIS, 2009
I. Boy, Man
On March 22, 2009, a Sunday, the actual drama—murder, flight, capture—was almost over. But the news was coming out faster and faster, like the spokes of a wheel going blurry, then oddly static: there was too much information to process. Everyone involved, down to the accused murderer’s family cat Fluffy, had a presence on the Internet. MySpace, Craigslist, YouTube, twistedsiblings.com, georgeweber.net, ibeatyou.com, XTube, vampirefreaks.com.
Murders are mostly local news. Like all great international cities, New York also has a local side, a sort of urban private life that isn’t necessarily part of its public image. For instance, when outsiders hate or adore “New York,” the boroughs other than Manhattan often don’t figure in their thoughts. This was a local story, a Brooklyn and Queens story. Even the Manhattan part of it—the media-insidery sifting through all that titillating online “evidence”—was somehow local, an example of the cozy Manhattan compulsion to act more dreadful than you think you really are, to signal that you’re wise to the world.
A body was found in the parlor-floor apartment of a brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, right around the corner from the 76th Precinct house. This wasn’t the fanciest section of rapidly gentrifying Carroll Gardens; the buildings on this stretch of Henry Street weren’t all fussily restored. The area looked a lot like neighborly New York of a long time ago. Indeed, many old-timers still lived there, and newcomers had adopted their habit of weekend stoop sales. You got a few dollars and unloaded junk like LPs, that ironic Elvis plate, or a birdcage spray-painted gold. But the March Sunday when the body was found was too early in the season for the sales to start. It was cool. The street was empty. Stubborn brown leaves from the previous fall hung on the ends of twigs.
Coworkers worried about the victim when he missed a Saturday shift. They called the police. Cops walked around the corner from the 76th Precinct house to the Henry Street building for the first time just after midnight. Nothing seemed amiss. After more anxious calls, they came back at eight thirty Sunday morning. This time a neighbor mentioned hearing the water running in the parlor-floor apartment. The water had been running for days. Something was wrong.
For the rest of the day it was cop cars, news vans, the medical examiner’s truck, yellow tape, idling videographers. A man in a white jumpsuit appeared at the front door and ushered out two others in ME windbreakers, who maneuvered gingerly down the stoop carrying a body in a thick black vinyl bag lashed to a spine board.
Because it was the weekend, the story began the old-fashioned way: information was gathered by reporters who called up police press officers and wrote squibs for newspapers and wire services. The local TV stations made a chopped salad of old images of the victim, of the black bag coming down the stairs, of God-I-can’t-believe-it interviews with neighbors. As those images shuffled in the background of one broadcast, a plummy voice-over droned the usual platitudes: “A man who lived for the news, who, with his tragic death, is now making the news . . .” Because, ironically, the victim had been a reporter too. The Daily News and the New York Post love murders. They dove in. But even the New York Times put the story on page eighteen of its Sunday “Region” section. The local New York edition only, but still.
The victim, it turned out, was well-known locally. He had that hale-fellow-well-met retail fame that prompts the owners of your favorite bars and restaurants to ask if they can hang your picture on the wall. (Best Lasagna in New York!) He was an ABC Radio newsman, George Weber. He even had a jaunty trademark, George Weber, the news guy. So, fairly or not, the news was already a little newsworthier than your average murder.
Mainstream reporters got the hard information efficiently. Weber was forty-seven (forty-eight if he’d lived until Monday, his birthday). He’d worked for about twelve years on various shows at the big New York affiliate, WABC NewsTalkRadio 77. He’d done the first two hours of Curtis and Kuby in the Morning as all but an equal partner. But that popular program, run by Curtis Sliwa (founder of the Guardian Angels in another lifetime) and attorney Ron Kuby, ended when the affiliate picked up Don Imus’s Imus in the Morning.
Weber stayed on. He helped Michael Bloomberg on the mayor’s Friday show. But he’d finally, and just recently, lost his job to cost-cutting. He found a little work at the affiliate’s national network, WABC.
No longer a guy with a regular job, he was now a benefitless “freelance anchor.” His news show was still picked up by owner-operated stations like 1010 WINS in New York. It was a typical “great recession” job story. He wrote about it—no sour grapes, of course—on a blog his friend and ex-producer Frank Morano encouraged him to start, georgeweber.net. “Hey, it’s George Weber, the news guy . . .”
With so many media-savvy types surrounding Weber, it was simple work for reporters to get eulogistic quotes to plug into their stories. To a network vice president, Weber was “a consummate journalist.” Ron Kuby spoke easily and eloquently about his ex-colleague to Tim Fleischer of ABC TV. Even the mayor issued a statement: “George called news events as he saw them with little regard to party politics or ideology.”
On Monday, the police fanned out around the Henry Street brownstone. But the end came quickly. By Tuesday, with his own father’s agonized participation, a suspect was captured (in Middletown, New York, about halfway to the Catskills).
When the suspect was driven back to the 76th Precinct from Middletown, he was apparently talking pretty freely. A Brooklyn assistant DA, Marc Fliedner, showed up at the precinct house to discuss charges. He spoke to the father. He interviewed the suspect on video. The city’s police commissioner himself, Ray Kelly, gave a press conference describing in appropriately staid terms what sounded a lot like a gay hookup gone awry or even a hustler murdering his john. Apparently, the suspect had confessed.
Details started coming out that hinted at a salacious underside to Weber’s eulogies. It had already been reported that he was stabbed anywhere from ten to fifty times, including defensive wounds to his hands. A witness had seen a man on a cell phone pacing in front of the Henry Street brownstone on Friday night. A neighbor had later heard a thump.
Now reports came out that the victim’s legs, or both his hands and legs, had been bound with duct tape. An informant mentioned rough sex. There was no evidence of forced entry, so the victim knew his killer or at least opened the door for him. Word got out that drugs and alcohol were involved. Erotic snapshots were found in the apartment.
TV cameras were trained on the ’60s modernist 76th Precinct building when the Middletown captive was led out. A young, thuggishly handsome man, shaved head, olive skin, handcuffed, he wore a teenager’s, or criminal’s, default expression of scorn. He looked at the cameras with black-eyed indifference. His upper lip was swollen, injured during the capture in Middletown. His black sweatshirt and khakis were oversized, though not in the fashionably baggy way. In fact, the police had given him these clothes. They kept as evidence what he’d been wearing when caught.
The kid was John Katehis (the middle syllable is stressed and rhymes with “say”), and, though he looked older, he was only sixteen, a minor.10 SIXTEEN! ROUGH SEX! MURDER! FAMOUS NEWSMAN! Even the dourest observer must have felt a shiver of tabloid fascination.
The media and gossip website Gawker, an aggregator and commenter on the news, had already noted Weber’s murder over the weekend. The site, which is famous for half-put-on/half-real Manhattan dreadfulness, has a keen moralistic streak invisible to many of its readers and, especially, to the targets of its scorn. Hamilton Nolan wrote a rueful post imagining the Daily News’ description of the suspect as a male “companion” (his ironic quotes) and expected the Post to up the ante to “Sex Slay” in the title of a Tuesday article. “Not what . . . you would want your legacy to be immediately after your untimely death,” he noted.
Tawdry or not, Nolan pursued the story with the you-decide completism of modern Internet journalism. He found Katehis’s eerie MySpace page and countless photos of the accused killer posing with items from his very scary collection of knives. Nolan posted everything on Gawker, including links to Katehis’s childish YouTube videos of himself: the boy giggles helplessly while listening to the crank phone calls he made for his site JSKCranks. In another he boasts with tough-guy profanity about a seventy-five-dollar bottle of “fucking” Absinthe he just bought, kisses it, and concludes, “Now I’m gonna go try me some of this fucking shit.”
Nolan even put up a link to the diciest item Katehis had online. As “greekjohn92,” Katehis had posted on XTube a forty-six-second video of himself with the descriptive title, “Wanking my semi-soft uncut cock.” From a steep overhead angle, against a background of dun carpet, the faceless video shows an olive hand doing exactly what the title says to a darker olive penis. “Semi-soft” may betray a touch of cautious underselling from an otherwise cocky boy, but the video is just what you’d expect from a kid showing off his junk. A Gawker commenter pointed out that since everyone now knew greekjohn92 was sixteen instead of eighteen (as his XTube profile claimed), maybe it was best to leave the link alone for legal reasons.11Gawker removed it.
What kind of a sixteen-year-old was this? Would his MySpace self-portrait really be so eerie except in retrospect?
My name is John, I am sixteen years of age and live in Queens, New York. I enjoy long conversations, drinking, bike riding, hanging out, roof hopping, hanging off trains, any type of Parkour exercise, Extreme Violence (chaos, Anarchy, ect.) Video Games, Violent Movies and listening to my ipod. I am a very easy person to talk to. I like to do crazy and wild things.im like an adrenaline junkie, I’m always looking for a big thrill, I’m a big risk taker and like to live life on the edge.I am an Extremist, an Anarchist, and a Sadomasochist. As long as you show respect for me i will show respect for you, if you disrespect me, then i will fucking break your neck. To learn more about me just send me a message or catch me on aim, my screen name is johnkatehis92, my yahoo is greeksatan92[AT]yahoo.com, johnkatehis92[AT]yahoo.com and my msn is greekjohn92[AT]hotmail.com. You can ask me any kind of questions, I am always happy to chat with a new person. Oh and be sure to check out my crank call videos at youtube.com/JSKCranks, and see if u can beat any of my challenges or beat my scores at challenges, at ibeatyou.com my screen name is crazyjohn92. [sic throughout]
The “92” that keeps showing up refers to his birth date, June 26, 1992.
It’s simple to identify the quotes that caught journalists’ attention. Here was a kid who would break your neck if you dissed him. But maybe it wasn’t as scary as that. XTube has convenient switches to indicate your own sex and the sex of the person you’re interested in. Katehis was signed up as an eighteen-year-old male interested in women. His hobbies were buying swords, playing video games, fighting, and sex. His self-presentation, including flaunting his penis, makes him look like a precocious and arrogant fifteen-year-old trying to intrigue dream-babes. Since he hadn’t logged on for a year, the babes must not have been beating down his door.
Based on his confessions, the story came out that Katehis had responded to Weber’s “Adult Gigs” post on Craigslist. That could have been a one-time thing, an easy sixty bucks. What really seemed strange was Weber’s fetish. The title of his post was “Smotherme.” He liked to be smothered, and that’s what he’d hired this risk-taking kid to do.
Soon this material was all over news sites, and Internet commenters started to weigh in. Katehis had to be at least bi. He was gay and obviously couldn’t deal with it. No! Weber was the criminal! A forty-seven-year-old pedophile having sex with a kid. He deserved it. Katehis just went over on a lark and freaked out. But look at those pictures of him with his machetes! What about his parents? Anybody who would do that is obviously a demented fag. Good riddance to both of them. Some, who claimed to know Katehis or to be fellow students of his, said, “He was quiet,” “He’s not a tough guy,” “It’s so weird.”
The anonymous commentariat debated pedophilia vs. ephebophilia and whether smothering counted as sex, because real sex had to cost more than sixty dollars, and what was the ultimate responsibility of a sixteen-year-old, anyway—all this time joking with the Internet’s usual clever, postprivate savagery—and the aggregate judgment turned against Katehis. There were a few firebrands like “Damian Hospital” who railed against Weber the pedophile in a long series of posts, and shouted a rhetorical “FREE JOHN KATEHIS!” into the hush of the web. In his opinion, “that sick bastard” Weber’s reputation was being protected by bigwig media friends.
To most people, Katehis seemed troubled and troubling. He went to a special school in Westchester. Online he claimed to be a satanist. As “John Psychedelic,” he put up a page on twistedsiblings.com (a Goth-oriented social site linked to but not affiliated with MySpace) that included a self-description more or less identical to the MySpace one. But instead of breaking necks, he warns, “I don’t take shit from anybody, so if your [sic] looking for problems, fuck off!” And between “anarchist” and “sadomasochist” he adds that he’s a “LaVeyan satanist.”
John Psychedelic’s twistedsiblings page is a red and black symphony of pentagrams, a horned devil, and a large background photo of Anton LaVey. There’s an image of a lapel button with the slogan, I HATE christians.
Katehis’s satanism turns up everywhere. In scores of online pictures Katehis is almost always doing one of three things: brandishing a knife, giving the camera the finger, or, very frequently, making the devil’s horns sign with his index and fifth fingers. He has a large tattoo of a pentagram on his right shoulder with 6-6-6 between the star’s upper points and Diablo in gothic letters below. He often appears wearing a silver pentagram around his neck and another on the middle finger of his right hand. His T-shirts (always black) advertise ghoulish third-wave heavy metal bands like Cannibal Corpse, Lamb of God, the Black Dahlia Murder.
But how seriously can you take a sixteen-year-old’s infatuation with satanism? Even with the tattoo. Heavy metal music and antisocial anger are part of the classic teenage bag of tricks. Furthermore, Katehis specifies LaVeyan satanism.
Though books on satanism were found at his family home (Katehis’s father later tells me they were his own), it’s unlikely Katehis could have read deeply about an occult practice that has hardly any depth to begin with. LaVeyan satanism isn’t what it sounds like. A 1960s Hollywood invention of Anton LaVey, it began as more of a Playboy Mansion party than a coven. It denies the existence of God and Satan both. Despite its original, spooky mise-en-scène, LaVeyan satanism’s tenets are actually rather humane. There’s a blanket, hedonistic replacement of indulgence for abstinence, but adherents are expected to behave pretty well. Still, vengeance is prescribed over turning the other cheek. And if someone in your home annoys you, you’re meant to treat them cruelly and without mercy. Maybe this is what Katehis was getting at when he talked about breaking necks.
The satanic details are beside the point. If Katehis had been going to Exeter, say, instead of a school for troubled kids in Westchester, he might well have fixated on Nietzsche. Katehis’s “LaVeyan satanism” is the masculine ideal of perfect self-reliance. Many boys are drawn to that fantasy. For them, the simplistic seems stronger than kryptonite. When they read, “Anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” they feel like they’ve been struck by intellectual lightning. How serious could this boy be?
At the same time, George Weber now appeared before the public completely exposed. You just couldn’t get more naked. He would have hated it. He would have raged or died of shame. First off, he didn’t think of himself as gay. Besides harboring a different set of desires, he had the waning white-picket-fence hopes that often afflict very cheerful, very public personalities. Friends, family, no one, knew about his secret fetish except the hustlers he hired. One of them remembers spotting George with a crowd of bar friends in Brooklyn. They exchanged a glance of fond but forlorn knowingness straight out of the 1950s. The hustler, ex- by that time, says he understood not to say hello.
A blue-collar social philosopher before bouncing around the country for his radio career, Weber had grown up outside of Philadelphia. His parents still lived there, as did a sister with a perfect, straight-arrow husband. Weber might as well have been South Boston Irish, though. The blarney, the relentless good cheer, the ethics veering between maudlin and vengeful, the pretty serious alcoholism. He had a hard drinker’s gut and a hard drinker’s bloated face, pillowy along the jawline. He had wispy hair and bad skin, pasty and prone to flush. He looked older than he was.
Apart from the bar friends and the media friends and the neighbors, Weber’s social world revolved around his beloved dachshund Noodles and, for more articulate intimacy (and sex), hustlers. They talked to him. And he talked to them. It was friendly. He explained to one that the smothering thing started when he was a kid. An older boy had wrestled him to the ground and put his hands over his mouth. Somehow Weber remembered liking it—the scare, the contact eroticism. For an irrepressible talker like him, a story was a much better explanation than anything as dryly descriptive as “autoerotic asphyxiation.”
In any case, smothering worked for him. One guy who answered his “Smotherme” ad on Craigslist explained that Weber never even took his clothes off. He would lie supine on the bed, maybe gripping the thin steel bars of the headboard. The hustler said all he had to do was straddle him, clamp down on Weber’s mouth and nose, and Weber, staring at his own reflection in a cheval glass tipped over the bed, would eventually come. Meanwhile, the hustler gazed at a black-and-white art photograph of a movie-house marquee hanging on the wall over the bed. If he got bored, he confessed, he might press down a little to make George come faster. But that was it. It was hardly sex at all.
Fetishes are by definition unusual, but this one was particularly eerie. After all, it was flirting with death. People shied from imagining it. At one point, the no-nonsense trial judge Neil Firetog couldn’t keep himself from calling it “this smothering garbage.” The hustler remembers the movie marquee photo so well because he was avoiding looking down at George’s face. The broken capillaries disappeared in an all-over redness, purpleness, and somehow the eyelids gaped slightly as if air or blood were straining at ducts around the eyeballs. One time, smothering George from behind for a change, he says George lost consciousness, becoming dead weight as a few tablespoons of vomit slipped from his mouth. Thinking he’d killed him, knowing he could have, the hustler refused to see George ever again.
George went on, though. He got into light bondage. Sometimes he was short of cash. Perhaps, every time he had sex, he felt a self-disgust as elaborate, as ceremonial, as his sexual practices had become. But outwardly he was a sweetheart, loved by neighbors, coworkers.
His secret hustler family liked him too. In fact, the hustlers worried about his getting into trouble. All was innocent enough while George sat watching wrestling on TV until he was aroused, but then he’d lead any stranger into the bedroom where everything was set up. One of his regulars, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to John Katehis, said he talked with friends about the danger George ran of meeting the wrong guy.
Mostly George was alone. He’d drink rum-and-cokes from the moment he came home, or wander down to Angry Wade’s, a faux-old sawdusty red stucco tavern on Smith Street with a roaring animal head on a shield over the door and football on the wide-screen TVs.
Even after Noodles suddenly died, George planned his second annual Noodlepalooza party. He cadged refrigerator space for beer from a neighbor, throwing out jovially, “Oh, and you can come too!” The marquee guests at the first Noodlepalooza had been Joe Franklin and Bernie Goetz (a weird New York personality locally famous since his 1984 vigilante subway shooting spree). This time George had a crowd of sixty and an a cappella doo-wop group. He wrote about it on georgeweber.net.
On Friday, March 20, the day before he was killed, George uploaded a photograph of his thick ankle and lower leg to his blog. The hairless white skin was covered with red spots. In the accompanying post he wrote: “Many of you know I have had two bouts with bedbugs in my over ten years at this location in Carroll Gardens, so my radar is always on when it comes to the blood sucking bastards that made my life hell.” He explains that he’s gotten rid of them thanks to a good exterminator and comments on a political aspect of New York City’s bedbug hysteria, then in full swing. “I predict, thousands of additional residents will be infested with bedbugs by the time this ‘advisory board’ reports back to the mayor with it’s [sic] recommendations. Then, what? How much longer will it then take to actually carry out the panel’s advice? 2010? 2011? Too long!” After posting that cri de coeur, maybe he glanced at his e-mail from the day before. “From: Satan Katehis [greeksatan92@yahoo.com] To: smother boy [handsmothered@hotmail.com] Hey dude its me John. I changed my number. my new number is 347 634 0105.”
II. John’s Version
After he was tackled in Middletown, John told police his name was Nick Smith. The playacting didn’t last long. While his father Spiro, who’d come along as part of a ruse, was hustled back to Brooklyn in another car, John was rear-handcuffed and put in a police department Chevy Impala. A Detective Yarrow drove. A second detective sat in the front passenger seat. In back, next to John, sat a third detective, James Normile, a trim gray-haired man with a slight jowliness and the wide-open eyes and flat-footedness of a TV second banana.
As Normile tells it, he explained to his prisoner that it was going to be a long drive and that John could ask for a bathroom stop if necessary. John began to relax. He said he was sixteen. This was apparently his first truth. Maybe he believed it would make a difference in the long run. When asked what he wanted to be called, he told Normile his real name was John. And he said he’d killed Weber by accident, because the man had pulled a knife, and . . . At this point, Normile says, he told John they could get into the story back at the 76th Precinct (Miranda and all that). So the exchange turned to small talk.
John may have been a little disconcerted to find the detectives so unvengeful. Asked if Middletown was quiet, he told the older men about the area’s demographics. A lot of Mexicans lived there. When a marked law-enforcement vehicle appeared on the highway next to them, he noted their own car was going over the speed limit and wondered jokingly if the Impala could make a getaway if this turned into “hot pursuit.” By the end of the trip he was laughing now and then. He was still handcuffed.
Since the capture had occurred at about ten forty-five p.m., they didn’t make it to the Brooklyn precinct house until one. Normile interviewed John with a colleague, and by two forty-five they had a written statement. Normile wrote it out himself in block print. A stitched-up injury had completely immobilized John’s right forefinger, so he had trouble writing. Even so, before the interview, Normile was careful to get John to sign a simple form stating that he understood his Miranda rights. “Do you understand?” the form asked six times after spelling out each right. “Yes” was circled six times and John managed his initials “JSK” next to every one. After he finished writing the statement, Normile asked John to read and sign it as well. Did the kid want any changes made first? John asked only that “accidentally” be inserted before “. . . stabbing him in the neck.”
Meanwhile, an assistant DA had shown up at the 76th Precinct. Marc Fliedner is a small man with an easy political glibness and the taste in blue suits and red ties to go with it. On this occasion he dressed down. He interviewed John on video at four twenty-three in the morning with Normile in the room.
III. The DVD
The DVD opens with a shot of what looks like an old movie clapper. A hand appears and writes in black marker, “0423,” the time. The hand then moves to the space for the name of the interviewee, “Jonathan Katehis,” and crosses out “Jonathan,” replacing it with “John.” The camera pans to show who’s in the room. After that, it’s one long, unflinching shot of John.
The kid has the slightly ashen look the olive-skinned get when overtired or stressed. His buzz-cut hair and eyes have their usual obsidian gleam. But he’s animated. He frequently swivels back and forth or shifts the entire chair on its wheels. His forearms only rarely come to rest on a yellow tabletop. Behind him are what look like closed metal shutters, a grated radiator, and over one shoulder, the clapper-like card is stuck to a wall now. On the table are the black mic and a half-eaten donut on a blue-rimmed plate.
John is wearing a black bomber jacket over a T-shirt. He speaks with a trace of the tough guy’s d’ese-and-d’ose outer-borough accent. Sometimes his voice rises in a staccato ha-ha-ha of nervous laughter. A man-among-men baritone returns abruptly. Throughout the interview he has a blustery confiding tone, as if he believes that, through sheer energy, he can make his listeners understand what it was like to be in his shoes.
While his right hand, the injured one with an immobile, slightly curving forefinger, is surprisingly kinetic, his left hand is even busier. Whenever he isn’t making explanatory gestures or stroking the side of his nose, which he does a couple of times (a tic reputed to betray liars), John uses his left hand constantly to dust donut crumbs from himself. He does this with an unexpected, aristocratic finickiness. He doesn’t often pick up a piece of the broken donut. He takes a bite two or three times at most. But his elegant fingers twiddle endlessly over the plate as if his hand were an infinite source of crumbs or stickiness.
In response to Fliedner’s questioning (on the DVD the ADA comes across as abundantly patient and relaxed yet serious), John tells the story, some details of which were soon to leak.
* * *
John says he sold a Sidekick and another smartphone on Craigslist and he was checking around the site and found a “smother thing” in the “Adult Gigs” section. He figured it would be an easy sixty dollars. He and George exchanged pictures. George’s weren’t explicit, just hands over his mouth and nose, and John thought he could do that. They had a back-and-forth about setting up a time, and John finally took the subway to Carroll Gardens on a Friday afternoon. He picked up a pack of M&Ms and a Stewart’s root beer (probably at the Rite-Aid next to the subway entrance on Smith Street). He says he followed George’s directions to 561 Henry Street, which was a straight shot past Carroll Park, down President Street.
In front of the Henry Street brownstone, John continues on the DVD, he phoned George. George came to the front door and let him in. John was still carrying his root beer, but he must have been about finished, because George offered him a Bud Light as soon as they got in the apartment. In an odd detail that must refer to Noodlepalooza 2, John says the older man joked that he had a lot of beer left over from a party. His friends had run through all the hard stuff. George was drinking something himself, but John doesn’t know what. It was in a red plastic glass later found in the bedroom—maybe rum-and-Coke. After a minute of beer talk, George said, “Let me show you what’s going on in the other room.”
On the bed in the bedroom (here, John speaks to the ADA and detective with a buddylike expression of shared distaste) were mirrors, black duct tape, and rope and scissors. George explained how he like to be smothered, and John tried it, gingerly putting his hand over George’s mouth and nose without pressing down.
After that delicate introduction to his fetish, George led John back into the living room. George had a chest he used as a coffee table. According to John, the inside of the chest was strewn with loose cocaine. On the DVD John tries to be helpful: “I assume it was cocaine. You guys have got to test it.” George took some out and cut three lines for John but had none himself. “I was hyperjumpy after that. I don’t take drugs. I’m—I got super paranoid.” He says George explained that he wanted “the stuff you use to clean VCR tapes” sprayed on a sock and held to his mouth. (In the written statement he’d called this stuff “poppers.”) “VCR tapes?” the ADA wonders. John lets out a high-pitched laugh, “VCR, yeah, I thought it was extinct.”
George and John returned to the bedroom. They were both clothed. George got on the bed. John says he wrapped the duct tape around the man’s ankles three or four times. Helpfully again, he explains that if police found any tape on his hand it must have been from when George was trying to get it off his ankles later, after the struggle. But George was on his stomach at this point. John says the older man turned over and pulled a knife from his pocket, probably just to show it off or something, but “I’m jumpy as shit from what I just told you.” On the DVD he examines his dirty nails for a moment.
Fliedner asks, “Are you on the bed?” John shakes his head and spits out a fleck of something before saying no. Then, in order to demonstrate how George must have pulled the knife from his right pocket after turning over, John briefly makes as if he’s George lying on the bed. He says he (John) freaked out and grabbed for the knife.
Like someone patting a ball of dough into shape, he mimes their wrestling for the knife with his hands. Pressed, he says, “I’m leaning over the bed.” He leans. “He’s lying on his back.” He leans back. He raises his voice a bit: “Both of our hands were on the knife. We were fussing over this knife.” He was cut himself in the struggle. He holds up the injured finger.
More questions: “What were you talking about? Was there any conflict?”
In a striking flash of anger, John raises his voice: “NO! It was like I just told you. We were fussing over the knife and it slips and goes into his neck and he starts cursing and shit.”
John is at once calm again. He returns to the scene. “I’m bleeping paranoid. Here I don’t remember the sequence.”
Fliedner asks whether John was carrying any knives himself. He mentions that John’s own father said he usually carried two. But John had already explained in the written statement that he had no knife on him because he was coming straight from school where you weren’t allowed to carry a knife. On tape, he repeats, “I just said I came from school.” The preposterous idea of carrying knives to school causes him to erupt, “Ha-ha-ha!” with the same strained, high-pitched laughter as before.
Now, on the DVD, the wheels of John’s chair squeak suddenly. He leans forward and grabs his right thigh. He’s felt a shooting pain. Fliedner asks if he wants to stand up or stop. But John says the pain is “from the antibiotics or something.”
* * *
Meanwhile, in court, while the DVD is being played, John’s cheeks have turned distinctly red under his terra cotta complexion. No one enjoys seeing themselves “played back.” John’s father Spiro has scuttled from one side of the courtroom to the other to get a better view of the video. He can’t stop sniffling, sobbing almost, as he watches.
* * *
The video interview continues. “It’s all out of sequence,” John says. “This dude’s fucking stabbed and I’m bleeding the hell out of my hand . . .” He says he “ran around searching for shit.” He took a bottle of whiskey and “chugged” some, but stopped because he wasn’t sure if it might thin his blood and make the bleeding worse.
“I don’t know how I did it so fast,” he explains when asked why he went through George’s collection of children’s lunch boxes—twenty of them lined up atop the kitchen cabinets. He found “like just sippy cups” inside, “Ha-ha-ha!” Up on the countertop he started to feel dizzy. He ran water from the kitchen faucet over his deeply cut finger.
He went into the bathroom and tried to rinse the finger again but the water was too hot, so he took the lid off the toilet tank to soak his hand in cold water. He found some gauze bandages and tape in “the—like—the—” he makes an oddly elegant movement with his left hand and Fliedner supplies the word “mirror.” “Yeah.”
His clothes were bloody, so he took them off. He didn’t want to get blood on his sneakers or on his Harley jacket. Mentioning this, his hands gesture toward his lapels. “That jacket?” Fliedner asks in a how-bout-that tone of voice. Yes. John was trying to keep blood off the very jacket he’s wearing during the interview. He explains he sprayed himself with some Axe body spray he found in the bathroom and dressed in some of George’s clothes. He wore one of George’s leather jackets and carried the Harley jacket in his left hand.
“I’m tripping, I’m paranoid,” he emphasizes repeatedly. He says he went back into the bedroom where George was still mumbling. He reached into George’s pocket and took sixty dollars, “what he was going to pay me for this smothering garbage.” (It’s a different-sounding dismissive from when the judge picks the phrase up later.) As John reached into George’s pocket his hand dragged the older man’s pants down, and the body, or still-softly-vocalizing man, fell onto the floor.
“He still has his boxers on,” John answers Fliedner’s question with a little frown of propriety. He says he picked up the knife and took it with him, a flip-knife with a tiny knob on the three-inch blade so it could be opened with one hand. In the written statement he’d judged it a pretty good knife but added that he had a nicer one in his own collection. (“Yeah, I like my swords and knives,” he admits defensively to Fliedner on the DVD.)
“I close the door behind me. That’s something I do everywhere.” At the foot of the brownstone’s steps, he says, he turned right, then right again on President Street. “I dispose” of the knife by throwing it by a tree. “I was walking calmly. I was walking quickly.”
Whatever John had used to bandage his finger wasn’t holding. He’d severed a small artery, so blood pulsed out with every systole. He’d need stitches or a tourniquet to stop it. In the subway, he says, a “Hindu” couple swiped a MetroCard for him at the turnstile. He took the G train north, back toward Queens. He moved from car to car; his bleeding was attracting too much attention. Wherever he sat, his throbbing forefinger filled the shallow depression of the plastic subway seat next to him with blood. A stranger fished a fresh sock from his gym bag and handed it to him to stanch the flow.
In Long Island City, at Court House Square, John left the G line to switch to a eastbound 7 train. That would take him to 90th Street and Elmhurst Avenue, the stop closest to home. At Court House Square, an elevated station, an MTA functionary wasn’t as helpful as the Hindu couple. He refused to buzz John through the emergency exit for two dollars. He sold him a single-ride MetroCard instead. John made it up to the platform, but by now he’d lost so much blood that another MTA worker promptly sat him down and called 911. An EMT later testified that his pulse was undetectable. He lost consciousness several times and was, in fact, near death. But he recovered quickly as soon as the injury was treated.
So why did he flee to Middletown after getting stitched up at the Cornell Medical Center? “I was reading all this shit about like twenty stab wounds and no mention of the coke, so it looks like he was killed in cold blood. I panicked.” He says he spent a night in Penn Station before taking the train to Middletown where he had friends. He got a call from his father, who told him he’d finagled a ride upstate from somebody for fifty dollars and would bring three hundred dollars to John. “You know the rest.” In Middletown, Spiro called John from a parked Ford Explorer with tinted windows. John approached. Even before the three detectives got out, he could see his father wasn’t alone. He ran. There were four other cars, ten or twelve detectives in all.
IV. Discrepancies
On March 18, John posted an ad on Craigslist: “Iphone 3G 16gb Unlocked . . . Also comes with alot of games. $500. Call me at 347 612 6013. Anytime after 6pm. or reply to this message.” A few minutes later he posted another ad offering to sell “my Sidekick 08 for 120 bucks, phone only.” Apparently he needed money. Six hours earlier, giving Craigslist the same reply e-mail, greeksatan92@yahoo.com, he’d posted in the “Casual Encounters” category, “I Blow 4 Cash – m4m.” Though John had to enter eighteen as his age for the system to take the ad, the body of his post read, “I am a 16 yo dude looking for quick cash, im bi, white, and uncut. but im only into oral play. will blow guy of any age. but only 4 cash.”
Within fifteen minutes he got a reply from George Weber. He got other replies too. In his responses he presents himself as young and sexually savvy, but the details shimmer a bit uncertainly. “Hey dude, i would come over and jack off for you. is that all ur asking for? im in need of serious cash, im an uncut white male, 19 yo . . . lol u can even take pics or record if u want.” “hey dude, im a 17yo white greek irish and italian dude, uncut 5inch dick, but I only like oral play . . .” In a message to one guy the next day, the day before the murder, John sounds almost plaintive: “Hey whats up dude? don’t you wanna meet me and have some oral fun. do u have a car? im available today from 5pm . . .”
Only the exchange with George seems to have gone anywhere.
John: ok ok. cool. how much are you willing to offer. im available everyday . . . i attached a few pics.
George: cool . . . thanks for getting back. i have a few guys who [do] this tie up/smothering thing on me and I usually do $60 for 30-minutes. let me know if ur interest . . . oh and what r ur stats?
John: oh yea dude. im totally interested. what do you mean by stats????
George sends some smothering pictures to see if “Satan Katehis” is all right with it.
John: lol yea I saw the pics, pretty cool stuff. im aprox 150lbs, 5foot 11inches.
They have some trouble setting up a time. At one point John teases the older man, “youve been a bad boy eh. lol . . .” First the meeting is set for Thursday, then Saturday, then Friday. The last message from John comes Thursday, the one in which he gives George a new phone number.
A couple of oddities stand out in these e-mails. Though he gets the sexual lingo down (as anyone could who’d spent a few minutes looking through ads of this kind), John doesn’t know what his “stats” are, and he says his dick measures five inches, which sounds perfectly realistic but too honest for an experienced hustler. Unless John was underplaying his measurement, because he had a notion that submissiveness in dick size, age, and all the rest is a plus in attracting another man (an idea one could argue was curiously masculine, even straight, since gay men are more used to the paradoxes of sissified or boyish tops and hairy, big-dicked bottoms).
Furthermore, the photos John sent of himself don’t look quite right for a hookup. He’s fully dressed and doesn’t appear particularly friendly. In one he leans back like a rock guitarist making double devil’s horns with his hands by his thighs. In fact, the whole “I Blow 4 Cash” premise is a little odd, since guys like John, if they’re straight and at all experienced, know they can get at least sixty bucks for just standing there while someone else blows them.
A slight aura of inexperience means nothing when it comes to the business of sex, of course. Everyone’s a beginner at some point. But it raises two interesting, contradictory possibilities: maybe John was a little into the idea of sex with a man, or maybe he was trying to entice a victim based on an imaginary version of gay sexuality. Either way, he wasn’t responding to George’s ad as he later claimed. George was responding to his.
* * *
When he was found by EMTs at the 7 train station, John was in shock, sweating, pale, cool to the touch. The EMTs elevated his legs, raised his bandaged hand, and took him in a scoop stretcher to an ambulance where they gave him oxygen. He soon had a detectable radial pulse. The whole time he was being treated John couldn’t stop worrying about a bag he’d been carrying. “I need my bag. Please don’t forget my bag,” Valerie Vera-Tudela recalls him saying over and over. He explained that he’d came from Coney Island where he’d cut his finger on a Snapple bottle. (Later he said something about juggling bottles.) He told her he’d had no drugs or alcohol. His pupils looked fine.
On the ride to the hospital, Valerie says, John’s color came back, and by the time they reached Cornell he was even laughing a bit and “flirting” with her. Routine toxicology testing on John’s blood showed no traces of alcohol or cocaine.
As for the white powder found in George’s chest and other places in the apartment, it tested negative for cocaine and opium alkaloids. Furthermore, a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry test showed no “extra peaks” that would indicate any other controlled substance or medicines like aspirin or acetaminophen.
No test was available to find out what the powder actually was, but two bottles of identical-seeming white NIC Pro-Organic insecticide dust were found in the apartment. Nic is a natural insecticide advertised to work against roaches, ants, bedbugs, carpenter ants, fire ants, flies, lice, mites, scorpions, termites, and ticks. Though never brought up in court, Nic’s ingredients are listed clearly on its website: “Composition: Active Ingredient: Mint___1%, Rosemary___1%. Inert ingredient: Limestone___98%.” If inhaled, the first aid recommendation is “move to a ventilated area.”
* * *
A ring of black duct tape was found around one of George’s wrists. It isn’t plausible, as John casually suggested on the DVD, that this was a piece of tape George tried to get off his ankles. The duct tape around his ankles was still intact.
The ring of black tape around George’s wrist was sticking to the skin on one side, loose on the other. The medical examiner reported it slipped off with ease. The loose side of the ring was badly stretched and twisted. It seems obvious that the tape originally bound both wrists and that George was able to free one of his hands during a struggle. In a coup de théâtre, the prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, began her summation by claiming John had admitted as much. She cued the DVD interview to the moment Fliedner asks John how George was holding the knife when the struggle began. John mimes George’s starting position by bringing his wrists together and raising them to just under his chin. “He was like this . . .” The prosecutor paused the DVD at the image.
* * *
Thirty or forty crime scene photographs were introduced into evidence. Hundreds were taken. Tavis Watson of the 76th Precinct was what’s called the “first officer,” the first cop on the scene of a crime and the one responsible for securing the area. He was the one who came to Henry Street at eight thirty that Sunday morning.
George’s door was locked, but Watson and his partner roused a neighbor in the ground-floor apartment and made their way to the backyard. At the top of a few steps, the door to George’s parlor-floor apartment was unlocked. As soon as he entered, Watson says, he recognized the smell of a dead body.
In the bathroom the water in the tub was running onto a crumpled pair of black jeans. A bloody washcloth and a bloody gauze pad were on the edge of the bathtub. An oval rug on the floor was splattered with blood. There were also bloody spots and partial footprints all over the tiny hexagonal floor tiles. More gauze pads and their Johnson & Johnson paper wrappings were strewn on the rug along with a bloody towel.
The water was running in the sink, splashing and rocking a bottle of Axe body spray to and fro. The medicine cabinet was open. The top of the toilet tank had been taken off and placed on the toilet seat. The top of the tank was spattered with blood and greenish shaving foam. A broad ribbon of blood ran down the toilet’s ceramic belly. Two black socks and a stray gauze pad were later found soaking in the open toilet tank. (One of George’s hustler pals recalls his bathroom being filthy whenever he came over, but in the photos it looks as if it had been remodeled not long ago. The tub and fixtures are new. The tacky souvenir lighthouse, which the boy remembered as symbolic of George’s loneliness, is gone.)
The kitchen was a mess. Ordinary stained wood cabinets, all agape, lined the walls above and below a counter cluttered with kitchen equipment. Paper bags and dishware, apparently from the ransacked cabinets, littered a narrow kitchen rug. (A closet in the short hall back to the bathroom also spilled its contents.)
A bottle of Dewar’s scotch was on the floor. A DNA swab later confirmed this was the whiskey John had chugged. In the sink, inside a large cooking pot, were an empty can of Stewart’s root beer and another of Bud Light. Twenty nostalgic lunch boxes lining the top of the cabinets were in disarray. Each had been methodically opened.
Though blood swabs were taken from many places in the kitchen, the room’s true “bloodiness” only showed up after the surfaces were painted with leucocrystal violet and photographed under UV light. All over the wood floor, all over the white countertop, dense footprints of stockinged feet glowed in an eerie blue. You could all but see someone—someone with a spade-shaped big toe—shuffling along the counter opening lunch box after lunch box.
There were more signs of a ransacking in the living room. The bedroom, too, was in complete disarray. Closets and armoire drawers spilled clothing. At the foot of the bed, a chest with a flowered paper interior had been emptied of everything but the ubiquitous white powder. The walls in the bedroom were painted a glossy ox-blood red. The real blood all over the floor was redder. The bed, front and center between two shaded street-facing windows, had a barred metal headboard and footboard. Miscellaneous objects were strewn across the bed’s brown-striped sheets: an empty camera box, a bottle of Nic bug powder, an empty Verizon phone box, a paper bag, an encyclopedia, an empty vodka bottle, scissors, a roll of duct tape, a length of rope, a cylindrical black plastic container, a bottle of lube. On the floor were a bloodied cable box, a pile of folded white T-shirts, one stamped with a bloody shoe print, aspirin, snippets of rope, and scraps of black duct tape.
George was on his back in a pool of blood. He lay under the heap of a tan comforter which was partially blackened by blood and which must have slipped or been pulled from the bed. Only his duct-taped ankles and feet were visible. When the comforter was raised, George’s face appeared covered with a dense scattering of white pills—aspirin. An aspirin bottle rested by his head.
George had been stabbed fifty times front and back. Some of these wounds were random cuts and slices, but the majority weren’t. Both hands were injured in a messy way “consistent with” warding off a blade. From under his left ear to the area of his Adam’s apple, there were four stabs and three incised wounds (wounds made by slicing). The carotid artery had been cut. The left temple had been stabbed, as well as the right cheek, a deep stab that penetrated George’s cheek and tongue. There were also two incised wounds and a stab to the back of the head and one behind the right ear. The haphazard nature and changing angles of these injuries suggested to the ME that the victim was alive and struggling when they were made.
On the pale-as-flour skin of George’s back, six stab wounds were grouped at his left shoulder and eleven on his right side below the scapula. These were up to two inches deep, and some went through his ribs to penetrate his chest cavity. The ME explained that clustered wounds like these are made when the victim is not (or no longer) moving. Seven more stab wounds formed a cluster in the middle of George’s chest, including a deep one near his heart. Finally, six gaping incised wounds, roughly parallel, running down George’s pale left arm, made it look like a ghastly version of an unbaked baguette.
George was wearing a black T-shirt which had been pushed up over his chest. His pants were unbuckled, unbuttoned, and unzipped. They were pulled down below his knees. So were his boxer shorts. The shaft of his penis was bruised from possible squeezing. An additional circular area of bruising to the head of the penis was reportedly consistent with a bite.
* * *
While listening to this matter-of-fact, yet horrific, testimony, John leans back in his chair as usual, his legs flung out under the defense attorney’s table. He appears buried in himself, buried by choice and as deeply as possible. He is uncannily motionless, his cheeks red from consciousness of the eyes that keep shifting toward him. The scene as described differs so much from a single accidental poke to the neck that left George still mumbling and cursing when John disappeared that night.
V. The Trial
Spiro and Beth Katehis, John’s parents, were married after they’d known each other five days. Spiro, twenty-one, was about to fly back to Greece with his grandfather and already had a plane ticket. Beth, eighteen, was anxious to get away from her Dominican American family, so when Spiro told her the only way he could stay was if they got married, she agreed. John was born two years later. The marriage ended in bitterness three years after that.
Though never brought into evidence, John’s school records show a very troubled kid. He wasn’t in the public school system but attending a special school for the emotionally disturbed in Westchester County. He was suspended repeatedly. He harassed a girl for taking her medication. He exposed himself on the school bus and engaged in other “sexually inappropriate behavior.” He threatened a teacher. He vengefully took one kid’s backpack, threw it in a toilet, and peed on it. He got into fights. An eerie report in the file contains the observation that he “seems to enjoy the pain and discomfort of others.” Also on file was something John himself wrote at twelve: “When I grow up I want to be a killer.”
In 2000 Beth had a daughter, Bethany Angelica. Beth doted on the girl and sent her to the John Robert Powers school in New York City, a somewhat faded performing arts feeder for kids who want to get into TV commercials and movies.
Clips of nine-year-old Bethany Angelica’s dances and “runway with poise and confidence” school performances were uploaded to YouTube by GODDESSBETH, but languished online with only a few adoring comments from GODDDESSBETH herself, princessbeth0413, and sometimes, sweetly, greekjohn92.
Beth is short and large-busted. Her hair, sometimes mahogany, sometimes blondish, falls to her shoulders in loose strands doctored with a hair crimper. She dresses carefully, wears large sunglasses, and carries a clear vinyl bag. She has a taste for pearlescent fingernail and toenail polish and elaborate makeup including foundation and vaguely bluish sparkling lipstick with contrasting purplish lip liner. As “LadyBeth” she has posted several low-quality videos of herself dancing to a Lady Gaga song, for example, or doing a tame fake striptease to a Sinatra number with an umbrella as a prop. Sometimes Beth came to court with a heavyset white-bearded producer/director/handbag designer and Segway aficionado named Itsi Atkins, who believed a movie deal was in the air and wanted to be part of it.
Beth had a remote poise with reporters. Completely unprepared for media attention, her ex-husband Spiro seemed to have a much harder time being “public.” A newspaper picture from the arraignment caught him sobbing, his balding, flyaway hair a mess, while an expressionless Beth stands next to him, her fingers just touching his tie, a stony gesture of comfort. Long afterward, Spiro still resented that picture. After it was taken he shaved his head, a much better look for him.
Spiro is also small. His fancy trial clothes usually looked too big on him. Nervous, he always came early, scuttling down the hall with a side-to-side gait, cell phone in hand like an old-fashioned bookie with his pad. He was working overnight shifts as a waiter in a Queens diner and got little sleep. During testimony his leg bounced constantly, his hands trembled. He sniffled at regular intervals and was often just shy of crying. Like an agonized sports fan, he sat forward on the blond-wood courtroom bench watching John’s attorney spar with the judge. Unable to keep still or repress derisive snorts, he was reprimanded and almost asked to leave the courtroom twice.
Spiro and Beth have the personality differences, the sour hostility, that suggest the unwanted aftermath of an intense, youthful passion. But neither seems likely to have sired or raised a monster. She comes across as a little cool or self-involved, Spiro a little hot-headed.
More interesting, Spiro appears to be completely smitten with his son. He claims they were like brothers, and so they appear in MySpace pictures, both in black heavy metal T-shirts standing in front of a big Ozzy Osbourne logo. Strangely, looks apart, Spiro comes off as the younger, idolizing one. In court his love is naked and innocent, and he watches the proceedings with an expression of anguish.
(Boy and man are profoundly mixed up in this case. It isn’t just that middle-aged George had a taste for kiddie cartoon lunch boxes, or that his fetish might have reproduced a childhood event, or that the child John Katehis’s taste ran to swords and knives, or that he could admonish his elder by e-mail, “you’ve been a naughty boy”—father and son themselves seem reversed.)
At five-eleven, taller than either of his parents, bigger, handsomer, more poised, more adult-seeming, John was led to the defense table rear-handcuffed before every pretrial hearing in the spring and summer of 2010. Judge Neil Jon Firetog held these cattle calls on Fridays. Family members and lawyers crowded a fourth-floor courtroom as the judge summarily dispatched motions and scheduling matters for a slew of defendants, some of whom appeared by video-link from Riker’s Island. The scene could get hectic as a sergeant expelled those who couldn’t find seats; Firetog mocked a lawyer’s Vivaldi-playing cell phone (“Either turn that off or change the ring tone”); a Chinese translator scrambled to a phone line open to the video booth at Riker’s; and irrelevant but fascinating conversations were whispered nearly at one’s ear: “My baby was shot in the back eight times.” “Mm, that hurts.” “They know it was a silver Audi, but they don’t have a plate or a gun or a shooter.”
John was often brought out late in the session when the crowd had thinned. Spiro and Beth and whoever had come with them might move to get a better spot for the brief moment when John would turn his head and hunt for them. He scanned others in the crowd as well, and sometimes, like a teenager—like most of the defendants—he’d play it tough.
From a distance his brown eyes look pure black. The bridge of his nose is broad, which gives him the tawny-skinned air of a lion in repose. A dent convinced anonymous “experts” online that his nose had been broken once. His long chin juts. He looks more like his mother than his nebbishy father, but outshines them both by far.
Brisk and unceremonious, anything but a showboater, Judge Firetog appeared to find the slick defense attorney, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, irritating from the start. A major flare-up occurred during a hearing on April 23. Schwartz appealed to have Weber’s computer hard drive released. The computer likely did contain records of his exchanges with hustlers and maybe pornography, but Weber’s reputation and past behavior really weren’t at issue in this case (though of course they were). Firetog brusquely denied Schwartz’s request because it had no relevance to the defense the lawyer was planning. “Why do you really want this information?”
Schwartz, wearing an overly white, overly even, but somehow confrontational smile, along with flashy cuff links, watch, and a quadruple-pointed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his chalk-stripe suit, replied, “Prosecution aims to prove Katehis came over to rob or attack Weber, but if we can establish Weber had a pattern of inviting over underage boys for sex . . .”
Firetog scooted forward. Shaking his robed forearm back and forth, he demanded, “But what is your defense?”
“It appears Weber invited our client, an underage boy, over—”
“It doesn’t work that way. What is your defense?”
“It’s been established that physical force is allowable in the case of an unwanted sexual assault.”
“So this will be self-defense?” An outright argument of self-defense would be tough given the evidence.
“No,” Schwartz conceded, but he continued arguing.
Firetog cut him off and explained with a great sigh that the computer information would be under seal and available as a possible appellate issue.
Still, Schwartz argued. He complained that the date Firetog set for the trial was too soon.
* * *
The trial began on October 18. Firetog’s annoyance only increased. Schwartz was combative and scattershot before jury selection. He claimed he hadn’t had enough time to prepare; police officers had failed to determine reasonable cause; Katehis was the victim of an adult predator; evidence of some kind of illegal sexual contact simply had to be introduced.
Schwartz kept at it until Firetog shouted him down wearily, “You can’t argue facts that are not in the record!” When Schwartz still wouldn’t back down, the judge threatened him with contempt of court if anything like this happened in front of a jury. The lawyer would be fined $2,500 per offense.
The following day saw a long and contentious discussion at the bench. The main points of the bench conference were later repeated for the record: defense felt the warnings of contempt of court, the mention of fines, and the number of objections sustained all indicated that the judge was unduly hostile. Schwartz felt his ability to defend his client was compromised. In conference he’d asked the judge to recuse himself. Sighing, yet elaborately conciliatory, Firetog tried to brush aside the mess.
Schwartz stood up. “I’ve never had an experience in my life where I’ve been threatened with contempt.” He said he was an ex-prosecutor and understood trials from both sides, but in this case his guiding light was the best interests of his client. He claimed the judge was “chilling” their defense. “You have made me feel like a marked target. You have frightened and terrified my client, a sixteen-year-old boy, and his family.” He claimed that John, Beth, and Spiro had all lost confidence in the judge’s fairness.
For the record, Schwartz went on, he wanted to tell a story. “You have overpersonalized this,” he said. “We’ve had an experience in the past.”
Schwartz recounted that he’d been assigned a prominent case a year or so earlier. “Though my client wanted me,” another lawyer “bad-mouthed” him, and the judge on the case shut Schwartz out. Schwartz said he’d filed a grievance against the judge in question even though “Your Honor” recommended against it. Firetog had told him to let it go. “You offered to give me another high-profile case.” (Schwartz gravitates to prominent cases; he was representing John Katehis pro bono but getting some press attention for his efforts.)
Judge Firetog listened to all this and wondered aloud how any of it could have prejudiced him against Schwartz. They argued a bit more, but Firetog soon announced, “The motion for recusal is denied.”
Schwartz then asked if he could go at once to the current chief administrative judge to have a new judge assigned to the case. “I can’t operate with a target on my chest. I feel muzzled.” He said he was so uncomfortable that he’d asked an ethics attorney to sit in on the proceedings.
Nonetheless, the trial continued. Schwartz was often slapped down with “asked and answered” and “objection sustained” even in the presence of the jury. (Once, during ADA Fliedner’s testimony, the jury was ordered to file out for a moment, and Firetog gave Schwartz a quick browbeating.)
The defense didn’t have much going for them, but the well-prepared slickness of the prosecution witnesses, police witnesses especially, may have been causing a few juror doubts about whether proper procedure had been followed during the investigation—an idea Schwartz was, of course, trying to foster. Spiro clearly believed that information about the Middletown capture was being held back. On the stand, Normile and Fliedner smoothly described Spiro as invariably cooperative. It must have hurt. Spiro was beside himself, red-faced, glaring, tearful, as he listened to them. They were making it sound like he’d betrayed his son. “Did you notice they wouldn’t look at me?” he later asked me with a flash of uncomprehending rage.
Outside the courtroom, Spiro said he couldn’t wait to get on the stand to tell his side of the story. But he never got the chance. The defense presented no case, perfectly normal in a situation like this where you’re better off not opening your side to awkward questioning. To me, Spiro claimed the police had burst into his place, threatened to shove a cell phone down his throat if he didn’t give them what they wanted, and then drove him up to Middletown in handcuffs. He skipped over the telephone call actually setting his son up for capture. But he clearly believed he and John had been wronged.
Tension was rising. Spiro hissed about Itsi Atkins. “I don’t know what Beth thinks she’s doing with him. He’s a fucking producer. If he tries to sit in my place again I’m going to fucking kick the shit out of him.” With sublime disgust, he complained that a Greek reporter had even mistaken the much older Itsi for him, Spiridon, the father.
In the men’s room, where the plumbing made the constant unnerving sound of a patient on a respirator, Itsi suavely accosted me after seeing me talk to Spiro. “You might want to be careful who you talk to . . . I’m just saying. There are two sides in this, and they don’t always see eye to eye. Just so you know, Beth and I are in control of the real information. And we have John’s full support and approval.”
Spiro, meanwhile, had seen me give Beth an e-mail and telephone number. He complained, “When I saw you do that, I thought, Oh shit, he’s just gonna get her side of things. Did you see that huge fight we had yesterday? No? Good.”
* * *
No quick verdict came the day the jury was sent to confer. Schwartz bustled and grinned nervously. The slender, long-haired assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, sat lonelier than ever at the prosecution table. Every so often her skinny elbows rose and she’d grasp the chair’s armrests as if about to rise with an objection. She merely shifted, but with odd precision. (She was, incidentally, enormously pregnant with a little girl. In the context of her controlled and graphic descriptions of the murder, the pregnancy was a bit disconcerting.)
Before lunch the jury sent out notes requesting to review testimony. Later, a note came out saying they were having trouble reaching a verdict. They weren’t sure what constituted reasonable doubt. The judge had them file back into the courtroom and recited his definition for them.
At 4:48 the jury sent out a note saying they still hadn’t come to a unanimous verdict. Firetog highlighted their use of the words “at this point.” The next day the jurors watched John’s video confession again. They had more testimony read back. They asked about reasonable doubt yet again. They said they were still struggling to reach a verdict. Eventually, the judge called them out (John as well) and read what’s called the Allen charge—basically, Go back in there and really try! Experienced reporters said the Allen charge rarely worked and was usually a prelude to a mistrial.
The final day was veiled in tedium. Around noon the press filled the front row reserved for them. I could overhear whispers from a bench conference. “You want to try it again real soon?” “November 3?”
John was brought out at twelve twenty. Judge Firetog announced that the jury had sent out another note saying they were deadlocked, and he declared a mistrial. After that came a flurry of administrative announcements. As retained but unpaid counsel, Schwartz said he might not be able to handle the retrial. John was left alone at the defense table while his lawyer and a colleague went to fetch boxes of trial material from a back room.
Firetog: “So they’ll go to the 18B panel for a new public defender. Who’s up? Maybe Herbert Moser. Another ADA may be necessary as well, due to . . .” He nodded toward the pregnant ADA. November 3 was announced as the date for reassignment.
“Oh, and can we revisit bail?” Schwartz asked, returning with his boxes.
“Maybe,” the judge said. “Let’s see what the split was. If they want to tell us the split.”
The jury was led in and the mistrial was announced. Several jurors tried to communicate dissent by stiffly shaking their heads. The judge thanked them all and dismissed them, saying, with a wintry smile, that he’d see them all again in eight years. John couldn’t resist a grin as the jurors filed out. He looked surprised, though Schwartz had boasted to reporters back when the first jury note came out, “We won!”
It was agreed the judge would speak to the jury first. After that the lawyers could debrief them. Then reporters would be able to question willing ex-jurors.
But after a few moments Judge Firetog hurried back into the courtroom, his black robe flying. It was strange to see him off the elevated bench, on a level with the lawyers and other mortals. He rested a hand on the court reporter’s desk. He was wearing a somewhat sheepish but giddy expression. He slicked his black hair. “Something very strange just happened. The minute I went in there the jury told me, ‘If we could have just an hour longer we could reach a verdict.’”
Schwartz jumped up and started to argue coercion. “They’ve been dismissed!”
“I didn’t say a word to them,” Firetog countered, then climbed onto the bench.
Schwartz was outraged: “This is unconscionable!”
The reporters scribbled in their steno pads.
Asked to respond to Schwartz, even Nicolazzi seemed at a loss. “Well, this is a very unusual situation, but . . .” It was obvious to everyone which direction the verdict had to be leaning.
Firetog hustled things along: “Let’s bring out the defendant.” John was brought back in looking deeply confused and, frankly, scared. As soon as he was uncuffed and the court officers had taken their usual seats behind him, Schwartz stood and argued for all he was worth.
The judge was adamant about pushing ahead. It was a rare opportunity, and it was worth trying to get a verdict from this jury.
“There is no jury. The jury’s been dismissed.”
Firetog announced, “The mistrial is vacated.”
Schwartz kept arguing, until another note was passed to the judge, who quieted the defense lawyer with a wave of his hand. He said it now looked like all arguments were moot, because the jury was asking to speak to the lawyers. Firetog said this with an air of deflation, as if he thought he’d witnessed something magical—magical justice—only to realize at the last moment it was a clever fraud. The world worked in the same old messy and unjust way. The mistrial was reinstated.
“No backsies this time, judge?” Schwartz demanded.
It turned out the jury had taken three votes. The first was nine-to-three to convict. Three women voted to acquit. (Because he was young, cute? No, said juror seven, a man. Was it about the sex thing? Tough at first, but we got over it.) The second poll was ten-to-two. The final tally, eleven-to-one. The one woman held out, it was revealed, because she couldn’t resolve a doubt about John’s intent.
VI. Time
After almost a year, during a stretch of heartbreakingly golden late-fall weather in November 2011, John Katehis was tried again in Brooklyn Supreme Court. He was eighteen now and had been moved from the Robert N. Davoren Complex (detained male adolescents) to the Otis Bantum Correctional Center (detained male adults), both on Riker’s Island. An eleventh grader when he went in, he’d passed his GED while imprisoned (with very high scores, Spiro insisted to me proudly). There’d also been a serious fight and a stretch in isolation.
On court days John would pull his pink shirt or his brown-striped one from under his cell mattress where he kept them “pressed.” He’d wear one of these and a tan striped tie. By the end they were looking quite wrinkled. A beat-up white bus with grated windows swept him into the underground garage of the court building. The old cast of characters had assembled, along with a canny new defense lawyer, Jay Cohen, who hammered away at the unsavory sex details. But nearly a year had passed, and things were inevitably different the second time around. Judge Firetog conducted the trial with a slight air of haste. Prosecution seemed almost rote at first. Beth was absent sometimes, notably when the lawyers made summations and the day we waited for a verdict. One morning after stiffly scanning the crowd, John muttered almost inaudibly to himself, “Where is she?”
Spiro was obviously exhausted. (He was out of work and complained that he didn’t have enough money for lunch one day.) I once noticed him asleep in his oversized pinstriped suit on a bench outside the courtroom. Later he fell asleep in the courtroom itself as a series of gruesome photographs was introduced into evidence—a bad moment for John. John turned to see his father’s chin slumped on his chest and made a sour expression, undoubtedly feeling terribly alone.
Along with the sense of hurry came a sort of callused energy. Much more horrible photographs were introduced this time. The language was more graphic. Defense was more aggressive about disparaging George Weber’s behavior. We even saw a shocking picture of the bruised (bitten?) penis. As the actual murder receded into the past, memory seemed to grow colder, more brutal. “I just need five more minutes, judge,” Nicolazzi snapped at Firetog before her summation. Then she delivered her speech with stiff passion.
Though this time they were given the option of a second, lesser charge—manslaughter—the jury was slow again. Perhaps they couldn’t forgive Weber’s strange sexuality. Or they couldn’t bear throwing a young man’s life away. You could see the strain on jurors’ ashen faces and imagine their weariness. They chose murder in the second degree, finally, the more serious charge (and the highest possible in New York, where first degree murder has to involve “special circumstances,” like a police officer victim, multiple murders, or torture).
They’d decided John meant to kill. Until the foreman spoke the atmosphere had been heavy. Now Spiro looked faint, cameras chittered like squirrels, glances collided and retreated in the courtroom’s suddenly frictionless air. John’s mild self-confident expression froze. Poked on the shoulder by a court officer, he turned to give his father a big those-are-the-breaks smile and a shrug. A tough guy.