Daddy’s Precious
If there were a contest for the world’s most loving and indulgent parent, George Telemachos would be a difficult candidate to beat.
He doted on his darling daughter and gave her everything that it was in his power to give. When she was sick, he spent tens of thousands of dollars for the best medical care available anywhere in the country. When she was a little girl, he filled her room with dolls, stuffed animals, and other toys. When she reached her teens, he gave her fistfuls of money, expensive jewelry, and a new car.
But the hardworking Romanian immigrant’s love and generous gifts weren’t enough. When Katherine Maria Telemachos was nineteen, she decided that she wanted her father’s life.
Ironically, from the time that little girl he called Katy was born in Hollywood, Florida, on May 16, 1971, her father lived in dread for her life.
George Telemachos had barely observed his twenty-first birthday in 1952 when he left his Romanian homeland and emigrated to New Zealand. Through hard work and thrift he opened his own restaurant after a couple of years, and in 1967 was married.
The couple’s first child, Tony, was born with a faulty liver. So Telemachos, now with a wife and a chronically
sick baby, emigrated again. This time he headed for the United States, where he hoped to find better medical care for Tony, and settled his little family in Broward County, along the warm southeast coast of Florida. Their second and last child, Katherine, was born there —with the same dangerous liver ailment her brother suffered from.
Katy was four years old when her brother died. Telemachos and his wife Mary hadn’t given up their firstborn without a fight. They flew the child to New York, London, and anywhere else they heard there was a specialist who might be able to preserve his life. When they failed, they turned their love and attention to preserving the life of their only surviving child, Katy.
The couple spent thousands of dollars on medical care for their babies, and Telemachos raised the money with the restaurants he operated in the Fort Lauderdale area. When his wife filed for a divorce in 1977, income from the restaurants paid for the legal fees, the alimony, and child support. And it continued to pay for Katy’s medical bills. The year of the breakup, Katy’s father took her on a summer vacation to the Smoky Mountains.
The marital rift was nasty. Katy’s parents fought for ten years in court and out of court over her custody and child support payments. At one point after Telemachos threatened in a letter to a friend to kill his former wife, the divorce court judge issued a restraining order against him. In 1978 when the divorce decree was granted by the courts, Telemachos moved out of the master bedroom in his house and gave it to his daughter so she would have plenty of room for her dolls, stuffed animals, and clothing during her visits. He moved into one of the three smaller bedrooms in the carefully tended stucco bungalow.
The decade-long court battle was finally concluded with the couple agreeing to share custody of their child. According to records in Broward County Divorce
Court, it was agreed that she would live with her father in his comfortable Cooper City home at the edge of the Everglades.
While Katy’s parents were jousting over her custody and care, her liver was failing. She was a few weeks past her tenth birthday when surgeons at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, replaced her worn-out liver with a new organ from a donor. The new liver lasted less than a year before the child was back in the hospital for another transplant. This time the organ wasn’t rejected, and Katy’s surgery was lauded in the medical community as one of the first successful liver transplants in the United States. It was 1981.
But the transplants weren’t covered by health insurance, and they cost Katy’s father nearly $60,000. He considered the staggering medical bills to be little enough to pay for his daughter’s life. During Katy’s hospitalization, her father stayed at the Ronald McDonald House with the parents of other ill youngsters. And he spent every minute he could at her bedside until she was well enough to bring back to South Florida.
Under the watchful eyes of both her parents, Katy regained her strength and participated in normal activities with her schoolmates. At Cooper High School she performed with the drill team and marched with the honor guard. She was approaching graduation from high school when a new medical emergency occurred, however. The powerful medication she took to fight rejection of her donated liver weakened her kidneys and they began to fail. Katy was so sick and weak toward the end of her final year, that during a senior trip to Disney World in Orlando, she had to be pushed in a wheelchair. Her mother donated one of her own kidneys, and the organ was successfully transplanted into Katy’s body at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. She was eighteen.
While she was a patient, her father visited faithfully every night, bringing her favorite foods from local restaurants to replace the less appetizing hospital fare.
When she was released from the hospital, he celebrated the occasion by presenting her with a new car. The teenager didn’t like it, so he replaced it with another, a bright red Ford Probe sports car. On May 16, 1990, he gave her a gold necklace worth several hundred dollars for her birthday.
Despite Katy Telemachos’s history of illness, and her parents’ acrimonious divorce, in many other ways she appeared to be a teenager to be envied. Both her parents were devoted to her, and her father’s love bordered on obsession. He showered her with gifts, and all she had to do if she wanted something was to ask for it. She needed only to look at him and say, “Daddy.” It was her magic word, and it served her as well as “presto” or “alacazzam” ever served the most skilled stage magician. Money, clothes, and whatever else she desired appeared as if by magic.
When a neighbor girl began taking piano lessons, Katy decided she had to take lessons as well. So her father bought her an expensive piano. After a few weeks she lost interest in the lessons. But whatever Katy wanted, she got.
Telemachos knew he was spoiling his daughter, and attempted to establish rules and pass on some of his own respect for hard work and honesty. He badgered her about hanging around with the wrong crowd, and pushed her to attend college, but found it almost impossible to refuse anything she asked for. He explained to friends that he couldn’t help himself. From the time his Katy was a sickly baby, he had lived in constant fear that she might not live to see her next birthday.
He couldn’t stop himself from repeatedly telling friends and acquaintances how beautiful his little girl was. He devoted his life to her, and had few hobbies. When he wasn’t working or with Katy, he watched soccer games if he could find a match on television. When there was no soccer to watch, he sometimes read Reader’s Digest or National Geographic. Or he worked in
his yard. He was especially proud of a mango tree on his property, and shared the tasty tropical fruit with neighbors and other acquaintances. But Katy was his obsession.
He even gave her a part-time job as a clerk at the Baker Street Tobacconist, a tidy little shop he bought at the Hollywood Fashion Mall after retiring from the restaurant business in Hollywood, Florida, and Fort Lauderdale. Officially he paid her $100 for a three-day week, but he actually handed over much more money than that, $200 and $300 at a time. Katy was spoiled and had a taste for life in the fast lane. In South Florida with its sunshine, inviting beaches—and runaway drug trafficking—that can be very, very fast. And the life she wanted for herself couldn’t be financed on $100 a week.
Acquaintances began to exchange stories about Katy that would later be translated in the courts into depositions: tales of abortions and of guns. She shaved one side of her head and combed the rest of her hair away from it, punk-rock style. According to at least one later report, she toked on marijuana while she watched over her father’s shop. And she talked tough and dirty.
The teenager’s adoring father wasn’t unaware that the darling little girl he had so solicitously sacrificed for and watched over seemed to have turned into a rebellious teenager whose behavior was deplorable and choice of friends was atrocious. He fussed about her dating, attempted to monitor her other activities as well, and gave her a beeper so he could stay in constant contact with her. He apparently knew about at least one of the abortions; he knew about one of the two guns—a .38-caliber revolver and a smaller caliber pistol she was said to carry in her purse and in her car; he knew about the reputed marijuana smoking; and he suspected that she had been robbing the till at the tobacco shop.
He also knew about Erik J. Delvalle, Katy’s husky boyfriend, who traced his ancestry to Puerto Rico and was a high school dropout who worked on low-paying
construction jobs. The couple first met at the tobacco shop, when Delvalle stopped there to buy a package of cigarettes. They dated only a few weeks before Delvalle gave Katy a ring and she accepted his proposal of marriage. In his way, he was as obsessed with the girl as her father was.
But Telemachos was outraged at his daughter’s choice of a boyfriend, and he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the young man. Katy would later claim under oath that her father resented the fact that her boyfriend was a blue-collar worker, and didn’t think he was good enough for her. “He didn’t like Erik at all,” she observed. The Romanian immigrant, who still spoke the fractured English of many of the foreign born, called Delvalle a bum. He pronounced the word perfectly.
His choice of words and pronunciation were also plain enough when his daughter and her boyfriend showed up together at the Baker Street Tobacconist and he loudly ordered them to get out and stay out. Earlier he chased them out of his house when he returned home and found them there. Telemachos had finally had all he could tolerate of his daughter’s outrageous behavior, of money missing from the cash register, and of Katy’s boyfriend.
Katy and her fiance reacted by signing a lease for an apartment in nearby Miramar. A couple of days later she rented a van and they began moving in.
At about two A.M., Saturday, July 21, 1990, Officer John Posson of the Cooper City Police Department was on patrol in a squad car when he spotted a yellow rental van stopped behind the Pioneer middle school. A white T-shirt was draped suspiciously over the license plate.
Posson left his patrol car, took a quick look toward the van to confirm his earlier conclusion that it was empty, and began checking out the doors and windows at the school. There was no sign of forced entry there,
so the police officer returned to the suspicious van to look around with his flashlight.
Three cool Buds were stashed under the front seat, and a single surgeon’s glove was stuffed into the door pocket on the passenger’s side. A woman’s wallet was lying on the dashboard. Credit cards and a driver’s license carried the name Katherine Telemachos.
Posson returned to his squad car and waited silently in the shadows, keeping his eye on the van. A few minutes later, the figures of three people crossed a small footbridge over a canal and climbed into the van. The patrolman notified headquarters that he was following the van and asked for assistance. Supported by a backup unit, he pulled the vehicle over a few blocks from the school.
The occupants identified themselves as nineteen-year-old Katherine Telemachos; twenty-one-year-old Erik J. Delvalle; and their friend, nineteen-year-old Vincent Bernard Magona. The young men and the woman, all visibly nervous but polite, explained that they were visiting a friend across the canal and parked behind the school because it was near the footbridge. It was a plausible story, and there was no reason to hold them, so after the officers recorded names and addresses, the three were told they could leave. The van pulled away slowly. The driver was studiously careful to obey all traffic signs.
Nearly a day and a half later, a merchant who operated a store near the Baker Street Tobacconist decided to check up on Telemachos because he hadn’t opened up his shop for two days. She enlisted the help of a neighbor, and together they found his car parked in the garage, and the door leading from the garage into his house ajar. It was nearly noon when they walked cautiously inside.
The interior was in a shambles. Drawers had been ripped out of cabinets and dumped on the floor; pillows slashed open with a knife; and clothing searched and
discarded in rumpled piles. Alarmed and reluctant to venture into the bedroom, Telemachos’s friends hurried from the house and telephoned police.
Uniformed patrolmen, quickly followed by homicide investigators, hurried to the house. Inside, they found the owner curled up on his right side in a fetal position on his bed. He was dead, his skull shattered by a bullet that appeared to have been fired point-blank into his forehead. A cluster of pinprick spackles that dotted his eyelids indicated he was asleep or at least had his eyes closed when he was killed. The gunpowder spray also provided unmistakable evidence that the weapon was held only inches from the victim, perhaps even pressed flush with his flesh, when it was fired.
The force of the slug smashing into flesh and bone had knocked the dentures from the victim’s mouth, and they were lying on the bedclothes a few inches from his body. The bedclothing near his head was drenched in blood.
The experienced police officers realized that it wasn’t the kind of killing usually tied to burglars. Professionals rarely kill, and when they do, it’s usually because someone has returned home unexpectedly or awakened and surprised the intruder in the house or bedroom. Telemachos’s death wasn’t the work of a nervous or panicked amateur. It had all the earmarks of a cold-blooded execution.
The homicide investigators quickly began developing leads on a strong suspect, or suspects. It appeared obvious that the killer or killers entered the house through the garage, where Telemachos’s pet dog Cocoa slept. Curiously, the feisty little mutt apparently hadn’t raised an alarm, although she was known by neighbors to bark whenever strangers were around. And the ransacked house seemed to be almost too littered to be the work of a real burglar after money or valuables.
Even though Telemachos’s expensive Movado watch was missing from his right wrist, and his billfold was
emptied of cash, the topsy-turvy condition of the house itself was suspicious. It appeared almost as if the intruders had wanted to prove to someone that burglars were there. Another strange aspect about the bizarre burglary, which would quickly begin to make sense, was the deliberate smashing of two pictures that had been mounted on the wall above the bed. They were framed photographs of Telemachos’s only surviving child, his daughter Katy.
Detectives also talked with neighbors and other storekeepers or employees who worked near his business at the mall, and quickly learned about some of the troubles Telemachos was having with his headstrong daughter—including the furious row a few days earlier when he ordered her and her boyfriend from the shop. Acquaintances said he was determined to break them up before Katy began attending classes at Broward Community College, as she had promised to do at the beginning of the next term.
And investigators learned from their own colleague’s midnight-shift report that the couple, along with another friend of theirs, had been stopped and questioned after their van was found parked near the victim’s house at two A.M. on the night of the murder. The Telemachos house is only a short walk across the footbridge spanning the canal from the primary school. The inference was obvious: the trio must have left the murder scene only minutes before they were stopped.
By nightfall on the day Telemachos’s body was discovered, Cooper City police had taken his daughter, her fiancé, and their friend in custody as suspects in the shooting. The trio was jailed and held without bail.
Neighbors and acquaintances of the victim, and of the slender young woman who was suddenly being cast in news stories as the architect and mastermind behind his murder, were stunned. Even friends who knew that Katy Telemachos was hardly the fairy-tale princess of her father’s
dreams, found it difficult to believe that she could have so ruthlessly set up his savage murder.
It was easier for police to believe when they began piecing together statements from her accused coconspirators with other evidence they had been gathering in the first brief forty-eight hours since the slaying. Among the evidence was a box of .38-caliber hollow-point cartridges. Ballistics experts would later identify the slug fired into Telemachos’s forehead as a .38-caliber hollow point.
Magona began blurting out his story of the murder almost as soon as he was taken to the Cooper City Police Department headquarters for questioning. He told police that Katy had taken him and his pal to the house on a dry run, to show them the door they would enter and to give her father’s dog a chance to get used to them. And he told them about the murder two or three nights later.
“They showed me inside the house with them, went in, went into a person’s room,” he nervously recounted. “I went over by the window. He went over by the bed, told me to look outside, and then he shot him,” Magona said of his buddy. He added that Delvalle fortified himself before the postmidnight murder mission by drinking five beers.
When police asked what Magona expected to get from his friends for his part in the slaying, he replied that he was promised $300. He said that Delvalle went through the dead man’s pants pockets after the shooting, took several hundred dollars, and gave him $100.
Continuing his statement, Magona said his friends wore plastic gloves while they were in the house. “Like surgical gloves?” Detective Mike Graham asked. “Yes,” he replied. Magona said that Delvalle tossed the gloves out of the van while they were driving away following the murder.
It took police about six hours after Delvalle was taken in custody before he agreed to tape a confession. Katy
invoked her constitutional rights and refused to discuss it. But investigators learned that she masterminded the killing.
The boys said as they were fleeing the house, Delvalle tossed the .38-caliber revolver used in the murder off one side of the footbridge into the canal. The extra cartridges were thrown into the water on the other side. Magona said his pal told him the cartridges were hollow points.
Delvalle at first told authorities that he was the triggerman. Then he changed his story and said his girlfriend had done the shooting. Explaining his story switch, he declared, “I’m not going to fry for this.”
Delvalle and Magona were a curious pair, neighborhood pals since shortly after the Magona family moved to South Florida from Islip, Long Island, New York, about ten years earlier. They lived across the street from each other, and continued their friendship as they grew into young men.
Magona was timid and tagged along after his more confident friend. At the time of his arrest, the five-foot-seven-inch, brown-eyed teenager was attending commercial art classes at a vocational school and lived in Pembroke Pines, part of the urban sprawl between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Like Katy, he had never been in trouble before.
As a small child, Magona had Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition that among other things manifests itself through twitching. But as many people who suffer from the disorder do, he outgrew the twitching condition as he matured.
Nevertheless, he had learning difficulties and for several years attended a private school for children with developmental disorders. Diane P. Blank, a licensed clinical psychologist from nearby Hollywood who later evaluated Magona for the court, reported that he had an IQ of 96, which is in the normal range. But she described
him as having a need to impress others and to be accepted and liked.
“His naivete and childlike manner could very likely have led him to the problems he faces today,” she wrote.
Delvalle had experienced a few brushes with the law, but only for minor offenses. While he was in San Francisco in 1985 he got in over his head abusing a variety of drugs, which resulted in frightening hallucinations and talk of suicide. He was treated at the McCauley Institute there and released after about six months.
The young man appeared to be getting his life back on track after returning to South Florida and apparently avoided serious drug abuse, although he indulged a taste for beer. He was alternately tough and tenderhearted, according to reports by people who knew him. He was muscular, with a boxer’s face, and had a reputation for a quick temper. But he was also an especially loyal member of the youth group at the Holy Sacrament Episcopal Church, and got his pal Vinnie to begin attending the weekly meetings with him. He didn’t curse, and he didn’t like it when acquaintances swore in front of him.
He was also infatuated with the pretty, dark-haired, privileged girl he had met at the tobacco shop.
A seventeen-year-old girl who knew Delvalle from the church youth meetings told investigators he had confided to her and others about the planned murder a day or two before the shooting. Delvalle and his girlfriend, whom he and their friends knew as Kathy, or Katherine, believed that Telemachos was worth $4 to $5 million, and that she would inherit the fortune, according to the statement. In his statement to police, Magona also said his friends thought Katy’s father was a millionaire.
Ironically, police would later learn, Telemachos was not only worth much less than $1 million, but he probably
wouldn’t have lived long even if he wasn’t murdered. He was critically ill with heart and lung ailments.
The girl from church said Delvalle told her Kathy claimed her father had sexually molested her, so the murder would be justified. Other teenagers had heard the same story from Delvalle. Police never uncovered any corroborating evidence. But the story must have horrified and outraged Katy’s boyfriend.
The girl said that Delvalle, his pal, and girlfriend met with her the morning after the shooting and bragged that they had carried out the murder. Asked about her reaction to her father’s death, Katy was quoted as saying she didn’t feel anything. She hated her father. Delvalle was the one who was upset, the girl told police. One moment he would be bragging, the next moment crying and worrying about the electric chair.
As police and prosecutors continued rounding up evidence and witnesses, and Magona was released on bail to custody of his mother, Katy and her boyfriend remained locked up in the Broward County Jail in Fort Lauderdale. The troubles the lovebirds had experienced followed them inside.
Jail guards weren’t as tolerant of Katy’s sharp tongue and spoiled ways as her father had been, and she was barely locked up before she was placed in an isolation cell. Her health problems also continued, and she underwent surgery on her reproductive system at the Broward County Medical Center while awaiting trial.
Meanwhile her boyfriend was cranking out one mispelled and ungrammatical love letter after another to her.
Delvalle and Magona didn’t seriously contest the charges against them. And because they had each made statements that incriminated Katy, the court approved a motion by her defense attorney to sever her trial from theirs. Later a similar decision led to severing the trials of the two young men, as well.
Magona hung tough for a while, and refused a plea
bargain offer that prosecutors linked to an agreement calling for him to testify against his friends. But a few months later, after Judge Greene rejected defense arguments that the teenager’s arrest was illegal, and after psychologists decided he was competent to stand trial, Magona changed his mind.
He agreed to testify against his pal and Katy, and was permitted to plead guilty to second degree murder and conspiracy to commit first degree murder. The plea sidestepped the grim possibility of conviction for first degree murder and a sentence of death in Florida’s fearsome electric chair. Under the reduced charge, the most severe penalty he could face would be a term of up to twenty-two years in prison, if he was sentenced as an adult. If the judge decided to sentence him as a juvenile offender, the maximum penalty would be four years in prison followed by two years of house arrest.
Magona’s parents and a priest were in court with him when he testified that he had accompanied his friends to the home of Katy’s father on the night of the shooting. Asked why they were there, he replied in a voice that could barely be heard: “To kill Mr. Telemachos.” As Delvalle watched and listened intently, his friend stated that he was acting as a lookout and was peering out a window, so he didn’t actually see the shooting. But it appeared that Delvalle was the person who pulled the trigger, the nervous youth told the court.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Greene announced that he would sentence Magona after the trials of his codefendants. The judge added that he would consider the degree of Magona’s involvement and the truthfulness of his testimony at the trials in determining the sentence.
Several months later Magona was sentenced, as a youthful offender, to three years in prison, with the term to be followed by two years of community control. The judge recommended continued education tied to a boot camp program, and also ordered restitution of
$5789.50. Magona was given credit for fifty-two days already spent in jail.
Delvalle pleaded guilty after his girlfriend’s trial to charges of first degree murder and of conspiracy to commit first degree murder. Broward Circuit judge Charles M. Greene sentenced him to life in prison, with a minimum of twenty-five years to be served on the murder count, and a twelve-year sentence for conspiracy. The judge ordered the sentences served concurrently, and gave Delvalle credit for 491 days already spent behind bars. The young man, still vowing his love for Katy, was also ordered to pay court costs of $5789.50.
Shortly before Delvalle’s sentencing, prosecutor Jeffrey Marcus filed documents expanding on the purported motive for the shooting. He disclosed that about a week before the slaying, the lovers had taken checks from Katy’s father, cashed them for $8600, and used some of the money to buy furniture for their new apartment. Telemachos had to be killed before he learned about the checks, the prosecutor said.
Katy. was also given an opportunity to plea bargain. She could plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment, or she could go to trial for first degree murder and take a chance on conviction and a possible death sentence. She took the gamble and rejected the plea bargain.
Fifteen months after Telemachos was shot to death in his bed, his daughter went on trial in Broward Circuit Court for his slaying. She was charged with conspiracy to kill and with first degree murder. Marcus said the state would ask for the death penalty.
The defendant’s accused coconspirators each appeared as witnesses in the high profile trial, but they provided startlingly different testimony. Delvalle said he carried out the murder on his own, and his girlfriend didn’t know about it until after it was over. Magona said she masterminded her father’s murder because she
wanted his money, and she walked into the bedroom to watch him die.
Magona’s account of the murder was chilling. He told the jury that Katy quieted the dog while he and Delvalle creeped into the sleeping man’s bedroom. Inside, Magona said, he peered out a window while his companion pressed Katy’s revolver to her father’s forehead and pressed the trigger once. A hollow-point cartridge smashed through the victim’s brain.
Magona said that Katy came into the bedroom after hearing the shot, and watched while her father gagged on his own blood and desperately gasped for air. According to the witness, she didn’t show any emotion, but commented on noise her father was making. “She didn’t say much, except to discuss that’s the way you breathe when you’re choking on your blood,” he said. Only a few hours earlier, she had eaten dinner with her father.
The victim was still struggling for air as his daughter and her boyfriend began ripping open drawers and dumping things on the floor, the witness continued. “They started to tear things down to make it look like a burglary,” Magona said.
Mary Torres, Katy’s mother, who was remarried then widowed following her divorce, was sitting behind her daughter during the grisly testimony. Mrs. Torres put her hands to her head and sobbed while the witness described the last moments of her former husband’s life and the cold reaction of the young woman they both loved. The defendant meanwhile busied herself leafing through some legal papers spread out on the defense table.
Magona said that he and Katy went shopping at a department store with her father’s money the day after the shooting. Katy bought a coffeepot, a can opener, and some other appliances for the apartment she and her boyfriend had just moved into.
Katy schemed her father’s murder because she wanted his money and was sick of his nagging her about
her boyfriends and not attending college, the witness testified. When the prosecutor asked why he joined in the murder scheme, Magona blamed peer pressure.
Delvalle told the jury he killed his sweetheart’s father to stop him from interfering with their love affair. And he insisted that she didn’t know of his murder plan. After making statements first that he was the gunman, then accusing his girlfriend of being the shooter, the witness had returned to the early version.
He testified that he dropped his girlfriend off at a club along the Fort Lauderdale beachfront at about eleven P.M., the night of the shooting. He and his pal Vinnie drank a couple of beers and smoked a few joints and decided to kill Katy’s father, he said.
Continuing, Delvalle said he and his buddy had sneaked into the house in Cooper City and walked into the bedroom, when Telemachos woke up and said hello.
“I don’t know if he was dreaming or if he knew it was me,” Delvalle told the jury. He said it startled him. But a moment later he pulled Katy’s .38, pressed it to her father’s forehead and pulled the trigger. He said he told his girlfriend about her father’s murder later that night.
“She reacted pretty badly when I told her,” the witness gallantly declared. “I pleaded with her not to say anything and see how things turned out.”
But the most dramatic testimony of the trial came from the defendant, who backed up her boyfriend’s story that she hadn’t known about the murder scheme until her father was already dead. Tears were welling from Katy’s eyes and streaming down her cheeks as she told the jury that although she sometimes quarreled with her father, she would never plot his death.
Swiping at her eyes with a tissue, she sobbed, “I always loved my dad. I knew everything he worked for was for me.”
The slender, five-foot-ten-inch, dark-haired young woman insisted she didn’t know her father was going to be killed. “I couldn’t believe he was that much in love
with me that he could take my father away,” she said of Delvalle.
During cross-examination, Marcus asked her if she had manipulated her boyfriend by telling him that her father was worth $2 million. “No,” she softly replied.
Marcus asked if she had told Delvalle that if she continued seeing him, her father would cut off her money. “No,” she said again.
The prosecutor accused her of shedding crocodile tears as she held her boyfriend’s hand and cried less than a month earlier when Delvalle testified about the murder and pleaded guilty.
She denied it. “Those tears were for my father,” she said.
Despite the witness’s frequent tears, the jurors were stone-faced. There was no hint either of stern disapproval or of sympathy. Katy Telemachos’s pleading histrionics were being played out before a tougher audience than her doting father.
And when Marcus summed up the case for the prosecution, he wasn’t depicting the defendant as a sickly little girl, but as a devious master of manipulation and deceit who cold-bloodedly plotted the execution murder of her loving parent. She not only convinced her boyfriend to murder her father, but then got him to lie for her on the witness stand, the prosecutor declared.
“She even lied to Delvalle, telling him she was pregnant in jail with his baby,” Marcus told the jury.
He described the twin motivations for the murder as greed and hatred.
“This case was shockingly evil,” Marcus asserted. “She forfeited her father’s life for money.”
The jury deliberated two days before returning verdicts of guilty to both charges, conspiracy to kill, and first degree murder. Dressed in black, Katy accepted the verdict quietly but chewed nervously on her lower lip and looked as if she was struggling to hold back tears as the verdict was read. Her mother, Mary Torres, cried.
Judge Greene instructed the jury to return in three weeks to determine its recommendation of the penalty. Marcus said the prosecution would ask for execution in Florida’s electric chair. The only alternative sentence for a first degree murder conviction was life in prison, with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years.
Defense attorney Howard Zeidwig told reporters he didn’t believe the law would permit his client to be executed, because the admitted gunman was expected to get off with a life sentence. He said that even if it was true that his client had plotted the murder, her father would not have wanted her to be given the death penalty. And he pointed out that Katy had never previously been convicted of a crime, a factor that could be expected to work in her favor.
On December 4, 1991, the jury voted eight-to-four favoring a recommendation to Judge Greene of death in the electric chair for Katy. The recommendation was a surprise to some court watchers, who had expected more lenient handling because the defendant was female.
Although it’s true that females commit far fewer murders than men, they are responsible for approximately ten percent of homicides nationwide. Yet, studies show that only about 1.5 percent of prisoners on the nation’s death rows are women. And of more than 160 inmates executed between 1976 when a U. S. Supreme Court ruling permitted reinstatement of the death penalty, and the recommendation from Katy’s jury in 1991, only one—serial poisoner Velma Margie Barfield, in North Carolina—was female.
No woman has ever been executed by the State in Florida, although several have been sentenced to die in the electric chair, and at the time of the trial four were on death row. One of those four would be moved off the pink-painted death row for women at the Broward Correctional Institution near Fort Lauderdale when she won a new trial before Katy’s sentencing date. More
than three hundred men were locked up on death row in the prison at Starke awaiting dates with the killing machine inmates call “Ol’ Sparky.” If Florida ever electrocutes a female, she will be transferred to a cell at Starke a day or two before the execution.
Judge Greene overruled the recommendation, and ordered a prison sentence of life plus thirty years. Ironically, the experienced jurist said he agreed that the death penalty would have been appropriate punishment.
“This case was one of the coldest, cruelest, sickest, and most offensive homicides I have ever heard,” he declared. However, he said that he opted for mercy after considering the young murderess’s life experiences and illnesses.
Although overruling a jury’s recommendation in a capital case isn’t an everyday event, it is not unprecedented. Recently, a trial judge had gone the other way when he overruled a jury recommendation of leniency for a seventeen-year-old gunman who killed three restaurant workers in a robbery, and sentenced him to death. The Florida Supreme Court reversed his order of death, however, ruling that the judge should have taken the defendant’s youth and miserable childhood into consideration.
This time, Judge Greene was overruling another jury’s recommendation, by ordering leniency for a particularly coldhearted killer. He read from a twenty-nine-page sentencing document, and for the first half hour as he talked about the heinousness of the crime, it appeared that he was going to comply with the jury recommendation and order death. But as the defendant began to realize that he had decided on a more lenient sentence, she softly asked her lawyer, who was standing beside her, “Am I getting life?”
He nodded his head affirmatively.
Katy began to cry. She was still sobbing as Judge Greene pronounced the sentence of life in prison, with no parole possible for twenty-five years. And she was
dabbing at tears as she bent her head to kiss her mother on the cheek, while being led out of the courtroom by Broward County Corrections officers.
Her attorneys continued to fight for her freedom, however. And in documents filed with a motion for a new trial, they pointed out that she is still ill, has a limited life expectancy, and will probably need another kidney transplant in the future.
They asserted furthermore that evidence developed during the penalty phase of the trial indicates she “was an excellent daughter to her mother, and a good daughter to her father, and was an excellent friend to her best friend … .”
At this writing, Katy Telemachos’ appeal from her conviction is pending, and she is in custody at the Broward Correctional Institution.