American Honor Killings

by David McConnell

  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.