Free Republic

NEW YORK - A construction worker who admitted strangling an actress and then hanging her body to make it look like a suicide was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday. Diego Pillco, a 20-year-old illegal immigrant from Ecuador, had pleaded guilty in February to first-degree manslaughter in exchange for the sentence. He had faced 25 years to life in prison if he had been convicted at trial. Pillco, who was doing interior renovations in the Manhattan building where Adrienne Shelly had an apartment she used as an office, admitted he killed the "Factotum" actress after she found him...

Murdered actress Adrienne Shelly's husband told his wife's killer to "rot" in jail - a sentiment echoed by the judge, who threw him behind bars for 25 years. "You deserve no mercy. I want you to rot in that cell," Shelly's bereft husband, Andy Ostroy, told pudgy strangler Diego Pillco. "For the last 499 days, I have been consumed by unfathomable grief. I will spend the rest of my days hating you with every fiber of my being for what you have done." Shelly's parents also said they will never forgive Pillco, 20, a teenage illegal immigrant who hanged the...

There is an image at the conclusion of Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" that producer Michael Roiff can't get out of his mind. It's of Shelly's young daughter, Sophie, walking down a dirt road with her onscreen mother, played by Keri Russell. "Yeah, that's the one that I think is the hardest for all of us," Roiff says. What makes it hard is that Shelly died last November, shortly before the film was accepted to the Sundance Film Festival, where it subsequently became a hit (it opened in New York last week). Now, of course, Shelly will never know what became of...

SLAIN ACTRESS' UNWITTING ROLE IN ALIEN WAR (NYC Actress who was murdered by Illegal Alien) By ANDREA PEYSER November 30, 2006 ADRIENNE Shelly always wanted to be famous. But not for this. On a street in Greenwich Village where the indie-film actress and budding filmmaker once worked in obscurity, more than a dozen people came out last night wearing her picture around their necks. Carrying candles and literature, speaking softly and intensely, they gathered on the street. In the evening's warmth, their numbers swelled. In their 30s and 60s, they came from uptown and even New Jersey. All shared one...

The construction worker accused of killing indie actress .Adrienne Shelly tied a sheet around her neck, dragged the unconscious woman to a bathroom - and strung her up while she was still breathing, sources said yesterday. Then 19-year-old illegal immigrant Diego Pillco fled the West Village building and calmly went to work at another job site - leaving her to die in what originally appeared to be a suicide, the sources said. "This woman did not die from a strike to her head," Assistant District Attorney Marit DeLozier said as Pillco was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court. Pillco "fought with...

Her family's insistence that actress Adrienne Shelly would never take her own life, a mysterious sneaker print at the Greenwich Village murder scene, and detectives' discovery that the apartment beneath Shelly's was being renovated -- these were prime factors that police sources Monday said led to the arrest of a suspect in the slaying. Diego Pillco, 19, of Sunset Park, a handyman who was working in the apartment being renovated, was charged with second-degree murder in the popular indie-film actress's death on Thursday, police said.

A construction worker was arrested Monday and charged with murdering an actress who was found hanging from a shower rod in an apartment she was having renovated. Police charged Diego Pillco with second-degree murder in the slaying of Adrienne Shelly, Detective Kevin Czartoryski said. Pillco, 19, was picked up early Monday and was questioned for several hours until "he made statements," said Czartoryski, who would not say what they were. Shelly, who appeared in the movie "Factotum" last year, was renovating the Greenwich Village apartment she used as her residence and office. Pillco, one of the workers, was one of...

On election day, I was in New York City. You know what a lot of New Yorkers were buzzing about that day? Not the election. They were buzzing about a tragic story that has disappeared under the national MSM radar screen--even though folks who live in the city (including journalists) are still talking about it around the water cooler and the local tabloids have covered it wall-to-wall. Last week, a veteran indie-film actress was found dead: The body of a beautiful, talented actress was hanging from a shower rod in the bathtub of a Greenwich Village apartment by her horrified...

'KILLER'S' UNDERWORLD' ACTRESS SLAY' ILLEGAL LIVED IN BASEMENT DEN By HEATHER GILMORE and DOUGLAS MONTERO November 12, 2006 -- Diego Pillco, the teen accused of killing indie-film actress Adrienne Shelly for fear he would be deported, lived in hiding with his illegal-immigrant relatives in a basement boiler-room hovel owned by their construction boss. Access to the dungeonlike lair the 19-year-old shared with his brother Wilson and cousin in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, is hidden behind the main stairs of a three-story brick apartment building. A small door leads to narrow plywood steps and the windowless underground home. Placed around the dingy...