A man convicted of the “ritualistic” murders of a mother and teenage son during a cocaine-fueled home robbery on Long Island more than 20 years ago was sentenced yesterday to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Louis Telese was sentenced to 50 years to life in a case that provided little comfort to the victim’s relative Michael Eigen, who was only 11 years old when he came home to find his relatives slaughtered.
His mother Susan, 41, was sexually assaulted and strangled and his older brother, Richard, 17, was suffocated inside the family’s Oceanside home in February 1984.
Before the sentencing, Michael, now 31, fought back his tears and told the Nassau County courtroom about the demons he had lived with since the day he found his mother dead, sprawled naked and tied to a second-floor balcony.
“He didn’t give me any Miranda rights, a trial, a jury of my peers. He gave me a life of haunting memories and visions that cannot be erased,” Eigen said.
Michael’s sister Karen, who was not present for the sentencing, had a statement read to the court by a friend.
“Someone close to me once described my life as a broken life,” she wrote. “I still have no idea how someday I will explain to my children why I don’t have a mother.”
Judge Joseph Calabrese showed no mercy in sentencing Telese to two consecutive 25-to-life sentences.
“These murders were horrific. They had a certain sadistic quality to them that they were almost ritualistic. Each of them were perpetrated without mercy and designed to give the most pain and suffering to the victims,” said the judge.
The killer said merely, “I’d like to take this opportunity to give my deepest sympathies to the loved ones of the victims.”
Telese was led away in two sets of handcuffs, with the chains lengthened to fit his obese girth.
In 2002 cops were able to track down Telese, of Nanuet, through a set of fingerprints he had submitted for a job as a school bus driver in 1988. Cops were also able to match him to a thumbprint found on the plastic bag used to suffocate Richard Eigen.
Cops maintained that Telese had gone to the Eigen’s waterfront home intending to rob it in order to feed his cocaine habit. Instead, he found Susan Eigen at home. When her son Richard walked in on the murder, he was also eliminated as a witness.