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What a twisted weapon.
The bloody corkscrew that a handsome Portuguese model used to geld his elderly lover was shown to stunned jurors in his horrific castration murder trial yesterday.
Renato Seabra, 22, admits to using the bottle opener to gouge off the testicles of wealthy Portuguese fashion journalist Carlos Castro, 65, during a sickening January 2011 slaying.
In daylong testimony in Manhattan Supreme Court, NYPD crime-scene Detective Ricardo Yanis described to jurors images of items on the blood-splattered floor of a room at the InterContinental hotel in Times Square, where the corkscrew was found.
“What is in this picture?” prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal asked the detective.
“It is a corkscrew showing possible blood,” Yanis said. In the photo, the corkscrew lay atop a white hotel slipper on the carpeting.
Also atop the slipper lay a small square note, on which was written in Portuguese, “Atras . . . mas boa pessoa — poucas vezes.”
The message, in English, is cryptic: “Behind . . . but good person — few times.”
Prosecutors said Seabra also used the corkscrew to disfigure his lover’s face.
“Here you have a white blanket cover, and the black sneakers, and the decedent’s testicle on the white blanket,” Yanis testified. A broken and bloody wine glass also was found in the room.
The floor was a tangle of bloody towels and discarded laundry, including Seabra’s black Calvin Klein “extreme skinny” label jeans.
Defense lawyers David Touger and Rubin Sinins say the crime scene is evidence of Seabra’s insanity — as are his statements to shrinks explaining his lover’s corkscrew castration as a way of exorcising the “evil” and “demons” within.
Seabra told shrinks he then slit his own wrists, and held Castro’s severed testicles to his bleeding arms to “harness their power.”
Rosenthal showed Yanis images that appeared to show Seabra’s testicles in the hotel room.
“Here you can see the decedent’s other testicle,” the detective said, indicating a lump of flesh that lay on the carpeting to the side of the room’s bed, flush against the wall as if it had been tossed there.
Some of the photos went beyond merely recording evidence, and suggest a chronology.
“This shows where the bloodstain happened,” the detective said of a photo of the bloody bottom hems of the room’s silver, floor-to-ceiling curtains.
“And then the curtain was closed.”
Hotel security video indicates Seabra had spent some five hours in the room — amid the bloodstains and broken glass and furnishings, with Castro’s uncovered, naked corpse on the floor the whole time, the face an unrecognizable crimson pulp.
The detective would later spend 13 hours in the room, meticulously cataloguing the carnage.
Testimony continues Monday.