“Carlos is not coming out of that room anymore,” Portuguese underwear model Renato Seabra announced ominously as he left his lover’s bludgeoned and castrated corpse behind on the floor of their Times Square hotel room, according to riveting testimony in the case yesterday.
“I kept asking, ‘Where is Carlos? What is the room number,’ ” the prosecution’s first witness, Wanda Pires, testified of confronting the handsome aspiring model in the lobby of the InterContinental hotel soon after her friend Carlos Castro was murdered in January 2011.
The influential, 65-year-old Portuguese fashion and gossip writer had told her earlier in the day that his 21-year-old boy toy had just announced that he “didn’t want to be gay anymore,” and that they’d fought all the prior night, Pires told a Manhattan jury. She’d then gone to the hotel to find him, she said.
Instead, she found Seabra crossing the lobby on his way out of the hotel — in his best suit, his hair neatly gelled, Pires told jurors. “He kept hesitating,” she said. “When he finally gave us the room number, he said, ‘But Carlos is not coming out of that room anymore.’ He was very calm. He was normal.”
The testimony helps prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal, who is hoping to disprove Seabra’s insanity defense by convincing jurors Seabra killed Castro because the younger man was ending the three-month-old relationship.
Testimony continues today.