… testifying against Gilberto Valle (inset with their baby).
GRILLED: Kathleen Mangan-Valle leaves court yesterday after testifying against Gilberto Valle (inset with their baby). (
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He thought his wife was a real dish.
The terrified spouse of accused “cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle repeatedly broke down in sobs, and twice had to leave the witness stand, during testimony yesterday in which she recounted the horrific discovery that her new husband was allegedly plotting to torture and murder her — and rape and cook her friends, too.
Testifying for the prosecution, Kathleen Mangan-Valle tearfully described reading an online chat last year in which her husband, a six-year NYPD vet, made “plans” with an Internet buddy to take her life.
“I was going to be tied up by my feet and my throat slit, and they were going to have fun watching the blood gush out of me because I was young,” she said, choked with emotion.
The pretty brunette said her husband’s Internet pal warned him she might cry in the process and instructed: “Don’t listen to her. Don’t give her mercy.”
“Gil just said, ‘It’s OK. We’ll just gag her,’ ” she told prosecutor Hadassa Waxman. “I was going to be stuffed in a suitcase.”
In an opening statement before Mangan-Valle took the witness stand, Manhattan federal prosecutor Randall Jackson told the jury that the cop plotted to kidnap and kill his wife “in order to satisfy a deeply held desire he had to cannibalize human flesh.”
Mangan-Valle, 27, also said Valle — who wept repeatedly throughout his wife’s testimony — intended to prolong her suffering, recounting, “He said he wanted me to live as long as possible, that he had no remorse at all.”
She said Valle’s friend Andria Noble “was going to be burned alive.”
“He talked about devising an apparatus so the girls could be on the spit for 30-minute shifts and be taken down so they would live longer,” she said.
“The suffering was for his enjoyment, and he wanted to make it last as long as possible.”
Valle, 28, also allegedly discussed raping two women “in front of each other to heighten their fear” and abducting a woman his wife, a former Teach for America volunteer, had worked with at a public school in Harlem.
“He was going to get her in her apartment and put her in a suitcase and wheel her out and deliver her for rape and murder,” the wife testified.
Mangan-Valle said she grew suspicious when Valle lost interest in sex with her following her pregnancy and the birth of their daughter and began spending hours at night on the Web in their Queens home.
One time they did have relations, she said, “he couldn’t finish” and “ran off into the bathroom.”
“I thought there was something wrong with me,” she sobbed.
So she opened the laptop they shared, saw he was still logged in and noticed icons for a Web site called “darkfetishnet.”
“I just remember it was porn, and it was disturbing,” she said.
“I know S&M is popular, with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ but this seemed different. The girl on the front page was dead.”
After she confronted her husband about the discovery, “things got bad” and “these very weird things started happening,” said Mangan-Valle, who met the cop on the OKCupid dating Web site and married him after giving birth to their daughter.
“I started running because I thought that would help if I was thinner or prettier,” Mangan-Valle said.
She broke down after describing how Valle “seemed very interested in my running route” and asked if there were street lights or many people around.
“He encouraged me to run at night,” she said.
She said she installed “keylogger” software on her computer to find out what Valle was up to. The next morning, she checked the spyware and saw “a lot of Web sites that I’d never seen before, and pictures of feet that weren’t attached to bodies.”
“I went to a Web site I didn’t know about . . . and there was a woman just on the front page. She was dangling,” she said.
“She was naked with blood all over her.”
Mangan-Valle said she took their baby daughter, Josephine, and the computer and returned to her home state of Nevada, where she called the FBI.
In opening statements, public defender Julia Gatto told the jury that Valle’s chats were merely “preposterous, infantile chatter” prompted by a “bizarre” sexual fetish.
Under cross-examination by Gatto, Mangan-Valle broke down again as photos of her hubby holding their baby were displayed.
She denied the lawyer’s suggestion that her marriage had been a good one, noting acidly: “The wedding was nice. The marriage was not.”
Additional reporting by Amber Sutherland
bruce.golding@nypost.com