The husband of murdered actress Adrienne Shelly today told his wife’s killer to “rot” in jail – a sentiment echoed by the judge, who tossed him in prison 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, who was a teenage illegal immigrant when he hung her from a shower rod in her Greenwich Village apartment in November 2006.
Both spoke heartbreakingly of Shelly’s toddler, Sophie, who was only two and a half years old when her mother was slain.
The indie filmmaker’s body was hanging by the neck. In his confession, Pillco noted he tied the bedsheet using the same knot he’d learned when stringing up pigs in his native Ecuador.
Little Sophie “will never again hold her mother’s hand, kiss her mother’s face, or feel her mother’s hug,” said Shelly’s mother, Elaine Langbaum. “Now, I know sadness as I have never, ever known it before.
“You have taken her from us and for that there can never be any forgiveness.”
Pillco was painting an under-renovation apartment one flight down from Shelly’s Abingdon Square writing offices, and had followed her to her door during his lunch break – bent on rape or robbery or both.
He clamped his hand over Shelly’s face “out of desperation,” after she threatened to call the police, he confessed last month.
When the struggling woman fell to the floor, “I was very scared,” he admitted. That’s when he took a bedsheet or bed covering, knotted it around her neck, and hoisted her up to the shower rod.
He was too short to do it on tiptoes. He stepped, instead, on the toilet seat cover. Cops know this, because Pillco’s construction site was covered with gypsum dust, and they found on the toilet seat cover a perfect footprint, in gypsum, matching Pillco’s workboots.
Today, Pillco made a feint at apologizing. Killing Shelly had not been his intention when he went to her building that day, he insisted. “I came with the purpose to do work, and to help my family out,” he said, speaking through a Spanish interpreter.
“I have suffered because I know what I have done,” he said.
There was no sympathy to be had in the courtroom.
Shelly, who was also helping raise Ostroy’s teenaged daughter, died at the height of her creativity.
Her last movie, “Waitress” which she wrote, directed and acted in – would wind up triumphing at Sundance Film Festival, going on to get good reviews and big ticket sales at theaters nationwide last summer.