Metro

Icy smirk of evil killer

They sobbed. She smirked.

As the tearful daughters of slain Realtor to the stars Linda Stein pleaded for justice in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday, her ice-blooded young murderess, Natavia Lowery, simply rolled her eyes and showily flipped through legal papers.

Lowery, 28, was unbowed and unrepentant, laughing with her lawyer even as a judge sentenced her to 27 1/3 years to life in prison — the maximum allowed for the murder’s two dozen skull-shattering blows and the $30,000 embezzlement that had sparked the fatal 2007 confrontation in Stein’s Fifth Avenue penthouse.

“You beat her to death,” Stein’s eldest daughter, Samantha, 38, said through tears, glaring at her mother’s personal-assistant-turned-killer as she stood at a podium to make an emotional victim-impact statement.

“You are a disgusting person,” Samantha wailed in anguish. “Do you know the pain I wake up to every day?”

Still, Lowery kept whispering with her lawyer at the defense table.

“Where is your apology?” Samantha sobbed. “Where is your remorse? . . . You can’t even look at me today!”

Only then Lowery turned.

And the murderer flashed a smile at the crying woman.

“Natavia,” Samantha went on, undeterred. “You know the truth. The whole world knows the truth: Natavia Lowery will forever leave a legacy as a murderer and a thief. You will forever leave a legacy of hate.”

Lowery’s response was one last smirk for Samantha.

Then she turned again to give a warm smile over her left shoulder to her family.

The display was so galling, even Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers made mention of Lowery’s coldness as he pronounced sentence.

“She was reading documents and looking completely unconcerned as the victims were reading their heart-rending statements,” the judge noted, calling Lowery a cool, calculated murderer who could lie on the phone about Stein’s whereabouts to cover her tracks, even “at a time when the bloody corpse was lying at her feet.”

The last laugh, though, may be on Lowery. Under the sentence, she will be in her early 50s before she even sees her first parole board.

And the court record that the parole board will review will include a transcript of the judge recommending yesterday that Lowery stay caged for life.

“Miss Lowery acted with an uncommon and almost inhuman degree of coolness and calculation,” the judge noted, agreeing with prosecutors that the bludgeoning was no impulsive act.

The evidence, he agreed, showed Lowery’s astounding level of mental preparedness to take a life to save her own hide.

Hired through a temp agency by Stein’s bosses at the real-estate brokerage Douglas Elliman, Lowery had worked for Stein a mere four months, largely out of Stein’s apartment — and had started stealing from her almost immediately.

It took the trusting Stein all four of those months to realize the young woman she had welcomed into her home — the young woman who helped her dress, did her hair, went with her across Fifth Avenue for walks in Central Park — was running up her credit cards and writing checks in her name.

The night before she died, Stein told one of her closest friends that she was about to confront Lowery on the thefts.

Both the judge and the lead prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, noted yesterday that Lowery was acting in a calculated way when she took a blunt object — the actual weapon was never recovered or identified — and beat her boss to death.

“When a person commits a horrible crime impulsively, they will exhibit involuntary manifestations of what they have done,” the judge said.

But Lowery didn’t cower or hide, the judge said. Instead, Lowery calmly lied on the phone to Stein’s ex-husband, Seymour Stein, president of Sire Records — telling him her boss was out for a walk even as Stein lay on her carpet in a puddle of blood, possibly still dying.

Lowery had the level-headedness to realize she couldn’t walk downstairs — into the path of the surveillance cameras in Stein’s apartment lobby — wearing bloody cargo pants. The surveillance video showed she had merely turned the pants inside out before leaving.

“She famously turned her pants inside out — no doubt to hide from view bloody signs of what she had done,” the judge said. “Why else would she do that? It was obviously not a fashion statement.”

Stein’s younger daughter, Mandy, 35, also took a turn at the podium, calling Lowery “brutal, violent and inhumane.”

“I was the person to find my mother savagely beaten on the floor,” Mandy said.

“I am haunted by images of what I saw that night, as well as what I felt — my mother’s body, hard as a rock and cold to the touch. That hideous memory constantly seeps into my thoughts and dreams.”

The city’s real-estate industry “lost one of its strongest women,” Mandy said of Stein, who repped at various times Elton John, Madonna, Angelina Jolie and who, in a previous music career, managed the Ramones.

Given her own opportunity to speak, Lowery griped about the judge’s decisions throughout the trial, and about her “inadequate and incompetent” former defense team.

“I was never afforded a fair trial,” she said, uttering not a word about the murder itself.

“This is just the beginning of a new fight, of a new beginning to get a fair trial,” she threatened.

Her new lawyer, Paul Brenner, has vowed to file both a motion to set aside the verdict and an appeal, and continues to insist his client is innocent.

laura.italiano@nypost.com