First came the love, then came the castration.
A Portuguese fashion journalist seemed head over heels in love last year as he vacationed in New York with the young, Portuguese underwear model who just days later would bludgeon, strangle and then castrate him alive with a corkscrew in their Times Square hotel room, the victim’s close friend told a Manhattan jury this morning.
The vacationing lovers seemed at first delighted with each other, the pal said of Carlos Castro, 65, and Renato Seabra, an aspiring model who was just 21.
“It was the best thing that ever happened in his life,” Castro told Wanda Pires of the relationship, Pires told jurors. “They were just happy.”
There was no talk of the “evil” or “demons” that Seabra would claim compelled him just days later to kill Castro slowly, over the course of an hour, last January 7 as they argued in their room at the InterContinental hotel, said Pires, the first witness in the sensational trial.
Defense lawyers are trying to show that Seabra had mentally snapped when he attacked Castro. It was legally, and patently, insane for the younger man to bludgeon the older man with the hotel room’s television, stomp on his face, strangle him and then castrate him with a corkscrew as he lay unconscious on the carpet.
Seabra told doctors that he then severed Castro’s testicles to remove the “evil” of homosexuality — and then applied them to his own slit wrists so that he could “harness their power.”
But prosecutors are using Pires’s testimony today to show that the two had been lovey-dovey until the day before the murder — when Seabra began taunting his sugar daddy by openly ogling young women at the hotel — even getting their phone numbers. If Seabra snapped on January 7, prosecutors say, it was from rage, because Castro wanted out of the relationship and the gravy train was ending.
The older Castro had lavished costly gifts on the young man since they met in October, 2010, including a watch and cell phone, Pires said. Castro planned to escort Seabra to casinos, basketball games, modeling agencies, and shopping malls during their time in New York, she said.
“He would hand over his credit card,” she said, of a trip to a mall and dinner in Edgewater, NJ, on January 4, just three days before the murder.
“Carlos was just giving money to Renato to gamble,” she said of a trip to Atlantic City she joined them on the next day.
The cooing lovebirds would even feed each other at dinner, she said of their meals at lavish casinos.
“At one point in time he was feeding Carlos in his mouth, I don’t’ remember if it was fish, meat,” Pires told jurors.
“So he had a fork or spoon and he held it to his mouth?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes.”
“And what was Carlos’ response to that?”
“Smiling. Everytime they went to eat they were sharing food with each other… very friendly, very happy. Very normal relationship,” she said.
“Renato was very overprotective of Carlos, always behind him looking what he is doing, caring, pleasant,” she testified. “Renato is alway smiling, always had a smile on his face.”
“What about Carlos?” asked prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal.
“The same.”
Only the night before the murder, when she met Castro at the InterContinental lobby so they could leave for dinner, Pires learned the two were having troubles.
“They are both mad, with the face,” she said, pulling a long face on the witness stand.
She spoke to him the morning of the slaying, she told jurors. “He said they were fighting all night,” she said Carlos told him. “She said Renato told him that he is not gay anymore,” and that he would rather pleasure himself than be with the older man.
Testimony by Pires continues this afternoon.