She was always on his mind — so he killed her.
Jury selection is due to start today for the Manhattan rape-murder trial of love-obsessed Senegalese accused killer Bakary Camara — a trial that for both sides will hinge on his three-page, hand-scrawled confession.
“I fell in love like never before with her,” the accused knife-swinging killer wrote cops of Italian beauty Rita Morelli, found slashed to death on her bed inside her East Harlem apartment last November.
“I can’t take her out of my mind,” Camara, 42, wrote of the elegant, 36-year-old Borough of Manhattan Community College student, who he’d met when she worked sales and he worked security at the 7 For All Mankind shop on West Broadway in 2009.
For the prosecution, the disjointed, misspelling-laced letter is evidence of guilt. “I went to my ex-girl Rita around 8 p.m.,” he writes. “I kill her and I want to get kill … or I will hurt again.”
But the defense seems poised to use the letter to show Camara believed he was powerless against a curse — or ‘curs,’ as he spelled it — and so could not have killed her intentionally.
“They put a curs on me,” he wrote. “They make me seck[cq]” wrote Camara, who was raised in Senegal but born in the U.S. “They make you do anythings,” he wrote. “Could make you die fast or go to jail… you always be mad and sad. This is a curs.”
Camara lawyer Seema Iyer and prosecutor Evan Krutoy are also set to argue today over defense plans to present testimony from an expert “spiritualist” that the DA derides as a “witch doctor.”
It is unclear if Camara and Morelli had been lovers, as Camara claims in the letter. U.S.-based Italian journalist Giorgio Morelli, of Dutchess County, insists his cousin, a lover of fine food, museums and high fashion, would never have bothered with someone so “course” and “low.”
Prosecutors and law enforcement sources have termed the former relationship a romantic one.
Camara faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted of the top charge, first degree murder.