A former Stuyvesant HS librarian headed to trial next week over a sick plot to rape and murder women and children was motivated by a sadistic torture video he kept stashed at home that authorities say served as a “how-to” guide for living out the twisted fantasies.
Now prosecutors want Manhattan federal Judge Paul Gardephe to let them provide prospective jurors with deranged details of the video, titled “Pain 35,” that the FBI seized last year from the Greenwich Village home of 62-year-old Christopher Asch, along with roughly 100 others — including another creepy video one filled with child porn.
Authorities came upon the Asch case while investigating the notorious NYPD “cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle, a former police officer who was convicted last year of a plot to kidnap, cook and eat women.
The “Pain 35” video, the feds say, depicts two men torturing two nearly naked women with nipple clamps, a leg spreader, riding crop, handcuffs, rope and “at one point, the men insert needles into one of the woman’s buttocks, breasts and genitals.”
“The FBI believes that women in Pain 35 are not actors, and are actually being tortured,” Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a Jan. 8 letter to Gardephe.
Prosecutors aren’t planning to play the video in court but may offer jurors a handful of selected “screen shots” from Pain 35. They also plan to have an FBI agent describe the video in detail to jurors to help show Asch intended to carry out his grizzly plan and wasn’t just “fantasizing” as he alleges.
Bharara said the video’s content “will undoubtedly be shocking to members of the jury” but added it’s something they must be aware of because Asch allegedly used it as a “practical ‘how-to’ guide to kidnapping, restraining and inflicting pain on his intended targets.”
He said Asch in March and April of 2013 gave an undercover FBI agent “the very same instruments” used in the video “for use on a female undercover” FBI agent.
The video is apparently so damning that alleged co-conspirator Michael Van Hise asked Gardephe on Friday to be tried separately because he doesn’t want his case tainted by “Pain 35.”
Brian Waller, Asch’s lawyer, in legal filings Friday asked the tape be withheld at trial because it could “deeply prejudice a jury against” the former librarian.
“Regardless of Asch’s guilt or innocence, this material will bias any jury,” he said. “The highly prejudicial nature of such a video is indisputable.”
Provided Asch doesn’t testify, the government says it isn’t currently planning to enter as evidence the child porn tape, Asch’s membership in the controversial North American Man/Boy Love Association or that he was once accused of inappropriately touching male students at Stuyvesant HS. He was arrested in the Stuyvesant case in 2009, but the charges were dropped.
Asch and Richard Meltz — an ex-chief of police at the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass — were busted in 2013 during the feds’ probe of Van Hise, who was a cohort of Valle.
Meltz pleaded guilty on Thursday.
Asch and Meltz offered to help Van Hise when he said he wanted his wife, sister-in-law and sister-in-law’s kids raped and murdered, the feds say.
The case grew out of an investigation into Valle, who was convicted last year of a plot to kidnap, cook and eat women.