Cobra Killer (37 page)

Melnick’s relentless references to the tape transcripts, and even offers to have the phone conversations replayed for the jury, seemed to irritate Cuadra significantly, with the defendant offering an exasperated, “There is a lot more that goes to that, Mr. Melnick. There really is. That (tape) is not the whole picture. It is just not.”
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He also questioned why Cuadra would describe Kerekes repeatedly as this “tyrannical figure,” yet “despite that you had multiple three-way conversations with him and Renee Martin time and time again.”
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“Yes sir, I loved him,” Cuadra replied. “I missed him. The first year being incarcerated was so difficult. It’s, you know, somebody treats you like dirt and you don’t have the guts to just leave them, you feel like you just need them, and now all of a sudden I was liberated from him, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how to act.”
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Cuadra attempted to offer a similar explanation when Melnick confronted him about one telephone call taped with Kerekes from the jail in which Cuadra is recorded as cautioning his partner while discussing alibis and explanations: “Don’t make my hole too deep for me to crawl out of, you know. I know (investigators) don’t believe that I opened the door and saw the body. I know they don’t believe that.”
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Perhaps sensing he had put Cuadra on his heels and off his more confident direct testimony, Melnick began questioning him about an undoubtedly even more painful period of his life involving his alleged childhood molestation. He asked that if his childhood was so damaging and awful, why did Cuadra make his alleged molester the beneficiary of his $50,000 life insurance policy upon enlisting in the U.S. Navy? “Stockholm Syndrome,” Cuadra said. “Even my mother, to this day, tried to get me to stop forgiving him so much. It’s hard, but I forgave him for years of that (sexual abuse) and I wish him well in life. Maybe I’m too soft, I’m too easy to forgive people, but that’s just the way I am.”
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Melnick even tried to demonstrate how Cuadra’s Naval training as a hospital corpsman may have assisted or instructed him on working with knives, the undisputed weapon used to kill Kocis. “I never had knife training, sir,” Cuadra said. “I knew how to give sutures. That was about the extent of poking or withdrawing blood, but (I) never made incisions.”
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The state was successful in getting Cuadra to disclose that most, if not all, of the couple’s credit cards and bank accounts were set up using Cuadra’s name and credit. Kerekes’ previous bankruptcy had made it difficult or impossible for him to obtain credit on his own, and by showing Cuadra had more control over what credit the couple could access helped diminish the argument that Kerekes controlled Cuadra in all matters of life.

The cross-examination also served to emphasize that Cuadra had at least
one
open chance to flee from Kerekes, if he in fact needed one, when he went
alone
to Mitch Halford’s home to borrow a truck. Cuadra said he feared Kerekes would kill Halford if he tried that, and so he took the truck and went back to flee south with Kerekes.

Cuadra’s participation in interviews with producers from MTV and HereTV! were also highlighted by Melnick to help demonstrate he was making his own choices about what to do and what not to do. It was a good opening for Melnick to pursue, because in the HereTV! audio-taped phone interview, Cuadra had to acknowledge that he is heard on tape saying it was his idea to come to Pennsylvania to see Kocis: “Even when I wanted to come to Pennsylvania, not physically, but (Joseph) fought me on it. ‘No, no, no. I don’t want you meeting with that queer. Blah, blah, blah.’ I’m like, dude, come on!”
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Cuadra began to weep quietly on the witness stand and could only muster in response that he didn’t realize he was being taped for a documentary, and his old stand-by response: it was all Joseph Kerekes’ idea. Kerekes was “wicked” and “twisted,” Cuadra said.
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Retelling the murder scene

Melnick then asked Cuadra to explain why he claimed Kocis had cried out, “Why are you doing this?” as he was attacked, when the pathologist indicated that Kocis’ neck, vocal cords, hyoid bone, and carotid artery were all destroyed with one swoop of a knife.

First Cuadra said it was because Kerekes “took that swipe out of the side of his neck when he got him on that couch, it wasn’t all the way because I was tugging at him to stop.” But Cuadra admitted “memory is a tricky companion” and that as best he could remember Kocis said something before dying. “Maybe he said that before he sliced him, because he got him on the couch first and they were struggling; and then he went into his pocket and pulled out that little knife and that’s when he did that,” Cuadra tried to explain.
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Inconsistency in Cuadra’s story also came up as Melnick walked him through photographs taken at the murder scene shortly after the fire was put out. He succeeded in having Cuadra admit that the cocktail table was not tipped over in some violent fight, as he had described earlier, but Cuadra had an explanation for that too: “Please keep in mind that Joseph stayed in the house for about fifteen, twenty minutes” and could have righted the table and put the wine glasses back in the kitchen sink, he said.
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Cuadra again struggled to keep his story straight on what Kocis’ behavior had been the night he died. During direct examination from his own lawyers, Cuadra said Kocis had acted “as a perfect gentleman” and had not done or said anything lewd. However, under intense questioning from Melnick he embellished the story to say Kocis “had his hand on my penis. He answered the phone and was able to get to the door at the same time.” Melnick drew a few snickers when he responded, “And would you agree with me that it would be inconsistent to be answering the phone, that he’s dragging you by the groin (and) going to answer the doorbell? That should be pretty hard to do?”
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On a few other topics, however, Melnick was less successful in getting Cuadra to contradict himself. Little headway was made in directly implicating Cuadra in any alleged reconnaissance work a day before the murder at Kocis’ house. Despite cell phone tower reports that showed his phone in use near the Kocis home, Cuadra stuck to his assertion that at least twice, once while he slept in the motel room, and once while he worked out at a local gym, Kerekes left on his own without telling Cuadra where he was.

Cuadra vs. Melnick

The defendant and the prosecutor openly sparred on more than one occasion—perhaps not unexpectedly. Prior to the trial, Cuadra told documentary producer John Roecker (via a jailhouse telephone interview) that he viewed Melnick as “a smart guy” but one who “looks like he could be a hard ass,” who had had the wool pulled over his eyes by other witnesses. “It’s hard to believe that someone that smart like this prosecutor is…would continue to hound us like this,” Cuadra said.
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Cuadra seemed to take most umbrage when Melnick would identify him as the killer of Bryan Kocis. Cuadra defiantly declared that the only person saying that he had killed Kocis was the district attorney, not any of the witnesses. “Mr. Melnick, you’re the only one out of ninety, out of ninety, I counted them this morning, ninety people that have taken the stand for you, (and) you’re the only one that is calling me a murderer or an accomplice or a conspirator,” Cuadra said, motioning to a slip of paper he pulled from his breast pocket with the number ninety circled on it. “You’re the only one. Your statements (Mr. Melnick) are not evidence, only what is said up here on the stand.”(The state actually called eighty-six witnesses and the defense two.)
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He later asserted that Melnick had “coached” witnesses who testified against him.

He also alleged from the stand that Lockhart and Roy were lying and had joined “in collusion to get their stories straight to be able to make you (Melnick) happy so they can go back to San Diego and carry on with their lives.”
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For his part, Melnick attempted to paint Cuadra as a coward who worked to get out of the Navy just as U.S. military forces were ramping up their efforts to begin protracted military conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Cuadra’s attorneys strongly objected to that line of questioning, and the court agreed.

Melnick tried a bit more, prompting Cuadra to shout out, “I am not a coward!”
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Cuadra’s attorneys admonished him not to answer and asked the judge to remind Melnick that he cannot continue to ask questions that the court ruled were irrelevant.

Cuadra repeated his claim of having lived like “a battered wife does” and made excuses for Kerekes’ behavior; he said it hurt him to speak poorly of Kerekes after the fact, and that before he got away from Kerekes he spoke up for him to others. He said, “I mean, I saw a very sweet side of Joe that nobody else ever did see. I was defending Joe to people.”
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In Cuadra’s mind, “(Kerekes) had a lot of chances to get away with this and to blame it all on me, but he plead guilty to murder and he came here willing to cooperate, but he changed his mind and leaves.”
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During this same period, Cuadra reminded Melnick through tears, “I have always held onto my innocence, always.”
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1)

Continuing down this line, Cuadra opened his own summary argument on Kerekes and his theory of why he did not try to defend himself: “He was guilty of murder, and Joseph Kerekes pleaded guilty to murder…in his conscience, he’s ashamed of it. (When he was here in court), he could look no one in the face. He looked down to the floor and left as fast as possible. He is guilty of murder. He killed Bryan Kocis.”
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Seeing an opening, Melnick added, “Now that you mention the subject, let’s follow up on that. (Kerekes) admitted he was your accomplice…” The words were barely out of the prosecutor’s mouth when Cuadra’s counsel Walker strongly objected.

“Your honor, I would object to that,” Walker said. “I don’t know that there has been any admission in court.”

The judge agreed. “That is absolutely false and untrue, Mr. Melnick,” Judge Olszewski said. “And I don’t want to hear that question again.”

Melnick tried to explain, but Olszewski had heard enough.

“I don’t want to hear that question again. That is the last time I am going to tell you (that). The question was most improper,” Olszewski said.
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The judge has a question

Interestingly, at the end of Cuadra’s testimony, Olszewski himself posed a question to the defendant (in front of the jury). The judge asked him whether he was stating Kerekes had anything in his hand when he allegedly burst into Kocis’ home and asked for more clarification of Kerekes’ alleged movements immediately after Kocis was slain. The judge also had Cuadra confirm that Kerekes drove the SUV away from Kocis’ home and was wearing the same clothing as when he went into the home to allegedly attack Kocis.

Cuadra offered, “Your honor, his hands were clean, no blood on them, so I assumed that he had washed them in either a bathroom or a sink.”
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The judge’s question and Cuadra’s response would later prove important to some of the jury members. One juror, Jim Scutt said, “I’ve shot deer, many deer in my life and the femoral artery or any artery will squirt blood like a fountain.”
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He made a mental note of Cuadra’s claim that Kerekes did not take anything into the house with him and that he had on “a nice pair of jeans on and a shirt.” From that, Scutt asks: “I guess he drove back to Virginia Beach in blood-laden clothes?” It’s a claim he doesn’t believe, noting that it was Cuadra who said he took a backpack into the home with him, not Kerekes. “If you sliced someone’s throat to the point of decapitation, you would have blood all over you,” Scutt said. “Joe (Kerekes) wasn’t in there killing him.”
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Judge Olszewski’s question ended twenty-four hours of testimony on the stand for Cuadra and the defense rested. No other witnesses were called by D’Andrea and Walker.

Closing arguments

In presenting closing arguments to the jury, both defense and state attorneys took about an hour making their case, with Cuadra’s defense attorney Joseph D’Andrea going first.

D’Andrea told jurors that first and foremost his client was innocent. He said Cuadra lacked the physical ability to have killed Kocis. “The horror that was inflicted on Bryan Kocis by his killer was terrible,” D’Andrea said. “But a mystery remains, who is Bryan Kocis’ killer?”
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D’Andrea asked jurors to remember the seven-minute videotape they had watched of Cuadra and Lockhart tossing a football back and forth on Black’s Beach in San Diego. “I hate to be so condescending, but it was almost feminine,” D’Andrea said of his client’s throwing ability. “Harlow is not a jock. Harlow is not the muscleman who has the physical ability to kill.”
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D’Andrea’s argument about Cuadra’s football throwing style did not impress at least one of the jurors. Juror Tom Stavitzski, a former football player and coach, told his fellow jurors that he knew many strong players who couldn’t throw a football well.

Regardless, D’Andrea continued to poke at the state’s circumstantial evidence, including the state’s contention that Cuadra purchased condoms and lube before going to Kocis’ home. “You’re not worried about safe sex if you’re going to kill someone,” D’Andrea said. “At best, my client was a witness to a crime. My client didn’t have to testify. He didn’t have to sit here and be barraged for two days. He waited for two years to talk to you folks.”
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