Closing Arguments end in New York "Cannibal Cop" case
By Chris Francescani | Reuters – 4 hrs ago
Reuters/Reuters - Former New York City police officer Gilberto Valle (L), dubbed by local media as the
"Cannibal Cop", listens as his wife Kathleen
Mangan testifies in this courtroom sketch on the first day
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City's accused "cannibal cop" crossed the line from fantasy to reality in plotting to kidnap, cook and eat women, a federal prosecutor told a jury in closing arguments on Thursday.
Defense attorney Julia Gatto countered in summations that her client was playing a fantasy role online, and told jurors "we don't convict human beings because of ugly thoughts ... even if they are police officers."
In a case featuring grisly testimony, New York City Police Officer Gilberto Valle, 28, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of conspiring to kidnap and a charge of improperly accessing a law enforcement database to gather personal information about potential targets.
The jury of six women and six men deliberated for several hours after closing arguments without reaching a verdict. They are due to resume deliberations on Friday morning at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Hadassa Waxman said in her closing argument that Valle was at one point engaged in fantasy, but that his intentions had grown more sinister.
Pointing to his extensive online research on kidnapping, making chloroform and cooking women, she said: "These are real searches conducted to carry out real research to kidnap real women."
"This case is not about freedom of speech, or freedom of thought," Waxman told jurors. Fetish websites "are not on trial here. This is about Gilberto Valle's plans to hurt young women."
But defense attorney Gatto compared Valle's online activity to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast on October 30, 1938, which many Americans mistook for a real alien invasion.
Valle's role play "was set up to sound as real as it could, sprinkled with real details," she said.
When others come across it, Gatto said, "panic ensues, because they think it's real ... but it's all make believe."
Gatto told jurors that after nearly a year of fantasizing about roughly two dozen women - in many cases, discussing kidnapping with other fetishists - none of the plotters had ever met, exchanged money or committed any crimes.
Valle, dubbed the "cannibal cop" by the tabloid media, did not testify.
The trial has brought to light a macabre community of cyberspace where millions of people discuss and exchange images and video of extraordinary brutality, much of it staged.
On Tuesday, defense attorneys took jurors on a video tour of DarkFetishNet.com, a website at the heart of Valle's case.
The website functions like mainstream social media networks and its creator, Russian Web entrepreneur Sergay Merenkov, likened it to Facebook in a videotaped deposition earlier in the week. However, instead of family photos and cat videos, members share photos and videos of extreme cruelty - including rape and asphyxiation - with the goal of sexual stimulation.
Members dream up brutally violent scripts, said Merenkov, who has kicked members off the site when "it seemed not to be fantasy anymore."
Prosecutors said Valle revealed himself to be such a person when he began taking steps to act on his fantasies.
More Sorid Details Revealed
By The Huffington Post:
NEW YORK — Lawyers asked a jury on Thursday to decide whether a police officer was a monster with a badge and a dangerous desire to cannibalize women or a failed family man whose disturbing fantasies ruined his life but never put anyone in jeopardy.
The jurors began deliberating after hearing the conflicting portraits of Officer Gilberto Valle in closing arguments at his kidnapping conspiracy trial. They deliberated for about an hour before going home for the day without a verdict and were to return Friday.
Valle's chats on fetish websites about abducting, torturing and eating at least six women, including his wife, "are no more real than an alien invasion," defense attorney Julia Gatto had told the jury earlier Thursday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Hadassa Waxman said the evidence showed Valle "left the world of fantasy and entered the world of reality." The officer's actions were "no joke," she added. "It was not just sick entertainment."
In a rebuttal argument given before the jury got the case, prosecutor Randall Jackson labeled Valle "a sexually sadistic individual."
Jackson also said the alarming material uncovered by an analysis of Valle's computers was like other investigations that found people "engaging in fantastical discussions about seeing planes exploding" – a comparison that prompted the defense to ask for a mistrial, arguing he was trying to frighten the jury with a veiled reference to terrorism. The judge disagreed and denied the motion.
The arguments came at the close of a two-week trial in federal court in Manhattan that has made the baby-faced officer a tabloid sensation. Jurors sometimes appeared squeamish when shown sadistic images like a staged video of a chained, naked woman screaming as the flame of a torch was put beneath her crotch. The 28-year-old officer openly wept over his wife's testimony describing how she uncovered his late-night computer activity, fled their home with their infant child and contacted the FBI.
Valle's arrest last year interrupted a ghoulish plan to "kidnap, torture, rape and commit other horrific acts on young women," Waxman said Thursday.
The prosecutor argued that Valle took concrete steps to further the plot – looking up potential targets on a restricted law enforcement database, searching the Internet for how to knock someone out with chloroform and showing up on the block of one woman after agreeing to kidnap her for $5,000.
Valle also viewed a clip of the slaughter of a goat, a "gruesome video ... a practical how-to guide to killing, an educational tool for Valle's killing," the prosecutor said.
At trial, the jury heard the testimony of women who knew Valle and were trading innocent-sounding emails and texts with him at the same time prosecutors say he was scheming to make meals out of them. The government also sought to drive home the point that Valle was more of a threat because he was a police officer.
"Women who wanted no part of this were put in grave danger by that man, Gilberto Valle," Waxman said.
The defense claims Valle is being prosecuted for indulging in offensive but harmless fantasies fed by visits to websites meant solely for role-play.
Gatto started her closing by reading from a 2012 Valle email saying, "I just have a world in my mind and in that world I am kidnapping women and selling them to people interested in buying them."
The attorney called her client's obsession with cannibalism a "stupid, infantile" habit that destroyed his life but not proof of a conspiracy with three other people he never met in person. The defendant, wearing a dark suit and yellow tie, again cried as his lawyer described how the case had "cost him everything," including his wife and "adorable baby."
Gatto also compared the Valle case to the infamous 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, which, according to myth, caused some people to flee their homes. Likewise, she said, Valle's role in "dark improv theater" caused his wife to panic and set in motion a misguided prosecution.
The lawyer argued Valle's only crime was fantasizing about doing sick things to women he knew.
"That's Gil's porn," she said. "Gil has a fetish. He's had it for a long time."
Gilberto Valle
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