‘Cannibal cop’ Gilberto Valle faces life in prison after jury finds him guilty of conspiracy to kidnap and illegal use of federal databases
Stick a fork in him.
“Cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle is looking at the possibility of life in prison after a Manhattan federal jury found him guilty of conspiring to kidnap women, then cook, kill and eat them.
Valle, 28, shook his head no as the jury foreman read the verdict Tuesday morning, and later broke down in tears
The NYPD officer hugged his defense lawyer, Julia Gatto, before he was led away in handcuffs.
Gatto said the married dad was “devastated” by the verdict. “It was an emotional and shocking moment for him,” Gatto said.
The ruling also stunned Valle’s mom, Elizabeth Valle, who’d been in court for every day of the sensational, gruesome and embarrassing 12-day trial.
“I’m in shock,” the furious mom said. “What trial were they watching?”
Gatto said: “This was a thought prosecution. These are thoughts, very ugly thoughts, but we don’t prosecute people for their thoughts.”
“The jury couldn’t get past the thoughts,” she said.
Juror Victor Pineiro told the Daily News he disagreed.
“I think anyone who would have sat down and looked at the evidence like we did would have come to the same conclusion,” he said.
“My conscience is clear that I’ve done a just thing today.”
Prosecutors contended the city cop was “a sexual sadist” who had been seeking guidance online for how to abduct, torture, rape, cook, kill and eat women, including his wife, two old college friends and an Archbishop Molloy High School softball star.
Their key piece of evidence was Valle’s family computer, which had been handed over to the feds by Valle’s wife of three months, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, after she discovered his horrifying plans.
The computer at their Forest Hills, Queens, home was loaded with crime-scene pictures of dead and mutilated women, twisted images of women being tortured and sexually assaulted, pictures of female friends he’d downloaded from Facebook, Google searches for terms like, “How to kidnap a woman” and “human meat recipes,” and sickening chats with three co-conspirators where he spoke about his stomach-churning plans for his victims.
Valle’s lawyers maintained he was engaging in “fantasy role play” with like-minded “death fetishists” he’d met online. Gatto said Valle liked to pepper his stories with real-life details to make them sound more genuine — and “scary.”
Jurors spent four days reviewing the grisly evidence against Valle. Some of it was “material that degrades the human spirit and corrupts the human soul,” Judge Paul Gardephe told them after the verdict.
“We did what we had to do,” foreman Ceaser Monitto told the Daily News. “We did our duty. I’ll leave it at that.”
Pineiro said that when the six-man, six-woman jury started deliberating, there was “a split” but “an opinion started to evolve” late Monday, after they’d thoroughly reviewed all of Valle’s online chats.
“It was gradual. There was no, ‘Ah, that’s it,’ ” the 48-year-old buyer for an industrial company said. “There was a lot of respect. We let everyone speak, any questions, any doubts, and we pursued them all, maintained order [and] kept things organized
The group had drawn timelines to discuss what exactly occurred, when it occurred and how it occurred, and as they pieced it together, the picture that emerged was that of a man who was stepping out of the world of fantasy and into reality.
“The majority of what we were looking at we felt was fantasy. I think like an addict needs a larger and larger dose, he was needing things that were more and more real and he was progressing,” Pineiro said. “He was speaking to what we felt [were] serious people and he didn’t back away from them. He willingly continued the conversations and sometimes was the provocateur of the conversations,” and then he carried out “overt acts.”
Accused "Cannibal Cop" Gilberto Valle wept as he listened to his estranged wife, Kathleen Mangan, testify against him on the first day of his trial, Monday Feb. 25. “He was bringing it into real life,” he said.
He didn’t specify what made jurors feel that way, but there had been testimony from an FBI agent that Valle told him his secret cyber life was “bleeding” into reality.
In July, Valle had emailed one of his creepy co-conspirators pictures of his friend Kimberly Sauer in the days before he and his wife were having brunch with her in Maryland — along with a document called “Abduction and Cooking of Kimberly: A Blueprint.”
Julia Gatto was Valle's court-appointed lawyer. “I’ll be eyeing her from head to toe and licking my lips, longing for the day I cram a chloroform-soaked rag in her face,” he wrote.
After the brunch, he emailed the man, later revealed to be a British nurse named Dale Bolinger, to say, “She looked absolutely mouthwatering. I could hardly contain myself.”
Then in September, he closed his account on the Darkfetishnet.com website, telling Bolinger he was doing so because it would make it harder for him “to get caught.” Around the same time, he also used his computer to look up the address of the high school student he’d been eyeing, Kirsten Ponticelli
The second charge against Valle, accessing a federal database without authorization, “was pretty straightforward,” he said. Prosecutors said Valle had used his police computer to tap into a federal database last May to look up information on one of his targets, former high school classmate Maureen Hartigan, and NYPD records backed the claim up.
Cannibal cop Gilberto Valle wept after the verdict was read, says his lawyer. Pineiro found Gatto’s claim that they hadn’t been fair to her client hard to swallow.
“We did what we did in good conscience, and if I were on trial I would have wanted that jury for me. All good people,” he said.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara hailed the jury for finding “Valle’s detailed and specific plans to abduct women for the purpose of committing grotesque crimes were very real, and that he was guilty as charged.”
Seperated: Gilberto Valle won't be able to spend quality time with his daughter. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly would only say Valle would “be terminated immediately from the Police Department.”
Gatto said she ask the judge to set aside the verdict, and vowed to appeal if he doesn’t.
“We truly believe our client is innocent,” she said. “The prosecution didn’t meet its burden of proof.”
Valle’s wife was not in court for the verdict, and she declined comment when reached at her family’s home in Reno, Nev. She fled there with her and Valle’s now year-old daughter Josephine after using spyware to find out what her hubby had been up to on her computer.
Valle is scheduled to be sentenced on June 19 — his first wedding anniversary.
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