Man Charged with 19-Hour Torture Session of NYC Grad Student Says He Is Retarded
He wasn’t retarded enough to not know what he was doing
Simply killing this bastard is to good….
Anchorage Daily News
An ex-convict went on trial Thursday on charges of raping, torturing and burning a Columbia University graduate student in a 19-hour attack during which her eyelids were slit and she was forced to take so many painkillers that her liver failed.
Robert Williams, 31, sat with chained arms and legs, his head lowered, as the prosecutor delivered an opening statement that left several people in the courtroom weeping.
Williams turned the victim’s small one-bedroom apartment into “his torture chamber” and violated the 23-year-old woman “in every way imaginable and in some ways unimaginable,” Assistant District Attorney Ann Prunty told the jury.
Prunty said Williams stopped the torture only after the victim blacked out from hours of pain caused by knife wounds, boiling water, battering and sexual assaults. At one point during the ordeal she tried to kill herself.
“Then he could no longer feel power over another human being,” Prunty said.
Williams, who previously served eight years in prison for attempted murder, is charged with kidnapping, arson, burglary and sexual assault. He faces life in prison if convicted.
The defendant’s lawyer, Arnold Levine, tried but failed to have Williams declared mentally unfit for trial. Levine did not make an opening statement.
The victim, a Columbia University journalism graduate student, found Williams in her building’s elevator in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan when she came home around 9:30 p.m. on April 13, 2007, Prunty said. She said he followed her to her fifth-floor apartment and attacked her.
During the brutal ordeal, Prunty told jurors, Williams raped the victim, poured boiling water over her, hurled a pot of bleach in her face, ordered her to gouge out her own eyes with a pair of scissors, sealed her lips shut with glue and duct tape and slit her eyelids with a butcher knife.
After one assault, he forced the woman to swallow a fistful of pills from her medicine cabinet and wash them down with four beers, Prunty said.
Doctors later said the woman’s liver had failed, probably because of the medicine, and that a liver transplant might be necessary. Fortunately, the transplant was not needed, Prunty said.
The woman at one point tried to plunge a pair of scissors into her own neck in a bid to commit suicide.
After about 19 hours, Prunty said, Williams tied the naked, unconscious woman to a futon with computer cables and set it on fire. The woman awoke and smelled smoke, broke free and made her way to the hallway, where she was rescued.
Prunty said that Williams’ DNA was found on the victim and her clothing, and that her DNA was found on his clothing. Security cameras captured him trying to withdraw money with the woman’s ATM card, she said.
During the time she was conscious, Prunty said, the victim studied Williams closely. Prunty said every scar and feature she later described to police matched the appearance of the defendant.
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This is a perfect instance in which the taxpayers money will be wasted on a worthless human dung heap. Try this man fairly,
June 9th, 2008 at 11:02 amthen put him in prison in Southern Louisiana where they know
how to really use “Southern Hospitality” on a person of his stature. Really, make him wish everyday he was dead but don’t allow it
This punk needs an introduction to a little Red Ant therapy…face first.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:10 amWhy is he even still alive?
June 9th, 2008 at 11:59 amThat dickhead attorney of his saying he didn’t do it - must not be paying any attention to:
“Prunty said that Williams’ DNA was found on the victim and her clothing, and that her DNA was found on his clothing. Security cameras captured him trying to withdraw money with the woman’s ATM card, she said.”
No matter what his problem is it makes no difference to me and the DNA evidence is there. Kill him A.S.A.P.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:44 pmIs it just me, or is this guy’s attorney smiling while he says that he didn’t do it.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:12 pmstreet justice by the victims family: only real justice.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:33 amIt was a definite smile to me. The bastard.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:22 pm