Justice is finally being served to the man who killed Waitress mastermind Adrienne Shelly.
An Ecuadorian illegal immigrant construction worker pleaded guilty to manslaughter in New York court Thursday in connection with the 2006 death of the up-and-coming 40-year-old actress, director and writer.
Diego Pillco testified that he killed Shelly in her Greenwich Village apartment during a botched robbery attempt. Pillco, who was 19 years old at the time, was a member of a construction crew working on the building.
He testified that Shelly, who wrote, directed and costarred in the indie hit Waitress, caught him stealing money from her purse on Nov. 1, 2006. He said that the actress threatened to call police on him and that she was killed in the resulting altercation.
"I took the phone from her," he said in court through a translator. "Out of desperation I covered her mouth. I was scared and didn't realize what was happening. I saw a sheet, and I decided to choke her."
In an attempt to cover up the grisly incident, he hung the actress from a shower rod in her bathroom to make the death appear as a suicide. Although the death was erroneously first reported as a suicide, police never ruled out foul play, having found mismatched shoe prints around the bathtub. Just five days after the slaying, NYPD arrested Pillco.
Pillco, now 21, will be sentenced to 25 years in prison at a hearing Mar. 6.
Shelly was survived by her husband, Andy Ostroy, who first found his wife's body, and daughter Sophie, now 5.
In addition to the Keri Russell-starring Waitress, Shelly had made a name for herself in the industry by appearing steadily in film, TV and theater work, most notably 1989's The Unbelievable Truth and 1990's Trust. She made her directorial debut with 1997's Sudden Manhattan.