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Waitress Star's Killer Gets 25 Years

Fri., Mar. 14, 2008 11:28 AM PDT by Josh Grossberg

"I want you to suffer like she suffered."

Those harsh words were uttered by Andrew Ostroy, husband of rising actress-director Adrienne Shelly, to Diego Pillco just before a New York Judge sentenced the Ecuadorian laborer to 25 years in prison for the 2006 murder of Shelly.

"No sentence would be enough for you. You deserve the same fate you handed Adrienne," an emotional Ostroy told Pillco during the sentencing hearing Thursday. "You are nothing more than a cold-blooded killer, a murderous beast who in an intent to rob, rape and then silence your innocent victim...took the life of a beautiful, loving woman who, unlike you, had so much to give to society."

Ostroy, a marketing executive, found Shelly's lifeless body hanging by a sheet from a shower rod in the bathroom of their Greenwich Village apartment on Nov. 1, 2006. While her death was initially, and erroneously, reported as a suicide, police never ruled out foul play. Pilco, 19 at the time, was arrested five days later after his shoe print was matched to one near Shelly's bathtub.

Pillco, an illegal immigrant working as part of a construction crew one floor down from Shelly's digs, eventually confessed in court that he killed the filmmaker after she caught him stealing money from her purse and threatened to call police. He testified that he strangled her and tried to stage the hanging to make it appear that she took her own life.

Before her death, the 40-year-old Shelly had just finished writing, directing, producing and costarring in the indie flick Waitress, starring Keri Russell. The film went on to debut to much acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.

Shelly, whose acting credits included the film Factotum opposite Matt Dillon and TV appearances on Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz and Law & Order, was survived by Ostroy and daughter Sophie, now 5.

"You stalked and brutally attacked my wife, silenced her screams with your hand until you rendered her unconscious and then, in a brutal and gruesome act of cowardice, took a bedsheet and strangled her to death," Ostroy said in court. "You tied her up and hung her the way you strung up pigs back in Ecuador.

"You sentenced that little girl to a lifetime of anguish and sadness and questions and feelings of what could've been."

Ostroy added that he was "haunted by the image of you walking this earth, a free man 23-and-a-half years from now, as a man with much of his life still left to live."

Pillco, whose 16 months behind bars will counted towards his term, replied through a translator that he's accepted his fate.

"I left my house with the purpose of working, not to hurt anyone, and this is what I deserve."