Cobra Killer (39 page)

Service on a jury in any case is difficult, but that is especially so in a murder case and one where jurors are asked to consider the death penalty. Deliberations on the death penalty were unproductive, Stavitzski and Scutt said, because some of the jurors placed more weight in mitigating factors in Cuadra’s favor.

After the trial, juror Matulis said her life “has been changed” from her experience and that “the shock of actually seeing some of this, it was mind-boggling seeing a burnt corpse, a heart cut with stab wounds.”
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Scutt was also moved. “Don’t think this wasn’t difficult on me, because it was,” he said. “Bryan Kocis was no angel, none of us are,” he said. “It’s like a boss of mine used to say, ‘Everything travels in a big circle,’ and (I think) the circle of life killed Bryan Kocis. He victimized people for profit in a not-so-honest business, and Harlow Cuadra just showed up in his life how many years later, working in the same not-so-honest business and he victimized Bryan Kocis.”
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“Tell me who was more over the edge in life?” Scutt asked. “I would say Harlow Raymond Cuadra (because) Bryan Kocis, along with any other human being, didn’t deserve to die that horrible death.”
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Hindsight

In hindsight, defense attorneys D’Andrea and Walker both agreed that Cuadra’s testimony at trial had “done more harm than he did good,” but it was something they felt they had to do. D’Andrea defended having put Cuadra on the stand to tell his story to the jury. He said doing so allowed Cuadra to explain why the evidence collected by police investigators showed he was at the murder victim’s home. Trying to “get around” that evidence, D’Andrea said, would be unwise. Their focus instead was on helping jurors to believe that Kerekes was the killer, not Cuadra.

Kerekes, who backed out of testifying for Cuadra’s defense at the last minute, “again showed that (he) was trying to control Harlow Cuadra’s life,” D’Andrea said.
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D’Andrea said he personally talked to Kerekes inside the Luzerne County Courthouse just five minutes before he was called as a witness, and that Kerekes was going to offer testimony to exonerate Cuadra of the murder. Between the time they talked, however, and when Kerekes was called, he changed his mind. “It appeared to be very evident the commonwealth’s evidence was that our client was at the residence when this happened,” D’Andrea told reporters. “It seemed imperative to me the position the defense had to take was that our client
was
there.”
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D’Andrea seemed to take victory from the fact that the jury would not and could not recommend the death penalty. “Academically, it feels good that they said by their verdict that he wasn’t the killer…the jury did not believe our client deserved the death penalty,” D’Andrea said. In his view, if Cuadra had been a stronger witness, “we may have gotten a better result,” but also supported the idea of having Cuadra testify. “He has to take the stand in a death penalty case, there was no question he had to,” Walker said.
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“(Cuadra) wasn’t the best witness,” D’Andrea acknowledged. “We were hoping he would have been much more cooperative on the stand, not as combative (with the prosecutor).”
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D’Andrea said Cuadra’s testimony at trial capped more than twenty years of frustration and silence about how his life had progressed, stretching back into his history of sexual molestation and intense poverty as a child. “He had a whole life of emotions that came out in twenty-four hours on the witness stand,” D’Andrea remarked.
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For members of Melnick’s team, including members of the district attorney’s staff and state and local police investigators, the victory was sweet. Melnick’s voice cracked with emotion as he talked with reporters at the trial’s end, the gag order imposed by Judge Olszewski finally lifted. Words like “unbelievable” and “magnificent” came from Melnick’s mouth as he declared his team “the hardest working trial team in Pennsylvania.” The sentiment was shared by Melnick’s boss, Luzerne County DA Jackie Musto Carroll who said, “In all of my years as a district attorney, I have never seen a trial team work so hard.” Melnick heaped most of his praise, however, on police investigators who drove the case forward.
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Regarding Cuadra’s testimony at trial, Melnick said his team had prepared for that possibility and assessed his performance as “very poor, contradictory, and utterly inconsistent.”
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Melnick also said Kerekes surprise announcement that he would not testify, after apparently telling defense attorneys he would, was no surprise to Melnick. He said his interactions with Kerekes had convinced him that “the last thing I wanted was Kerekes as a witness on my side.”
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As it worked out, Melnick said, Kerekes became “their problem, not ours.”
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Paying for the blockbuster trial was the problem of Luzerne County taxpayers. Media reports indicated the county spent more than $112,000 to prosecute both Cuadra and Kerekes. “It was a very expensive prosecution,” DA Musto Carroll acknowledged. Defending Cuadra and Kerekes would also cost local taxpayers, reportedly more than $25,000.
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Some final words

After the jury, judge, and lawyers had all exited Courtroom No. 2 in the Luzerne County Courthouse, only Cuadra and Sheriff’s deputies remained as he sat in a chair next to his mother for a final good-bye as the winter darkness of an early March sunset took over the cold air outside. Cuadra’s mother could no longer contain her emotions, and sobbed bitterly and deeply for her son as jail deputies removed Cuadra from the courtroom.

The following Monday, Cuadra was back in the courtroom before Judge Olszewski to formally learn his sentence. Reporters noted Cuadra, now in handcuffs and shackles “dropped his shoulders and leaned back” as Olszewski sentenced him to two consecutive life terms without a chance of parole for killing Kocis. Olszewski told Cuadra, “I certainly hope that a day does not go by for the rest of your life that you do not remember the tragedy, the grief, the pain, the endless pain, that you have caused.”
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Following his sentence, tears began to fill Cuadra’s eyes. Convicted and condemned to life in prison at age twenty-seven, he will be in prison for many more years than he was ever a free man. Both Cuadra and his mother quietly mouthed “I love you” to one another as he was led from the courtroom and returned to jail.

Bryan Kocis’ father said sitting through the trial had been an ordeal, but one they had to endure. “You hear the lies, the lie after lie after lie…the dramatics that Cuadra himself put on that you know he was lying through his teeth when he was talking. To sit there and listen to that, it’s all I could do not to explode,” Michael Kocis said.
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Bryan’s mother, Joyce, said she often sits in a chair next to a table holding the vase of her son’s ashes. “People say, you know, have closure,” she said. “Justice. We have justice, but we don’t have closure. We don’t have him.”
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Epilogue

“Much like Bryan’s personal home and residence, my world went up in smoke and flames when he was killed. The truth is…when Bryan was killed, everything in my world crumbled to my feet. All of my plans, hopes and aspirations were put on hold until I could get a grip on the situation.”

—Sean Lockhart

“If you pay enough attention, you can actually see people carrying their tears around like sacks of stones.”

—Harlow Cuadra letter to “Natasha”

Joe Kerekes with time on his hands

Joe Kerekes will spend the rest of his life inside the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections unless a quixotic appeal effort succeeds in winning him post-conviction relief in the form of parole. That seems entirely unlikely, however, as Kerekes accepted a plea agreement that included a life sentence with no chance for parole. For now, the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania is home. The prison, one of the state’s oldest maximum facilities, opened originally in 1889 as a reformatory for juveniles, but was transformed into a maximum-security prison for men, and now operates as a “close-security institution,” according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The Huntingdon prison walls and giant rolls of barbed and rip wire fencing dominates its dense, working-class neighborhood as it likely always has. Just a block in one direction is a wide tributary of the famous Susquehanna River, the Juniata River, and a few blocks in the other direction is the new Wal-Mart, proudly serving this aging town of just over 6,000 residents.

Kerekes reports he fills his days with weight-lifting and watching TV, or spending time in a day room area where inmates are allowed to congregate during certain times of the day. He resides in a 7’ x 7’ cell and gang-showers with the rest of the men in his unit. Joe’s family, so far about his only visitors, can see him face-to-face and embrace him quickly in a community room carved out near the aging limestone arches at the front of the nineteenth-century fortress. Guests fill out forms and are sent through a metal detector, and often have their cars or bodies searched, prior to reaching the community room, before they can visit an inmate held at Kerekes’ level.

The community room resembles the faculty office of any middle school in America, with rows of mismatched chairs taking up the center of the room and along one side of the walls bearing institutional-pink paint. No tables are provided to inmates or their guests. Those are reserved for the two or three DOC officers who remain in the room constantly.

Joe Kerekes bounded into this room one summer day in 2009 with seemingly more confidence than anyone else in the place. Family members and loved ones of the other seven inmates present whispered their visiting remarks quietly to the easily-identified inmates who all wore off-brown shirts and pants marked “DOC” on the back. Joe’s jail garb fits his stature well, his looking more like light brown surgical scrubs than a jail uniform. The weightlifting he has resumed while in prison has helped bulk him up again to resemble more of his pre-arrest days. His ever-receding hairline is doing so in an attractive, orderly pattern, especially since Joe wears his hair very short. Take Joe Kerekes out of the prison, and he could pass any day, anywhere, as a suburban father standing on the sidelines cheering his kids at a soccer game.

But games, family, and a life outside of the Huntingdon walls are all but impossible. For reasons he seemingly is still struggling to explain, Kerekes accepted a plea “deal” or agreement in December 2008 that keeps him locked up for life with no chance of parole. In retrospect, it looks like anything but the best deal for a defendant, since Kerekes was not compelled and ultimately did not give testimony against his co-conspirator, Harlow Cuadra, who continues to insist he did not personally kill anyone. It is, however, a deal that allows Luzerne County prosecutors to feel comfortable. It’s what the residents of Luzerne County, including Bryan Kocis’ family, wanted.

Life without possibilities

Kerekes struggles with the reality of his life sentence. Since arriving at Huntingdon, he’s befriended other inmates who are similarly situated on murder charges that brought life sentences, but who have the chance of parole. “I was misled,” he says about the discussions with his attorney and the state that led to his guilty plea. Kerekes also feels he was threatened. Kerekes says he felt pressure from the district attorney’s office to accept the plea or face the possibility that authorities would somehow seek to draw his parents into the investigation. He says the DA made it clear that his parents, because of their help in moving items from the Stratem Court home and helping their son prior to his arrest, could have been charged with “aiding and abetting” a criminal. “I couldn’t put my parents through anymore,” Kerekes says in a phrase strikingly similar to what he said during his aborted appearance on the stand in Cuadra’s trial. “They hadn’t done anything wrong. All they did was get some of my stuff for me and my dad went and picked up a car for me from the repair shop when I asked him to.”
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The DA doesn’t comment about people they have not charged (such as Kerekes’ parents), but Kerekes says the pressure was real, including the spring day in 2007 when Harlow and Joe were still watching over their shoulder, waiting for the cops to swoop in. On one of those days investigators paid a visit to Joe’s parent’s house, and Joe called while they were there. Joe refused their requests to come and meet with investigators, with Joe recalling, “My mother was like, ‘Joe, what is this all about? We need to talk to you, honey.’ But I was not going to go there as long as the cops were there.”
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His impulse that day, to leave his parents talking to the police while he and Cuadra went further underground, reflects just some of the impulsiveness that seems to have led to tough times throughout his life. Combined with a quick temper that is hard to conceal, he finds himself out of chances and out of a life of freedom.

Perhaps it was impulsiveness that led him to agree originally, and then recant, on a deal to come to Cuadra’s trial and provide testimony that may have exonerated Cuadra of killing Bryan Kocis. “I was ready to go into court and lie for Harlow,” Kerekes says. “I had talked to his attorney and I told them I would go in and back up their story about Harlow being at (Bryan’s) house to model and that I burst in during a jealous rage and killed him.” But “that is not the truth. I’m telling you just as I told my parents this, I told them and I tell you, I did not kill Bryan.”
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