Comcast worker’s murder trial begins
The couple was doing a favor by checking in on a friend.
Piotr Czechowski went into the Southwest Side house, first combing through the rooms, with his wife following close behind.
When Czechowski went upstairs, he glimpsed a “leg” from the bathroom, went into “shock” and shoved his spouse away from the gruesome scene.
“His face was very scared,” an emotional Arleta SzpakCzechowska said Wednesday of her husband’s discovery of Urzula Sakowska’s dead body on Dec. 8, 2006.
“He started to push me and said, ‘Get out. Get out.’”
Hours before, Sakowska, 23, had inadvertantly welcomed her killer — Comcast worker Anthony Triplett — into her home, in the 6100 block of South McVicker, Cook County prosecutors said.
But instead of installing her highspeed Internet, Triplett viciously beat and choked Sakowska and forced her to perform oral sex on him, assistant state’s attorney Ashley Romito said at the opening of Triplett’s murder trial.
The last thing Sakowska saw was the duct tape Triplett allegedly wrapped around her head before he threw her in her bathtub filled with water.
Triplett is also suspected of killing 39-year-old Hyde Park resident Janice Ordidge in a similar manner seven weeks earlier. Although Triplett, 32, isn’t on trial for Ordidge’s murder, prosecutors plan to outline details of that slaying to bolster their case in Sakowska’s slaying.
Defense attorney Allan Sincox questioned why Triplett would kill Sakowska when he was under the watchful eye of the authorities after they questioned him three times following Ordidge’s strangulation.
But Romito insisted to jurors that Triplett killed both women who made the innocent mistake of allowing him into their homes for Comcast service.
The prosecutor also pointed out the “powerful and overwhelming” physical evidence tying Triplett to Sakowska’s murder: her blonde hair found in his Comcast van and her blood on his jacket.
Also damning evidence was Sakowska’s fiance’s Seiko watch, which authorities found on Triplett, Romito said.
“He is not just about the sex and murder. Be it greed, be it trophy hunting — he takes something,” Romito said.
Sakowska’s fiance Grzegorz Magiera, a truck driver, was en route to New Jersey at the time of the slaying. He called his friends, Piotr Czechowski and Arleta SzpakCzechowska, to check on Sakowska.