Jury finds Kris Zocco guilty of all counts in Kelly Dwyer homicide.
Defense attorney says trial issues are likely candidates for appeals
Kris Zocco was found guilty Friday of killing Kelly Dwyer at his east side Milwaukee apartment in 2013 and then hiding her body in rural Jefferson County where the skeletal remains were found 19 months later.
The jury of 10 women and two men reached its verdicts after a little more than two hours of deliberation, finding Zocco guilty of first-degree reckless homicide as well as hiding a corpse and strangulation. Zocco faces up to 48 years at his sentencing Dec. 14.
“A case like this presents issues that are very likely candidates for appellate review,” defense attorney Craig Mastantuono said after the verdicts were read.
Assistant District Attorney Sara Hill called the case, which featured more than 65 witnesses and no direct evidence, the most complicated of her career.
The verdicts followed a two-week trial and testimony from experts on cadaver detection dogs, computer forensics and the entomology of human decomposition.
Jurors also saw graphic selfie video of Zocco, 43, and Dwyer, 27, engaged in extreme oral sex three
weeks before she disappeared, and heard from a woman who said she engaged in such dangerous “breath play” sex with Zocco weekly for about a year before he switched to Dwyer.
Hill repeatedly told jurors that the only logical, reasonable inference to be drawn from the extensive circumstantial evidence was that Dwyer died during a similar choking-sex episode and Zocco hid her body.
Extremely detailed coverup
She and investigators laid out an extremely detailed, careful coverup you might read in a crime novel: Zocco, panicked from the death, cleaned Dwyer’s body in his spare bathroom, wrapped it in his shower curtain and stuffed inside a large travel golf bag.
He then wheeled the bag to his underground parking area and put it in his Audi’s trunk before 7:20 a.m, when a large SUV was blocking the security camera of the garage entrance.
The next day, he took a “shopping” trip to near Madison and on the way back found a thicket down a steep shoulder of a dead-end road in Sullivan to dump the body.
Investigators say Zocco sent Dwyer texts on Friday and appeared cooperative and concerned on Saturday when her friends and mother were exploring her failure to show up for work.
Defense claims prosecutor tunnel vision
The defense called investigators and the prosecutor biased and tunnel-visioned about Zocco, who admitted he and Dwyer had done cocaine and had sex that night, but insists she left when they awoke in the morning.
A key part of the state’s case was that Dwyer is never seen leaving the apartment.
But the defense revealed that detectives did not, in fact, review every camera and argued that Dwyer, who also nannied for other tenants, was familiar with the building and all its exits.
The defense posited that Dwyer, who had ongoing casual sex relationships with others, could have left alone or with someone else through a different parking level.
And that supposed Zocco confession about killing Dwyer during risky sex and hiding her body?
Never mind.
In a bombshell development just a couple weeks before Zocco’s trial in the 2013 death and disappearance of Dwyer, prosecutors filed a new charge of solicitation of witness intimidation, based on a fellow inmate’s claim.
Zocco has been serving a 19-year prison sentence for possession of child porn and drugs discovered during the investigation into Dwyer’s disappearance.
The inmate, Donrtrell Leflore, said Zocco tried to enlist his help to set up a possible hit on an ex-girlfriend expected to testify against him and said Zocco had confessed to killing Dwyer. Hill referenced that confession in her opening statement, but quietly dismissed the new charge — and, implicitly, the claimed confession — after Zocco’s defense announced two more prisoners contacted them to say Leflore asked them to help him support his lie about Zocco.
Mastantuono, Zocco’s attorney, wanted to put those prisoners on the witness stand even if the state dismissed the solicitation charge to prove the defense contention of state bias and error in its tunnel-visioned pursuit of a homicide case against Zocco.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Wagner denied that request but did give a special instruction to the jury that new information, introduced by the defense, led prosecutors to drop the solicitation charge and to disregard Hill’s reference to a confession in her opening statement.
Wagner gave the instruction, and others, to jurors Friday morning ahead of the closing arguments.
He told jurors that they could only consider the evidence of Zocco’s prior engagement in choking-style sex with Dwyer and another woman as evidence of his intent, or motive, and they should not conclude that such sexual proclivities make him a bad person and, therefore, also guilty of the crime.