Trial begins in slaying of elderly landlady
His DNA was found in the dead woman’s car. He used her cellphone and gave away her credit cards after her death.
That evidence is at the heart of a case that Franklin County prosecutors began building Wednesday against Charles J. Greene, accused of killing an 81-year-old landlady who was known for collecting her rents in cash and carrying wads of it in her shirt. Greene, 54, sometimes worked as a handyman for Alyce Seff, who owned rental properties from Bexley to the South Side.
The trial in Common Pleas Court is getting underway more than eight years after the discovery of Seff’s body in a wishing well behind one of her German Village rental properties.
Defense attorney Frederick Benton cautioned jurors in his opening statement not to assume that Greene’s connection to Seff’s car, phone and credit cards means he was responsible for her death.
“There is no physical evidence, no forensic evidence from the crime scene that links Charles Greene” to the slaying, he said.
Benton’s client faces charges of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping. If convicted of aggravated murder, the maximum sentence would be life without parole.
Investigators have said that he was with Seff when she was last seen alive on July 5, 2008.
Her body was found four days later, stuffed upside down in the wooden, decorative well behind 836 S. High St.
Seff had been strangled, Assistant Prosecutor Laurie Arsenault told the jury. A plaid piece of cloth was wrapped around her neck, and her wrists were bound with duct tape. Vinyl, outdoor pillows had been placed atop the well to hide her body. Her blood was splattered on a nearby fence.
Arsenault said Seff’s distinctive, 1993 blue Ford Escort was found near Greene’s home on the Near East Side with his DNA on the steering wheel and driver’s side armrest. She said testimony and phone records will be introduced to show that Greene used Seff’s phone in the area of his residence.
Testimony also will establish that a woman who used Seff’s credit cards got them from Greene and that he tried unsuccessfully to enlist another person to rob the landlady, Arsenault said.
“All of the evidence in the case points to the guilt of one man, and he’s sitting right there,” she said, pointing at Greene.
Benton said the evidence is far from conclusive. None of the evidence collected from the murder scene can be linked to Greene, he said.
Greene’s DNA was not found on duct tape or rubber gloves at the scene, nor under the victim’s fingernails, Benton said. No blood was found in Seff’s car.
“And this was a struggle, a very violent, very bloody struggle,” he told the jury.
Benton suggested that other suspects will emerge from the testimony.
Greene, he said, “is not the one who killed Alyce Seff.”
The trial is expected to continue into next week in the courtroom of Judge Laurel Beatty Blunt.