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YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: A judge in Hackensack today sentenced a New Milford busboy to life in prison for killing his estranged wife by slashing her throat after tying her up and raping her.
Shaday Betancourth
Pedro Gutierrez got 75 years for murder, 20 for kidnapping, 15 for aggravated sexual assault and five for hindering his arrest in total. He must serve 85% of that term before he could be eligible for parole — 93½ years, which would make him 121½ years old.
Although it was a moot point, Presiding Superior Court Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi — in her last sentencing before transferring to Superior Court in Passaic County — added lifetime parole supervision “upon release.”
Jurors in April found Gutierrez, 28, guilty of 11 of 12 counts — except armed unlawful entry.
As members of both his and Betancourth’s families watched, the judge today told Gutierrez that he “wanted to make her suffer.”
Gutierrez contended during the trial that 23-year-old Shaday Betancourth attacked him in her brother’s Teaneck home after they had bondage sex and that he stabbed her after wresting the knife from her.
Gutierrez knew exactly what would happen when he broke into his brother-in-law’s East Forest Avenue ranch house on Oct. 4, 2011, Assistant Prosecutor Wayne Mello told jurors during openings.
Presiding Superior Court Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi
(STORY/PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
He’d seen Facebook photos of his wife with other men and even told friends that if he saw her with another man, he would kill them both, Mello said.
After discovering that Betancourth planned to move back to her native Colombia without him, Gutierrez went to his brother-in-law’s Teaneck apartment well-prepared, the prosecutor said: He brought a knife, zip ties, latex gloves and condoms.
“The beautiful young woman, who was in bed sleeping when Gutierrez broke in, was bound with zip ties and savagely raped,” Mello told the eight female and five male jurors.
“She was bound hand and feet, symbolically and all too terrifyingly real, before her death,” he added. “She was sexually assaulted…and she was brutally murdered by a knife held in the hand of this man, her estranged husband — the man who promised that she would be loved, she would be cherished, and in an act of ultimate domestic violence took that knife and slashed her throat.
“Six times.”
Andres Bentancourth found his bloody, unconscious sister and, with a neighbor’s help, rushed her to Englewood Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
Pedro Gutierrez (STORY/PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
Gutierrez flew out of JFK Airport soon after and was about to hop a connecting flight to Colombia when authorities grabbed him in Orlando, he said.
His bag contained what Mello called “instruments of death” — a cut-up T-shirt that Shaday Betancourth had worn to bed the day she was killed, a black bra sliced in half, zip ties that detectives said were used to bind her, a kitchen knife with her blood on it, a roll of tape, condoms, latex gloves (one of which Mello said was bloodied) and a bloody pair of men’s jeans.
Defense attorney Brian Neary said prosecutors didn’t present evidence of non-consensual sex or burglary or that the knife wasn’t already there. If the murder was planned, Neary argued, Gutierrez wouldn’t have done it in the middle of the day or bought his plane ticket with cash at the airport.
His client was “frightened,” and “not diabolical,” he said.
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutors Wayne Mello, Danielle Grootenboer, defense attorneys Brian Neary, S. Emile Lisboa with Gutierrez (STORY/PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
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