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Edward Ates, 64, must serve 68 years in prison without parole for murder and obstruction of justice.
Whether it’s because of the free time the holiday season affords or their disdain for his gruesome act, more than a half-dozen of the jurors who convicted Ates came to Superior Court to see him sentenced.
It was only fitting, given what a unique case this was from the start.
“Ten or 15 years ago, a case like this could never have been considered — pure circumstantial evidence,” Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
But his investigators deftly uncovered online tracks that Ates tried to destroy, including visits to a Web site called “How to Commit the Perfect murder.” They also pulled mileage records on his car. Senior Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Wayne Mello then assembled an airtight case.
Ates drove to Paul Duncsak’s $1.1 million home, broke in, waited for his former son-in-law to come home, then shot him, Mello said.
He then fled to his mother’s house in Louisiana.
Duncsak, who was involved in a bitter custody dispute with Ates’ daughter over their two children, was on the phone with his fiance when he walked into his house the night of Aug. 23, 2006. She said he screamed and then she heard a thud before the line went dead.
Ates, who was 285 pounds at the time, claimed he was too fat to make it up the stairs and aim accurately without his hands shaking.
But that wasn’t the way it played out, Mello told jurors, who reached their verdict in their second day of deliberations.
Ates served in the military for 16 years after enlisting as a 17-year-old, and later retired after 30 years in government work as the civilian equivalent of a general. The day of the murder, he picked the lock to get into the victim’s house, waited for him to come home from work, and then shot him several times with a .22-caliber handgun, Mello said.
“The detectives involved did a great job in gathering this evidence and working the street in gaining sufficient other evidence which allowed this knowledgeable and diligent jury the ability to agree with us and find him guilty,” Molinelli told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Besides the “perfect murder” site, Ates researched .22-caliber guns, silencers and lock-picking online. He apparently missed sites that explained how to successfully delete such information.
“Our detectives and Ramsey police did a great job, and, once again, [Mello] has distinguished himself as one of our nation’s top trial attorneys,” the prosecutor said.
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