"I will kill her," the white-haired ex-lover had vowed.
And when the corpse of young and pretty Sherra Morgenstern was finally found in her Second Avenue bed -- maggot-ridden, still in pajamas, and with two shell casings in her hair -- it was the ex-lover's handiwork, prosecutors told a Manhattan jury today, describing a callous, 2009 murder.
Edward Demirojian, 57, a former limousine owner from Orlando, Fla., is on trial for allegedly killing Morgenstern -- a woman half his age and the mother of his young child, Shakira -- in order to keep the child and collect on a $250,000 insurance policy.
Steven Hirsch
Edward Demirojian
"The defendant brutally murdered her inside her home, while she was asleep and helpless," Assistant District Attorney Shanda Strain told jurors in opening statements this morning.
The smell was horrid, the victim's mother, who discovered the body, told jurors this afternoon.
"It smelled like, uh, I would say like a dead smell," a tearful Sheila Morgenstern, 72, testified.
"Like rigor mortis," she said. "I saw my daughter laying there dead. And I screamed."
The couple's child, Shakira, was just three years old, and living with Demirojian in Orlando when cell tower records show he drove up to New York in July of 2009, the prosecutor told jurors in openings.
Morgenstern, who lived in Jefferson Houses in East Houses, had just announced her intent to move decisively to regain custody, the prosecutor said the evidence will show.
But Demirojian -- who is listening to testimony via an Arabic translator -- would stop at no ends to keep the child, the prosecutor said. In the trial's first testimony, the victim's best friend recounted a phone conversation with Demirojian from a year before the murder.
"He said, 'Before she ever gets the baby back, she'll be dead,' " the friend, Marva Puerto, said Demirojian told her. "'I'll kill her.' And behind that remark, he was, 'Ha, ha,' like it was a funny remark. A funny matter."
The .357-cal shell casings in Morgenstern's hair match Demirojian's registered handgun, and cell tower records show his phone moved up the Eastern Seaboard and arrived in Manhattan on the day of the murder, the prosecutor said.
Demirojian is further implicated by alibi lies he told family and cops, and by the $250,000 policy he'd been trying repeatedly to collect on, the prosecutor said.
But the defense contends that there are no forensics directly linking Demirojian to the murder.
"The evidence will show that no other forensic evidence was recovered from Sherra Morgenstern's apartment -- no DNA, no fingerprints, no hair or fiber," said defense lawyer Robert Weinstein.
The lawyer suggested that "many others" had access to Morgenstern's apartment. And the policy? It had been taken out by Morgenstern herself, he told jurors.
Testimony is expected to continue through next week.
