The suspect in this crime is Peter Sylvester. He committed this crime in 1994. He began by killing Steven Chaifetz on July 22nd, 1994. According to Mr. Sylvester he says he began the attacks to cover up a murder he intended to commit as a favor for a friend, a topless dancer who, he claimed, wanted to eliminate a rival in a love triangle.
Mr. Chaifetz, a 50-year-old lawyer and certified public accountant, was having dinner with his wife, Charon, at the North Shore Restaurant on Jericho Turnpike in Commack when Mr. Sylvester fired one shot from a rifle equipped with a hunting scope. "I often wonder what you were thinking when you shot him through the heart in front of my eyes," Mrs. Chaifetz said to Mr. Sylvester. "What was your purpose? What had he ever done to you?" Mr. Chaifetz's daughter, Francine Weiner, whose father was killed a week before her wedding, said she would make certain that Mr. Sylvester was never paroled. "I'll make sure you are always trapped in a cell,' she told her father's killer. "I hope you wake up every morning and realize you have nowhere to go." Mr. Sylvester, 25, shifted in his chair and often scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad as Mrs. Weiner called him "a cold-blooded killer." Mr. Sylvester had also pleaded guilty to firing one shot at the East Commack Amoco gas station, nearly hitting an attendant, Ali Gocmez, 24, on July 25, 1994, to burglarizing a home in Nesconset on Aug. 2, 1994, and to assaulting a 15-year-old girl in the home with a crowbar and flashlight. Mr. Sylvester had also been charged with raping and sodomizing the girl, but the charges were reduced to burglary in the plea agreement worked out with James M. Catterson, the Suffolk County District Attorney. Mr. Catterson told the justice that he wished to spare the girl the pain of "reliving her night of terror" by having to testify in a trial. "Peter Sylvester will only exist without hope, without normal human companionship," Mr. Catterson said. "He will be utterly alone." |
Peter Sylvester
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