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On November 1, 2006, Adrienne Shelly was found dead, hanging in the shower of her Greenwich Village work studio apartment. The initial examination of the scene did not reveal any suspicious circumstances, and police apparently believed it to be a suicide. Her husband, Andy Ostrey, insisted she would never have taken her own life, and brought about a re-examination of the bathroom that disclosed a suspect footprint.

[Almost sounds like Ostray had to drag the police back into the bathroom to look at more evidence, as though the cops hadn’t properly studied the script before arriving on the scene?]

One version of the story says that the murder too place, when Shelly, 40, confronted Diego Pillco, about taking money out of her purse.

A more elaborate version of the story has Shelly coming down to the apartment where Diego Pillco was working and complaining about construction noise. He didn't speak much English, having recently arrived in the United States, but Pillco said he understood when she threatened to call the police. Fearing that he would be deported if the police were called, he threw a hammer at Shelly and followed her back up to her apartment. There, she slapped him and he knocked her hard enough to make her fall back and hit her head against a table. Assuming the worst, he tried to cover up his crime by making it look like a suicide. He took a sheet from the bed and tied Shelly to the shower rail.

The police found her body hanging from a shower rod in the bathtub with a bed sheet around her neck.

Upon hearing this story, one has to consider how reasonable it is that a 19-year-old construction worker, illegally in the US from Ecuador, would go to the length of assaulting a 5’1” tall woman after arguing with her about making too much noise while working in a neighboring apartment? Wouldn’t there have been a motive for him to keep a lower profile? And would a 19-year-old construction worker from Ecuador similarly have the scheming capabilities, in a moment of panic after accidentally killing this woman, be capable of staging the death to look like a suicide by hanging? Why wouldn’t he just run?

The postmortem conducted on Adrienne Shelly later revealed that the blow had not killed her. She died of compression to the neck: in other words, the cover-up was the fatal aspect of the crime. Despite his confession, Pillco initially pleaded not guilty.

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