THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 20, 1997 TAG: 9702200139
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY W. BROWN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 85 lines
The voices told him to kill or be killed.
So, according to testimony Wednesday, Louis Pino took a dog chain, looped it around Adam Wese's throat and pulled.
Soon Wese was gasping for air, struggling for his life. But, prosecutors said, Pino pulled the chain tighter until Wese collapsed, then wrapped two plastic bags around the teen-ager's head and sealed them with tape.
Later, evidence showed, he took Wese's dead body and stuffed it inside a cardboard box in a bedroom closet for two months.
Those details in the grisly death of Adam Wese were laid out Wednesday in Norfolk Circuit Court as Pino's murder trial began. He is accused of murdering Wese, the Norfolk boy who was missing for two months before his body was discovered in Pino's Willoughby Spit apartment last March.
Pino has pleaded not guilty. His attorney is arguing that Wese's death was a suicide.
Wese was 16 when he disappeared on Jan. 18, 1996. His father, Robert Wese, launched an extensive effort throughout Hampton Roads to find him. He plastered ``missing'' posters and even hired a plane to fly a banner asking that his son come home.
But Adam Wese's body was not discovered until March 21, when Pino called police.
In a statement to police the day the body was found, Pino said he choked and suffocated Wese. Prosecutor Lisa McKeel recapped the statement in opening arguments.
Pino, who was 18 at the time, and Wese were acquaintances from Granby High. After school on Jan. 18 Wese went to Pino's three-story apartment in the 1000 block of Little Bay Ave. to listen to music and learn to play Pino's electric guitar, prosecutors said.
But then, Pino said in his statement, he heard the voices telling him to kill the boy or the voice would kill Pino.
He then took the chain - commonly used to train dogs - began to twirl it, and choked Wese, the statement said. They briefly struggled.
``Louis Pino takes his foot and places it on Adam Wese's back and yanks harder,'' McKeel said, describing her version of the incident to the jury. Wese began to wheeze. ``The defendant heard the sounds Adam was making, and he wanted the hissing sounds to stop.''
Homicide investigator David Goldberg later testified that Pino told police he went to the kitchen and grabbed two milky white plastic bags. He placed one loosely around Wese's head. The other, he sealed with tape. Wese soon died.
The body sat on Wese's floor for hours before he taped Wese's hands behind his back and sat him in the closet, according to testimony. But Pino could not look at it any longer, so he covered it with a sheet. When the body began to decay, he slid it into a U-Haul box and taped it shut.
Pino had moved into the apartment just a few weeks before Wese was killed, testified Anna Lea Bailey, who lived there with her husband. Soon a foul stench was in the house, but Pino told them it was a wet horsehair blanket. The smell worsened over the next few weeks. The Baileys never saw the box in Pino's closet.
Pino, Bailey testified, was not eating or bathing and had stopped going to school. Finally, on March 21, she told Pino he would have to move. A few hours later, Andrew Riffe, a friend of the Baileys, came over to play Scrabble.
Riffe testified that Pino spelled out the word ``crime'' on the game board. Minutes later, on the landing of the apartment, Pino told Riffe about the body, Riffe testified. Riffe said he told him to call police.
When police arrived minutes later they found the box, wet and stained.
Pino later told police he had bipolar disorder and that he heard voices. He then detailed in a statement that he killed Wese. He identified the body as the same as the boy on the ``missing'' posters.
In his opening statement Wednesday, Pino's attorney, John Doyle III, argued that Wese's death was a suicide.
Adam was depressed, he said, and hanged himself while Pino was out of the apartment. Evidence will show that Pino was emotionally disturbed, Doyle said. When he found Wese's body, he did not know what to do.
``Much of what's in that (police) statement is not corroborated by evidence,'' Doyle told the jury.
Dr. Leah Bush, the chief state medical examiner for the Tidewater district, testified that Wese's autopsy indicated he did not die from a hanging.
The commonwealth was expected to rest this morning. The trial may be concluded by week's end. ILLUSTRATION: ALBA BRAGOLI/Illustration
Louis Pino, right foreground, is on trial in Norfolk Circuit Court
for the slaying of teen-ager Adam Wese. Seated at left is the
victim's mother, while prosecutor Lisa McKeel questions the victim's
father, Robert Wese. Judge William F. Rutherford is presiding.
KEYWORDS: MURDER TRIAL