- N.Y. v. Paul Cortez
- •March 23, 2007:
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Murder trial opens for ex-boyfriend accused of slashing stripper's throat
Excerpts from
Paul Cortez's journals
'I saved her from rape'
In this excerpt, Cortez writes about picking up Woods from the strip club where she worked after she was allegedly drugged and raped by a customer.- 'I will wait for you'
In a letter to Woods, Cortez expresses his devotion and pleads with Woods to give up stripping. - 'The Killin Machine'
In an entry written one month before Woods' slaying during a rocky period in the relationship, Cortez's writings express themes of murder and death.
NEW YORK — Aspiring dancer Catherine Woods was just 17 when she left Columbus, Ohio, for New York City to pursue her dream of becoming a professional Broadway dancer. She hit a few bumps along the way and eventually became a stripper to pay the bills.
But Manhattan prosecutors say her life took its worst turn when she met Paul Cortez, an aspiring actor, singer and songwriter who was working as a personal trainer at a gym where the two met in 2005.
Woods did not live to fulfill her dream; she was viciously slain in her Upper East Side apartment on Nov. 27, 2005. And now Cortez, 26, is standing trial on one count of second-degree murder.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Peter Casolaro said during opening statements Monday that Cortez brutally slashed Woods' throat when she tried to break it off with her "obsessive" lover.
He told jurors they would hear passages from Cortez's journals that revealed his growing rage with Woods as she tried to distance herself from him.
"If he could not possess her, nobody would," Casolaro said Monday.
The prosecutor also said the most direct evidence linking Cortez to the crime scene was his bloody fingerprint on her bedroom wall.
Woods' roommate and on-and-off boyfriend, David Haughn, discovered her mutilated body lying face-down in her bedroom around 6:30 p.m.
Her body lay drenched in blood from wounds to her throat so deep that her head was nearly decapitated.
NYPD detective John Entemann testified Tuesday that the room was in disarray, leading him to believe that a struggle preceded her death. He also found a guitar that had been broken at the neck, which he believed was used in the attack.
Entemann testified he found a few disparate traces of blood spatter around the room, including some bloody footprints near Woods' bed and traces on the wall nearby, where investigators allegedly found Cortez's print.
He attributed most of the blood to "arterial spurts" from the victim as her throat was being slashed, and characterized the print on the wall as the result of a hand transfer pattern.
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