Last week brought a measure of closure, if something less than perfect justice, in the case of the murder of actress-filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. Shelly's death was first reported as a possible suicide some fifteen months ago, after her husband found her hanging by a bedsheet in the bathroom of her Tribeca office. The police subsequently arrested Diego Pillco, a construction worker who claimed that he had gotten into an argument with Shelly over the noise he was making at his job; he said that he had punched her, knocked her unconscious, and, thinking she was dead, had panicked and staged the suicide. In court last week before Judge Carol Berkman, Pillco changed his story; speaking through a Spanish-language interpreter, he claimed that Shelly had caught him stealing money from her purse and that he had choked her to death when she tried to phone for the police. The change was part of a plea agreement that Pillco, who can be easily distinguished from a five-foot piece of shit in that a five-foot piece of shit would spend less time whining like a stuck pig, worked out with the district attorney's office, in exchange for his agreement to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, with a fixed sentence of twenty-five years.
Shelly, who achieved instant indie-film immortality with her performances in Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1991), had begun to branch out into writing and directing by the mid-'90s, and had completed her third feature, Waitress, by the time of her death. The film, which featured a breakthrough performance by its star, Keri Russell, was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival, news that Shelly didn't live long enough to hear. The movie went on to earn good notices in its theatrical run and is now available on DVD. Adrienne Shelly was forty years old.
