Lopez

PROVIDENCE — “I killed her. I killed her. I killed her.”

With those rapid-fire words on the telephone, Hamlet M. Lopez allegedly gushed a confession to the disbelieving sister of his erstwhile girlfriend on May 20, 2007.

Lopez, 53, a prominent figure in the local Dominican community who used to work as a teacher’s aide in the city schools and hosted a Spanish-language radio talk show, is on trial for the first-degree murder of Miledis Hilario, 40, in Hilario’s Federal Hill apartment on that date.

Infuriated by Hilario having ended their romance, according to prosecutors and disputed trial evidence, Lopez slashed and stabbed her 40 times with a serrated kitchen knife and a butcher knife in the apartment where she worked double shifts running a home day care for 12 children.

Judge Gilbert V. Indeglia yesterday afternoon gave the case to the jury after a 10-day trial that briefly took a surprising turn with feisty testimony by former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. The jurors were in their room for about 3½ hours, until the judge released them to resume their deliberations today.

Lopez, who denies having committed the murder, yesterday shook his head no in response to an inquiry by the judge and declined to testify in his own defense. If Lopez is convicted, Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch has said that he would request a sentence of life without parole.

Lopez is accused of threatening death to Hilario, making good on the threats, and then, apparently distraught over what he had done, trying to kill himself with carbon monoxide by running the engine of Hilario’s minivan in a closed garage.

Only the intervention of the police, who broke into the garage looking for him as a suspect in the slaying, stopped the suicide, according to Special Assistant Attorney General Daniel Guglielmo, the lead prosecutor.

Calling it a classic case of domestic violence in his summation to the jury, Guglielmo spelled out how the couple’s relationship supposedly went through cycles. First there was an act of violence, such as a shove, Guglielmo said, then Lopez’s apology and expressions of love, then her forgiveness, and then violence again.

The night she died, there was a partial glass of wine and an empty beer bottle in the apartment, the contents of which the prosecutors say Lopez and Hilario consumed after Hilario made the fatal mistake of allowing him into her apartment for a talk.

At some point between 9:44 p.m. and 10:17 p.m. on May 20 — a timeline established by telephone records — Lopez allegedly flew into a murderous rage. Trial evidence showed that the killer’s knife thrusts went as deep as 4 inches, pierced the victim’s heart and liver and caused a collapsed lung. Dr. Alexander M. Chirkov, an assistant state medical examiner, testified that the much more shallow defensive wounds on her hands and arms would have been extremely painful.

After having murdered Hilario, according to the prosecution version of what happened, Lopez resumed making and receiving a flurry of telephone calls. One went to Cruz Gonzalez, Hilario’s sister. With Jose Marte, Gonzalez’s boyfriend and Lopez’s longtime friend, listening in, Lopez allegedly blurted out, “I killed her. I killed her. I killed her.”

According to Marte’s testimony, Lopez said something to the effect that “no one would help me.” Marte said he took that to mean that nobody had helped to reconcile Lopez and Hilario.

Lopez also allegedly confessed in a long-distance telephone call to his son, Emmanuel Sanchez Lopez, who was in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., and said he intended to do away with himself. A recording of the younger Lopez’s call to 911 in New York was replayed yesterday.

He is heard sobbing and reporting that his father is in Providence, that he has said that he killed someone, and that he intends to kill himself.

When Guglielmo concluded his summation, the defendant gave out a soft cry at the defense table, then quietly wept and dabbed at his eyes with a tissue.

Defense lawyer John F. Cicilline tried to sow seeds of doubt in jurors’ minds, contending that some prosecution witnesses, including two police officers, all too conveniently remembered details on the witness stand that they had never divulged before.

And he attached great significance to the fact that no eyewitness could place Lopez in the victim’s house at the time of the murder or in her minivan afterward.

Referring to one key witness, Marte, Cicilline declared in his closing remarks, “He starts to make up things” on the witness stand to embellish the case against the defendant.

Your role, Cicilline told the jury, is to “stand between the accusing finger of government and another human being.”

Outside the courtroom, Lopez’s sister, Juana Ramos of Aventura, Fla., contended that the case against her brother is a bunch of lies. She complained again that Lopez is being mistreated at the Adult Correctional Institutions, where he has been held since his arrest in the garage. The Department of Corrections has denied the charges.

Cicilline tried to capitalize on what Guglielmo conceded were two errors made by Detective Sgt. Joseph F. Donnelly of the city police, who helped to investigate the case. Donnelly put the wrong time stamp on some photographs that he took, and instead of immediately compiling an investigative report, as he should have done, he did it months later.

Guglielmo took pains in his summation to swat away Cicilline’s references to purported inconsistencies or holes in the case, including Cicilline’s disparagement of the police work.

“Don’t allow any of this to cloud your search for the truth,” the prosecutor said.

The defense called four witnesses, including Cianci, mostly to rebut prosecution witnesses who suggested that Lopez had lived with Hilario and not contributed to the expenses of the household because he was unemployed. Lopez worked as a security guard at a CVS and as a teacher’s aide, and Cicilline called Cianci to the stand Monday to establish that the mayor had awarded Lopez a citation for his work in the schools.

Cianci sought to minimize the importance of the citation, which bears his signature, and said he could not remember having issued it. Cianci is himself a radio talk show host, and he has been sarcastically critical on the air of the administration of Cicilline’s son, Mayor David N. Cicilline.

Cicilline, the defense lawyer, brought out — during a contentious exchange with Cianci — that Cianci has been criminally convicted on two different occasions, including a case in which the former mayor was found guilty of having run City Hall as a racket.

Later, Cicilline asked the jury not to hold it against his client if it seemed that he, Cicilline, had been rude at several points during the trial. He said that he has been going through a tough time, but he was not explicit.

Cicilline’s other son, lawyer John M. Cicilline, recently pled guilty to having extorted bribes from clients with a promise to subvert the criminal justice system on their behalf. The younger Cicilline has been disbarred and sentenced to serve 18 months in federal prison.

gsmith@projo.com