Wholesale Corsets model convicted in sugar daddy’s castration-murder
Not sexy lingerie supplier nuts. But definitely guilty.
A Manhattan murder jury today convicted a Portuguese underwear Wholesale Sexy Underwear model of bludgeoning and then castrating his sugar daddy with a corkscrew in their Times Square hotel room last year.
It took just over a day for the six-man, six-woman jury to reach a verdict in the lurid case, and reject the insanity defense of boy toy from hell Renato Seabra.
The lithe, ivory-complected Seabra was only 21 when he admittedly strangled and beat his lover, Carlos Castro, a wealthy and influential Portuguese fashion writer who at 65 was three times his killer’s age.
The young gigolo admitted ripping open the dying man’s scrotal sac with a corkscrew, slitting his own wrists, and then applying the severed testicles to his own bleeding arms so he could “harness their power,” as he’d told shrinks.
“Justice was made,” the victim’s sister, Maria Amelia Castro, of Cascais, Portugal, said afterward, adding that she hoped her brother’s murderer would get “prison for life.”
For Castro’s niece, it was the hair gel that convinced her Seabra was cunning, not cracked. Seabra had turned up at a hospital an hour after leaving the blood-splattered hotel room — wearing his best suit, with his thick black hair neatly pomaded.
If you’re really crazy, “You don’t have to take a shower, put gel in your hair,” she scoffed to reporters.
Seabra had absented himself from the courtroom during the final days of the trial, but re-appeared at the defense table for the late afternoon verdict, wearing dark jeans and a rumpled tan fleece jacket, his hair newly shaved.
He showed no emotion, but began blinking rapidly when the verdict of guilty of a single count of murder in the second degree was read aloud by a weeping jury forewoman at 4:15 p.m. Seabra’s mother, too, showed no emotion as she sat — her coat bundled tightly around her — in the second row of a Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Daniel FitzGerald set Dec. 21 for sentencing. Seabra can get anywhere from the mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years to life, up to the maximum allowed by state law — 25 to life.
“This was a brutal and sadistic crime, where Renato Seabra bludgeoned, choked and mutilated his victim before murdering him,” Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. said in a written statement issued after the verdict. “But the jury’s verdict now, finally, holds Seabra accountable. It is particularly tragic that Carlos Castro not only was betrayed by his spurned lover, but met a very painful and violent end far from his home.”
The two doomed lovers had been vacationing in New York from their native Portugal when they began arguing bitterly, witnesses who’d spoken to Castro in the days before the murder told jurors over the course of two months of testimony.
Seabra’s fatal attack — spurred by the older man’s decision to end the relationship –stretched over the course of hours, medical and forensic testimony established.
Defense lawyers had argued to jurors that the sheer overkill scope of the assault — which included gouging Castro’s face with a corkscrew, along with bludgeoning attacks using a computer monitor, a wine bottle and Seabra’s own sneakers-clad feet — demonstrated he had suffered a psychotic break with reality.
Seabra then told doctors that as Castro lay naked on the carpeting of their room at the InterContinental hotel — still breathing, bleeding, and frothing at the mouth — he used the corkscrew to rip out the man’s testicles.
Castro had become a “monster” to him, he’d told shrinks, and “The power of the monster was in the balls,” he explained of his grotesque mutilation of the likely unconscious man.
But prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal convinced jurors that Seabra had attacked out of fury and revenge.
