No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Tragic Betrayal And Horrific Murder Of Kimberly Antonakos
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Tragic Betrayal And Horrific Murder Of Kimberly Antonakos
When Kimberly Antonakos let a young family who was down on their luck move in with her, she could never have imagined how she would be repaid for her kindness
Background
Thomas Antonakos did everything right. When his daughter Kimberly missed their daily phone call on the morning of March 1, 1995, he immediately went to her apartment to make sure everything was alright. When he found nothing but a single gold earring on the floor of her garage, he filed a missing persons report.
Even after police were assigned to the case, Thomas didn’t rest: he posted huge cash rewards for his daughter’s return or information on her location and even visited crack dens and seedy neighborhoods in the hope that somebody, somewhere, might know where his beloved daughter had gone.
But a year later, on Kimberly’s 22nd birthday, the search was over. Her kidnapper had been convicted–and a grieving Thomas was left to report the news to her graveside in Staten Island. When Kimberly’s body was initially discovered by firefighters who were responding to a house fire in Queens just a few days after her disappearance, it sparked an immediate outrage across the entire city of New York.
The murder, after all, was clearly a malicious one; Kimberly had been bound, gagged, and set on fire while she was still alive.
“Obviously this is a crime of hate,” an investigator on the case claimed.“Somebody hated her enough to make her suffer in the worst kind of way.” However, in reality, the circumstances of Kimberly’s death were much more tragic than anyone possibly could have imagined.
Daddy’s Girl
Kimberly was dearly beloved by both of her parents, Thomas and Marlene Antonakos. She was especially close to her father Thomas, whom she had lived with for a year following her parents’ divorce before deciding that she wanted to move out on her own.
Even after she moved into her own apartment, the two had dinner together once a week, talked on the phone every day, and took trips to visit Thomas’s 77-year-old mother every Sunday.
His work as a computer consultant allowed Thomas to spoil Kimberly with gifts, from a brand new Honda Accord and name-brand clothes to the expensive gold earrings he one day found on the floor of her garage.
“I have no life,” he explained in one interview with the New York Times. “Kimberly was my princess.”
Marlene Antonakos had moved to Florida following the divorce, but she and her daughter remained incredibly close. After moving out on her own, Kimberly even went so far as to rent a two-bedroom apartment, just so that her mother would have a place to stay when she came to visit.
Kindness Betrayed
Thanks to Kimberly’s generosity, the spare bedroom found a new use when a close friend along with her boyfriend, Joshua Torres, and their infant son were forced to leave the home they’d shared with relatives.
Kimberly offered the room to the young family until they were able to find their own place. But it didn’t take long for Torres to notice Kimberly’s close relationship with Thomas, as well as how generous he was with his wealth.
Using the information he’d learned while living with Kimberly–her schedule along with her habits, Torres with help from two friends had Kimberly kidnapped from her driveway as she was returning home in the early morning on March 1st.
Torres had planned to use the kidnapping to get a ransom fee from Thomas Antonakos, before returning Kimberly home more-or-less safe and sound.
But, unbeknownst to Torres, Thomas was in the process of setting up a new voicemail machine–and the kidnappers didn’t wait for a beep when leaving their message. So the search for Kimberly continued, and Thomas remained unaware that the money he so freely spent on her could save her life.
In the meantime, Torres publicly appeared to grieve her disappearance, claiming that she was “like a sister” to him. He went so far as to accompany Thomas on his desperate searches, but drew one firm line: despite being a practicing Catholic, he refused to go to church and pray for Kimberly with her father.
Murder and Aftermath
On March 4, 1995, Torres received a panicked call from the kidnappers, Julio Negron and Nicholas Libretti, who had gone to check on Kimberly.
Negron and Libretti claimed that when they entered the unheated Queens basement where they’d been keeping Kimberly bound and gagged, they found her dead–a conclusion they had come to after kicking the unconscious Kimberly in the leg and not getting a response.
Desperate to cover up the evidence of their crime, Torres and his two accomplices rushed to the gas station to pick up a canister of gasoline.
According to Negron’s later testimony, Torres kissed the still-unconscious Kimberly on the forehead and told her “sh*t happens and life sucks” before pouring the gasoline over her body and setting it ablaze. It was only after the body was found that a forensic pathologist was able to confirm that Kimberly was still alive when Torres set her on fire
Torres was finally arrested six months after Kimberly’s body was discovered when an ex-girlfriend he had confessed to went to the police.
The conviction came on November 14, the eve of Kimberly’s 22nd birthday.
Despite Torres and his lawyer’s claims that he’d been framed by Negron, the jury saw things differently.
“Now, every year on Kimberly’s birthday,” Thomas stated to the New York Times, “we’ll know it is another year he’s been in jail.”
If the kidnapping had occurred just a few days earlier, the horrific nature of Torres’s crime–which a judge referred to as “among the most savage and brutal crimes ever to have been committed in Queens County”–would have made him eligible for the death penalty. Instead, he received 50 years to life in prison.
Sources:
Article clipped from The Record. December 11 1996. Newspapers.Com. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-record/132786199/
“Horrifying Torch-Slay Testimony.” November 7 1996. New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/1996/11/07/horrifying-torch-slay-testimony/
Ojito, M. “Man guilty of murder in setting student afire.” November 15 1996. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/15/nyregion/man-guilty-of-murder-in-setting-studentafire.html
Ojito, M. “Murder verdict is father’s last gift.” November 16 1996. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/16/nyregion/murder-verdict-is-father-s-last-gift.html
Ojito, M. “58 years to life for the murder of a friend.” December 11 1996. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/11/nyregion/58-years-to-life-for-the-murder-of-a-frien d.html
“Police: Kidnappers burned woman alive.” October 4 2005. Tampa Bay Times. https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1995/09/09/police-kidnappers-burned-woman-alive/
“Slay Victim Burned Alive.” March 8 1995. New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/1995/03/08/slay-victim-burned-alive/
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