Cobra Killer (35 page)

Talking of killing Kocis

Cuadra’s version of the dinner at Le Cirque included details that Roy would often lapse off into mini-rants about ongoing problems with Kocis. “It was an uncomfortable conversation regarding killing Bryan Kocis,” Cuadra testified. “How that got that way is, Grant Roy started to talk about (their) settlement and…he would end every negative paragraph with ‘F Bryan, F Bryan...’”
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It was during one of the rants, Cuadra said, that Kerekes added casually, “I would have killed him a long time ago.” Cuadra said Roy responded that he had thought about that himself, but said if Kocis were killed, suspicion would immediately fall on himself and Lockhart.

As expected, Cuadra said he was not part of the back-and-forth between Kerekes and Roy about killing Kocis. Conversely, Roy and Lockhart offered a different version of the conversations during their testimony, saying it was Cuadra and Kerekes who suggested Kocis “go away” to Europe or Canada.

Cuadra did recall that Kerekes gloated that one of Cuadra’s regular escort clients was affiliated with the mafia and “he does this sort of thing.” He said he realized Kerekes was lying.
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“Then Joseph is the one who tells (Roy), ‘You know, they would stick (Kocis) in a car, in the trunk of a car, drive him over (to) Canada, the border, and dump him off in the woods,” Cuadra testified. “Grant gets a laugh out of it, like a chuckle.”
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Sealing a deal?

As expected, Cuadra’s version of business discussions over dinner with Lockhart and Roy varied again, even when it came to who wanted to proceed with working together on porn projects. Cuadra said it was Roy who pulled out a small tablet and began mapping out three video projects and how the money could be split up.

“Then Joseph…still assumed that he had to pay Sean something,” Cuadra testified. “(Joseph) reaches into his coat and he pulls out maybe about $12,000 and he puts it on the table and slides it towards Grant Roy.” Roy pushed the money back toward Kerekes assuring that the deal would require no “upfront” investment from BoyBatter, Cuadra said.
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Cuadra said Kerekes and Roy openly discussed him and Lockhart and “referred to us almost like a third person or something like…Joe wouldn’t even look at me. Then Grant Roy treated Sean Lockhart the same way…They would talk about us, we’re here on these opposite ends and they’re looking at each other.”
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Cuadra also told jurors that it was his impression that Lockhart was “swooning over me. He liked me a lot and kept saying that to Joe.”
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If being talked about as if he weren’t there bothered Lockhart, Cuadra said, it didn’t show. He reported Lockhart continued to text friends on his cell phone and take calls. “(Sean) could care less,” Cuadra said. “I’m used to being around company where you have to act right. So I’m just, you know, trying to be respectful.”
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In their version of the dinner, Roy and Lockhart never mentioned any cash being literally brought to the table. Kerekes version was never heard.

Plans for after-dinner drinks were shelved as Roy and Lockhart begged off as of being tired. Cuadra said he and his partner Kerekes returned to their hotel room and met up again with Roy the next day on the floor of the Adult Video Network convention.

It was during this time together, Cuadra said, that he and Kerekes formed the idea that he may want to model for Cobra Video because of its popularity. Their thinking: if bringing Sean Lockhart to BoyBatter would help build an audience, so would working with Kocis’ Cobra Video.

Roy’s flirtations, Cuadra testified, were why he and Kerekes made an early departure back to Virginia and did not attend a major circuit party occurring at the AVN event. Cuadra said that Kerekes told him he could “absolutely not” attend the party because “he noticed the way Grant is looking at me, and, you know, it makes him a little uncomfortable. (Joseph) is a very jealous person.”
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Before they even got home to Virginia, Cuadra said, Roy sent Kerekes a text message that said, “We’re all good. We settled. We’re feeling great. It’s on. The Cobra suit is done.”
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Cuadra said he thought this meant they were OK to proceed with planning a shoot with him and Lockhart around the time of the GayVN Awards event in February at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. He also thought it meant going ahead with approaching Cobra Video for work, he told jurors, even though he said Kocis’ criminal past made him leery of him.

No one has ever been able to verify or confirm any of the elements of Cuadra’s version of events, a major stumbling block for any defendant.

While prosecutors had both Lockhart and Roy saying virtually the same version of events, Kerekes did not cooperate and there was no way to effectively counter with Cuadra’s version. It became Cuadra’s word versus the word of two others.

Cuadra’s version served the purpose of helping explain why he would have ever gone to Dallas Township, Pennsylvania to see Bryan Kocis. Moreover, it also attempted to take away an alleged motive for Cuadra and Kerekes to act to get rid of Kocis. By telling jurors about an alleged text message regarding the settlement from Roy to Kerekes (no evidence beyond Cuadra’s direct testimony was ever produced to verify), Cuadra inched toward eliminating motive. The mountain of circumstantial evidence was stacked against him, however, and an inability to find corroborating testimony for his own meant Cuadra and his counsel may have tried chiseling away at the base of the mountain, but they got nowhere.

Getting more specific

By now, jurors had heard gruesome details about Kocis’ murder, and heard damning testimony from Lockhart and Roy that placed any planning for a murder at the feet of Cuadra and Kerekes. Telling the story of his life, giving his version of the events were all valuable, but Cuadra had no choice but to also detail his version of events on Midland Drive that night.

Immediately gone was Cuadra’s earlier version told to potential alibi witnesses, the one where he had arrived at Kocis’ house to find him slain, a small fire started, and fled when he heard noises. It didn’t matter. Jurors wouldn’t hear that version anyway, instead hearing the defendant trying to tell events in his own words.

In setting up the trip to Pennsylvania, which Cuadra insisted was to fulfill an appointment to potentially model for Kocis and appear in a Cobra Video, all of the preparations and planning were pinned on Kerekes. Cuadra said it was Kerekes who picked up a gun, the knife, the rental car, even the pre-paid TracFones inexplicably used to communicate only with Kocis (and for no other purpose).

Cuadra testified that Kerekes ordered him to drive to Pennsylvania on Tuesday, January 23, 2007, a nine-hour roundtrip they made in one day. During the trip, Cuadra said, Kerekes continued communicating with Kocis via a mobile Sprint PCS card attached to his laptop. Kerekes sent e-mails and photos to Kocis while Cuadra drove the rental car north from the Virginia Beach peninsula to Pennsylvania.

He said it was clear during this back-and-forth that Kocis seemed to know who Cuadra really was, knew what BoyBatter was, and wasn’t buying the “Danny Moilin” act at all. He said Kocis even asked why he used the name Danny instead of his real name, Harlow, and whether he had an existing contract with BoyBatter. “(Kocis) knew who I was,” Cuadra said. “I laughed. He knew who I was. I was a little nervous (but) he can care less. He didn’t care at all that I was an escort.”
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Cuadra said Kocis knowing who he really was and that it did not bother him “made me feel a lot more confident, like, this is good.”
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Plans to meet that first night, however, were immediately shelved. Cuadra said Kocis called him off. “He goes, ‘Forget it. I’m too tired.’ Something like that, something along those lines,” Cuadra testified.
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Cuadra’s version again strays from what Kocis’ friends and family reported. All of them reported he anticipated meeting his new model Danny on Wednesday, January 24, not Tuesday, January 23.

During the evening of Tuesday, January 23 and daytime hours of Wednesday, January 24, Cuadra said he and Kerekes filled their time poking around online, watching TV in their motel room in Wilkes-Barre, eating lunch at a nearby Friendly’s Restaurant, and visiting a local gym. “I wanted to look perfect for Bryan,” Cuadra testified.
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Cuadra denied the state’s theory that he and Kerekes ran reconnaissance on Kocis’ home on Tuesday evening, contradicting what was gloated about on the Black’s Beach tapes recorded months later.

Cuadra did mention that Kerekes left him alone in the gym in Wilkes-Barre for more than hour and did not explain his absence. When he returned, a small bag containing condoms and other items (including lighter fluid) was stowed inside the vehicle, Cuadra said, which surprised him because he planned to do a solo masturbation scene with Kocis, a scene not requiring a condom. “Unless it’s a movie, I don’t perform oral sex on another person unless they’re wearing a condom,” Cuadra turned toward the jury and explained. “It has to be unlubricated or else it kind of burns your mouth with that chemical.”
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“Time to see Bryan”

Watching the clock move slowly, Cuadra said, the couple returned to their motel room after the gym with food and a bottle of Chuck Hill Chardonnay and a bottle of champagne. His appointment with Kocis, he said, wasn’t until the evening hours so “I had enough time to eat and shower up, get all nice and spruced up and ready. Joseph didn’t eat anything. All he did was drink half of each bottle.” Cuadra said he didn’t drink and “from there, it was time to see Bryan.”
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According to Cuadra, the plan was for Kerekes to drop Cuadra off at Kocis’ house and then leave and come back later to pick him up. Cuadra said he took with him a backpack containing clean underwear, condoms, lube, and his ID. “(Joseph) pulled in and I got out…and I went right up,” Cuadra explained.

Kocis answered his knocks at the door, Cuadra said, with wet hair, looking like he had just finished showering. “He opened the door wide, ‘Danny, come on in!’ He liked me a lot, and it was hard to look at him sometimes because he was so smitten over me. You know, like when somebody is, like, ‘Oh, your dimples’…I felt really good though. This was going to be very positive, (a) very good thing. I did not feel like something bad was going to happen at all.”
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Cuadra and Kocis sat on the sofa, he said, while the large screen TV played a werewolf movie that Kocis did not appear to be paying attention to. Glasses of wine were poured, Cuadra said, with Kocis drinking more than he did. “In between that, he had received maybe about three phone calls, about five minutes in length,” Cuadra testified. “After he would hang up, he would apologize (to me for the interruption).”
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Cuadra said the meeting with Kocis felt a lot like the escort calls he had grown accustomed to. “I was basically there to entertain him, get it on film, and leave so that he can produce this thing, market it, and then I can benefit off of it,” Cuadra said. “That was what I assumed I was there to do.”
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During their meeting on the couch, they sat next to each other, Cuadra said, and Kocis was “a perfect gentleman. He never said anything lewd or anything like that. He didn’t even touch me other than to hug at the beginning and kiss on the cheek. He was very nice to me.”
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A heavy knock at the door

Cuadra told jurors the conversation was progressing nicely when “all of a sudden, when we were in conversation, you can hear like a rapid knock, like a knock, knock, knock”(Cuadra knocked his knuckles on the witness stand to demonstrate the intensity of the knocks).

Cuadra said Kocis appeared surprised by the knocking, but went to the door to answer it. Here, again, Cuadra’s version of events not only cannot be verified, but also differ greatly from the pattern of behavior the state had demonstrated in its case. According to Kocis’ family and friends, a knock at the door did not necessarily mean Kocis would have answered his door.

“So the minute, the second he turns the knob and cracks the door a little bit, Joe comes in and they fight a bit at the door,” Cuadra said, his voice cracking with excitement. “Joe just busts in and he looks at me and then he looks at Bryan and he decks him right in the face; and Bryan fights back with him, but Joe is, they fight and they come over to the area where (I was).” The tussle between Kocis and Kerekes, Cuadra testified, knocked over the cocktail table in front of the couch and spilled the glasses of wine sitting there.(Photographs taken just after the fire was extinguished, however, showed the table in an upright position, and detectives said they found the wine glasses stowed in the kitchen sink.) “I’m yelling, ‘Joe! Stop! Stop! Stop, Joe! What are you doing? Joe, what are you doing!’” Cuadra testified.
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Kerekes didn’t stop, Cuadra said. “He grabbed Bryan, (and) Bryan is wearing like a track suit, it’s all black, black top, black bottom (and) he’s wearing white socks, no shoes on,” Cuadra detailed. Pinned to the couch, Cuadra said, Kerekes began punching Kocis in the face and “I grab Joe by the belt loop by the back of (his) pants and I’m trying to get him off of him,” Cuadra said, but reported Kerekes struck him with a fist in the mouth, knocking him away.
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“Then (Joe) goes in his pocket, he takes out a knife and it’s not that, it’s not that Sig Sauer, it’s that little one, and he slashes him right across,” Cuadra said. “Bryan immediately grabs his throat and he starts yelling at Joe, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’” Cuadra said. “Except you can hear gurgling, like the blood is going into his throat; and I’m, like, ‘Joe, what are you doing?’”
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