Victims' kin face stress of parole hearing

Most New Yorkers go to Florida to escape.

The job. The cold. Traffic.

But Peter Guadagnino's trip this week was out of grim duty. Every five years, the man who raped and killed his sister in 1977 is up for a parole hearing, and with that rises an always-bubbling well of stress and grief.

On Wednesday, the killer, Peter Michael Green, asked the Florida Parole Commission for four years off his earliest-possible release date of 2037 from a murder, burglary and sexual battery sentence. He received two years off, but for Roseanne LoPiccolo's survivors, the details are obscured by the process.

"Like clockwork, the stress starts lurking a year before: What will he ask for? What do you say?" said Guadagnino, 64, of Bohemia. "It's just a knot you start to feel."

The dread of parole hearings -- facing the inmate, the graphic crime recounted -- is an oft-overlooked reality for murder victims' kin, years after public consciousness fades.

"It's very trying," said Chris Baumgardt, leader of the Parents and Other Survivors of Murder Victims' Long Island/New York Metro chapter. "The families have to relive that sequence of events, over and over again."

LoPiccolo, a 25-year-old legal secretary, returned to her Fort Lauderdale apartment in April 1977 to find an intruder upstairs. Green, then 21, raped and strangled her before fleeing.

With accounts like that in mind, Baumgardt is lobbying New York lawmakers for a bill to space parole appearances from every year or two to every five years, as in Florida. So far, she has been unsuccessful.

Even when hearings are five years apart, they aren't easier. LoPiccolo's twin sister, Patricia LaCorte, can't bring herself to face Green for the parole proceedings he's had since 2001.

Memories of sitting in the courtroom in 1978 are still vivid. Spectators gasped when LaCorte entered. A prosecutor said, "It's almost as if the deceased has risen from the dead."

"It gets to the point where I think: 'I can do this now. I'm strong,' " said LaCorte, 59, of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. "But I find every excuse in the book. I just can't see his face."

LaCorte credited her brother for representing the family this time around, impacting parole commissioners more than letters alone. Her twin, she said, was bright, sociable and trusting -- she'd encountered Green weeks before at a corner store, when he offered to carry her groceries home.

"Rosie thought it was cute. 'He was just a kid,' she said," LaCorte recalled. "I guess we were both brought up like that. Everybody gets the benefit of the doubt."

Guadagnino, a retired construction electrician, called his sister "unbelievable" and recalls her doting on nieces.

But the positive memories will continue competing with those of her killing -- at least every time a hearing comes around. In a small victory for LoPiccolo's family, the commissioner set Green's next hearing for seven years, not five.

"You hear things like, 'He's been good in prison. He's asking for four years off,' " Guadagnino said. "I think, 'Wait. Does my sister get four years of her life back?' "