Prosecution opens in 2009 Mastic homicide

Pizzini's mother, Margaret Dovale, testified about looking in her bedroom window after her daughter failed to show up at work. "I saw her on the floor, and I knew she was dead," she said, breaking into tears.

Even as a man followed her constantly, called her, stared at her and peeked in her bedroom window while she was with her boyfriend, Laura Pizzini never saw him as a threat -- until he stabbed her and let her bleed to death, a Suffolk prosecutor said Monday.

"She never called police," Assistant District Attorney Robert Biancavilla said in his opening statement of Pizzini, 25, killed two years ago in her Mastic kitchen. "She saw him as a weird guy, pathetic."

That man, prosecutors said, is Guenter Wende, 44, on trial for second-degree murder before Suffolk County Court Judge Barbara Kahn. Wende's defense attorney said his client is not guilty.

Biancavilla conceded that Wende, who was 18 years Pizzini's senior, loved her, but it was a "fanatical, obsessive" love that she did not share. But instead of feeling threatened, Biancavilla said Pizzini laughed him off, telling friends she could deal with the man she called "my stalker."

She did sleep with him once, Biancavilla said. "Unfortunately for Laura Pizzini, this was a bad decision that cost her her life," he said.

An hour before she died, she's seen on a video at her favorite bar, Good Friends, kissing Wende on the cheek after he bought her drinks. But then he followed her home and when she told him they would never be together, he stabbed her with a 10-inch hunting knife through the stomach, Biancavilla said. As she lay bleeding to death, Biancavilla said she asked him, "Why?"

He lay next to her, kissed her on the cheek and told her, "Because I love you, and I can't live like this," according to Biancavilla.

Defense attorney Jason Bassett said that never happened. He said his socially awkward client makes a convenient target, but he lived a life without violence or trouble before this. Bassett said Wende signed a nine-page confession only after he was "interrogated by a tag team of detectives for 12 hours" leaving him with "a big old welt above his left eye."

Even the idea that Wende lay down next to Pizzini after stabbing her makes no sense, Bassett said. None of her blood was found on him, his clothes, his shoes or his truck, he said. A police crime scene video shown to the jury showed little blood outside the large gash in Pizzini's stomach, as she lay against the refrigerator. There was none on the floor, her face turned to the wall.

Bassett noted that it's not the jury's job to decide who other than Wende might have killed her. But he noted that her boyfriend had just gotten out of jail after a parole violation, a previous boyfriend was a martial arts devotee like Pizzini and another ex-boyfriend hanged himself a month after she died.