Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the morning of Monday, November 15, 2004, Peter Porco did not show up for work.
Porco, 52, was a law clerk to the presiding justice of the Appellate Division, a state appeals court in Albany, New York. A court officer was sent to his house to check on him.
The Porcos lived on Brockley Drive in Delmar, a leafy suburb just south of Albany, near the high school.
Inside, the court officer found Peter dead.
In the bedroom, his wife, Joan, was still alive. She had been attacked in her bed with an axe. Her injuries were so severe that she would lose an eye.
The nod
Paramedics and police filled the house. A Bethlehem police detective named Christopher Bowdish leaned over Joan as she was being treated.
The Porcos had two sons, Johnathan and Christopher. Christopher, 21, was a student at the University of Rochester, more than 200 miles away.
Bowdish asked Joan whether Johnathan had done this. She shook her head no.
Then he asked her whether it had been Christopher.
She nodded yes, Bowdish later testified. Two paramedics who were in the room backed up his account at trial. The defense would always dispute it.
Investigators believed the axe had come from the family’s own garage. Someone had used the family’s security code to turn off the burglar alarm. A phone line outside the house had been cut. It looked, at first glance, like a burglary.
Investigators did not think it was one.
And Peter Porco, prosecutors said, had not died right away. Despite his injuries, investigators believed, he got up and moved around the house for some time that morning, going through parts of his normal routine, before he collapsed.
The son
That evening, Christopher Porco drove back to Delmar. He said he had learned about the attack from a reporter. He said he had spent the night of November 14 at his college dorm in Rochester.
Detectives started looking at his life. What they found was a young man who had been lying to his parents for years.
In the fall of 2003, the University of Rochester had made him withdraw because of poor grades. He had kept up the story that he was a student in good standing. In 2004 he took out a $31,000 loan and forged his father’s signature as co-signer. He used his father’s name to get credit for a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler.
Police also believed he had staged two earlier “burglaries” at his parents’ house, in 2002 and 2003, and stolen laptops. One of them, investigators said, ended up for sale on eBay.
About a month before the attack, his eBay account was frozen. Investigators said he had posed as his brother in emails to customers, claiming that Johnathan had died.
About two weeks before the attack, Peter Porco sent his son an email.
“Did you forge my signature as a co-signer?” he asked.
The mother
When Joan Porco came out of a coma, she told investigators she could not remember the attack.
And she said her son was innocent.
In December 2004, she testified by videotape before a grand jury. She did not name Christopher as her attacker. About nine months after the attack, she wrote a letter urging authorities to “search for Peter’s real killer or killers.”
It took a year. In November 2005, a grand jury indicted Christopher Porco for the murder of his father and the attempted murder of his mother. The district attorney said 22 agencies had worked on the case.
His mother stood by him the whole way.
The trial began on June 27, 2006, moved to Orange County because of the publicity in Albany. Joan Porco came to court to support her son.
But prosecutors had witnesses she could not argue with: the security cameras on the University of Rochester campus.
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